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were other people involved with it, too. But you had to check with everybody. You couldn't just go on.

This created a very, very big problem for me. I wasn't used to working -- my position was I can't before I call up somebody check with twelve people what I'm going to say. “You've got to let me go. If I send something I know what the position is, I know what you're trying to do. Let me go!” At the beginning my hands were tied, but after awhile it became clear that they -- what I would do is every morning I would call Dennis very early in the morning. Like at seven o'clock in the morning Dennis and I would go over what had to be done that day with the media. Then the arrangement was that Dennis would handle the Amsterdam News and the El Diario and the City Sun. I was able to talk to the City Sun too, but that Dennis would handle that and I would handle the rest of the press. But we would check what the angle was, how we could play it -- this way, that way -- and this is what we would do. Similarly with political moves and other moves, there was checking done, but it was complicated.

The other thing that's important to keep in mind is that we won an election without a candidate. Let me explain what I mean by that. Georgiana Johnson ran for president, and Georgiana Johnson was totally unknown to most members, in the sense that Georgiana Johnson was known to certain people. But you're talking about a membership of 75,000 eligible voters -- I forget what the figure was, it's in the seventy thousands. You're talking about 200 or more institutions. It's impossible for them to know anybody. It's not like a political campaign that you can go on television and bill the candidate over a period of time. Georgiana was not known. So in voting, people were being asked to vote for Slate 2, Save Our Union, without a known leadership! How do you know that Georgiana can run a union? The whole question of winning confidence. Doris won the confidence for us, because if there's any campaign in which you would say that if Turner -- if you were to map out a campaign and you say, “I wish that the opposition would do these things,” you couldn't ask for more than what she did [laughs]! She virtually did all the wrong things.

At the same time, we did virtually most of the right things. There was large rank and file support, but it was difficult. We were putting out a publication. The publication was designed carefully. It was a four- pager. At first it was an eight, then a four -- it was really a leaflet as a publication, because it was an easy read. Everything that went into that publication was very carefully discussed, based on polls, of what we were hitting at. So that we were hitting issues in the publication designed to hit where we knew the weaknesses were or the strengths