John Steinbeck: What is a Red?

[IrishAyes]

20. Thanks for the note and the picture

Those were dark days indeed. A particular relative of mine, young at the time, wound up with a big steel plate on his cranium where he took blows during the Great Dock Strike. Lived into his 90's somehow - a big pugnacious Irishman who kept a lot of speed and agility longer than most men. I loved him dearly, and he didn't mind telling stories of those days either. Including the time he knocked one of his own brothers on his keyster for helping break a strike at Granny Goose. He used to intone, "Regardless of what other wrong a man does in life, he can be forgiven anything except crossing a picket line." And he meant it too.

He left me one of my most prized possessions, his 50-year service pin which I keep in my bank box with a note that it is to go to the Harry Bridges Institute. He was Harry's West Coast business agent eventually, and I also inherited his personal copy of Bridges' portrait which still hangs in the union hall from what I hear. People look at mine and ask, "Is that Jacques Cousteau?" I just answer, "No, but he sure does look like him, doesn't he?" No point in trying to explain to these MidWesterners, many of whom have never traveled more than a couple hundred miles from home. They don't care one iota about anything except what Pig Boy tells them on the radio. I did once tell a woman it was Harry Bridges, who founded the Longshoreman's Union. She gave me a blank stare and asked, "What's that? I never heard of it." She knew everything about other local folks' social and sexual escapades and brushes with the law, etc. and that's all she cared to know in life. Period.