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said we accept it. So I said, “Remember that proposal? If you look at it carefully, that's what happened in this.”

So he wrote a story and described the William H. Davis proposals, other papers did the same, and said, “It's happening on Monday.”

On Monday morning before the meeting, he had another piece saying, “Today the hospital workers are going to ratify a settlement which includes this,” and I always believe that if the New York Times says something twice, it had to be true. [Laughter]

What did Van Arsdale think?

Van Arsdale was eventually happy, because then as it came to the meeting and the meeting ended with the workers had Davis on their shoulders and Van Arsdale on their shoulders and their photographs.

The thing I regret about that meeting is that that strike meeting took place the day that my daughter Nancy was graduating. The question, would I go to the graduation. Davis said, “I'm ordering you. Go to the graduation. We'll take care of things here.” So I went to the graduation that day. That I remember.

I also remember some things from the 1962 strike, which was the Beth El / Brookdale strike, sixty-two days, fifty-six days, that ended up in the law being passed. We were preventing Beth El from trying to prevent talking to us and instead deal through the mayor. We didn't want to deal with the mayor because he didn't have the power to change the law. We wanted it to be Rockefeller. But in the discussions that we had, we convinced one member of the board of trustees, Theodore Shapiro, who was a wealthy man and the hospital had named a pavilion after him, the Theodore Shapiro Pavilion.

Which hospital? Beth El?

Beth El. And, now Brookdale, we were talking about the press statement that I had written, and Elliott was there and we were about to give it out to the press, and at the last minute Shapiro said, “Do you think if I make this decision, that they'll take my name off the pavilion?” [Laughter] But he went ahead. I remember it was so funny to see that he would think that way. His name is still on the pavilion.

At Brookdale.

At Brookdale, yes. Then I recall that in Albany in 1962, it was the time that Davis had his second heart attack during the