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drugstores. That was the difference that we had with the farm workers. The difference with the farm workers, because theirs was also a cause, as was ours, was that we built a union, a new union on top of an existing union, with a structure with experience of running an organization. The farm workers didn't. They had to start from scratch. That was a n enormous advantage that we had over them. While everything gets mixed up a little now. Elliot Godoff was a genius in organizing, he really was, but really the masterminding of all that was Davis. He was also very, very, very shy about press. He didn't want to come forward. He didn't like to be in the limelight. It was only later that he would, because first of all, he was always concerned about his accent and that kind of thing. And yet he would impress people who would spend time with him, walked away feeling very, very impressed by what they learned from him, because you could learn a great deal from him, just as you could learn an enormous amount from Osman and Levenson. You could learn an awful lot from Davis, too. It was my good fortune to have been able to work with all three of them, and to just sit and listen to them and participate, and you learned a great deal. The beginning I had was with 65. That experience was enormously important. But my experience in the left and the youth movement also was valuable for me. All the approach to united fronts -- how to unite, to broad concepts. It became like second nature to me. I would always think that way. You know, I didn't have to figure it out. You knew right away how you'd go, and you'd sense that what would interest this group and that group. I'm floating.

That's okay. What was the internal life of 1199, the drugstore union, like? Were there regular meetings? Were there good acts?

he contracts were very good. I remember when we started to organize in the hospitals, a porter in the drugstores was making seventy-four dollars a week, forty-hour, five-day week. See, the big thing that happened in my term, while I was there in the drug union, what happened maybe a year after I came or just right after I came was the winning of the forty-hour, five-day week, which was a revolution in this industry, because the drugstores are open from early morning to early night, and it was expected that you worked long hours, seven days a week, from early morning to late at night. Your schedules were awful. The union broke through in the chains with a forty-hour, five-day week, had a strike over it, and then brought it in to the independents, and that was a major, major event.

What was the union like? Remember, Davis had learned a great deal in his life and coming to 65 staff meetings, so the steward structure was based on that. But there had been in existence long before a structure