Paul Heide
In October, Patrick Heide, former Local 6 Business Agent, visited the ILWU Library with his wife Janice and donated a significant collection of papers and memorabilia collected by his father, Paul Heide.
A committed union activist, Paul Heide was a seaman in his early years before settling in the San Francisco East Bay Area. Just after the 1934 strike, Heide left his seagoing career behind and found work in an Oakland warehouse “high piling” heavy sacks of sugar. Soon thereafter, Heide, along with his brother Ray, Charles “Chili” Duarte, Bob Moore, and J.R. “Bob” Robertson became an organizer for the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 38-44 (later ILWU Local 6), and was at the forefront of the March Inland, the far-reaching drive to organize warehouse workers along the Pacific Coast waterfront and beyond, which became one of the building blocks of the ILWU.
Heide was incredibly successful in organizing workers, and upheld a philosophy of organizing across racial and gender lines. He, his brother, Duarte, and Moore were integral in organizing dozens of warehouses in the East Bay Area. Heide was initially paid a commission for each worker he signed up, but was so successful at bringing people into the union that he was embarrassed at his high pay and asked for a pay cut by requesting to be paid on a salary basis.
Heide was a tall, slender, striking man who was a boxer by training and did not shy away from confrontation on the picket lines. Heide’s organizing efforts sometimes involved conflicts with people hostile to the union. In Crockett, CA in 1935, Heide took a gouge to the face while lending support to a picket line that was confronted by vigilantes. The following year, he was accosted by police for violating an anti-picketing ordinance during a strike at a warehouse in Oakland. Later, Heide was sent to the Gulf Coast as part of the ILWU’s effort to organize racially integrated locals in the area, a campaign also met with violent opposition from employers and other anti-union forces.
Along with his wife Wilhelmina, Heide became an important figure in East Bay Labor in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s. He helped organize the United Labor Committee, which sought to bring labor into political action, and served as Secretary of the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee. Heide was an organizer for the National CIO, and served Secretary of the Alameda CIO Industrial Union Council. He was appointed ILWU Northern California Regional Director in 1950 and was elected Business Agent for the East Bay Division of Local 6 in 1951. He held various offices in Local 6 and was a member of the ILWU International Executive Board before retiring in 1971 after a career lasting nearly 40 years.
The collection given to the Library represents much of Heide’s work as an early ILWU organizer and as an officer in Local 6. It augments his oral history interview by Harvey Schwartz in 1981, excerpts of which are in the book Solidarity Stories, and helps preserve the story of the March Inland and the ILWU’s early days.