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How did you know Will Geer and people like that?

I knew them through Ossie, Ruby. Will Lee, I knew. Will Geer, I guess I just knew him. Or if you went to Ossie and you said, “Get some people.” Pete, I knew. Then we had a comedian at the program. The comedian was Bernie West. Bernie West came out of the student movement. At that time he was performing with Judy Halliday. What's that, where he played the role of the dentist in that musical? It was with Sidney Chaplin, “Just in Time,” “The Party's Over.” Anyway, he also did a stand-up thing, but he came out of the student movement. He was a comedian, he used to do “Pens and Pencils” at the ASU things. He later went on to write. He's still writing in Hollywood. He wrote the Norman Lear thing, “All in the Family.” He's a top producer of sitcoms.

Is that right?

That's right. But anyway, so that was the entertainment. That was a big, big event. A big event, you know.

At that time, was it easier, do you think, to get union members to participate in the kinds of activities you're talking about?

Well, remember that the spread to the suburbs had not yet taken hold, so people lived in New York. There was a tradition of activity in the union, and the union provided the opportunity and was very competitive about getting it. I would always work on the theory that you have to have competition. We had geographical divisions that you were getting so many from this one, you were going to have somebody from that one, and organizers would look at each other. You've got the union leadership. Davis at the top was pushing these things.

What was your relationship with Davis like at that point? How did that evolve?

I think I told you how I got to know Davis and how I got the job. It's one of the true things about the article in New York magazine. We would drive in. He at that time drove in to work, and so I would drive in, or George Glotzer would drive in, and we would drive in and out together, three or four of us who lived not far from each other. Those trips were the basis for just talking about things. The union was your whole life. You were always talking about things, always figuring out angles. I would figure out something to test it. So I had a relationship with Davis where I would say, “I'd like to do this.”