The second time the question of hiring blacks was going to come up, the men in my department said in effect, "We've got to forgive Red for his strange ideas," and "He needs help on this resolution." The speakers in favor of bringing blacks in were mainly Portuguese from my department and that won the rest of the Portuguese: ''If you don't want to do it on a moral basis - the fact that everyone's got a right to eat and work - you damn sure better do it because if we have a strike they'll recruit scabs in West Oakland." It was only a matter of time after that that blacks were on the line and working everywhere in the plant.

It was in that period right after I met her that the Oakland general strike occurred. The Oakland general strike was called by no leader. It was unique, I think, in general strikes in this country. There was a strike of women who were the clerks at Kahn's and at Hastings' department stores and it had been going on for months. The Teamsters had begun to refuse to make deliveries to those department stores and the department stores needed commodities badly.

Not many people had cars right after the war and you took public transportation to work in the morning. You had to go downtown to the center of Oakland and then out in the direction of your workplace. So thousands and thousands of people travelled through the heart of town every morning on the way to work, on public transportation. Very early one morning, here were the policemen of Oakland herding in a string of trucks, operated by a scab trucking firm in Los Angeles, with supplies for these department stores. Some truck driver or some bus driver or street car conductor asked some policeman about the trucks (this is now part of the mythology) and the policeman told him, "This is a scab trucking firm coming in from L.A. to take stuff to Kahn's and Hastings'." Well, that truck driver, that bus driver, or that street car conductor, didn't get back on his vehicle. Truck drivers got off their trucks and that increased till those trucks and those buses and those street cars just piled up and thousands of people were stranded in town.

In a small way it was a holiday. The normal criteria for what was acceptable conduct disappeared. No one knew what to do and there were no leaders. No one called it. Pretty soon the strikers began forming into committees on the street corners. Certain shopkeepers were told to shut down and drug stores to stay open. Bars could stay open if they didn't serve hard liquor, and they had to put their juke boxes out on the sidewalk. People were literally dancing in the streets in anticipation of some kind of new day. Soon the strikers began to direct traffic and only let union people into town and keep out those who it was feared might be against the strike. It lasted fifty-four hours.

It was that vision and the experiences in that strike that I experienced and which my wife saw, the vision in actual life of people determining their own destinies that sustains one and makes one stand fast for a long, long time. You don't have to so often go through all those doubts about, "Are the fundamental ideas of Marxism sound?" if you've been fortunate enough to have had those experiences. It's a matter of being advantaged or disadvantaged through your own life experience that sustains or drives one away from those basic ideas.

I made friends with the people around me the way you normally do. Most of them were Chicanos from my side of town. We soon had a ride group going. We were on swing shift and one night we'd go to the black community where part of our work group lived and have ribs and the next night we'd go up and have tamales, enchiladas, tacos or burritos, and the next night we'd go and have spaghetti-here and there to each one's house. One guy's mother'd make a big feed and my wife'd make a big feed and so on. We created our own social life, which you have to do on the swing shift, when you work from four in the afternoon until midnight. And the politics that I injected into that group? I didn't even have to try. It came in the natural course of life.

Running late at night through small rural towns I often have the feeling that I am the only one awake in the whole world. Things appear different from high in the cab of a truck. The trees along the road make a tunnel through which your headlights illuminate a semi-circle of green. The limbs across the road are so close that at times I can reach out and touch them. Mailboxes seem to rise up from the ground as my lights pick them up. The dashlights glow softly in the dark and the dials are constantly keeping me informed that all is well with "my horse." The easy snick-snick of the stick as I change gears and the sound of the tires singing in the cool night air, all combine to make my truck seem like a living thing that is keeping me safe and protected in its shell. Oncoming trucks blink their lights in a friendly hello as we pass in the night, or maybe flash them to warn me about the local cop in the next town who may be still awake trying to make another fine before he turns in. Another truck overtaking me comes around and I see the same soft glowing lights in his cab as he lifts his hand from the wheel to wave. I signal him in and he fades off into the darkness leaving me alone with my thoughts again. There is a soft glow in the East and then the rising sun comes up on a new world for I am four hundred miles from last night. These are the hours that compensate for the rest of it and for me they are the best part of trucking. Although the hours are long and hard and the amount of money earned is often less after expenses than in other skilled trades, most truckers will not trade places with anyone.

MANN: I can give you a good example of rank-and-file action not connected with elections. We had a man killed in the open hearth three years ago. He had seven days to go to retirement. Two or three months before that I'd filed a grievance, requesting that certain safety features be adopted. The grievance was rejected out of hand. He was killed by a truck backing up. One of the items on the grievance was that trucks backing up have a warning system.

The guy gets killed. Everybody liked him. He'd worked there . . . how many years? . . . you know. All right, I led a strike. I had to scream and holler, drag people out by the heels, but I got them out, shut the place down.

We went right to the union hall. We appointed a committee immediately. Every area-pit, cranes, floor-was represented. I said, "I want three men from every area to be on this committee. Now, what is wrong in your area?" Before the company could call us, in two hours, we had a list of thirty demands. When they called, we didn't just say, "Goddamn it, Tony got killed and we're shutting it down." We said, "This is what we want."

The company met with us. They bargained for three days. We got what we wanted. We kept the committee in force. Our local president cut this committee out about three months later but it worked for the time it existed. They still talk about it.

What we learned in the Schenley boycott was that we weren't going to win boycotts in Delano, we were going to win boycotts in New York and Boston. As long as the struggle was local, there was no way we could win. Farm unions had always been destroyed by fighting it out on local turf. By re-defining the struggle as national, then we had the leverage, because the growers couldn't do much in New York, or Boston, or Chicago, but we could. They could run the police and the courts and everything else in Delano, which they did, but we could get Stop and Shop in Boston to cooperate.

It was exactly the same thing the civil rights movement did: to re-define the arena of struggle. Gandhi did the same thing. South Africa did the same thing. Power is often a lot more unequal locally than it is on a broader scale.

The Beep-A-Thon was great! We started with the big one that Saturday. There were seventy-five cars, driving real slow. It went all the way from the school, up the back, and around. The cops were so tickled that we weren't marching that they held up traffic for us, remember? We went back and forth. People were in the cars, holding up signs, driving one after the other. the signs said "Scabs," "Sweeney's a union buster." We honked and honked. I burned out two of my horns. But it was well worth it.

I think it's things like that that politicize people. I was at an age where I was like a sponge, wanting to participate in society. Then I found out what society was like.