Thursday, October 7

October 7, Thursday - Sent car back again today and bought a new battery.

October 8, Friday - An ordinary Friday.

October 9, Saturday - Dad died a year ago today. Strike has started. Milgram's. Look for the other chains to lock out the butchers.

Cadillacs. I remember the Caddy's battery being twice the size of others, and it probably cost three times as much. Cars were a complete and total pain in the ass in the fifties and sixties. Carburetors, distributor ignitions, spark plugs and points, drum brakes. They were designed to be serviced regularly and without fail. Having a mechanic in your backpocket was important. Dad had the home numbers of Lynn and Joel at the Standard Station on Independence Avenue. Really.

Mom's dad dropped dead on his front porch the year before at the age of 72. He worked most of his life on the railroad, tending refrigerator cars - "reefers". I always thought Grandpa Patton was really old when he died. He was the age I am now.

The Grocery Strike of 1965. Milgram was a locally owned chain of stores, but most of the Kansas City grocery landscape was made up of national chains - Safeway, Kroger, and A&P. If you worked in the business in those days, you were union. Clerks belong to Retail Clerks Local 782, meatcutters and wrappers belonged to the Alamgamated Meatcutters Union. No one dared blink in Kansas City without going through the unions first. The Meatcutters wielded the same kind of power and influence that the Teamsters did, and were probably even stronger in a town with as many slaughterhouses and packing plants as Kansas City. 

The Kansas City Stockyards - Be grateful you can't smell this.

The four major industries in Kansas City in those years were the packing houses, Armour, Swift, Cudahy and others; the steel mills on the other end of town, Sheffield Steel and Armco; the railroads that kept them all supplied, and the defense industry. Bendix Corporation was planted on a couple hundred acres in what was then the southern limits of the city. They built assemblies for atomic weapons. Dad always said that if we had enough warning of incoming Soviet missiles, we'd run downtown and head to the top of City Hall for the best view. We were going to be toast, anyway.

Milgram's talks with the Meatcutters stalled, and they locked the union out of their stores. It would just be a matter of getting the word out around town before the other chain stores followed suit. The independent grocers, mostly based in Kansas, were non-union, and would soon represent the only grocery jobs in town. Things are about to get rough. The scramble is on.