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Notable New     Yorkers
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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Engineers. I can't think of what his name is now, but, oh God, what I owe him. He was simply wonderful. He became one of my best friends. He was the best public servant I ever saw. He was only an adviser, but he knew the worst about boilers and he knew what they ought to be. He wanted to see them right. He was practical. Nobody could dispute him, because, after all, he was a boiler expert. He was really wonderful.

That was what we would do whenever we had a code. Take, for instance, the laundry code. There was no laundry workers' union. The same was true of the dry cleaning code. In neither of those trades was there a bona fide union. When I say bona fide, I mean there was something that called itself a laundry union, but it had no membership to speak of.

Of course these were all AF of L unions at that time. The only unions at that period that were not AF of L were in the Trade Union Unity League. There were not any of them in New York State that I ever heard of. There might have been some, but not any registered. There were some rump unions in the mining trades and there was a little rump union in textiles that got going around Lawrence, Massachusetts. They were communist unions. We didn't know what communist meant at that time. The word





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