My father, who feared and hated unions –he had been an owner almost all his life– warned us to look out for union men when we got to New York.
Brother Dave and I were planning to drive a straight-bed truck to Brooklyn from Charlotte, N.C., to pick up a slitter scorer for Dave’s box shop, Queen City Container Inc.
When we got to “the bridge” into New York City, Dad said, Teamsters would stop our truck and tell us to move over or go home — non-union drivers weren’t allowed in New York.
Of course, we didn’t pay any attention to that gobbledygook.
We drove into Brooklyn without incident, to the plant where the slitter scorer, an exceedingly heavy piece of equipment, was waiting on the dock, ready to be loaded.
We wanted them to load it right away so we could head home, and that’s when the trouble started. The forklift drivers wouldn’t load it at all because they were union and we weren’t. They only loaded trucks driven by Teamsters. Dad had the details wrong, but he was partly right about those union boys.
I always wondered how they knew.
Could it have been because we talked funny, because we were from the South? Were we working too hard to suit them? Not hard enough?
Anyway, a management guy jumped on an enormous fork lift, picked up the slitter scorer, and loaded it before things got out of hand and he had a wildcat strike to deal with.
When he rolled the fork lift, with Dave’s machine in its arms, off the dock onto the bed of our truck, the boards in the bed of the truck moaned and creaked like they were going to break. And I heard someone ask, “You think he’s gonna fall though?”
He didn’t.
Minutes later, we were on the way back to North Carolina. And, no, there was still no trouble at “the bridge.”
Coming Monday: Things That Use To Be