On March 1st, hundreds of well-wishers gathered at the Bayview Boat Club on the San Francisco waterfront to offer a final toast to Local 10 pensioner, Reg Theriault, who passed away on February 15 at the age of 89. In addition to being a longshoreman, Theriault was an accomplished author of several books on work and the working class. His most successful book was, How to Tell When You are Tired: A Brief Examination of Work. It was widely praised and won acclaim from labor writer Studs Terkel who called it “a classic.”
Theriault saw work as a basic human condition. His writing gave voice to men and women who perform manual labor. “Most of the people across the face of the earth are doing work, much of it hard work, most of the days of their lives,” wrote Theriault in How to Tell When You are Tired. “By the time most kids are big enough or old enough or educated enough to get their first job, they are already conditioned…to pass beyond liking or disliking work to accepting it as inevitable.”
His other books included, The Unmaking of the American Working Class which was recently translated into Korean and Longshoring on the San Francisco Waterfront. Many books on work and workers have been written by academics. Theriault was a working class intellectual whose perspective was informed by a lifetime of labor. He came from a family of “fruit tramps”—roving, migrant farm workers who sorted and packed fruit for shipment. After a finishing a job, his family might drive hundreds of miles overnight for a job at the next orchard or farm.
Theriault proudly served as a paratrooper during the Second World War and was witness to the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri. After the war, he attended Cal for a few years before dropping out and eventually became a longshoreman in 1959. Theriault served as Vice President of Local 10, caucus delegate and member of the negotiating committee.
He lived in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco for over 40 years. In the late 40’s to the mid-1950s he rubbed shoulders with the era’s radical writers, beatniks and free-thinkers such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti who gathered at City Lights Bookstore, Speck’s, Gino & Carlo’s and Vesuvio’s where Theriault worked as a bartender. He enjoyed diving for Abalone while camping on the Mendocino coast and learned to snow ski with his children when he was 50.
Through his books and as an officer at Local 10, Theriault spent his life fighting for safer and better working conditions, increased benefits for fellow workers and promoting the dignity and value of labor.
He is survived by his three sons, Thomas, Marcus and Raymond and three grandchildren. He was proud of all of his sons who became union members with strong work ethics.