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It was supposed to be a two-year term. The by-laws provided that this 1986 election would be two-years. Now, the next election will be three years from now. Okay.

How did that rank and file slate emerge, do you recall? And did you have any relationship to it?

I was not involved in the planning of the slate. I was not involved in the decision making on the slate. I was really very slightly involved in that campaign, hardly at all. Because it was an internal union affair, and therefore could not get any outside media, etcetera. I may have helped in terms of leaflets and things like that, but really no major role.

Do you recall that as the period during which you were least involved with 1199 that you can remember?

Well, see I was more involved with the national union at that time, and the problems related to the merger and the defeat of the merger, than to the local situation. Most of my time right through the merger crisis was on that issue, not on the 1199 situation.

When did you go to work for Local 342?

I went to work for 342 in January of 1983. I retired in November of 1982, in January of 1983 I started with 342. I had been approached by Irving Stern earlier about the fact that they had rather large sums of money that had been accumulated through employer contributions to an education-cultural fund, and had nobody to know what to do with it. I told him at the various times he approached me that I was not available, that I was busy and stuff like that. When I retired he approached me shortly thereafter. He had known about my retirement. I met with him, and then he arranged a meeting with the president of the local, Nick Abandola. They asked me to come on to do cultural programming, and asked that I draft a one year program for the trustees, which I did and submitted to them. It was approved and I went to work for them.

I worked for them for more than three years. I ended my arrangement with them officially at the end of March 1986, just when the election was beginning to heat up. I was not very happy. I devoted two days a week there. [Interview interrupted; tape stops and starts]

The first year I found interesting and we did a number of things that I felt that I was doing something there. We did an oral history series called “A Slice of Life” where Tony Gillotte and Mark Levy worked with