Working. Part 39

STEVE DUBI.

We're in Pullman, an industrial neighborhood on the far South Side of Chicago. It is a one-family dwelling, much like all the others on the block. He has lived in this area all his life. "I was born in the shadow of them steel mills." He has worked as an inspector at the South Works of U.S. Steel for forty years.

"I was hired in '29 as a water boy. I was sixteen. I had to be seventeen, but in those days they overlooked a little thing here, a little thing there. I worked for a year. Then came the Crash. I was rehired in June '33 and I've been inspecting ever since. I'm ready for retirement. But the home we live in isn't paid for yet. The car I'm driving isn't paid for yet. Nothing to show for forty years of work."

His wife is a licensed practical nurse who "works with geriatrics." They have two sons. Robert, a Vietnam war veteran, is married. He's in the field of sales. Their other son, Father Leonard Dubi, is one of the city's most reknowned activist priests. As a pa.s.sionate spokesman for the blue-collar community in which his parish is located, he has on numerous occasions challenged some of the city's most powerful men and inst.i.tutions.

During the visit, as his weariness is evident, his wife joins the conversation.

When we were kids we thought the steel mill was it. We'd see the men comin' out, all dirty, black. The only thing white was the goggles over their eyes. We thought they were it, strong men. We just couldn't wait to get in there. When we finally did get in, we were sorry. (Chuckles.) It wasn't what it was cut out to be.

You're on your feet all day, on concrete. They lay the steel out on the skids. It's like a long horse, and they lay the steel across. You get your flashlight and you walk over it and you chalk it and mark the defect. You look for the defect in the steel. You watch the tolerances for lengths and thickness and what not. You have a chipper or a grinder to smooth it out. If it comes within the tolerance the customer allows, it's all right. If it goes too deep, you sc.r.a.p the bar or recut it. When we broke in, the older men showed us what defects to look for. A crack in the bar is called a seam. Some would be wide open where you couldn't miss 'em. Some were real tight and you would have to look close. It's hard on the eyes. Oh, your eyes do get tired. I put some drops in my eyes.

I'm getting up in the age now where I can't take it any more. In my younger days I used to work eight hours, go out and play a doubleheader of softball, go out and drink a shot, and sleep it off (laughs), and go back to work in the morning. And not feel too much pain. (Sighs.) But now I can't take it any more. I'd like to retire. I think I've worked hard enough and long enough, but I still can't see my way out. I don't know if I'll make it. I got sore legs and a sore back, sore arms, arthritis, bursitis, and every other thing is catching up on me. (Laughs.) Everyone looks forward to retirement, but there's a lot of 'em not makin' it. That's all they talk about is retirement. Where are you gonna go? What are you gonna do? And the poor soul never makes it. A lot of 'em, they're countin' the months instead of the years-and pa.s.s away. A lot of my friends are pa.s.sed away already.

I can take it any time I want, but I won't be fifty-nine until December. I don't get on social security until I'm sixty-two. Why, that'll be another three years. I don't want to go just yet, but maybe I won't be able to take it any more. It's gettin' tougher. I'm not like a machine. Well, a machine wears out too sometimes.

And they're forcin' more work on ya. It's knockin' off men, makin' cutbacks here and there to save money. They've knocked off an awful lot of jobs. With the foreign imports of steel they're losin' money. That's what they say. I suppose in order to make a profit they have to cut somewhere. But I told 'em "After forty years of work, why do you take a man away from me? You're gonna force me into retirement." All of us were real angry. But there's nothin' we can do about it. What can I do? Quit?

I try not to take this home with me. I don't tell her nothin' about it. It'll cause her to worry. There's nothin' I can do about it. About four ' I'll sit down here and watch TV, maybe get my dinner on a TV table and watch the finish of the ball game or the finish of a good movie. I'll sit back here and work the crossword puzzle and read the sports news and fall asleep. (Laughs.) I had to ask this coming Sunday off because I'm going to a golf outing. Otherwise I'd have had to work from three to eleven. They're working us twelve days in a row. When I'm workin' on the day shift I'll work Monday through Sat.u.r.day, seven to three. The following week I'll be lined up on the three to eleven shift. It's a forty-hour week, but it's always twelve days in a row.

If they're in a slack time, they go down to one shift. You can't make any long-range plan. When we bought this house fourteen years ago, the real estate man wanted to sell me a lot more expensive house. I said no. With the job I have I don't know if I'll be workin' three, four months from now. We might go out on strike. We may go down to four days a week. Been like this all these years.

I got nothin' to show for it. I live in a home the bank has a mortgage on. (Laughs.) I own a car the finance people have the t.i.tle to. (Laughs.) I don't know where they got the idea that we make so much. The lowest cla.s.s payin' job there, he's makin' two dollars an hour if he's makin' that much. It starts with jobs cla.s.s-1 and then they go up to cla.s.s-35. But no one knows who that one is. Probably the superintendent. So they put all these cla.s.s jobs together, divide it by the number of people workin' there, and you come up with a fabulous amount. But it's the big bosses who are makin' all the big money and the little guys are makin' the little money. You hear these politicians give themselves a thousand-dollar raise, and they scream when the steelworker asks for fifty cents an hour raise.

You pack your lunch, or you buy it at the vending machine. We used to have a canteen in there, but they cut that out. The vending machine is lousy. It hurts a man when he'll put his quarter or thirty-five cents in there for a can of vegetable soup and it takes the coin but don't kick anything out. There's no one there to open the machine and give him his quarter back or a can of food. (Laughs.) A lotta machines are broken that way. Every day it occurs.

You're not regarded. You're just a number out there. Just like a prisoner. When you report off you tell 'em your badge number. A lotta people don't know your name. They know you by your badge number. My number is 44-065. When your work sheet is sent in your name isn't put down, just your number. At the main office they don't know who 44065 is. They don't know if he's black, white, or Indian. They just know he's 44-065.

Of course, there are accidents. They're movin' a lot of steel-a lot of crane movement and transfer buggy movement and switchin' and trucks. And there's machinery that straightens the bars and turning lathes. Always movement. You eat the dust and dirt and take all the different things that go with it. How you gonna grind a defect out of a bar without creating dust? How you can scarf the billet without makin' smoke? When a man takes off sick, he's got a chest cold, how do you know what he's got? A lot of people died, they just had a heart attack. Who knows what they die of?

We have to slog our way through dirt and smog and rain and slush to get to our place of work. From the mill gate to where I work is about a fifteen-, twenty-minute walk. In-between that you have puddles. We don't have a nice walkway with an overhead ramp. We don't have a shuttle bus. If it's raining, you walk through the rain. If it's snowin' or blowin', you're buckin' that snow and the wind. In the wintertime that wind is comin' off that lake, it's whippin' right into your face.

That place is not inside a building. It's just under a roof. There's no protection against the winds. They won't even plug up the holes to keep the draft off you. Even the snow comes through and falls on you while you're workin'. The roof is so leaky they should furnish you with umbrellas.

His wife murmurs: "He's sick all the time."

The union squawks about it, but if the steel mill don't fix it, what are you gonna do? The washrooms are in terrible shape. But when they get around to fixin' 'em, there's five hundred men usin' one bowl to sit on. The union's helped a great deal, but the steel mill is slow in comin' across with things like they should.

If I retire right now, I would make $350 a month. There's a woman across the street got a half a dozen kids and no husband, and she's probably gettin' five hundred dollars a month from ADC. She gets more money than I would right now after workin' for forty years. If I retire now, my insurance is dropped. I belong to this Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance now. If I go on a pension, I would get dropped automatically. The day you retire, that's the day it's out.

I told my sons, "If you ever wind up in that steel mill like me, I'm gonna hit you right over your head. Don't be foolish. Go get yourself a schooling. Stay out of the steel mill or you'll wind up the same way I did." Forty years of hard work and what have I got to show for it? Nothing. I can't even speak proper. When you're a steelworker (laughs), you don't get to speak the same language that you would do if you meet people in a bank or a business office.

"When I was going to school I really loved mechanical drawing. I really excelled in it in high school. I was gettin' good marks. But my dad died. Well, most of the children had saloon keepers and grocery store keepers, they had dads workin', and they were able to buy things. I felt embarra.s.sed because I couldn't buy the proper paper. I would use the other side of someone else's discarded paper. I did love mechanical drawing and I was good at it. Well, I had to get a job . . ."

I was hopin' Leonard would be a doctor. When he entered the seminary, I thought: Gee, what caused him to go in there? When he was an Andy Frain usher he was a.s.signed to Holy Name and he got acquainted with a lot of priests there. A lot of the ushers were at the seminary. They probably influenced him. He's happy, so I'm happy for him. At first I wasn't sure he was gonna stay, 'cause he loved life too much. He loved everything, people and animals. (Muses) Maybe that's why he became a priest . . . (Trails off.) In the past, it was strictly parish. They come out once a year to bless the house and shake the hand. But now, with the younger set, things have changed. All the priests are goin' without their collars and doin' a lot of things that the old-time priest would never think of doin'. I don't think they were allowed to.

Henrietta Dubi reflects: "I'll never forget those women, my neighbors, they were sittin' out on the porch and they couldn't understand why I'm grievin' that Leonard went into the seminary. They said, 'Oh, it's such an honor.' I said, 'Yes, but it's gonna be a hard life.' No freedom, no privileges. We could only see him once a month. I figured he was in prison. One day I said to him, 'Leonard, are you happy?' He said, 'I can't begin to tell you how happy I am. Please don't ask again. I chose this life and this is the life I'm going to lead.' When he was havin' his senior prom, I should have known then. Everything he was buying was black. It never dawned on me. The first time I seen Skid Row in my life was when my son took me down there. He said, 'I want to save people like this.' In a kidding way I said, 'These people are beyond saving.' He said, 'As long as there's breath in 'em, they can be saved.' I was sad and depressed when he first went in. I couldn't understand why. Now I'm very proud of him. I wish there were more like him to speak out, but some are afraid. We pray for him all the time."

Sometimes I worry about him. He takes on the real big shots. He might buck the wrong person. They've been shooting Presidents and senators. He could be shot at too-if he says the wrong thing or gets the wrong man angry. When you're foolin' around with a politician, why you got troubles. But he's for the people, he wants 'em to have a square deal. And I'm glad. If the people don't like what he's sayin', why that's too bad.

You know the big joke? When Len was an Andy Frain usher, he used to seat Mayor Daley in his box at Comiskey Park. Ten years later he's fightin' him on the Crosstown Expressway business and the county a.s.sessor's office. (Laughs.) When we first started visiting Leonard at the seminary we weren't even allowed to bring him a newspaper. He wasn't allowed to have a radio. It was so strict at that time. What amazes me now, I turn on the TV and I see him arguin' with the mayor, (Laughs.) Or the county a.s.sessor and them politicians. It's so different, it's fantastic.

When he started on this pollution against the steel mills, I told Leonard everybody knows the steel mill is polluting. How can you make steel without polluting? I'm not gonna bite the hand that feeds me. They been doing it for a hundred years. It could be cut down a great deal, I suppose, if they wanted-which they are trying to do. They're putting in a lot of new buildings. I don't know what they are, but they claim it's for ecology. Who knows?

This pollution business. He helped them people on the West Side where he lived. When we used to go to visit him it seemed you are going into a valley. It seemed you hit a fog bank. We learned later it was smog from the Edison plants. And he cleared it up. So we're for him one hundred percent. But this fightin' with the mayor and the aldermen, that scares me. (Laughs.) Mrs. Dubi interjects: "When I see him on television, I run. There might be a nut in the audience who'll shoot."

She's scared. We're real proud of him. All my friends cut clippings out of the newspaper and bring 'em to me and they'll say, "Hey, I heard Leonard on the radio on my way to work." They'll tell me they're all for him. My sister was tellin' us the other day that her doctor was speakin' of a young priest who was doin' so much for the people in the neighborhood. She said, "That's my nephew." He said, "Gee, he's wonderful."

You know what I told him to start on next? He's fightin' for lower taxes, which is all right. And better livin' conditions, which is all right. And this road that he's against, it's all right. Like he said, they're gonna demolish a lotta homes, a lotta people are gonna be put out. So the next thing I want him to do is lower this age of retirement, social security to about sixty, so I can get out of the mill sooner. If they lowered the age to about sixty, maybe they'd get a year or two benefit out of the pension before they die.

Hard workin' never killed a man, they say. I say workin' in the steel mill is not like workin' in an air-conditioned office, where politicians and bankers sit on their fannies. Where you have to eat all that dust and smoke, you can't work hard and live a long life. You shouldn't be made to work till sixty-two or sixty-five to reap any benefit. We're paying social security, and most of us will never realize a penny from it. That's why they should give it to him at a younger age to let him enjoy a few years of the life he ruined workin' in the factory. I told him. "Leonard, you get to work on that next." (Laughs.) Yeah, we're proud of Len. At least he's doin' somethin'. What have I done in my forty years of work? I led a useless life. Here I am almost sixty years old and I don't have anything to show for it. At least he's doing something for his people. I worked all my life and helped no one. What I'm happy about is that them two boys took my advice and stayed out of the steel mill. (Laughs.) We're a couple of dummies. We worked all our lives and we have nothing.

MRS. DUBI: You know what we have? We got two million dollars in our children. Even in this angered world, both these kids turned out good, right? So we're still winners. (To him) Even though we don't have the cash, Father, we don't have nothin' to retire with we still got two million dollars.

You gotta show it to me.

MRS. DUBI: You see him on TV, don't you?

No thanks to me. I had nothin' to do with makin' him what he is. I told you I am nothing. After forty years of workin' at the steel mill, I am just a number. I think I've been a pretty good worker. That job was just right for me. I had a minimum amount of education and a job using a micrometer and just a steel tape and your eyes-that's a job that was just made for me. But they don't appreciate it. They don't care. Bob worked in the mill a few months during a school vacation. He said, "I don't know how you done it all these years. I could never do it." I said, "I been tellin' you all your life never get into that mill." (Laughs.) FATHER LEONARD DUBI.

He is a.s.sociate pastor of St. Daniel the Prophet. He has just turned thirty. "This is a big year for the parish. It's twenty-five years old. Tonight I have a meeting with the book ad committee. I have a person coming in for counselling this evening. My day will end around ten-thirty. It's a fourteen-hour day, sometimes longer. I wear two hats. I'm a full-time priest and I'm cochairman of a community organization, CAP."92 "My day begins about six ' in the morning. We have three ma.s.ses: six forty-five, seven-thirty and eight. I rotate with my boss, the pastor, Father Brennan, and Father Tanzi. We come back to the rectory. We put on a cup of coffee, we'll sit around, read the papers, chat. The kids start arriving for school. The doorbell will ring several times before that. A little kid wants to ask a question or see one of the priests to bless religious articles.

"The phone starts ringing and rings all day. Simple requests. Somebody's in the hospital: 'We'd appreciate your going to see him.' Kids call up for premarriage instructions. There are calls about funeral arrangements-ma.s.s, burial, wakes. The morning is spent answering the mail and checking with the CAP office. I try to do some reading in the afternoon or run out to the hospital for a visitation or I'm called to a meeting. After school I'll meet with the altar boys to plan for the ma.s.ses, for special liturgies, for the annual picnic. I don't know where the time goes. The weekends are the busiest time for a priest-weddings, confession schedules, ma.s.s schedules. Sunday's a great time to meet our people."

I never thought I'd be a priest. I didn't even know what a seminary was until I was seventeen. I started working for Andy Frain as I entered my senior year in high school. Frain hired a lot of seminarians. In the process of knowing these fellows, I started going back to church. One of my friends kept nagging at me: "Why don't you consider being a priest?"

My mother went to work when I was about four years old just to be able to make the weekly and monthly bills. My father completely discouraged me from ever thinking of a life as a steelworker. Where others would admire their fathers for their work in the mills, my father challenged me to lift my horizons beyond that.

The steel mill's been a hard thing for my father. He's always suffered from back trouble. There were times when just the burden of walking and bending over those steel ingots just knocked his back out and he'd be in pain for days and weeks at a time. He felt life was like that because people like him went to work too early, had no education. They didn't really discuss, they didn't read. When they'd get off work it was a release to go to the tavern and have a couple of drinks. He didn't want that for his children. He agonized. He was so unhappy with himself. Sometimes it caused serious strains in the house. I think he has tremendous ability. But because he was caught up in the system so young, the system that kept him so humiliated, he was just frustrated in his life. He didn't want it to happen to his sons.

I know my father had much more potential, but he was locked into a system day after day, and he didn't want me to get locked in. He encouraged me to go college-"to make something of yourself" were the words he used. My mother was lobbying very strongly that I go into the medical field.

When I entered the seminary, I can remember my mother would cry and cry and cry. My father was so frustrated, he thought I was going to be a priest to save his soul, that I did it to make up for all his sins, that I was doing penance for him. I said, "h.e.l.l no, Dad, I'm going because I'm choosing to go, not because of your life. I want to do it." Even today if I decided I could not be happy and personally fulfilled, I'd step out as a priest. The work of a priest is to bring life to people. If I don't have that life inside me, I can't give that life away.

My parents were raised in Catholic families, but they were not that deeply religious. They were married in court and did not have it validated by the Roman Church until I entered the seminary. My father was turned off by what he considered the religious hypocrisy of many of the Catholics he was raised with. My mother grew up in a Polish home, and many people of ethnic backgrounds looked upon the clergy as people who were just interested in money.

The priest would come on Easter to bless the baskets and pick up a five-dollar bill. My grandmother-she didn't have much money-used to embarra.s.s me every time I'd go over as a priest. She would hand me money. That would hurt me. I'd say, "I don't want it." She was a poor old lady. That's part of her tradition. When the priest comes you give him money. I started going over there less and less . . .

When I got out to St. Daniel's three years ago, I had an agenda for myself. I was trained in a very liberal seminary. I saw social action issues-war and peace and poverty. I spent my deacon years-before I was or-darned-at Catholic Charities. It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. I was a fisherman pulling people out of troubled waters. Trying to bring them back to life with artificial respiration and Band-Aids. Then I'd put them back on the other side of the river into the same society that pushed them in. I knew I'd have to do more than just be a social worker and patch up people.

When I got there I decided I would listen rather than just act. I kept hearing people talk about their problems and it blew my mind. I had stereotyped white middle America. I came from a steelworker's family. We lived in a cold water flat until I was fourteen. We had plenty of problems. But I hadn't been listening to these people. I put them all in the same bag: they were all prejudiced, they all hated black people, they were all for the war in Vietnam, they could hardly care less about poor people. As I listened, I saw they were as powerless as anybody.

We had a congregation of about twenty-four hundred families, two thousand attend regularly. We get about four thousand people at St. Daniel's every single weekend. It's a working-cla.s.s, a lower-middle-cla.s.s community. Most of the people are laborers. We have a high proportion of city workers, people who have migrated to the outer edge because of changing racial patterns. We're in the Twenty-third Ward. About twenty-four hundred policemen and their families live here. We have very few professional people.

The one high school here, John F. Kennedy, was built for fourteen hundred. Now thirty-six hundred kids go to this school. It's integrated because there's a public housing project nearby. Two white kids or two black kids can jostle and if they have a fight, it's just a fight. If a black kid and a white kid happen to jostle in the hall and a fight breaks out, it's a racial incident.

It's just one example of poor city planning of a community where taxes have doubled over the past ten years. People who were paying $350 are now paying $700. They're just about wild about that. They feel they're not getting the services they're paying for. They have been neglected by the city.

They couldn't do anything about their kid's poor education, the pollution caused by Commonwealth Edison and the Sanitary treatment plant that poured nine and a half tons of greasy aerosols on them every day. They couldn't do anything about the Crosstown Expressway when it was announced from on high. They wrote letters, they called the alderman, but nothing happened year after year. I was listening.

In January 1970 I got a call from a young Jesuit seminarian. He was working with a new organization known as CAP. I had lunch with him, and the next day I was off and running. It was like a roller coaster ride. It took off like wildfire. At St. Daniel's the women especially got active. I'm an advocate of the Women's Lib movement. I try to have as many women as possible partic.i.p.ate in the church services. Many of the extraordinary ministers at St. Daniel's are women. The women understand exactly the need for power. They became committed organizers for CAP.

There's a great difference between textbook civics and the actual civics of the streets. When people, fifty or a hundred, go to see the alderman or the mayor, they can't believe what they hear. They're resented by the men they put in power. For the first time in their lives they learn that politics is power. People with the big money-the big inst.i.tutions, corporations-have worked out deals in back rooms with politicians. They're not going to break these deals until they're forced to by the people.

We had five hundred down at Mayor's Daley's office during our battle with Commonwealth Edison. They were peaceful. Some of them for the first time in their lives had ever been to city hall. They were just digging it. They're really looking around and enjoying it. Out come two aldermen, Tom Keane and Paul WiG.o.da93 and they yell at the people, "You should be home with your kids. Why do you have your kids down here?" Who are you, sir?" said one lady. She couldn't believe an alderman would talk to her that way. The next thing, she's being shoved by a policeman. A middle-cla.s.s woman who loves the system, who's a friend of the police because they're for law and order. All of a sudden she's pushed. She came up to me with tears in her eyes: "I didn't do anything. I would have moved if he'd asked me, but he just shoved me. I could understand what those kids went through in Lincoln Park in 1968." She hated these kids before.

Funny thing, a lot of the police are for CAP. Some of them are from our community. Their wives have actually partic.i.p.ated. The people who delight me are the policemen and their wives. We have many of them involved. They can't take out-front roles, but they're silent supporters. They know the system needs an overhaul, that change must come.

Ours is a white community, except for the housing project. A strict racial balance was kept in the area adjacent to the project, fifty percent white, fifty percent black. During the civil rights decade, black organizations pressured for the removal of the quota system. Consequently, white people moved out and black people came in. Homes were built in this area, where you put five hundred dollars down and the rest of your life to pay. The community there is now ninety percent black. Youth gangs keep the black people of this area in fear.

This affects my parish nearby. "Where are we gonna go? We don't want to live in a black neighborhood." The blacks say, "We don't want to live in a white neighborhood." Both want to live where they can have good schools, good services, good transportation, and feel safe. I blame the CHA,94 which couldn't care less about these blacks and whites.

Yet in the process of organizing we have seen black people and white people share the same problems. The small home owners. The community has been built up around Midway Airport. When the airlines, in their overscheduling, clogged up O'Hare, Mayor Daley wanted a lot of them transferred to Midway, with their 747 jets. That's why we're fighting the Crosstown Expressway. It would gut the city and demolish many of the homes. Black and white together have united to stop the Expressway.95 Another fight. The Sanitary District had been processing waste into sludge, dehydrating the sludge, and the gases had been polluting the community. We had attended Sanitary District meeting after meeting, with one hundred, two hundred, three hundred people. It kept escalating. Finally all the trustees but two came to the rally in the school bas.e.m.e.nt at St. Daniel's. The room holds eight hundred. Over fifteen hundred were there. They were standing in the aisles, on the window sills, up on the doorway, out in the parking lot. We had testimony from the people who were being terribly affected by this pollution.

I gave a speech and demanded that the trustees sign a contract with the people, setting a date to end that pollution at their next regular meeting. The five trustees present made little speeches and signed their names. The people were just absolutely elated. The roof almost went off. For the first time in their lives they saw the culprits responsible for the smoke that was polluting their neighborhood. The people felt they had won. The trustees -I'll give them credit-have lived up to the agreement. It's a much cleaner neighborhood now. If it wasn't for the pressure of the people, this air would still be polluted.

In 1971 we started to fight U.S. Steel because of pollution. That's the company my dad works for. This company broke the agreement about cleaning up. How could we fight it? We didn't have a consumer angle. Ordinary people don't buy steel ingots. We started investigating U.S. Steel's tax history. We discovered it was under-a.s.sessed by P. J. Cullerton 96 to the tune of sixteen million dollars a year. Here were people being polluted to death by a company they were actually subsidizing, because the money lost by the county had to be made up by the small people. As we investigated further, we found out other companies and banks and race tracks were also under-a.s.sessed. We went to the county building, en ma.s.se, and demanded redress.

The people have now learned the importance of coming out in large numbers. We're peaceful. We trust ourselves not to be violent. Our strongest weapon is the volume of our voices. Confronting a person up to now considered unapproachable and making him show his face-and state his position in our presence. The people have become politically independent. They recently threw out an alderman . . .

Tremendous changes have occurred in their lives. They are able to understand that their problems in society are not just caused by what they used to consider goofy little minority groups. They're becoming extremely politicized. They're able to see people-even black people-as allies, rather than enemies you have to run away from if they move next door to you. What these people are seeing now is a common enemy. It can be called city hall. It can be called the private corporation. It can be called big money. G.o.d, have I seen att.i.tudes change!

The most exciting moment in my life? Picture this. It's the annual meeting of the shareholders of Commonwealth Edison, one of the largest public utilities in the entire country. The chairman of the board and all the directors are up on the stage. We had about two thousand people in the lobby.97 It was like a festival-people dancing. About twenty of us entered the hall. The chairman heads for the podium and is about to gavel the meeting to order. We walk down the aisle. Here is the symbol of the establishment of the United States-the annual meeting of a large corporation. I look up at the chairman and I tell him, "We're here to find out what you're going to do about pollution. You have a half-hour to give us your answer." People were on their feet: What is this priest doing here, disrupting this meeting? We did it.

It was a liberating experience for me. I never believed I would be able to do that kind of thing. I had always been taught to be polite. To say, Yes sir, No sir. To stay in my place. I should be seen and not heard. But I felt, h.e.l.l, if you're not heard, you're never gonna be seen.

We had the rally outside. A half-hour later we came into the hall again. They let us in, one at a time. Only about ten of us were allowed. They tried to seat us in different parts of the hall. I made a break for this aisle and the others broke away and followed. I faced the chairman again and asked for his answer. There was no answer. He threatened to adjourn the meeting. I said, "Okay, here's our answer. You won't listen to the people, but we're not gonna take it. We're gonna go to city hall and force this issue through law." By this time one of our women who had been wrapped in an arm lock by a security guard-she didn't know whether to be a lady or kick him or bite him-broke away. She told the chairman a thing or two. We all walked out together.

At the city council we forced them to pa.s.s one of the strongest air pol-lution ordinances in the country. We tangled with the all-powerful Commonwealth Edison and forced them to purchase six million tons of low sulphur coal. They've retired much of their antiquated equipment. It's not over yet. There's a lot of struggle ahead. But we've had a touch of victory and it's sweet.

To be free is to have some kind of say-so about your life. I have no vote on the board of directors of Commonwealth Edison. I count for absolutely nothing. But that company is polluting my environment, is shaping my life, is limiting it and the chances of the kids at St. Daniel's parish. It's killing me as a person, as life in the steel mill is killing my father. I have to fight back. That brash act-that rude act-of interrupting the chairman of the board did it. I felt free. I don't have to be afraid of him. He goes to the toilet the same way I do. What makes him better than me? His hundred thousand dollars a year? h.e.l.l no. Well, that act made me free. You can't emerge as a person if you're a yes-man. No more yes, Mr. Mayor. No more yes, Mr. Governor. No more yes, Mr. Chairman.

JACK CURRIER.

It was a chance encounter on the Illinois Central. He is a teacher of English at a branch of the City College, At night he conducts adult education cla.s.ses at an urban university; among his students are ADC mothers. He is thirty-seven.

My father is the comptroller, treasurer, and a member of the board of directors of a large corporation. His t.i.tle, salary, his house in the suburbs, everything about his life-the successful American life-is right out of the picture book. But I wouldn't trade places with him for a million dollars.

My father's spent his life adding up numbers for somebody else. Any connection between his real life and his work seems to be missing. I feel, with all my doubts about the inst.i.tution I work for, with the sense of hypocrisy, there's a connection.

In order to do a better job, I have to become a better man. In the business world, in order to do a better job, you have to become ruthless. In order to make more money, you have to care for people less. In order to succeed, you have to be willing to stab your compet.i.tor in the back.

A couple of years ago I was in my father's office. I think we were getting ready to go out for lunch. He got a phone call. His boss was chewing him out for something-in a tone and language that was humiliating. Here's my father who had worked for this company for thirty years.

My father's a dignified man and he works hard. G.o.d knows he's given that company all the years of his life. He doesn't have anything else. There are no hobbies. He wasn't close to any of his children. Nothing outside of work. That was it. He would get up in the morning and leave the house and come home twelve, fourteen hours later, six days a week. That was it. Yet here he is at sixty and here's a guy chewing him out like he's a little kid. I felt embarra.s.sed being there. I felt sorry that he knew I was watching that happen. I could see he was angry and embarra.s.sed. I could see him concealing those feelings. Sort of shufflin' and scratchin' his head, in the face of higher authority. We went to lunch. We didn't talk about it at all.

I would hate to spend my life doing work like that. If work means something to you, it doesn't matter what the boss . . . I can imagine being fired from my job. I can imagine an administrator at the college disapproving my teaching methods. But there's no way he could deprive me of the satisfaction that comes from doing my job well.

If my father were ever let go, I don't know what he would do. I suppose he could find somebody else to add up numbers for, although at this age that would be hard. There ought to be a reason behind what men do. We're not just machines, but some of us live like machines. We get plugged into a job and come down at nine o'clock in the morning and someone turns us on. At five o'clock someone turns us off and we go home. What happens during that time doesn't have any connection with our real lives.

I have a lot of respect for my father. He worked hard. During the Depression he went to night school in Washington, D.C., and got a law degree. He was a soda jerk in the drugstore of the Mayflower Hotel and he worked his way up to be the chief accountant. He gave his whole life to that corporation. I don't know any man more honest, more conscientious than my father. But what is it worth? What has it gotten him?

His family and his children got away from him. When I got old enough to go to college, I went off and that was it for me. My sisters graduated from high school and, soon as possible, moved out. It was a place where we all slept, but it wasn't home.

I felt, as long as I stick to talking about his job, we could have a pleasant, superficial conversation. As I became interested in music and politics, I found no comfortable way to pursue those things with him. His job was the only topic . . . He makes some contribution to the Republican party, he always votes, and he reads the newspaper every day on the train, but the job is really it. After all those years, that's his life. To ask whether he loves the company or not-it's irrelevant.

I had a series of jobs in the early fifties, after flunking out of college. I worked for a bank, sold insurance . . . I ended up with a good job as a traveling salesman for a business machine company. I was twenty-three years old and making ten thousand dollars a year. I probably could have made it seventeen thousand the next year. I could see it was going right up.

I began to run into conflicts with my own feelings. I couldn't accept the way my boss did busines or the way in which everybody in the field did business. If I had remained, I'd be sitting on top of a business of over a million dollars. One of the outfits that had become disenchanted with my boss offered to take me on as their manager and buy them out. It looked like a beautiful proposition. But I just . . . it wasn't my life. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wasn't doing it.

I think about guys that were in college with me in the early fifties. They sell real estate, insurance, they're engineers, they're bankers, they're in business. They probably make a lot more money than I do. It's like they're twenty years older than me. They seem a lot closer to my father than they do to me. They're in a groove, they're beyond change. They're caught into something which is so overpowering-it's as though their life was over. It's all settled. I think my job is keeping me young, keeping me alive.

He went back to school, the experimental St. John's College in Maryland. He taught elementary school for a year in a depressed rural area. "I just felt I had to get into teaching and really try my hand at it."

Laing98 says in a sick society almost anything that is done is harmful. I have that feeling about my cla.s.ses. You walk into a cla.s.sroom and you've got an enormous amount of power. I'm six seven and here were these fourth graders. You can imagine how much power I had there. They all listened when I spoke. I was the big father figure. They all loved me and I took care of them and it was a great thing for my ego. But I felt it wasn't really using enough of me dealing with fourth graders. There was something missing for me.

I ended up teaching adults. Again, that's very satisfying for the ego. You get into a cla.s.sroom and you have all the power of the inst.i.tution. You tell people what to do and they do it, what to read and they read it. You tell people what to think, how to interpret things . . . You can make them feel guilty because they haven't read certain things, because they're not familiar with them. Teachers are playing that kind of game all the time. And I was right in there, with both feet.

I was scared of my students when I began. I did everything I could to keep from being caught in an error, in a lapse of knowledge. I used all the authority I had to keep them at a distance, to keep them in their place. If any of the students didn't hate my guts, it wasn't because I gave them no reason. There was no communication going on in that cla.s.sroom at all.

The traditional education sees the school as a place where the student gets poured into him the acc.u.mulated knowledge of the past. I've gone very much from one end of the pole to the other in the last seven years. I'm very interested in listening to my students. But I still feel hypocritical about my work. I suspect people in the business world have to stay away from thoughts like that. Yet there are things I feel pretty good about. I know there are students I've helped. I'm not sure I ever helped anyone when I was selling business machines or insurance.

I've become suspicious of the teacher who automatically thinks he's superior to somebody who's out there working as a salesman. I don't think there is anything automatic about it. I am working for an inst.i.tution that turns out students so they will be salesmen.

When I began teaching at college, I pretended to be this authoritarian figure who knew everything. Gradually, over the years, it's become possible for me to walk in the cla.s.s and to admit to my own confusion. As I present the person I really am to my students, they present the people they really are to me.

When I was a salesman, there was never a day in which I felt I could be absolutely honest. It was essential that the role be played. I was on somebody else's trip. I would fit into that slot and behave in a certain way. In order to do that, it meant wearing a mask every minute on the job.

One summer I took a job out in Missouri, selling insurance. After I learned the pitch and got out in the territory I realized it was a crooked operation, a con game. Oh G.o.d, they were a terrible outfit. (Laughs.) I needed the money and I was a salesman. I found out I couldn't do it. I'd be driving down the country road and I'd come to the farm where I was supposed to make my pitch. It was difficult just to turn the car into the driveway. I'd drive around the place three or four times before I could pump myself up enough to go in and talk to the guy. I sold one policy in seven weeks and then quit.

I feel that my unwillingness to settle into a groove-my fear of being caught in a rut-is related to my father and his job and his success. While my contemporaries have been out pursuing exactly what it is my father has, I got a good look at it early enough. So I knew it wasn't the way I'd spend my life.

The corporation really wants that person's whole life. They like to have a guy who will join a country club for the corporation, marry an appropriate wife for the corporation, do community work for the corporation. These are the peple that really make it. That's my father's life.

It's hard to think of a friend that my father has. I don't know of one. There are people he works with. These are people in the family. That's it. Because of his particular job he's less in contact with people than a lot of businessmen. He's an accountant, a bookkeeper.

I can't talk to him about my social life. I'm sure he'd disapprove of a lot of people I'm close to, a lot of things I do. I really feel my life is wide open. I've got problems, there are things that get me down, but on the whole, I feel younger than I did ten years ago. I have a lot of friends, students, who have affected my life.

When I think of my father, the strongest memories are the very, very early ones. He hadn't been completely sucked into that business. He still had a life separate from the job. I must have been less than four. There was a parking lot across the street. I can remember sitting with my father at the window and he would name all the different kinds of cars for me. I remember his taking me out on a Sunday morning in the park. I'd be riding the tricycle and he'd be walking . . . I can't remember a time we spent together after that.

By the time I was ten I was aware of the distance between us. I was aware he didn't understand me. I was aware he didn't know what I was thinking, what I was feeling. That gap continues . . . (Pause.) When I got old enough to go out on my own there was nothing to hold me back. His job is the key to his life and, I think, the key to mine.

HAROLD PATRICK.

He is small, compactly built; his battered face has seen all sorts of weather. His shoulders are stooped-reluctantly, it would seem. He is sixty-six. Two of his sons are city firemen and one is a policeman.

I started workin' when I was eleven years old. With a peddler on Sat.u.r.days, at five o'clock in the morning until it was done. For twenty-five cents. The peddler used to yell out the wares and the woman would holler out the window, "Bring me up the potatoes." I'd run upstairs and give it to the woman. Fifty years later I'm runnin' a freight elevator. I been runnin' it for the past thirteen years. A man does a certain job and it becomes so repet.i.tious there's no imagination left . . .