The core group of checkers first met in a second-floor restaurant near the magazine’s offices. They figured no one else at the magazine would be going to a second-floor restaurant. They debated about whether to try to join the Newspaper Guild or District 65, an independent union associated with the United Auto Workers that had organized the Village Voice. The UAW connection held a certain proletarian appeal for those whom one of the checkers, Evan Cornog, now dean of the School of Communication at Hofstra University, has called “some of us baby Marxists.” But the Guild won out, and when the checkers’ small revolutionary cell contacted them, the Guild people told them how to go about organizing, how to inform management about the drive, and so on. The checkers proceeded to speak, very quietly, at lunches and in apartments on the then-seedy Upper West Side, to other members of the staff who the rebels thought were safe solidarity bets. Ultimately, twenty-two members of the magazine’s one-hundred-plus editorial staff joined the Organizing Committee that the Guild had instructed the rebels to form.