It was a timely dream. The once floundering culinary union had become increasingly aggressive over the previous three years, since naming the politically cunning Edward T. Hanley, a forty-year-old former bartender and labor leader from Chicago, as general president. It was Hanley who, in 1975, the year I met Lane, had directed the merger of the culinary union with the hotel and bartenders unions to create a force capable of taking on the rich and powerful owners of the nation's largest hotel and restaurant chains. The next year Hanley's new improved union was to play a lead role in a five-union strike against fifteen Las Vegas hotel-casinos, which virtually shut down the city's famed strip for more than two weeks during the crucial spring tourist season and cost the businesses an estimated $150 million.

In years past the culinary union had been considered sluggish and ineffective; membership numbers showed that the union was losing ground even as the number of service jobs in the United States exploded. Between 1963 and 1973, the percentage of restaurant workers belonging to unions had dropped from more than 25 percent to 15 percent. But Hanley's 1976 Las Vegas performance would show that such numbers didn't tell the whole story. Even before Hanley's rise to power, unionism wasn't as crippled as restaurant management people thought. In fact, union member ship was growing; it was just that hotels, restaurants, and bars were opening faster than the union could organize, so the percentage of culinary workers that belonged to unions remained small. With the Hanley presidency came a change in the way the culinary union operated, a change having to do with the political and financial clout the savvy young leader brought to the organization. During his first years in office, Hanley greatly increased the culinary union's organizing budget and heightened the organization's political profile with handsome contributions to sympathetic electoral candidates.