Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1987. január-június (41. évfolyam, 1-25. szám)

1987-06-04 / 22. szám

Thursday, June 4. 1987.

10.

John T. Gojack:

JÓCSÁK AND SON

XIV.

Besides learning how to shoot crap from the boys new to our neighborhood, I learned more, and this lesson would be helpful to me during this dangerous K.P. day. They called it "playing the dozens."

This game originated in China, although the version I learned was brought up from Mississippi and Alabama by my black friends. The "dozens" is a game of insult, and the object of the game is to maintain your cool and not lose your temper regardless of vile and personal insults. Two boys would agree to play the "dozens", usually as the result of a challenge. Facing each other closely, one would start with an insult. All were in verse or rhyme, and all were highly personal. Some boys were too tender-hearted to play at all. It did take a certain steeling, and objectivity, to withstand horrible charges about your mother, for example. The first time I played, I wanted to slug my opponent, but he was too big so I ran away crying. After watching some games, it dawned on me that the winners appeared detached, while the losers turned red with hurt feelings, and soon gave up. The trick was to blot the insults out of your mind and concentrate on remembering your best, or worst, insult to destroy your opponent.

Having a good memory, and knowing a wide range of insult verses, or being able to make some up, I became one of the top contenders in "playing dozens" in our neighborhood. Now, facing a day of verbal contests with the first sergeant, I was confident he would not be able to get to me. What, for example, could he say that would hurt more than these mild versions of the "dozens":

"Your pappy's in the poorhouse, your brother's

in jail.

Your mommy's on the corner hollering

pussy for sale."

"I laid your mommy on a cake of ice,

She liked it so much we did it twice."

These verses were extremely tame, out of hundreds used in the contests. Others were far more profane and vulgar. Playing the "dozens" was outstanding training in the art of keeping your cool.

Sure enough, the sergeant never missed a chance to ride me, whether I was running the dishwasher, sweeping or using the mop. By nine that evening, all the chores were done except washing the huge kettles. The Sarge let everyone else go.

"Make every one of those goddamn kettles shine," he ordered. He lit up a cigaret and took a stool nearby, saying, "I hear you're leaving our army, smart ass, and I want to watch you clean these pans so you'll know how to do it when you get home."

"That's kind of you, sergeant," I said smiling. "I've always wanted to learn this job." This went on for almost two hours and I thought it was the finish.

"Those lazy K,P.'s did a lousy job mopping the floor of the mess hall," the Sarge said, "and it's your duty to clean it right."

Showing me a mop and bucket, he sat down to watch with an evil leer on his face. Guessing that he couldn't be too eager to stay up very late, I deliberately mopped every inch of that mess hall as clean as possible.

"Sergeant, I don't think that was too

AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZO

clean, so I'll do it over if it suits you," I said, frequently re-doing an area. It was a test of wills and I knew he was boiling mad.

"That's enough," he said angrily, at last. "Put away the mop and bucket."

"Thank you, Sergeant," I said with a straight face. "You've given me an appreciation for the Army that I never had before." And he did!

In the morning I had my discharge papers and was on a bus for Dayton. I couldn't phone my foreman at Delco Products because I never had his last name. Taking a chance, I put on work clothes that evening and showed up early for the midnight shift. It seemed like good news to learn that someone else was hustling the springs in the shock absorber machine shop, and I would be assigned elsewhere. Within minutes, I knew it was bad news, the worst possible bad news. They put me on the shock absorber assembly line.

In those days, shock absorbers had screw- on caps on each side. Near the end of the assembly line, my job was to tighten the end caps. That meant picking a shock off the assembly line and placing it into a machine, with my wrists held by leather thongs,, in case I accidentally left a hand in the machine. Two large buttons are then hit which activated the machine to tighten and seal the shock. The problem was that the shocks came down the line next to each other, and often on top of each other, and you were supposed to keep up with the paée of the speed-up conveyor belt. There was a scene in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times movie describing such assembly lines, which people laughed at as being utterly absurd. This assembly line at General Motors in 1937, if filmed, would not have been seen as comedy, but as an inhumane and cruel pace of work.

Over the past four decades, university professors have from time to time asked me to guest lecture to their class on the "History of the American Labor Movement." Many years of talking to labor union groups taught me to gauge reactions and degree of interest. All students were bored with early labor union history. The fact of the first sit-down strike in 1100 BC and recognition of unions by the Pharaohs and Roman Emperors hundreds of years BC were meant to illustrate that labor organization was not new or novel. The fact that New York City cartdrivers refused to remove dirt from the streets for threepence a load in 1677 was dull for students. So I would start with the first strike in America, which was by Philadelphia printers who wanted a six dollar per week minimum wage. Classes would perk up when I reported "workers' children had no right to free education

during the early part of our history, with no public schools except for the rich." With no free school system in the North until 1850, and none in the South until after the Civil War, it was the labor organizations that won free schools.

While hilarious to this labor leader, the students failed to see the humor when during the first general strike in 1835 in Philadelphia, the employers declared, "It was led by lazy, idle, mischief-makers from abroad." Many of the workers were immigrants.

Allan Pinkerton, whose detective agency introduced strike-breaking on the American scene, published a book in 1878, claiming the railroad strikes of the previous year were led by "American Communists" who "patterned their subversive deviltries on the French Revolution."

During the seventeen years I lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, my favorite labor history story was by the same Detective Pinkerton. He noted a sympathy strike in Fort Wayne, "by chambermaids who privately loved the handsome conductors, brave engineers, bold firemen and doughty brakemen." With a romantic touch, Pinkerton wrote, "Every rosy-faced waiter-girl, every big-boned dishwasher, and every blarneying chambermaid at a pre-arranged hour marched into the dining room of every hotel in Fort Wayne, and in the name of each overworked hour and underpaid day treasured up in their memories, demanded an increase in wages of fifty cents a week!"

Even such a charming story of labor solidarity rarely brought a smile to students. This is not to blame our young people struggling for degrees, as few of them would ever profit from knowledge about American Labor History, even if it were taught. The classes always perked up when I offered a brief quiz, which was: "The international holiday on which more millions of people march is called May Day. Tell us which country initiated May Day?" Many hands are raised and about 75% answer "Russia" or the "Soviet Union"; about 20% say "Red China" or "China"; and a small percentage offer countries like "Germany" or "England." Some cite "Sweden", "Italy", "Japan", and even "Iceland". Not once, not once in years of lectures to university and high school students, did one of them ever suggest the United States of America as the home and founder of May Day. This suggests that American education is biased against organized labor, or blind to its history and existence.

Having been out of organized labor since 1956, and critical of much of its leadership before then and since, I still think it sad that the noble and brave in labor's past is hidden from students. So in these lectures I gave a brief outline of how May Day, as American as motherhood and apple pie, came into being.

It was during the struggle for the eight- hour day. New York State had passed an eight-our-day law, which was violated by most employers, thus precipitating the Great New York City Strike.

I'd read a quote from the New York Times of that day: "The lower classes of workmen will be by no means benefited by this new privilege. They will only the more frequent liquor shops and work for politicians." Even The Nation, the noted liberal weekly, wrote: "This, disguise it as we may, is Communism, doubtless imperfectly developed and unorganized, but still Communism, and it is at the bottom of the movement which is forcing the eight-hour system both on the capitalists and the soberer and more peaceable and industrious workmen." These quotes from respectable journals, suprised many students.

The crux of May Day's birth, I explained, "was in Chicago, then the center of a militant, left-wing labor movement. These Chicago Unions chose the first of May as the day for workers. Over 25,000 attended a pre-May Day organization." At the time, there was a strike at the McCormick Reaper works. "Two days later," I said, "a mass meeting at the gates was attacked by police, and six workers were murdered.

to be continued