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meeting and Doris would come back and report on what was happening there. Doris' plane got waylaid, so she didn't get to Charleston until twelve o'clock at night, and when she came to the meeting place, she thought everything would be over. The place was packed. They were just sitting and waiting. When she came back and told us that, we said, “Maybe they really are interested.” So Nick went down there. He had been down there, and Nick continued to work with the people. Then the firing took place and there was a decision that had to be made. Do you strike or do you walk away? We had had no dream of starting the national hospital union in the South. Charleston was not even an SCLC place. The SCLC was down already. It was after King's death. It was down. That was the setting in which we decide that we couldn't walk away, and we would stay, and that Nick would be there full time, and that Elliot would be in contact with them. I remember spending a day--I can't remember the day it was, but it was a holiday in New York. The office was closed, and I was in the office all day, talking to Nick about what was happening. It was the beginning, the strike was on, and they would get Abernathy to come in from Atlanta, make a big speech in the churches, and rally, everybody excited. The community was getting a little interested in it, and then he'd go back. So the people were left on their own, and the strike was going along, it was struggling along, and I concluded, and I remember calling Stanley, and I said, “We're going to die here. We cannot make it here, the way we're going. This has got to become a big thing.”

So he said, “What do you think could be done?”

I said, “Well, one thing we've got to do is we've got to create more turmoil about the thing. One of the things that could be done is we've got to get the SCLC to make this a do-or-die thing, to bring the whole staff in.” Of course, whenever Ralph comes in, he rallies everybody. Everybody gets very excited and for a while it keeps going. “We've got to something like that.” Specifically, we'd have to get Andy in charge of it.

He said, “You have to get a little bit more tummeling going on, on press and stuff, to show that there was something.”

So I started calling around and tried to get it. I got, what is his name? Murray Seegar. He's now the PR man for the AFL-CIO's press. He was then a reporter on the Los Angeles Times.

Well, anyway, we got him to go down there, and he did a feature in which he had some wonderful stuff in there, to react to the workers before the strike started. William McCord, he was the president of the hospital, born in South Africa and raised in South