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[laughs] One could easily say more than he ever deserved!

But on top of that, he called it the hospital division of RW, we called it the national union. He, in the AFL-CIO news and whenever he went around with the AFL-CIO, he kept talking about how my hospital division was growing. It would be in the AFL-CIO news and it was a credit to him. It looked like the RWDSU was an active, aggressive, feisty kind of organization! And that's the way it was.

Now internally, the problems arose with Doris as the negotiations became serious.

Can you pinpoint the time when that process was started?

When it starts?

The process of the negotiations intensifying, and the objections starting to be raised.

I would say that in 1980 it's very very serious, and by sometime 1979, 1980 Doris is beginning to distance herself from the merger.

In other words, after the 1979 convention you essentially have a mandate to proceed with the negotiations, and then you actually begin to negotiate.

Once we actually begin to negotiate -- and this was very complicated, to work out a health care division inside the service employees where we would have a great deal of influence and strength. We didn't want to merge our districts into their districts -- you know, each district would remain, identities were important. They had problems to win over their union to the idea of giving us a great deal of control, power, and not autonomy. We would join the SEIU, we would have positions in it. They had problems to win over their -- and they spent alot of time winning over. We had the problem of winning over the RW.

We assumed all along that everything was going to be alright inside. Then, as the possibilities increased for resolving the whole problem, Doris began to back off. Doris backed off for a couple of reasons. From my point of view, basically, Doris was fearful that she would be a small fish in a big pond. She knew that she was going to be the head of 1199. When Davis was considering stepping down, he set up a committee to make a recommendation as to who should be the replacement. Doris was a member of that committee, and they unanimously recommended Henry Nicholas. More than that, a meeting