Working the Waterfront: The Ups and Downs of a Rebel Longshoreman

By Gilbert Mers and George Green

An eighty-year-old looks back on his life as a Texas longshoreman and radical labor activist in this “colorful and absorbing” memoir (The Southwestern Historical Quarterly).

Somebody said, “History is written by the winners. The losers have nothing to say.” This book is by one of the losers, a bit player, not the star of the drama.

So begins Gilbert Mers in these personal recollections of forty-two years on the Texas waterfront as a longshoreman and radical union activist. But far from having “nothing to say,” Mers reveals himself as a thoughtful philosopher of democratic ideals and eloquent agitator for union reform. He challenges the conventional wisdom that the leader is more valuable than the led. He contends that long tenure in positions of power dulls the union officer’s working-class instincts. Always one to row against the current, Mers believes the union exists for the benefit of its members!

This is primary material of the best kind, vivid and evocative, and Mers, in his eighties at the time of writing the book, is an unusually vigorous and articulate spokesman for a democratic and humane unionism. Whether he’s describing the sweaty, dangerous, backbreaking work of loading cotton bales into the hold of an outbound ship or the gut-gripping tension of a face-to-face encounter with Texas Rangers bent on “law and order,” Mers writes with the voice and conscience of the rank-and-file worker. He paints the waterfront world as it was, and perhaps still is—full of peril, humor, dignity in demoralizing circumstances, frustration, struggle, and sometimes hope—and tells his story with such wry humanity that even those who disagree with his destination will enjoy the ride.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9780292788138

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THE DOCKS OF CORPUS CHRISTI, 1929

THE MAN was saying,

Stand back, you sonofabitch, or I’ll cut you in two right across your goddamn navel!

The man was wearing cowboy boots, a ten-gallon hat, business suit, necktie. In his two hands he held what appeared in the dim light to be a tommy gun, well aimed. The man was a Texas Ranger.

I stood back.

There’s a story leading up to how come the man to be talking like that, and some to follow after.

So howdy, my friend. Welcome aboard. This is one of those how come books. I hope you’ll come to find it interesting.

I was twenty-one years old when I first saw a body of salt water and a bale of cotton. The year was 1929. Sometimes now, it seems that I must have made physical contact with a million of those bales as they were loaded aboard the ships that plied the bodies of salt water from port to port around the globe. Far short of a million, no doubt; but there were many, many contacts, much heaving and grunting—and sweat.

I was born near Ponca City, Oklahoma, on January 21, 1908. My father, Clint Mers, farmed some and clerked in stores. My mother was Mattie Powers, who died when I was five. Father remarried after a couple of years, to Lora Roberts. I am the only living offspring from the first marriage. A sister, Edna Mae, survives from the second.

In 1916 we moved to Quinlan, a small town on the eastern edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle. There Dad managed a general store, and there a brother, Kenneth, was born. He died in Corpus Christi years later. Then we found ourselves in Towanda, Kansas, an oil boom town, where the Old Man ran a grocery store. By that time the United States had entered the World War on the side of England and France.

Then it was discovered that Mama, my stepmother, had tuberculosis. The doctor prescribed moving her to a high and dry climate in the West, the ultimate foolproof prescription in those days. Foolproof now, for that matter; but now medical science has progressed to deal effectively with the disease in the lower, damper altitudes. Back then they lost more than they saved of those unable to make the move west. Dad disposed of the store in Towanda and we boarded a train headed for El Paso.

The stay in El Paso was short. Dad answered a newspaper ad for a job in Bisbee, Arizona. For several years thereafter he was manager of the dry goods department of the Phelps-Dodge Mercantile Company’s Warren store. Bisbee was a mining camp, copper being the principal metal produced. The Phelps-Dodge Corporation, called the Copper Queen locally, the leading producer of the stuff, operated a mercantile venture as an adjunct to its mining enterprises. The community consisted of three towns, Bisbee, Lowell, and Warren, each having its own post office listing then. Now they’re all combined under Bisbee. We were settled in Warren before Christmas, 1918.

The Bisbee years were interesting ones. Aren’t the adolescent years always so? There were happenings during those years that ran the gamut of graceful, ungraceful, and disgraceful, you could say—and first intrusions of social opinions on youthful consciousness. We may have occasion to refer back to some of it. Well, I stumbled along as time went along and graduated, belatedly, from Bisbee High School in 1927.

Meantime, more than a year before (the graduation), Clint Mers had thought that he saw opportunity in Texas. The Bisbee climate had cleared the tuberculosis from Mama’s system. It never returned. In Corpus Christi the Old Man acquired a fruit stand doing a good business. The term fruit stand applied loosely to small establishments that featured citrus fruits from the Lower Rio Grande Valley and fresh seafood from local waters. The Mers store was a substantial one, selling bread, milk, and various grocery staples, on the order of the convenience stores that would flourish later.

The family began pushing me to leave mining country and come try my hand in Corpus Christi; specifically, in a small fruit stand which my dad would set up. So here I was, driving an old Model T Ford coupe that I had purchased for the trip, ready to become an entrepreneur in the fruit and fish selling business.

My fruit stand was located on Water Street north of the ship channel and not far from the drawbridge that lifted to allow ships to enter and leave the port. A high bridge goes up and over the whole shebang now. A few of the port’s longshoremen lived on North Beach. They would pass the stand going or coming when one or more ships might be working in the harbor. In fact, the longshoremen had a hiring hall, an oversized shack built of dunnage, that stood between the stand’s location and the bridge. If you find that word dunnage confusing, the dictionary at hand says, packing, usually of fagots, loose wood, etc., used about or below a ship’s cargo to prevent damage in transit. In this instance it was one-inch-thick, rough-cut boards of varying widths and from various species of timber, these nailed to appropriate supporting two-by-fours, etc.

The going and coming of those longshoremen was mostly on foot, since most people didn’t have cars in those times. You could say that we knew what our feet were for, and used them. So the man might stop and buy a piece of fruit or two on his going or coming. One in particular, Jack Todd, got in the habit of stopping by to chat. I would ask him stupid questions about the loading, unloading, and sailing of ships. He began to tout me on longshore work.

What’s a husky guy like you doing in a sissy job like this? You look like you got some muscle. Are you willin’ to put out some of it?

Back in Bisbee I had followed the pattern: growing-up sons of working class families sought employment in the mines; I had been so employed. I would tell Jack that I had just come from a brilliant career on the business end of a muckstick; if a strong back and a weak mind were prime qualifications for a longshoreman, then he had a hand. Then he would tell me how busy the port would be when cotton season began, and how the members of a cotton gang, paid by the number of bales stowed, collected $10.68 apiece for a straight-time day. Ten dollars was truly a big day’s pay back then. Other cargo paid eighty cents per hour, darn good pay for the times. The catch was: there was more work than you could ever get done in the busy season, then days spent staring at an empty harbor in the off season.

Finally I approached the Old Man and told him that I was discouraged with business and wanted to try longshoring. He wasn’t ecstatic about it, but he agreed to it. So, along with other newcomers, I began to hang out where longshoremen hung out, hoping to be recognized at a hiring time when the work had picked up. Things were much less formalized in those days. A friendly dock clerk would let a couple of oldtimers show a couple of us would-be performers a few of the sleights that made the difference, whether you handled that five-hundred-pound bale of cotton or it handled you.

Jack also informed us that all the regular longshoremen belonged to a union called the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). We should aim at making good hands and should apply for union membership as soon as our ninety-day tryout period was over. Jack was a believer in the union. What he told us seemed to make sense: You should belong to a union yourself and with your wages you should buy what other union members produced, and things would be better all around.

One fine July morning, 1929, there were two ships in the harbor. Seemed like a good time to try for that first longshore job. When the hiring had ended there were still eight or ten of us newcomers unhired. The last foreman to fill his book told those of us who were left:

You fellows can probably get on in the warehouse in No. 7 shed. It pays below scale, forty cents an hour, and it’s non-union. But we won’t hold that against you. It’s a place you could pick up a few dollars while you wait for shipping to get better. Some of you might be a little soft. It’s a good place to toughen up. And when we need more men here—and we will—then you can come back here.

Some decided to head for the warehouse. Another fellow and I sort of partnered up and walked that way together. We got hired. The job we caught was unloading lead bars from boxcars on the back track, trucking them into the shed, waterside, and stacking them for later loading onto a ship. The lead came from smelters in Mexico. The bars weighed from around 95 to 105 pounds apiece.

The bars were slightly wider topside than bottomside and were flanged at the ends, so that you could get a good hold of them. They were stowed in stacks in the boxcars, five bars on the floor, side to side, five turned crosswise on top of them, and so on. The cars were loaded to or near capacity, roughly fifty short tons, roughly forty stacks of twenty-five bars each. We stacked five bars on the prongs of a two-wheeled truck, broke the truck over and wheeled it to the designated pile in the warehouse, deposited the load, then back to the car for another, a great way to spend a day. The contents of each car were kept separate and so identified in the shed by car number. (And you would soon learn that lead was no respecter of a man’s fingers.)

There was a lot of that lead coming in. We trucked lead into the shed for three days. On the fourth day a coastwise ship had arrived. The scale and conditions of work on vessels in the coastwise trade differed from deep sea, which signified that the ship was in foreign trade. Some ports had separate locals for coastwise and deep sea work. In Corpus Christi the one local (or the two locals, black and white) handled both coastwise and deep sea, plus an intercoastal category. The coastwise scale was seventy cents per hour as against eighty cents for deep sea. In deep sea work longshoremen moved cargo from the ship and piled it in the warehouse, or moved it from warehouse to ship, as the case might be. Working coastwise, longshoremen landed the loads from the ship on flat-bed trucks and pulled the trucks to the warehouse door, where warehousemen took them into the shed and unloaded them, returning empty vehicles to the wharf. If the ship was loading, warehousemen loaded the trucks with cargo in the shed and pulled them onto the wharf.

The warehouse foreman picked me among others to receive cargo from the arriving ship. We worked through the day and were told to return after supper. We did, and worked all night. It’s worthy of mention that longshore pay, both deep sea and coastwise, was time and a half for overtime. Warehousemen just kept on grinding for that same old forty cents. Worth mentioning also: coastwise ships sought a quick turnaround. It was unusual for a coastwise vessel not to work around the clock. At breakfast time the foreman told us:

It’s been a long stretch, but any of you who think you can make the day can come back. If you don’t feel like you can, go get some sleep. If there’s no work tonight, there will be again in the morning.

Breakfast hour was from six to seven o’clock. I walked down the dock, crossed the bridge, and stepped into the longshoremen’s shack. There was an order on the board for a whole raft of sulphur trimmers for eight o’clock. I ate a bite of breakfast, drew three deep breaths to wake up on, and had my keister planted on the bench in the hiring hall at seven-thirty, the time for the eight o’clock hiring, and was hired.

The word trim can mean a lot of things. In this instance trimming meant leveling. Raw bulk sulphur had been dropped into the lower holds of the ship by means of clamshell buckets or conveyors. When we got down the ladder in our hatch we faced a huge pile of loose sulphur in the middle of the hatch, sloping to wings, bulkheads, and corners. Armed with a shovel apiece—the old idiot spoon, Mexican dragline, the muckstick I’d used in the mines—we set to work to make a mountain a plain.

In no time at all the message was delivered: sulphur dust and the human eye are not compatible. There was a lot of crying went on. The idea was to use the shovel with a raking, sweeping motion, never raising and throwing a shovelful, thereby keeping dust in the air to a minimum. The foreman was Dick Costello. Dick came to be a close friend as the years went by. At straight-up noontime they said that we’d trimmed ’er down. We strung our shovels onto a line, sent them out on the cargo hook, and the thirty or so of us climbed out of the hold, each to go his own way, all intent on relieving smarting eyes and washing sulphur and sweat from clothes and body. Later a gang would pull tarpaulins over our work until the sulphur cargo was covered, then make ready for other cargo on top by putting down the necessary dunnage. Yours truly found soap, shower, and a bed and passed out, in spite of smarting eyes. And that’s one way to begin a career at longshore work, pardner.

Two days later came the second job, in a lead gang. A lead gang consisted of four wharf men, the gang foreman, and a winchman on deck, and six hold men, a twelve-man total. Hold men worked three men to the side. I found myself working with two experienced hands. Lindgreen was of Swedish descent and from up north. He had done a stint in the iron mines in northern Minnesota; so we had a topic of conversation right away. Chico (Little) Aguirre was from south of the border, a naturalized US citizen, small, as his nickname implied, but mighty—and I was mighty lucky to be with two hands as handy as they on my first true stevedoring job. That job lasted three full days and into a fourth. It’s not impossible that I helped to stow some of the same bars that I had trucked into the warehouse a few days before.

The lead came into the hold fifteen bars at a time on a wire rope sling. My education in the vocabulary of the waterfront work environment was beginning. This method of loading, for example, was called single whip. I would learn that that cable that wrapped around the winch drum and paid out through sheaves at bottom and top of the boom to the hold where we were, or to dock, was called a line, a runner, a fall, or a whip. Soon to come was respect for the ability of that winchman who brought the stuff into the hold to us. The loads were made up on the wharf (naturally), then dragged up a stage that rested bottom end on the wharf (or dock), leaned toward and rested its top against the ship barely above the ship’s deck (or bulwark, if the ship was so constructed). At that point the load went onto the deck stage, that stage spanning the distance from ship’s side to the hatchway, or hatch coaming, to be precise.

When the load cleared the deck stage it was airborne, in that there was nothing then but empty space until it reached the point where you were going to handle it. It took some skill on the part of the winchman to keep a tight line on that load at all times as he pulled it aboard to hatchway, then lowered into the hold. If he ever failed to keep that line tight, the sling could loosen. And if a bar of that stuff ever got loose—or if the load touched a part of the ship as it was lowered to you—it could give you a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach. In fact, it could make that hold a plumb unhealthy place to be. A competent winchman commanded admiration and respect.

The stages, by the way, were built of heavy, tough wood to handle the rough punishment that they took. I don’t think you’ll find the stages around anymore. The usual operation now is double whip, one boom spotted over the dock, the other over hold or deck as required, the whips of the two winches joined (married) to make the journeys to and from ship and shore.

Everybody knows, I guess, that port is left side and starboard is right side of a ship. Well, I was learning, in longshore language, that whichever side of the ship lay against the dock was inshore; that away from the dock was offshore. There were decks: bridge decks, poop decks, weather decks, ’tween decks. And others that seamen learned and knew about, that didn’t concern us longshoremen very much. And, oh yes, a saying, that if you were to get lippy with some ready character and let your mouth overload your ass, you could get decked.

Back to work. A load on a single line lowering into the hold is going to spin. The farther it travels downward, the more spin generated. Deep in the lower hold that spinning 1,500 pounds could be intimidating. Well, you were supposed not to be intimidated. Get out there, meet that load, and overcome the spin with your two hands. But now and again you’d call on the winchman to kill the load by touching it down to the surface very gently. And I learned that that surface we stood on, the bottom of the hold, was the skin. The sides of the hold were the wings. Bulkheads divided one hold or compartment from another. Where wing met bulkhead was the long corner. That nomenclature wasn’t hard to figure out.

When a load was lowering away it was coming back. Once we had the load steadied, the three of us would get our hands on it as handily as possible, give it a backswing for momentum, then push like hell in the direction of our stowage, the work. When your swing was as close to the work as you thought you’d ever get, the leader of the set would yell, Come back! And the winchman would drop the load. We’d unhook the sling from the cargo hook. One would hang an empty sling from the previous load onto the cargo hook, give the whole business a proper swing as the winchman hoisted away, picked up, so that the foreman standing on the deck stage above could catch it and carry out the maneuver that got the hook and sling to the dock where another load was waiting.

Another expression learned: the guy who led the work on his side in the hold was said to grease the work. I had formerly heard the word greaser applied to Mexican or Latin American people in a deprecatory sense. Well, the greaser in this shipboard cargo handling was the guy who said how it would be done.

The three of us worked that job from start to finish, thanks in large measure to the willingness of my two partners to share with me what they had learned from previous experience. I was lucky to have them in my breaking-in. If you have a spot of luck, I think you’re a crumb if you don’t say so. Anyway, I had a fair idea of what you were supposed to do to stow a bar of lead by the time the job was finished.

Another aspect of stevedoring had begun to percolate consciousness to a tiny degree on that first loading job. That was, those representing the employer’s interest didn’t ever like to listen to a silent winch. They wanted to hear the blamed thing running, either delivering a load of cargo or traveling to pick one up. That percolation would progress with potent impact in a short space of time. The man wanted you out there to meet that hook and to be quick in detaching a load from it or hooking one onto it.

The consequence was—and it took less than forever for that to percolate, too—you learned to work fast to beat the hook, to stow your load or to make up a load as the case might be, so that you gained a little spot, a blow, a chance to catch your breath and relax muscles a moment before you had to tie into that next load. The time would come when things would go awkwardly for your set, your side, for a spell and there would be a load waiting by the time that you had finished one. The lesson learned from that was: without that blow the job was a killer. There was a popular saying among the less refined elements familiar with longshore work:

You can spot a damned longshoreman every time. His ass is always lookin’ for a place to set itself down. As with most homespun witticisms, the description had a basis in fact. If you could plunk your butt down on something between loads and relax, if only for a matter of seconds, the job was much less punishing.

In the copper mines the idea was to set a rather steady pace and keep moving at that pace for the duration of the shift. So a new tempo to fit this new occupation had to be learned. Moreover, in most jobs in the mine you worked by yourself most of the time. Here it was always a gang effort. You had to learn to function as a member of a team. In the mine you’d see the shift boss twice in a work day usually. Here the gang boss was always right there. And the walking foreman in charge of work over the ship was always right there, too—it would seem. It seemed to me also that somebody was always shouting at us: gang boss, walking boss; even the ship’s mates would get into the act. We discouraged that latter practice and toned down some of the former in time to come.

It summed up that there were pronounced differences in ways of work to be learned that would take some getting used to, some of it confusing, but all of it interesting. Anyway, I was committed to learning enough, by George, to make them a good hand and to be adopted by these dockwallopers. Bring on that next load!

The Port of Corpus Christi was beginning to hum with activity. You could feel a certain anticipation in the air. The cotton season was coming on. Bales of the early crop from the Lower Rio Grande Valley, eagerly sought by foreign buyers, were passing into dockside warehouses, ready for shipboard. Soon, cotton picked in adjacent fields was being trucked to the gins. Ginned bales were arriving by truck and rail at the compresses, there to be pressed into square bales for overseas shipment. Soon, the presses were working overtime. When a standpipe protruding above the roof where a press was housed belched forth a puff of white steam it meant another bale ready for shipment. Some wag would say, There’s another twenty cents for the hungry longshoremen. Twenty cents was the straight-time piecework rate paid for stowing the white stuff. The twenty cents was split evenly among a gang of fifteen men. While it was generally in the province of the employer to order a gang of so many men for any particular job, a cotton gang was by tradition composed of fifteen men, and remains so as this is written, in the year 1987.

Ships were entering the harbor, and regular longshoremen from Galveston, Houston, and Texas City were arriving to participate in the rush season. They would work in Corpus Christi for a month or so, by which time cotton shipping would have picked up in their port; then they’d return to the home port. Later, as the season petered out in Corpus Christi, some of the Corpus Christians would invade the other ports.

After that first lead job there was seldom a day, aside from Sundays, that I failed to catch a job for at least part of a day—until the end of the busy season. The six-day week prevailed, Saturday work at straight time. Sundays paid double time (reduced later to time and a half).

The hiring methods of these longshoremen brought on further extension of general education and vocabulary. Where I had been, you went and rustled a job: you presented yourself to an owner or agent and asked to be put to work. In this ILA hiring hall milieu you simply entered the hiring area (open to the public) and stood or sat around. At the specified hiring time each gang foreman whose name was on the board (ordered for a job) would pull out his book, generally a notebook from a hip pocket, and begin to hire his gang. Then he asked you if you wanted to work, when you could answer yes or no as you chose. To ask the foreman for a job was a faux pas,

Each day was a new day. The fact that you had worked on a job the day before did not mean that it would be yours again today, unless you were a regular member of that gang—and we’ll come to that. By the same token, you could turn down the job you had yesterday and hire to another foreman if you wished—again, unless you were a regular in that gang. There was, however, a sort of unwritten rule that outsiders, new hands such as I was, should go back today with the gang they worked in yesterday, if the job was open today.

A gang foreman was called a toter and the working member in the gang was a flatter. ILA members were button men. We have already mentioned outsiders. When a toter’s gang was not on the board, ordered out, he could hire as a flatter to any gang with an opening.

Gang foremen were selected by an arrangement between the union and the local stevedoring companies. Button men were assigned to regular gangs, each foreman carrying six or seven men as a rule. It was both the gang member’s privilege and duty to go with his gang when the gang was ordered for work. There were swap-out arrangements entered into from time to time where the foreman hiring would give first offer of a job to a member of the swap-out gang after he had his own regulars on his book. The member of the swap-out was not obligated to accept that job offer. He could shop for a better one if he chose.

After local button men had been hired, next in line for job offers were visiting button men, ILA members belonging to locals in other ports. Then, members of other trade unions, a rule not always adhered to. After which, the lowly outsider would take the leavings. The outsider had no established rights. A permit system designed to give hiring preference to outsiders who had worked at the trade for some period of time was tried on occasion but withered away from inertia of union members—a minor setback for unionism, in my opinion.

Among the non-rights of the outsider, he could be bumped by a button man at suppertime if the gang he was in was to continue working into night hours—those hours paying overtime, higher pay. This practice was discontinued later, but not until several years later.

The most significant aspect that struck me then and stays with me now was the privilege (maybe not a good word) to decide not to work. As before stated, each day was a brand new day. Except for the regular gang member obligated to go with his gang, any other hand could sweat (hope to be offered) a more attractive job. Even the regular gang member could turn down the job his foreman had, but was prohibited from working in any other gang that day, so had to lay off. And if you decided that you didn’t want to work on any given day, you solved that by simply not showing up at the hiring hall. You were not penalized in any way for such absence, except you didn’t make any money.

Back in the mines the company attitude toward laying off was quite lenient, I had thought. You could call in a half-hour or more before starting time, and your absence would be excused. This freedom not to report in any fashion at all was unheard of. It was a kind of worker independence I’d not dreamed of before: Work when you pleased. (If the work happened to be there.) Then again, so much freedom could tend to make a bum of a man. I’ve asked myself that question: Did it make a bum of you? Never got a clear answer back. Worthy of note: Old Mother Needmore was often present to nudge a fellow toward the hiring hall.

That busy season of 1929 was a record one for Corpus Christi in at least one respect. Ships literally piled into the turning basin until they reached an all-time high of eighteen within that confined body of water before their number began to decrease. This meant that nine or ten ships had to lie at anchor, not moored to any dock. Skippers of all those vessels must have had recurrent nightmares about the danger of collisions as ships maneuvered in the reduced turnaround space. Riding out a nightmarish experience too were the ILA business agents. Employers were requesting more gangs than the locals could possibly furnish. The business agent walked a tightrope in his efforts to supply the largest possible portion of those gangs without showing favoritism to any company, at the same time trying every whichaway to get ships finished, turned around, and out of the harbor so that waiting ships could come dockside and be worked.

An apology here for not having noted earlier that there were two longshoremen’s locals in the port—both ILA, to be sure—one composed of white men and the other of black men. The white local was ILA Local No. 1224 and the black was 1225. White and colored was the expression used to describe them. The work was done by solid gangs of white and black. Each local had its own hiring place and conducted its own business. There was an arrangement where the one local would work the forward hatches of one ship, then the aft (or after) hatches of the next, and so on. The usual freighter of the day was a five-hatch vessel with three hatches forward of the smokestack. If a ship having four or six hatches was to be worked, the hatches were split two and two or three and three.

The two locals would hold a joint meeting now and then, but there was never any arrangement for scheduled meetings of both memberships. This segregation lasted until the year 1983, when a federal court decreed that black and white locals having the same work jurisdiction in the same port should merge into one local union.

The pervasive ambition was to learn to work cotton. The first cotton job finally came. A cotton gang was ordered for a 1 PM start. There weren’t enough button men around the hall at the time to fill the gang. The man was going to have to take some outsiders. Well, my friend and sponsor, Jack Todd, was going in the gang, and he greased me on. That word grease again. It was used in that sense also. A man hired by a toter might ask the toter to hire a fellow to be his working partner. That was legitimate; but you never asked for a job for yourself. And the one who got his job that way would say, Jack greased me on the book.

To the ship and into the hold. The ship had already been working. We were loading cotton on top of cotton. Cotton stowage, without dwelling on the intricacies of how you fit your work into various rooms and spaces and so on, was mostly an exercise in stowing bales on their sides, called flooring off. You made sure that they lay tight to one another, sides and ends. As you would come close to the top of any compartment you would head or pile cotton to fill the space against the deck above you. This day we were flooring off in a lower hold. Four men, a set, worked on either side.

Leading our side, greasing the work, was one Grant McGowen. And that deserves a line or two. The McGowens were by way of being a waterfront legend in their lifetimes, with two generations accounting for themselves at that time (and another since). They were powerful men, agile and skillful, admired and not messed with, if you get what I mean—and especially, Grant. Jack Todd was his rolling partner. John Morgan rolled the second bale. My job was to send out the sling so that the next load could be wrapped up and sent in. Then I rolled the third bale to the work.

The cotton was pulled over stages, the same stages used for lead, single whip, three bales to the load. I’ve already told about the lead job, that the sling and cargo hook had to be swung in such a manner that the gangwayman on deck could catch it and carry it shipside and on to the sling-up man on the wharf. I was soon doing a fair job of that. For one thing, any time you failed to give that outgoing hook a proper swing you found yourself roundly cussed, a great encouragement to do it right.

So Grant and Jack would hang their hooks in the front bale, roll it to the work and have it properly stowed, almost always by the time John arrived with his. Those three would stow that bale, then there would be all four of us on my third bale, and that was the resting place of a load of cotton. The pace was fast, but every now and then the experienced hands would take a few seconds to teach me how it should be done.

Speak of that matter of luck again. John Morgan was the local president. He was not an old-time longshoreman, but was an old-time union man with years in the stagehands’ union. Well, old Grant, widely heralded for his toughness and roughness, took pity on my greenness and a liking to me at the same time that lasted through his lifetime. Jack was already prejudiced in my favor, of course. John Morgan decided that I was going to make a hand. So, from right there I had the recommendation of three heavyweights. Who says that luck doesn’t play a part? So, how lucky can you get?

Various ports had their various cargo specialties. In our area it was cotton. In the Pacific Northwest, lumber. They stowed it beautifully! Ports like Philadelphia and Baltimore were specialists in handling pipe, steel, and heavy machinery.

Again, the cotton handling added to education and vocabulary. The only tool required was a cotton hook. Add to that, though not actually a tool, a handleather to protect the back of the hand from buckles, rivets, and the sometimes exposed ends of the metal bands that held the bales to the size to which they’d been pressed. Those exposed ends were called spiders in the trade. Each cotton press was supposed to have a man, a spider killer, to look for and hammer those ends back under the bands where they wouldn’t bite you; but now and again one would be missed. They could inflict nasty cuts.

The square bale measured a rough two by two by five feet. It had two hard sides and two soft sides. On the hard sides the cotton was exposed. The soft sides and ends were covered by bagging. That’s where your hook would help you with handling the bale, in the bagging. The hook wouldn’t hold in that cotton at all. The soft side of the bale was the cant. Often the hard side was called the white side. The square bale was not exactly square. The two hard sides bore a resemblance to flatness, all right. The soft sides would round out just slightly. A bale laid on the white side measured a fraction higher than when laid on the cant. Approved stowage, with only rare exceptions, called for stowing the bale on its white or hard side.

The cotton hook had a shape all its own, differing from the more familiar box hook or hay hook. It was used backhanded. At first, that way of holding the hook would seem awkward, but it took only the briefest acquaintance with the problem for you to see the wisdom of using the hook as prescribed. Much more power could be applied that way, not to mention skill.

You learned what was meant by expressions such as cut, come under, set you, set me, pull for me, all having to do with aiming the bale toward the work in handiest fashion. Home on the roll or on your knees had to do with putting your bale snug against the bales already stowed: tight to the work. When you kneed a bale home you set your