Mostly, the pair socialized with other young married grad students like themselves. Whenever I hosted a party, I invited them, of course — they wouldn’t have been able to sleep with the stereo blasting and people stomping in my living room over their heads. At these gatherings Robert and Georgiana resembled anthropologist participant-observers at the ritual of some savage tribe: the Midwest meets California hippie-student life. Robert even smoked a pipe, and I don’t mean hash. You’d see him perched on an arm of my couch, talking earnestly with Remi or Meg or Alan, highball glass in one hand as the other hand inserted into and withdrew from his mouth the stem of his pipe, depending on whether he was speaking or listening. Georgiana would stand beside him, one hand on his shoulder, eyes fixed on whoever was talking to her husband, shifting her gaze to him when he replied. They called each other “hon.”
But, for all that, I liked them. I never probed too far about their views on the war. They were aware I was in SDS, but they didn’t raise the topic of Vietnam, either. From oblique comments they uttered, I deduced they believed that, even if the war was wrong, a citizen had to support the government in wartime. Georgiana’s brother was in the air force, stationed someplace in Texas.
That Saturday, once we emptied the truck and sucked back a brew, they invited me to supper, but I declined, explaining my thesis dilemma. I trudged upstairs and worked until 11:00 p.m., when nothing I read or wrote was comprehensible. Sunday was entirely a thesis day. I considered phoning Guantanamero Bay, but instead kept my nose to the grindstone.
I duly presented myself with considerable trepidation at the office of Dr. Bulgerak — Bulgy’s real name — late Monday morning, another fifteen pages completed. Suckhole that I am when required, I had also prepared a timetable outlining dates for completion of the first draft, the second and third rewrites, submission to my thesis committee, and the formal defence. I knew from experience that Dr. Bulgerak would demand this proposed schedule: I’d already developed four of these over the past two years, none of which I’d lived up to. I was resolved to adhere to this version, though; I wanted to be finished. With my master’s in hand I’d have to decide whether to pursue an academic career, which meant applying for a Ph.D. program somewhere, or return to journalism and fall into the gaping maw of the Vancouver Sun newsroom. If I goofed off the master’s, Sun reporter was my only employment option. There was always the possibility I’d be in jail by June, a consequence of some SDS protest in the upcoming months, or as a result of the scheme hatched at the Bay — if that actually went ahead and if I participated. Yet I couldn’t conduct myself as though prison were a career path. That left the thesis.
My topic was the Denver-based Western Federation of Miners, a union that at the turn of the century extended into southeastern B.C. The thesis focused on how the WFM had played a key role in the founding of the radical Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, yet only two years later withdrew from the organization.
My engagement with labour history had been Dr. Bulgy’s brainwave. He was more enthusiastic about my thesis topic than I was. “The ideological tensions that led to the WFM’s change of heart,” he had insisted, “are still present in the workplace and employee organizations today.”
Dr. B.’s nickname reflected his appearance — short and bloated. Unlike most UCI profs, he sported a tie, though it was usually askew atop his dishevelled short-sleeved dress shirt, whose buttons scarcely drew the cloth together over his paunch. He was also one of the few Irvine profs who didn’t invite us to call him by his first name. I had been assigned Dr. Bulgy by the department, since I expressed no particular affection for any historical specialization. As my thesis supervisor, he was delighted to discover — after some probing — that my family had a trade union background. He had seemed unmoved by my parents’ upward mobility. My father had progressed at the paper mill from the mill yard to digester operator to minor office functionary. My mother had returned to school when my sister and I were in junior high to bring her clerical skills up-to-date; she was now employed by the North Vancouver school board, helping to deal with truancy cases.
The current status of my parents hadn’t dented Dr. Bulgerak’s enthusiasm for what he had seen as the perfect fit between my parents’ lives and the specialty he had decided should be mine. “Labour history, after all,” he had told me, “is the story of your own family, your people.” His area of expertise was retention or loss of community in urbanized areas; he probably would have thought it impertinent if I had asked whether his field had a familial link. I had tried to tell him that my parents, while positive about their own unions and the union movement, were realists about shop stewards and business agents scrabbling for careers in the hierarchy. He had brushed my quibbles aside. “History —” his arm had flailed toward the floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books and papers that lined his office “— isn’t a connection with the dead. History is our connection with living men and women. The conditions of your father’s job, whether as factory hand or in his present white-collar status, are due to history. How much time, money, and energy he has at the end of a shift, his views on a host of topics, who his friends are, the very design of the subdivision he lives in, all are a specific consequence of history.” When he paused for breath, I had reflected on whether I should mention that my parents’ house wasn’t in a subdivision. But I had kept my big mouth shut.
As I composed myself to knock on Dr. B.’s door nearly three years later, I had forty-three pages completed of the sixty new pages I had promised to hand him at the end of the summer. But I hoped to convince him I had learned my lesson and was finally intent on graduating in June. To butter him up, I would quiz him on possible grad schools for a Ph.D. I had also assembled a fund of stories to confirm his belief that the issues surrounding the WFM’s history still resonated.
My examples of ideological differences among workers were collected over the summer mainly in the Waldorf Hotel beer parlour on East Hastings in Vancouver. I had stayed for July and August with friends at a communal house near Nanaimo Street and Kingsway. All six other occupants were left-wing activists of one shade or another. To varying extents they were heads, as well. Half were, like me, working at summer jobs. The others had already fully merged into the city’s industrial workforce: one was employed at a plywood plant on the Fraser River, another shipped out as a tugboat deckhand, the third had hired on at Hayes Trucks, where logging and highway tractors were assembled.
My friends’ experiences confirmed my sense that the unionized blue-collar world was closer to college student existence in Vancouver than in California. Perhaps this was due to B.C. being highly unionized, with a third of the province’s jobs covered by labour contracts. Or perhaps this was because many elected B.C. union leaders were born in the United Kingdom, where the social change aspect of unionism was still present and where ties to leftie academics were part of a belief in organized labour’s mission to create a more equitable society. Maybe the proximity between students and organized employment was simply a consequence of the province being a primary resource industry economy. Logging, fishing, and mining were still the major generators of wealth, and these industries were bastions of the union movement. Without a large tertiary economic sector, almost everybody either was employed or had close relatives at work in the woods or mills, at sea or in canneries, or in mines or smelters. A strong trade union participation in the city’s End the War Committee also facilitated acquaintanceships between students and union militants.
In California, agriculture and defence duked it out for the state’s main industry. Despite the population of the Golden State equalling all ten provinces and two territories of the Frozen North combined, I had yet to befriend anybody in California who had worked in either the fields or an aircraft plant. Our connection at UCI with unionism began and ended with support for César Chávez’s United Farm Workers: distributing UFW literature, publicizing their grape boycott, and participating in occasional information pickets outside large Safeways in Santa Ana or up in L.A.
During the summer, I had met through my