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He said, “What did you expect to happen?”

I said, “I thought people would read the letter, and the people on the trustees would do something. Is it possible you can have an editorial?”

He said, “What? We don't write editorials about a hospital. About the steel industry, the railroad industry, you know, the auto industry.”

And I talked to him and talked to him again and again and again, and finally one day he said, “Give me a little bit more on the facts.” And he wrote an editorial. At this time he was watching the Post editorials, too. They were running, too.

I thought the Post was a different kind of thing in those days.

Oh, gosh. The hospitals later on used to call the Post the downtown edition of 1199 News. But anyway, then I would go back to him, and after a while there was a second editorial. There was a third editorial, and eople were looking around, saying, “What's going on?”

Then Davis went -- and I was with him -- to Harry Van Arsdale, and Moe Iushewitz was the secretary of the Central Labor Council. Now, this is a period when the AFL-CIO Central Labor Council, they have just merged. This is many years after the AFL-CIO merger, because the central labor bodies -- I'm sure that Harry sensed early on not only a sympathy for the idea for organizing poor people, and his back got busted by the hospitals. He really got angrier and angrier with them as it went along. He also felt that this might be a vehicle -- he never expressed it--for uniting the AFL and CIO unions around an issue.

Uniting the AFL and CIO unions?

Around the hospital workers struggle, because it became clear that we could not win just simply that way. But Harry helped, because Harry was close to Mayor Wagner, and Harry was getting the mayor involved.

Now, meanwhile, the board of trustees of the hospital has on it people like George Kirstein, who was of the Bloomingdale family, but he was the publisher of the Nation, the owner of The Nation. One or two other people who are fairly important people. A member of the board, I remember, is Monroe Goldwater. He's the lawyer and member of the board. He is the chairman of the Democratic Party in Bronx county. He's a very important -- you know, the trustees in hospitals are very powerful people. They can kill you, because they can pick up the phone and reach anybody, and they're powerful people. Also the PR man for the hospital I find out is a guy named Victor Weingarten, and I