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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

pharmacists were out of work. Those who worked earned twenty-five cents or fifty cents a day and didn't have work. So there were a lot of unemployed pharmacists looking for something to do, and so they tried to mobilize those people. They had a number of strikes, they had an important strike in the Bronx, and they had strikes in different boroughs. Gradually very, very difficult, they got contracts. They were accused of being communists from the very beginning, and some of them were. Most were not. There were socialists and communists. They spent a lot of time in the early days fighting among themselves, political questions. What was interesting is that the Pharmacists Union of Greater New York was formed as an industrial union. That is to say that if there was a porter in the store, they organized in the same union. I think you know what that meant. You also are organizing a union of professionals and non-professionals. These things are things that are to play a very important role with this union later on and to provide experien ces that are very, very valuable to the union. They also build a structure where they base themselves on stewards, although the current structure of the union stems from Davis' association with those meetings at 65. Delegate assemblies, 65 assemblies, with a steward for every so many people, etc. Davis is the first full-time organizer in '36 at ten dollars a week. By the time I arrived, the union is a union of 5,000 members, very well-respected in labor union circles, although small, very, very much respected by the bosses, had won important economic gains, and had a strong union. It was nothing like 65 in the sense of the kind of activity, you know. But there, there were still things happening at night, but not on same way as 65.

So I come in and I am to organize social, cultural, educational programs and to put out the magazine, about which I know from nothing. I don't know how to type, and Davis says, We have somebody. We give a stipend. We have a free-lancer who puts out the magazine, so you'll take it over from him, and they have a magazine that's sixteen pages on glossy paper, they used a two-color cover. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, and I go, and I am typing with two fingers, I'm writing stories in longhand. Marty Solow, who by the time is in advertising, lives out in the Island, says, “I'll help you. You come out to my house with the stories, and I'll go over it. I'll show you how we do it.” And Stanley Glaubach says, “Don't worry. I'll be the designer.” You know, after a while I'm learning how to put out a publication, and it becomes a very much better publication because I have access to people like that. Also, my imagination, you know, ideas and things, what you do with it.





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