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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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That was the end of him. We didn't hear about him again. Several years later, while I was still Secretary of Labor, Harry Lundeberg, who by that time was head of the Seafarers' Union of the Pacific Coast, was in my office one day. He was a great gossip. He was telling me all the news from San Francisco. He was very anti-Bridges and anti-International Longshore-man's Union. He had his standing fight with them, not, I may say, on ideological grounds, but just a regular old power fight, the raiding of memberships from the sailors to the longshoremen, and vice versa, which is a common trick on the waterfront. He used to drop in and tell me things now and then.

I had once asked him if he knew what had become of Rathbone and he told me the same thing. He had heard that he had had a heart attack and he just got out of the radio operators' union. Then Lundeberg, who was a very suspicious man, added that perhaps they were getting up too close to him, by which I thought perhaps he meant the navy communications people. I didn't go into the subject.

However, several years later, Lundeberg was in telling me about these things. He said, “By the way, do you remember Rathbone?”





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