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It was a January to June session of '63.

Yes. But it was in the wintertime. Maybe March. Whatever, it was passed. So the bill is passed.

It provides exactly what?

It removes the exemption of voluntary hospitals, non-profit institutions, from the state labor law, and provides for compulsory arbitration, but limited to New York City.

The hospitals in New York City now see the handwriting on the wall. It's not going to take effect until July, see, because the state labor board has to be set up, it, the mediation board has to be set up, how you handle the elections and all this kind of stuff. The hospitals begin to see that it's going to happen, so they start talking to us about, “We'll permit elections before the law passes.” Why? They want to enter into contracts before the law passes and to give us the thing now in the hope that they'll get better contracts now, that we would buy a better contract for it. It was important for us to do it, to get contracts. So elections take place voluntarily, and we're winning them like crazy, by very big votes. Then another thing happens. Again, Local 144. During the lobbying for the bill, Local 144 hired as their attorney Percy Sutton, who had been a member of the legislature but was now an attorney. Percy, whom I knew very well and worked with very, very, very closely when he was with the NAACP on our campaigns and on the strikes, etc., now ends up as their attorney, and he's in Albany, and they're trying to show that they're involved in the law. They really do nothing, but they want to show that they're up front. When Local 144 knows that the bill is going to pass, they start leafleting the hospitals. In a lot of places we win because we're there, but where we go to new places, in every new place they go, we're in competition. So we grow to about 20,000 in this period, but we could have grown much, much faster had it not been the fact that we had the --

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We're at about 20,000 members, but the problem was in organizing places where we didn't have a base, because now everybody's ripe for it. In this connection, we were into trouble with 144 and that became a serious problem. They were attacking us. They got Victor Riesel to do columns again about communism. Of course, the guy, a big, fat guy who was their PR guy, had worked for Riesel, so that was a problem for us. That was a problem that existed for about a year or two, until it was worked out with a column A-column B deal; that is, we finally agreed that if we continued like this, we would just