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project. So we could set up -- the task force would have three meetings, but we would set up committees. I would meet with the union's executive council and explain what we're doing. Then I would recommend that the executive council set up a committee of staff people to work with me side by side on the thing, and that it have representatives at the advisory board. Then at one of the meetings with the staff, one of the staff members proposes that we ought to have a rank and file committee too. So we decide we'll have a rank and file committee. We ended up with a rank and file committee of 400 names -- people who volunteered. We printed out cards, distributed them. I spoke at the delegate assemblies -- “Who wants to volunteer to be on the committee?”

I begin talking about a project administrator, someone who will administer the project -- I'd be the director of the project. I talk to Betsy Wade, I talk to my friend Vic Terch -- he's now teaching in the schools -- maybe he might be interested in it. Debby Levy, who was on the staff in Connecticut, whether she would be interested. She had moved to Connecticut, didn't want to come back to New York. Betsy Wade suggests Karen Rothmayer, who is now at the Columbia School of Journalism, who had just left the Wall Street Journal and was looking for some more interesting kind of thing. For a short while she was interested in it, but then decided that her field was journalism and not this.

Ann Shore, who was the head of our retired members program, recommends that I contact Mordecai Bauman, who is retired, has been in cultural programs from the 1930s on, and was now retired and living in Belmont, Massachusetts. I called him on the phone and I asked him for advice and suggestions, I told him about the project. He says he's interested in the job. I say, “Well, send me a resume.” I begin to get resumes from lots of people. He sends me a resume that is mind boggling. I show it to my wife Anne and to friends. The first thing they say is, “Don't believe resumes.” It's new to me. “Resumes can say a million things. Don't believe resumes.” Anyway but I hired Marty Bauman. He came to see me in December of 1977 -- during the National Union Convention in New York. I stepped out of the convention and met upstairs with him. I hired him on the spot. Lois Dinerstein was employed as a consultant as the art historian.

We had a committee meeting at 1199 Plaza of members who live in 1199 Plaza (the union sponsored 1,600 family housing coop). The idea was to bring the programming to 1199 Plaza. The idea was to bring the arts and humanities to the hospital workers where they live -- where they work, where they live, and in their union community -- the