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there he sat down with Myrna, and he began to make a list of all artists who should be in it. Milton [Glaser] and Ed Sorel -- you know, a lot of the graphic designers.
So the idea was all ready flickering. I began to raise it with Lynn Smith and Len Oliver. They liked it, and they asked me, “How much is it going to cost?” I had begun to figure out what it was going to be. I said, “Maybe a 75,000 dollar thing. We have to pay the artists a minimum, but if you're going to publish we want to publish it as a book, we want to publish posters, and we want it to be an exhibition. The book would be a catalog, the poster would go along with it. I would like to have, since I've been collecting quotations about labor, we'll have some historians who we'll consult on it, on which ones will be included. I'd like to develop a study guide for schools and colleges on the idea, so that people would know more about labor history through the quotations.” They liked the idea, and they finally said, “We'll raise it as a possibility for a supplementary grant.”
When are we talking about?
We're talking now about late in 1979-1980.
All ready about half way through.
Yes -- we're in to Bread and Roses. They check with Duffy, Duffy likes the idea. Everybody like the idea but it's costly. They say, “For a supplementary grant, the best thing to do is with a match.” They said, “If you could match half of it, no problem.” I said, “I'll match half of it,” because I knew I could get foundation support. By this time I was in to foundations. Since I was raising foundation money, I could then say that I was raising general support from foundations. I could then take 10,000 from this and say, “That's a match for that.” I then went to the Rockefeller Foundation, because the head of the humanities of the Rockefeller Foundation was somebody I knew at City College, who was a chairman of the history department, and was an important historian at Duke University -- Joel Colton. I hadn't seen Joel in thirty, forty years. Joel was not a radical or anything like that, but Joel said, “Sure, come to see me.” I talked to him about it, he said, “This sounds like something that Rockefeller could do through the study guides. Rockefeller could do the study guides. Rockefeller could do the study guides because that's within the framework of what we do.” So I got a 15,000 dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the study guides. But I could mix and match money, and move it around. Anyway -- so I was funded.
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