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Lincoln Center in their lives, and they were all dressed up and that show sold out so fast. Those tickets were very, very hot. I mean, we could have sold it twice over.

Good thing you didn't go on the old [unclear].

They have iron seats. Also, for these programs, I would invite guests, and I would make sure that certain people I knew would come as guests, if they wanted to come. I remember, for that program, not only Van Arsdale and some of the labor people, but people like Jack Newfield and Ham Fish and Victor Navasky, and people like Abe Raskin was there, Jimmy Wechsler was there. A lot of the people I knew, I would invite, and it was a terrific opportunity to show off the union to them, because nobody anyplace was doing anything like that, and it was a very, very impressive kind of thing for them.

Belafonte brought in Letta Mbulu from the West Coast. I agreed I'd pay her fare to bring her in. She had a little baby and she had to get babysitters and all that kind of thing. He had another singer, Filoni Prince, and the Belafonte singers, and his musicians. On Saturday he was rehearsing in the studio to get the show, because right after that he was going to take the company to go abroad, to tour.

What were the financial arrangements with Belafonte? How did you contact him? How did you persuade him to do it?

Well, I knew Belafonte, and it was a long-shot. I first checked at the union whether it mightn't be a good idea for “Bread and Roses” that we go to a new place, and we'd try to get a bigger and better show, and we agreed that we could go to Lincoln Center.

You had been at Hunter all through the seventies?

This was the first time we were moving up. Hunter had a seating capacity of around 2,300, and we knew that if we were aiming bigger, that we would be able to do better, and so we wanted to go, the next step would be Lincoln Center, probably the largest place except for Radio City Music Hall, which at that time was not available. A few years later, the Radio City Music Hall became available, and is much larger.

I went to Belafonte and I sat with him for a few hours, telling him about “Bread and Roses” and explaining what we were doing, that it shouldn't be a total loss, that we were planning an exhibition at the time on the works of Charles White, a black artist, a very, very fine artist. I knew that Harry owned a number of originals, as did Tony