<Begin Segment 24>

TI: Ron, before you go into that, let's, I just wanted to finish up with the, the longshore.

RM: Oh, the longshore. Okay.

TI: So, like, how long did it take you to write that book?

RM: Seventeen months. It took seventeen months, I was really surprised that that longshore union had never discriminated on the basis of race. That from the beginning there were African Americans in the union, and Hawaiians, and all kinds of people. Anybody who could work on the docks was in, could be in the union. It was a different attitude than I'd ever heard before, because when I taught American history, we taught that the AFL-CIO discriminated, or put people in separate unions at best. Here's the longshore union that didn't really practice any of that, followed the concept of, "If you could work, you could stay on the docks." And that's what happened. I told that story, from the basis of that, that it was based upon how hard you worked, and that's how you got to stay on the waterfront.

TI: Good. I'm curious; what was the reaction of the longshoremen after the book was complete and they read it?

RM: It was incredible. We had a party after the book was finished, there were five, six hundred people there. It was, and there were people from the Humanities Commission, there were longshoremen, there were their families, they really liked the book, and they, they spoke of it as "our book." It was, it was different than any, writing a dissertation or anything. It was, it was a grand party. It was a culmination of something that I never could believe. The book got better reception that night, and actually it did sell 4,500 copies. It was really a well-liked book by -- and we balanced it between the employer and the longshoremen. The employers gave us access to their records, and I got to interview employers who hated longshoremen. And all of that, it was quite an interesting process. And the book was, it has been very successful. And so, and from that, the, I got another chance to write another book, just drifted from one project to another.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.