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in Spanish and we had to have somebody translate. So there was somebody. We were down in the basement, we were there, and they were listening to him on the loudspeaker and somebody was writing and running upstairs to read the translation. What a wild evening. But it was a packed house.
When was this?
Maybe in the Fifties some time. Maybe the Sixties. It must have been in the Sixties. Even things, like, I never forgot my friendship for someone like Carey McWilliams. I was a great admirer of Carey McWilliams, and when I got to know him, I got to appreciate him even more, and he was very fond of what we were doing in the union. We would invite him to come to lecture to the union staff about world events, and we could sell subscriptions to the Nation, my alma mater. Whenever I needed an editor or something for the publication, I would always go to Carey. “Carey, who would you suggest?” And he would make suggestions. I remember I once got an editor, Steve Murdock, who had been an editor for the ILWU Dispatcher and had been their legislative representative, had been red-baited out of his job with the Central Body and was now a sports writer for a small paper in Montana. I remember reading an article of his in The Nation, and I was very impressed with it, on sports. I forget what it was. I came to Carey and said, “Carey, I need an editor.”
He says, “There's this friend of mine, Steve Murdock, he's in Montana.”
I said, “He wrote that article on sports?”
He said, “Yeah. He's a very good man.”
So I called him up and I said, “Are you interested?” He said he was interested. I said, “I'll tell you what you do. We'll pay for your transportation to come to New York, and we'll meet and go over it and see whether we like each other, and we can meet with Davis, etc.” We hired him, and he was the editor, and then he died. He was very, very good.
Then I needed someone as a reporter, and he recommended Eleanor - - she just wrote this book on Josephine Herbst, Elly Langer. She was a reporter, very bright, and all the time she was doing research for an article on us, and did a series of two articles in the New York Review of Books, on 1199, an attack on lack of democracy, autocracy by Davis and all that kind of stuff, a lot of stuff. Oh, boy. I went to Carey and said, “Carey, look what you did to me.” That was when I had my big argument with Bob Silvers, the editor of the New York Review, whom I
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