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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

only one would run. And it's very difficult to explain, to justify that. You know, “Why can't he make up his mind at three o'clock in the afternoon instead of making it up at midnight?” So this got the researchers as mad as hell and the writers somewhat mad at the situation. And the Guild was getting stronger but it was getting much of its strength in the, quote, clerical, really non-editorial, they happened to be in the editorial department, but their real strength was in the copy room, office boy, lay out, what have you areas where they had practically a hundred percent membership. Whereas at the other end, writers, it must have been thirty percent; or something like that. I can't remember exactly what precipitated that, and I don't think there was any one thing that precipitated it, but there must have been some demand, and I'll just have to check up on it, some demand that came up that clearly crossed the dividing line.

Q:

You mean in the 1967 near strike?

Andrew Heiskell:

No, in the '76 strike. We knew that there was going to be a strike, or we were pretty sure there was going to be a strike and we took every measure possible to prepare for that eventuality, including all the alternate methods of getting copy in and out. And getting it typed and so on, so on. Our great worry, actually, about a strike was not the Guild but we have six teamsters who drove the trucks in and out of the building with all the material necessary to keep the machine going, from paper to photographs, to I don't know what.





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