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who was an American history major, at the end of the meeting said to me, “We ought to talk about your submitting a grant to the New York Council for the Humanities for the kind of work you're doing.” We met. I said, “I would like to do a film.” I felt I needed this time to do another film for organizing purposes, on health care and the role of workers and the role of the unions, etcetera. The film that Johnny Schultz would make that we would clearly define as a film that could help us. She said that to be approved by the New York Council for the Humanities you would have to have a task force of humanists and health care specialists, who would meet with me and would review the whole question of the subject matter of the film. Their determination had to be taken into consideration in such a proposal.

Q:

What was her connection to the New York Council on Humanities.

Foner:

She was executive director, at the time. Or Ron Florence may have been. She was on the staff. She later became the executive director. Ron Florence at the time was the executive director.

I was fearful of the idea of making a film that would have outsiders tell us what the film should be about. It didn't seem to me that that was of any value to us. Also, since we were coming in to the question of negotiations at that time, I decided to forget about it. This was prior to the 1978 contract.

Then Nina Felshin -- who I think I've mentioned, who was the curator for a number of our exhibitions, and who went to school with my daughter Nancy at Brandeis, and was an art historian and who at that time was working in Washington as a freelance, and was the consultant on art exhibitions for the George Meany Labor Center, and had helped me on exhibitions at Gallery 1199 -- said to me, “You know, you ought to meet Jack Golodner (director, AFL-CIO Department of Professional Employees). There ought to be something that should be done to help you with the endowments, because of the kind of stuff that you've been doing.” She said that she's familiar with what's going on in the labor movement because of her work at the center. She said, “Nobody's doing anything comparable to what you're doing.” So she arranged a meeting with Jack Golodner. Golodner suggested I contact Carl Stover at the National Endowment for the Arts' Special Project division. I called them and he said, “Yes, Golodner mentioned that you would call.” We talked briefly on the phone and he said, “Why don't you put together samples of materials that describe the kind of cultural programming in the arts that you have done in your union over the past years, and send it to me at my home.” I put





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