“Yes, he’s eighty-six years old and he still jokes about it!” She understood him completely and had that way of cutting to the bone.
Early on he rebelled against the life arranged for him. When he was thirteen he left for work one day and simply vanished. Searching turned up nothing and the family was forced to assume him dead, lost to the Calcutta streets of the Lower East Side. Until the following postcard arrived months later: “Dear Ma, I’m in China, Shmuel.” China! Family lore has it she fainted on the spot. Turns out he had hopped freight trains across the country to San Francisco, got a job shoveling coal on a ship to Shanghai. How he survived he never told us; the hobo jungles of the time were filled with runaways.
“Came back the sensation of the neighborhood!” Father would recall with a wry smile. “Wore a money belt!” His celebrity lasted about a week, about as long as his cash. But he was not proud of the escapade in the telling. The grief he caused my grandmother, who died three months before I was born, stayed with him.
Weaned on oil-based paint, turpentine, thick brushes, and dust, he remained a house painter fifty-five years until hernias laid him low and he rasped for breath. He had a special way of running his fingertips appraisingly across the wall of any room that was new to him. Yet he was fundamentally untamed.
I knew none of these stories of my father’s early life those Sunday mornings on the way to the Five-Ten Hall, nor would it have occurred to me he was my age when he worked the milk carts. What held me in awe was the immensity of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges as we passed under them, and in a different way, the stench of the oncoming Fulton Fish Market. The main pier was closed for the day, as were the stalls of the wholesalers on our side of the street. But the rotting fish stained the air.
“It smells! Are we there yet?” I would whine in small-boy disgust. Secretly I liked the smell.
My complaint was ignored. This too was part of our ritual.
Recently I took the old walk down South Street and found the mood, the sense of place, completely transformed. The FDR Drive traffic pounds over head. The Fulton Fish Market is closed for good. The red-brick eighteenth-century buildings—home to the warehouses, the workshops, the converted stables, the flea bag hotels, the twenty-five cent haircuts, the secondhand trouser and boot shops, the cheap eateries with the salt and pepper in one shaker and the steamed-over windows—they are all gone, gone with the merchant ships and tug boats that plied the harbor. Gone, as well, are the clattering, clanking overhead train lines, the “els” that branched from South Ferry like the tentacles of a gigantic iron squid, shedding rust and dust to the far reaches of Manhattan and the Bronx. Except for the faux South Street Seaport, which preserves a few of the old buildings as a stage set, the route is lined with monolithic housing projects and the cold towers of the financial district.
134 Broad Street, home of the Five-Ten Hall, was one of those ancient brick buildings in the permanent shadow of the “el” that has long since been demolished. I remember my sense of triumph as I turned right on the intersection of Broad and South, and let my tired legs propel me the last short block. I loved to climb the rickety stairs to the second floor loft ahead of Abe and my father. Climbing the rickety stairs of ancient lofts would turn out to be a staple of my childhood.
The loft was a simple spare rectangle, colored white. A polished timber floor creaked like the piers when you walked across it. Above your head loomed a dark, pressed-tin ceiling. At the far end, close to the naked windows, were two round poker tables of the kind you might encounter in the saloon of a Hollywood western—although the preferred game was pinochle. There was a leather couch along the wall opposite the door, some chairs, a table with literature arranged in scrupulously neat stacks, and behind it an equally neat, full bookcase. There were scrupulously detailed miniature ships—architects models, not toys—and all kinds of nautical things, knotted ropes and stuff: manly things that went straight to a boy’s heart.
What gave the place distinction, though, and what burns in my memory still, was the single decoration that hung flat against the long wall to your right as you entered. It was a ship’s steering wheel in solid mahogany red, nearly the size of the wall itself, gleaming in the morning light. Solid mahogany cylinders, spaced at regular intervals, radiated from its perfect rim. The center of the wheel challenged you with the following blunt message:
Industrial Workers of the World
I*W*W*
Marine Transport Workers
IU 510
These words, this hand-stenciled challenge, arose in shining red splendor above a simplified black globe: one world, the IWW logo.
This was the place our father walked us across town for—to 134 Broad St, the home of the IWW—the Wobbly Hall. It was also known as the Five-Ten Hall, after Industrial Union (IU) 510, the Wobbly name for its merchant seamen’s branch.
The IWW was a revolutionary labor union dedicated without apology, without obfuscation to the overthrow of capitalism, to the abolition of the wage system, to the world-wide solidarity of all labor, to the complete democracy of its internal affairs, to the building through the institutions of labor “the new society within the shell of the old.” It is the only such union in the history of the United States. The IWW, the Wobblies! This was the place—and now I am not speaking of 134 Broad Street, that had my father’s heart. To quote a song he sang in good moods, he “wore that button, the Wobblies’ red button and carried their red, red card.” Proudly. From 1922 until his last breathe in 1990.
The IWW was formed by revolutionary unionists and progressive activists who convened in Chicago in 1905. The pejorative “red”—as in despicable-flag-hating-revolutionist-less-deserving-of-life-than-a-cockroach—was originally directed at its members, the Wobblies, and not at members of the Communist Party, which did not exist until more than a decade later. No, the Wobblies were born of the American experience: Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners; Mother Jones of the Pennsylvania soft coal fields; Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Pullman railroad strikers and later of the Socialist Party; Father Haggerty, the defrocked priest and union organizer; Lucy Parsons, a black woman and the widow of Albert Parsons, the anarchist—and before that Confederate Civil War veteran—who was lynched by the State of Illinois following the Chicago Haymarket bombing of 1886.
The aim of the Wobblies was to “fan the flames of discontent,” to organize the poor, the oppressed, the people of no account in society into an effective fighting force. That many of the strikes they led were successful in the teeth of the entrenched power of mine owners, lumber barons, and textile manufacturers, who had at their disposal the goons, the police, the state militia, the press, the clergy, and the Federal Government is a tribute to their skill and bravery. You must not confuse a typical Wobbly-led strike of a century or so ago with today’s tepid union affair, top heavy with lawyers and professional bargainers. A Wobbly strike was a localized revolution. The old-time Wobblies I knew as a boy would tell of these struggles that raged across the American landscape—in the mines, lumber camps, factories, wheat fields, and waterfronts of a tooth-and-claw nation. The recitation of these forgotten battles, unadorned and at random, can bring a lump to the throat in the manner of a Whitman poem.
I go into this history because the Wobbly glories were a distant thunder by the time the three of us entered the Five-Ten Hall those sleepy Sunday mornings when I was a boy. Outright murder, state sponsored persecution and imprisonment, induced mass hysteria, internal dissension, mistaken tactics, the rise of the Communist Party, the Roosevelt New Deal with its social programs and favored treatment of “responsible” unions, and, above all, WWII and the general modernization of American life—these things conspired to bring the Wobblies low. The Five-Ten Hall was little more than a social club: a place for seaman who shared each other’s values to spend time together, to play silent games of pinochle, to gossip, to discuss the latest outrage, to speak of the past as if it were still happening. All this while waiting to “ship out.” The sea was their true home.
They were lonely men for the most part, childless, so they made a fuss over Abe and me. Huge shiny packages