Speech on a Buoy

Stocky Charlie Daggert knows how to use his fists. At 18, during World War I, he punched his way to the featherweight championship of the U.S. Navy. But, as Daggert says, he also has "a bit of Irish wit." Last week Daggert called upon that wit.

Daggert, now 46, is president of a small, independent union at the Quaker City Iron Works, a Philadelphia plant engaged in secret war work. Last February the union petitioned the War labor Board for a 10% wage increase, got no action through six irritating months. Despite the pleas of Daggert, and of servicemen sent in by the Army and Navy, the 350 members of the union voted unanimously to go on "a holiday."

Three days before the strike was to begin, Daggert went to Superintendent Robert Wilson, asked him to blow the quitting horn 30 minutes early. The men & women, their overalls soggy with sweat, hurried out of the sheds into the blazing sun. Daggert climbed on top a huge buoy he had been welding, stuttered a bit, then began booming in the voice he had used to referee many a Philadelphia fight:

"I'm not going to give you any patriotic spiel. You've had the flag waved in front of you for months to keep you on the job.

"All of you, as I look at you, have sons in the service, brothers, husbands. If you walked out now you'd be going back on them. For instance, you'd be going back on Jimmy Morris. You worked side by side with him, and you all remember how he left here to become a flyer. You know how he was the pilot of a bomber on an important mission in the Mediterranean and how he brought back his plane and landed it. You know the rest of the crew got out and after a while looked around for Jimmy. But Jimmy hadn't come out of that plane. ... He landed the plane and died."

Jimmy's father shuffled his feet, greasy bandannas wiped away tears. Daggert's finger picked out one after another of his old friends.

"How about you, Big Joe?" Daggert pointed to Joe Milewski, whose son, Tom, is in North Africa.

"Or you, Sally?" Sally Lempa has two brothers in the Army, one, first reported killed, a prisoner on the Japs.

The vote to call off the strike was unanimous. On the same day Private Albert Daggert, 19, wrote home from Fort Lewis, Wash. It said: "Tell Dad not to get too radical at work, for the fellows in the service need that stuff bad."

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