May 18, 2004
A Worker’s Journey: Jerry Tyler of Seattle’s Local 19 ILWU Oral History Project Volume VII, Part II
Introduction by Harvey Schwartz
This month’s oral history features Local 19’s Jerry Tyler, a veteran of labor struggles from the 1930s to the 1970s. Tyler’s life story recalls the experiences of a generation of workers who faced the harsh conditions of the Great Depression. Like many other early ILWU members, Foster went to sea, in his case during World War II. He also helped build the union movement through his dedication and talent. In the 1930s Tyler wrote pulp fiction novels. Most were about boxers or detectives. In truth, he could have been a character in one of his own stories.
He was variously a boxer, agricultural laborer, railroad worker, waiter, steward aboard wartime troop ships and CIO radio broadcaster. During the mid-1940s Tyler belonged to the Marine Cooks and Stewards, a union close to the ILWU. For 25 years he was a longshore worker. He road freight trains looking for work during the Depression and, much later, wrote a legendary newsletter for ILWU Local 19 called The Hook. Once he was even a member of the Communist Party. I interviewed Tyler in 2001 in Everett, Washington. You don’t have to know him long to recognize Tyler’s generosity and kindness. He is a man who feeds every stray cat he meets. A writer all his life, in his 80s Tyler published two popular books about his feline friends, The Gang in my Alley (1997) and Gray Face and Other Tales (1999). Thanks to Ronald E. Magden, the esteemed historian of Locals 19 and 23, for his help.
JERRY TYLER Edited by Harvey Schwartz, Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection
I was born 11-11-11. That’s a birthday you can’t forget. I was born in Shenandoah, Iowa, a little country town. You only had to walk 15, 20 minutes and you’re out in farm land. When the Depression hit in the ’30s, we didn’t even know there was a depression, ’cause we thought everybody had a tough life all the time. Dirt farmer, small farmer, he didn’t have a very easy time between the bank, the mortgage, the thunderstorms, the hailstorms and every damn thing you can think of that could go wrong on a farm. Although I grew up a farm kid, after a while we moved into Shenandoah.
They had two of the country’s biggest nurseries there, and I worked as what’s called a nursery rat, pruning, sanding, doing stoop labor. Then I got a job in a clothing store. I also worked in a vegetable cannery over in Nebraska City. I tried fighting, but I didn’t make much money at that. This was in the late 1920s when I was 16, 17, 18. I had a good trainer and didn’t do too bad. I started out as a bantam weight; I was a little wart then. But when I gained weight—I ended up a lightweight—that slowed me down a bit. They started tagging me. We discovered I had a glass chin. There’s only one cure for that, that’s don’t take punches. So I got the hell out before I was brain damaged. Well, I think I did, anyhow!
My mother always wanted me to go to college, and they had one over in Lamoni, Iowa, so I went there for a year. But I knew my parents couldn’t afford it, because this was in 1929, ’30, ’31. There was no work to be had anywhere, and they had other kids. So I just took off. Grabbed myself an armload of box cars and headed West, like everybody else. It was a crowded existence. There were a lot of guys on the trains. You’d be coming north out of L.A., headin’ to Portland or up to Washington to work the apples. And here would be a bunch of guys going the other direction. They’d say, “Where are you going?” You’d answer, “Up to Wenatchee, over in there, to pick apples.” They’d say, “Hell, man, there’s a picker for every apple.” You’d look at the guy and think, “Aw, you dummy, you wouldn’t know a job if it bit you on the ass,” and you’d find out you were both right. You’re just traveling, hoping you’d find something.
Getting something to eat, that was a little tough. It took a long time for me to get up enough nerve to hit a back door. That was in the little town of Turlock, California. There was a Black gal out in the back yard, splittin’ wood. I said, “Hey, lady, I’d be glad to split some wood for somethin’ to eat.” She said, “Get on it.” So I split wood. Then she called me in. I discovered I’d been at the back door of a whorehouse. All the gals are sittin’ around in their bathrobes. And boy, they fed me good! When I left, them gals all laid a half a buck or so on me and wished me good luck. So I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for prostitutes, people that are down on their luck and got a rough way to go.
I got one job on the Oregon shortline out of Salt Lake City. This was as a waterboy for the D&RGW, the Denver and Rio Grande Western railroad. They were laying new steel. “Waterboy.” They misnamed that. You were a mule. First thing I had to do, before anybody was up, was uncover the ice, wash it off, bust it up and put it in the keg on a pushwagon. Then I’d go eat breakfast in the mess car and the day would start. I’d push that damned wagon about a half mile, and finally move it off on a siding made especially for it. Then I’d start walkin’ with a yoke around me that had two great big water buckets with tin cups hanging off it. This is out in the desert—god, it was hot! I’m yelling “agua,” because most of the workers were Mexican, and I’d walk up and down with that goddamned thing—oh, I was tough then.
I landed in Modesto, California, where I got a job on a fruit ranch. Then I worked as a roadhouse waiter. A roadhouse was a night club—this was in 1933, when liquor came back, after Prohibition ended. If times were bad, I’d get laid off from the roadhouse and work at whatever I could get. Well, the cooks in this one Modesto joint where I got hired said, “The women working here are not unionized. We’re going to strike.” So just before lunch everybody sat down and had a cup of coffee. The management decided, “I guess we’d better talk to these guys.” That’s how we organized that place, and how I joined the Culinary Workers union. It was my first experience with a union and it opened my eyes quite a ways. When the 1934 strike happened I was still in Modesto. Rent was $4 a week.
I’d joined the National Guard with my roommate, Clancy Johnson. We got two bucks a week for drills, so that paid the rent. They wanted to take the Modesto National Guard to Stockton for strike duty. I went to Cap Freeman and said, “Cap, I can’t do that. My old man was a working stiff and I’m a working stiff, and here I’m going to go over there and stick a bayonet in some other poor working stiff? I can’t do it.” He said, “Okay, we’ll put you down as if you’re leaving the state, no problem.” So I didn’t go.
I went to San Francisco and got a job as a waiter at Goman’s Gay ’90s, an old place at Fillmore and Geary Streets. It was then that I sold my first fiction story. They called it “The Coward Who had Killer Fists.” I’d been writing all the time, trying to write for the pulps. In Modesto, when I’d worked in the roadhouse, I’d write during the day and go to work at night. A junior college teacher—I took some classes—told me who to contact and I sent stuff off. After that first check I couldn’t write a thing for about two months! Then I started whacking them out while I was working at Goman’s.
In December 1941, when we got into World War II, I was still at Goman’s Gay ’90s. I’d wanted to go to sea since I was a kid. For a farm boy, going to sea was romantic as hell. So when the war broke out I got my chance. They needed people. I registered, got a trip card and started shipping out of San Francisco in the old Marine Cooks and Stewards union (MCS). I’d been a waiter, so I got a mess job. I even sold a couple of stories while I was going to sea, but there was a paper shortage, the pulps went to hell and the short story market just died. One night while I was working on a troop ship a torpedo just missed us.
I used to like to sleep out on deck back on the fantail. There was a gun tub right over me. I woke up in the early morning and all these guys are tense. Everybody’s at general quarters. I said, “What’s going on?” A sailor answered, “A torpedo come by and passed just to stern of us. The guy on watch saw it.” So that kind of put an ice cube up my rear end.
I’d been in Local 30 of the Culinary Workers at Goman’s, but when I went to sea was when I really got introduced to unionism. At my first MCS meeting I thought, “These guys mean business.” They had a rank-and-file operated union. I popped my mouth off over some deal and that kind of set things in motion. They heard I could write and they accepted me, babied me along and got me involved. They asked me to write some stuff, and I wrote a stewards department newsletter for my ship. They put it up on the bulkhead in the mess room. During the war I went on the old Matsonia. She was a trooper with a big stewards department. That was when the Communist Party first approached me. I knew there’d been something wrong with our system, our economy. I’d heard all about these Commies and all that stuff, but pretty soon it seemed like they were the only people talking anything that made sense to a working man. So when they invited me to join, I said, “Sure, what the hell.”
I stayed in for quite a while after the war. I left the Party in the 1950s when I felt there was too much power at the top, that if you didn’t agree with the top, the democracy wasn’t there. I came up to Seattle to ship out after I married a Seattle gal. Then I took port jobs when the act screening workers off the waterfront came in. This was during the McCarthy period after the war. Later I bumped into Senator Warren Magnuson, who’d backed screening. He was supposed to be liberal. I said, “What did you do that for? You know what you did to us? If you were a member of the Party, you got screened. But if you were even sympathetic or if you were a damned good union man, you got it too. Didn’t have to prove nothing.” He said, “I never thought they’d use it that way.” I thought, “You stupid son of a bitch, and you’re a United States senator.”
I became an MCS patrolman [business agent] in Seattle and was publicity chair for the union. I also got elected secretary of the CIO Industrial Union Council. We decided to have a CIO radio program. The Joint Action Committee pointed the finger at me. This was by 1948. After my first broadcast, I couldn’t go any place on the waterfront without guys saying, “That was good, man, you gave it to them, my neighbors listened too,” which was what it was for.
On the day the 1948 longshore strike ended I interviewed MCS and ILWU guys at a meeting and put that tape on the air. When I was secretary of the CIO Council and had the radio show our local CIO didn’t have any money. So I went down to the executive board meeting of ILWU Longshore Local 19 and said, “It’s important to keep this Council moving. I would like to come down to the dispatch hall, and after everybody is gone, before you go outside to get casuals, I’d like to get a job. Anything I earn will be deducted from what the Council was supposed to pay me.” They said, “Yeah,” and that’s when I started longshoring.
Soon, of course, with the McCarthy period on, station time got hard to get, and we had to fold the radio show. When Local 19 opened the pool—we called ourselves “poolies,” it was a B list—I applied. They took me in. We used to get all the crap jobs, stuff the regulars didn’t want. Regulars we called “buttonheads” since they wore their union buttons on their caps. We got the jobs working green hides, bananas, pig iron, fish meal and all that good stuff. When you worked hides you muscled every one by hand. They’d stink and have lots of maggots. They were hell to stow because they were slippery. There was nothing worse that having a tier of hides silently melt and fall all over, making you rebuild.
Actually I started longshoring at the best time. I saw the whole revolution of cargo handling. When I started there was no packaged cargo. You stowed everything by hand. Then you began getting packaged cargo, cribs, robots and containers. If anybody told us 10 years before this started that it was going to happen, we would’ve thought they were reading science fiction. But Harry was smart, he saw it coming. Bridges attended some Local 19 membership meetings in Seattle. He said, “We can fight the employers on this container issue and we can cost them millions of dollars. But we’re going to lose. You cannot fight progress. So here’s what I propose.” That’s when he come up with the Mechanization and Modernization idea in the late 1950s of trading no opposition to containers for better health and welfare, early retirement and nobody loses a job.
A lot of guys thought, “Bridges is crazy.” I says, “That’s what you said when he started in about pensions, and now you’re glad that happened. So the crazy old son of a bitch must know something.” He sold us on it, and I still think that was the best thing. There’s a lot of guys that still say, “No, we should have fought it.” Well, how are you going to fight the inevitable? We got a good deal out of it. In the mid-1950s I made regular membership in the local. They’d had meetings for pool members and I used to speak. And I’d been active in MCS. So it wasn’t too long before I ran for Local 19 executive board and got elected.
I was vice-president of the local in the mid-1960s. Around the same time I became editor of the Local 19 newsletter, The Hook. George Olden, our secretary, talked me into it. He said, “We got some things we got to get out to the membership.” So I had to do it. We always had a “safety first” bit, because longshoring then was neck and neck with hard rock mining for danger. Still, I says, “They want a hook, I’ll give ’em a hook.” So I “burlesqued” it, made it funnier than hell. I adopted the pen name “Stevie Adorie,” after stevedore. It was a take off on the advice columnist, Ann Landers. I wrote about guys who’d throw their old beat up gloves and socks around, crap like that. “If they did that at home,” I said, “their old ladies would beat their brains out.” Soon we had to reprint and make more copies.
After a few months, we found out it was the wives who wanted the paper. “Where’s The Hook, bring The Hook,” the auxiliary told us. The women at home didn’t hear what’s going on, the man wouldn’t tell ’em anything. So they’d go for The Hook. It got real popular. I’d write about the guys, using lots of names. “So and so’s wife had twins,” I’d say, “so we know he’s gonna work a lot of overtime.” Now, I was very careful and didn’t go too far or insult a guy unfairly.
Then we had what we called “the big lump.” That was when they disbanded the strike committee, which I thought was a shame, and paid back the strike fund. We also had a Social Security overpayment we called “the little lump.” I wrote in The Hook that the little lump would be paid out on so and so date. I caught hell for that one! “Damn you,” guys said. “That was my hold out money. My old lady never knew anything.” I almost had to take a vacation! I retired the first day of 1974, when I was 62. I took all my work clothes, boots and all, to the laundrymat, washed them, and put a sign up, “I’m retired. If you can use this stuff, it’s yours.”
Soon there was a check in the mail from Social Security and a check from the union. “Damn,” I thought, “this is going to happen for the rest of my life.” My kids were all grown up then, I was single, I didn’t own anything, and I didn’t owe anything. Two weeks later I was in Cairo, Egypt, and I just kept rolling, traveling around. In 1981, when I was back in Seattle, I did start a newsletter for the pensioners that I called The Rusty Hook. I put out one issue and left to travel again. I guess I was one of the luckiest guys that ever pulled on a pair of pants when I joined the ILWU. I just hit it lucky when I got in the pool. If it wasn’t for that I don’t know where I’d be.
When they run the pension checks off in Frisco, they must say, “Is that old bastard still alive?” Every time I go to the hospital, or up to the clinic, or have to get some medicine, I think, “Thank God for Harry Bridges and the ILWU.” I see other guys from other trades, retired and living on nothing but Social Security and Medicare, and I think, “You poor devil, you should’ve been a longshoreman.” I remember when Frank Jenkins said he was talking to some guys uptown and telling ’em what we had. They kept asking questions. Finally Frank says, “Yeah, when you guys were calling us Commies, here we were, getting these good wages and conditions.”