Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Moe FonerMoe Foner
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 592

Foner:

It got a fairly good review from John O'Connor in the Times. They took an ad, PBS channel thirteen took an ad. It was a Saturday night in July, not exactly the best time of the year. They took an ad and the union took an ad, too. But before we showed it on t.v. we had a preview at the union. I invited lots of people to come to it, and it was very moving. It's a good thing to see -- it's really good.

The other things that we did -- now this was pretty much historic, doing a one hour documentary. [Telephone rings, tape stops and starts.] The other things that we did, one other thing that I'll just mention in passing because it was unusual, was that we decided that we would produce records. We did two records that we produced. One was an original cast album of Take Care. The second was “Ossie and Ruby and Bread and Roses.” That is, Ossie and Ruby put together a number of the things that they were doing in the hospitals, and other things, and Ossie wrote a tie for everything, linking it to Bread and Roses and the struggle of working people. It's a very nice record, a very good record. On the cover flap, on the other side, he wrote about “My twenty-five years with 1199.” Now these things were obviously valuable union things. We made them available to members like at a buck or two bucks.

Just to send them out to unions was a very important kind of thing. It's a good promotion thing. The endowments liked the idea that we were doing it. I'll come back to that after I discuss Images of Labor. As some of the things came out, particularly as books and posters came out, I began to think about the possibility of going in to direct mail. You know, we were very limited in our ability to move these things around. It was my feeling that there was a void in labor with this type of material, that we were the only ones around who could give it. Therefore if we could find a way of going in to direct mail with these materials, it would be a very very valuable thing. We didn't think of it as a fund raising thing. We thought of it mainly as a dissemination kind of thing. I began to talk to people at the National Endowment for the Humanities about it. At every stage I was told, “We don't do it. It's not done by the NEH. NEH has never disseminated materials.” [Telephone rings, tape stops and starts]

Maybe I should deal with Images of Labor first, because that's an important thing that gives a shot to the direct mail thing. The idea of doing Images of Labor goes back a long time. It was an idea that I had discussed with Stanley Glaubach, who was our art director, way way back. He died in the early 1970s, in the 1970s. He was a genius. [Telephone rings, tape stops and starts] I used to receive in the mail things from the Container Corporation of America. No, I used to see





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help