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Session:         Page of 592

that was -- see, that union, 1199, had been in the early days a union in which there were bitter fights, internal battles, socialists, communists, left-right kind of things, which became real chair- swinging kind of things. And the drugstore meetings in those days, in the old days before my time, before work schedules got routinized, they would start meeting at 12:00 o'clock at night and continue right through, and then there was a meeting early in the morning. So that's the kind of crazy way it was. As a matter of fact, when I decided to do this history of 1199, I started going through everything, and I had the advantage of my brother Phil, I asked him, and he started digging up stuff for me from the 1840s. And if you noticed that history, it has on drugstore shorter hour bills. It has a lot of very fine things. But also by going through the early magazines, see, this union, when it was formed it was the Pharmacists Union of Greater New York in 1932. Then later on it became a union of pharmacists and non-pharmacists, because that's what Davis wanted, an industrial union. Heywood Broun was a speaker at the founding convention. [tape interruption] Heywood Broun spoke at Mecca Temple in 1933 or '34, one of the early union founding meetings. The point I wanted to make was that when the union was founded, they decided to have a magazine called the Union Pharmacist, which came out once a month. Because they continued that thing and they kept records, it was fascinating for me to go through all these records and all the magazines, and then to sit with Davis and others and have Davis tell me the story of the union and to talk to others about it. So that when I would take all these notes and give them to Bill Cahn, Bill would be able to put it together, and we had all the visuals to give to Stanley Glauba ch to design the thing. If you listen, I'll give you the record. The record is a fascinating thing, because it tells a story in dramatization, and it's very good. The first strikes are strikes of part-time workers in the Bronx -- to organize in the Bronx. In the Thirties, you see in the publication, and we used them later, the poetry corners. Depression, the pharmacists working, those who could work were making like five dollars a week. These are people with college degrees. Then you have strikes where you have people picketing in caps and gowns in the Thirties. We have those pictures. You have a lot of things that are very unusual. Long strikes, the union's treasurer takes the money out of the bank and holds it to prevent they're always running into jails and all that kind of thing. It's a very dramatic history, and a very -- so that the people who have been through it all with the pharmacists, they knew. Then what the union had done, and that was -- see, in '36, the union decided to organize in Harlem, because in Harlem you had stores owned by whites, you had black pharmacists with degrees, working as porters,





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