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“What are you going to do?”

I said, “I don't know. Someone told me that I should learn typesetting and printing, that maybe they can get me a job as a printer.”

The honorable old left profession.

That's right. Then one day he said to me, “How would you like to come to work for us?”

I said, “Work for you? You don't have enough money to pay a person like me. Not in the amount of money that -- you don't need a full-time person to do what I do.”

He said, “Well, listen. You could put out the magazine, you can do this.”

Then one day he said to me, “How much do you make?”

I said, “Well, I make sixty-five dollars.”

He said, “Okay, we can pay it.” When I come there, I find out everybody is getting like eighty dollars. But, anyway, so that's what happened.

You were in the middle of detailing the pluses and the minuses of 65, that it would involve the membership on the one hand, but was fundamentally undemocratic on the other.

When I came and I was there, it was a time when they had already merged with the United Office and Professional Workers and the Distributing Processing and Office Workers, the DPO from the South, in Savannah, in Norfolk, and a couple of places in the South. The UOP was here. They were unable to withstand the attacks, and so it was discussed, the question of merging, with them. They merged. And what was supposed to have been a merger of equals became quickly -- Not only that, but Osman and Livingston thought nothing of every Saturday going after the leaders of the locals, to show how little they knew and how they had messed up everything and how they were faced with all the problems.

In the staff meetings?

In the staff meetings. It was really merciless, merciless. There were some people in the staff from UOP who like to argue with them. And, boy, did they get it. One of them is now what is his name, he's at Brooklyn Jewish, you've heard his name, he is a great talker, Mark Tarail, he's a vice president of Brooklyn Jewish Hospital -- Jim Durkin,