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time. I remember that when the strike ended, when Ann and I went to see “Raisin in the Sun” and we told Ossie -- he was in “Jamaica” -- that we were going to see it, he said, “Okay, good. After the show, come over to my place at Jamaica, and I'm going to have Sidney and Ruby to join us.” We went out to eat after the show was over, and there was Sidney embarrassed because he had not helped out during the strike. He was saying, “You've got to forgive me.” But Ossie and Ruby, they went to the picket lines, they went to the strike headquarters to perform, to talk. Pete Seeger, everybody I knew would go to the strike headquarters to talk to workers, to sing with workers. I remember Joe Glaser came down from Washington, and he never forgot singing with Van Arsdale on the picket line. Of course, he never forgot the spirit of that strike. My brother Henry was writing parodies on the strike for the [?}..

So these are the things that were happening.

Then, the other thing that you have to keep in mind is this: we were only representing service workers. We learned then that if you strike a hospital only with service workers, you could strike from now to doomsday. You can't really stop the hospital. The hospital just gets dirty, it gets dirtier and dirtier. They were bringing in volunteers, and the nurses were working triple shifts, triple time. I remember we have on television a wonderful segment from channel two, he's interviewing this woman outside the hopsital. Meanwhile, inside the hospital the volunteers are working, so you see volunteers going in. Some of them even came with their butlers. And he's interviewing this woman, and she said (about her butler), “Well, he does everything for me at home, and I thought he would come and do everything with me here.” There are wonderful things in there.

The point is that we could not close the hospital. We couldn't defeat them that way. We didn't have the professional and technical people. We had a few of them, but they were not in the union. We didn't have the nurses. And without them the doctors were bringing in their wives and the volunteers, they were able to operate the hospital. So it was quite clear that while they would close down a floor, they were hurt by it, the census were afected to a degree, but they could have continued indefinitely, and that was what was killing us.

Now the other thing that I just want to -- and then I'll come to the ending, and I'm leaving out a lot of stuff obviously -- we went to Adam Clayton Powell. See, Powell marched on the picket line before the strike at Knickerbocker. Of course, it was in his community. We didn't strike Knickerbocker, and the organizing power was on the picket line