Traverse City Record-Eagle

Terry Wooten: Elders Project

Related Photos

  • Wooten

    CSS9BCB.jpg
September 6, 2010

Terry Wooten: Workers and their rights throughout history

By Terry Wooten ----

Labor Day celebrates our nation's workers and their rights. Now there isn't enough work to go around. History shows us how our government struggled with this problem in the past and how painful change can be.

Chuck Shinn was notorious. He participated in the original sit-down strikes in Flint during the 1930s. Unions take a lot of bashing these days, but the Great Depression was a very different time. A lot of workers' rights and benefits, which we now take for granted, started with those brave men and women.

Any organization, faith or philosophy is only as good as each person representing it. Chuck represented his beliefs well. He was a great human being. I was honored to have been his friend.

Chuck's wife died young and left him with three little girls. In the 1950s the company bosses found out about Chuck's unionizing history from factory spies. They tried to bully him into quitting his job.

He was held out an eight-story window by his ankles. The thugs told him they would drop him on his head next time if he came back to work.

Chuck gave his little girls to his poet-friend, Max Ellison, and his wife, Florence, for safe-keeping. He went back to work. "Bethany's Story" was told to me at Max Ellison's wake. "Troublemaker" was written before the Elders Project but shows I was learning how to listen.

WPA is an example of the government helping people go back to work. Some workers jokingly called it "We Piddle Around." WPA built the old stone school in Kingsley. One wall still stands in front of the middle school.

Troublemaker

At 82 years old

Chuck Shinn

was still on the Michigan State Police

troublemakers list.

It was his Flint unionizing days

in the 1930s,

being a socialist

during the Great Depression.

As the new millennium approached

like a 80 mile an hour parade

of material possessions

headed north

out of the city

for the weekend,

Chuck's stubborn simplicity held true

like a good compass

nobody used anymore.

Everywhere he went

the ghosts of Ben Franklin,

Thomas Jefferson

and Joe Hill

traveled along urging,

"Give 'em heck Chuck!

Give 'em heck!"

Chuck was raised a Mennonite

and never could swear very well.

He spent his teen years hoboing

across Woody Guthrie's vision

of our land,

and worked

for the Civilian Conservation Corps

planting white pines

to repair what the lumber barons did.

The tops of those trees

were his favorite steeple.

At the end of his life

and the 20th Century

Chuck believed in

goodness and honesty

for their own sake,

and made no apologies.

-- Terry Wooten

Bethany's Story

My sisters and I

were pretty young

when we stayed with Max

and Florence.

We didn't know why.

Dad would come home

beat up a lot,

and there was a scary feeling

in our house.

The two things I remember most

were the spying car

always parked down the road,

and the bad storm

we had one night.

Florence was away somewhere,

and tornado warnings

were all over the radio.

Us kids ran in

where Max was writing

at the kitchen table.

We whined, "If a tornado comes

where will we go?"

Max just smiled

and pointed up.

Somehow it all made us feel safer.

-- Terry Wooten

Stanley Holzhauer WPA

There was a lot of stress

created by the lack of food

and jobs.

About this time the WPA,

Works Progress Administration

was set up.

The government gave out jobs.

Men made roads,

gutters on the streets

and built schools.

Surplus food was shipped around

to country buildings.

You could get grapefruit and oranges free.

Farmers couldn't sell anything,

and didn't know

what to do with it.

It was a sin to throw food away.

Mother worked on sewing projects

for the WPA.

The government provided

huge amounts of material

for dungarees.

A lot of folks couldn't afford clothes.

If you had a little pride

you didn't like to wear

those dungarees.

It stereotyped you as being poor.

You'd rather have a pair bought

from a store.

But WPA clothes

was all you might have.

It was pride

or not having any pants on.

-- Terry Wooten

Poet Bard Terry Wooten has been performing and conducting writing workshops in schools for 27 years. He is the creator of Stone Circle. Learn more about him at www.terry-wooten.com.

Text Only