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weekends. I remember he used to tell me he was a great Pittsburgh Pirates baseball fan, and he used to listen to the game on these little radios and try to get Pittsburgh. But anyway, he would call me and say, “Moe, it's Saturday. We've got to find a good Sunday peg to get on the front page.” He says, “How about you give me a statement about this is a strike aimed against poor blacks and it polarizes the city.”

I said, “Sure, I'll give it to you.”

He says, “Now I'll go to Buttenweiser.” Buttenweiser would give an angry statement denying this. There he'd get it, you see.

The other things to keep in mind is this was the biggest strike in the history of hospitals in this country. Therefore, it was big news not only in New York but around the country and we were getting foreign press coming around. There was television very early at this time, but there was television coverage of the strike because we made a film based on TV footage. Gabe Pressman covered the strike. I remember Davis went on to Mike Wallace's -- Mike Wallace had a show on every night on Channel Nine. So there was a lot of media on this. That was a way of reaching the workers and reaching everybody. Throughout it was a question that Jimmy Wechsler was in on this from day one on editorial statements in the Post because of the nature of the hospitals' trustees. Dorothy Schiff, the owner of the Post, who had close friends from that group was under very, very severe fire by the hospitals condemning their position privately, and they were trying to influence the publisher to change them. They stood by it. The reporter at that time was Richard Montague. I don't know where he is now. He may be at the Staten Island Advance writing editorials. He was a good reporter.

What was the character of public opinion, do you think?

Public opinion was, strangely enough, very sympathetic to us. Nobody had polls out, but I remember there were interviews, and in the 1959 film “Hospital Strike”, there was a whole series of interviews from one of the TV shows of people being interviewed in the street. Most of them said, “I think it's terrible what these people are making,” or “I don't think it's right to strike, but I think the way they treat these people is just awful.” So I think that public opinion was pretty good on this, because I think we made a very persuasive case and we made it very effectively.

What was the spirit of the workers like as the strike went on?