Correspondence

Yesterday I mailed out three dozen letters to various construction union Locals around the country asking them to post a note about this project so that their workers can be interviewed. Most of the UA workers at San Onofre were actually travelers from other areas; many were from California but quite a few were not. This story can't be told without their voices.

Adding Names

We now add to the list of our history-makers a pair of brothers: Dexter and Dana Levy. Dexter was Business Manager of Local 230 for two terms, and Dana was a business agent for the Local. Their father was on the Local 230 Executive Board. Unions tend to run in families, and union office seems to be the same way. Both these fellows gave entertaining and informative interviews.

Shared Experience

Right now I've got nine interviews finished. Most of the interviewees have had at least thirty years of time in the trade and/or the union itself. That makes for over 270 years of work experience.

I have been very impressed by the detail and accuracy of the interviews. Of course, a lot has been forgotten since some of these folks worked at San Onofre--which for many was a generation ago. Some are still working out there, building or rebuilding the plant. One of these days I hope to get down the coast to see the place myself. For all the listening and typing I've been doing, San Onofre is still just a couple of concrete lumps beside the freeway to San Diego.

M. McGrorty

Participating People

As of the date of this writing we have interviewed the following UA members:

Jim Cunningham, Nico Ferraro, Stephen F. Kelly, Lucky Fleming, Charlie Oakes, Gary Sallis, and Judy Camp.

More to come soon.

M. McGrorty

These conversations

I have spent a lot of my working life interviewing people. At one time I was a probation officer, then an investigator for the Department of Labor. After that I worked for construction unions enforcing wage standards. Over a generation of asking people about their work, give or take a few conversations. Over all that time I've found that working people are almost never asked about their work, either what they do or how they feel about it. When they are given the chance they often have quite a lot to say. Work is what we do. It make up a great portion of what we are. People say "I'm a pipefitter." If they think you really want to hear, they may tell you what that means. I want to hear what that means and I want to save the words so that other people can know. That's what this project is about.

Progress to date

After just a few days of casting about I have managed to find quite a list of UA vets willing to be interviewed. I now have four interviews in the can, tape-recorded and transcribed. These range in time from about twenty minutes to an hour. If you want to know what this means, an hour or so of talking turns into about 32 pages of text in double-spaced format.

How this works: when the recorded interview is done it is played back on a transcribing machine, which is just a tape recorder operated by a foot pedal. The words are typed in small bits, perhaps half a sentence at a time, with care taken to avoid errors. The foot pedal allows me to run the tape back a couple of seconds each time to insure that I've got the words right. Tedious? Not really. I am hearing and preserving the memories and thoughts of decades, a great privilege and responsibility. This is an important thing to get right and I'd rather be doing this than just about anything else.

Why San Onofre?

I decided to record the work and life histories of the UA workers on the San Onofre projects after hearing so many of the union brothers and sisters talk about their work there, and upon finding that, of all the many books and articles about the plant, none gave more than a casual mention of the people who actually built the facility. This project asks those people to tell their stories.