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be pouring money down the drain and nobody would get it. Of course the managements would love that and did love it. So we worked out a deal where lists were drawn up of hospitals. Column A was ours; Column B was theirs. The proprietary hospitals were theirs. It was very bitter. We never forgot that.

I can imagine.

This is the service employees union, its president is Peter Otley.

How big a local did they end up with?

Now they may have about eighteen thousand, nineteen thousand. They have the proprietary hospitals. There are very, very few voluntaries, very, very few, maybe fewer than on one hand. But they formed an association that was given to them to keep us out, but that was earlier. So they used that base against us.

Let me stop and ask you a question. How much did you deal with Rockefeller directly?

Personally? Very, very, very little. I would see him and meet him for ritual kind of things, but mostly this was done through his aides.

Did you have any impression of him, of the kind of guy he was?

No, I didn't deal with him. We endorsed him for reelection after that strike, but I didn't deal with Rockefeller, honestly. I dealt with his aides.

What is going on in Montefiore and the other hospitals during this period? At Montefiore you had a real contract.

At Montefiore we had a contract. In Trafalgar we get a contract, get in a few other little places contracts, but generally speaking we're still in that permanent administrating committee operation. So that is beginning to change now, and quickly we're getting contracts for lots of hospitals. Remember, we had kept our base in the hospitals where we struck in '59, plus others that we started to contact and try to organize. Since many of the hospitals signed on to the statement of policy, there were thirty or forty of them, virtually all of them were under the statement of policy. There were very few that were not. Beth El was one of the few that was outside. We had some kind of base in these places, not big bases, but we had contacts, we had committees and that kind of thing, hoping for the inevitable. But when we saw the handwriting on the wall that the legislation wast going to