My late friend Wendell Young III once told me, “Life is all stories.”
This is his.
He got himself elected president of the retail clerks union in Philadelphia in 1962. Local 1357 represented mostly supermarket workers. He was 24 years old and fresh out of St. Joseph’s College.
When I asked him once how he pulled that off, he answered , “I knocked the other guy out of the box,” which sounds like a Jimmy Cagney line, and he did have some Cagney in him when it came to standing up for his members and the greater community. He told some powerful people to get lost in his time.
Wendell – he was always a first-name guy – got elected at 24 by being smarter than the old guard; he organized the part-timers like himself and the women clerks and won by a landslide. He was a new and different presence on the Philly labor scene, which was old school and definitely not ready for what Wendell was bringing to their party, which was social justice unionism.
All this is in “The Memoirs of Wendell W. Young III,” and subtitled “A Life in Philadelphia Labor and Politics.” Francis Ryan, Director of the Masters of Labor and Employment Relations program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, spent almost 60 hours and three and a half years taping Wendell’s reminiscences starting in June of 2009, when Wendell was into retirement, and editing them into this unique and necessary document, especially in these ever-roiling times.
Parenthetically, Wendell and I had talked about such a project from time to time and even made some shaky false starts. I was editor of a trade paper for the tri-state (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware) grocery business at the time, which is actually how Wendell and I met in the mid-eighties. He was in full swing as a true labor leader and I was busy putting out a paper, so we never got too far with his story, which makes me especially pleased at what Francis Ryan has produced. Wendell was a great back-story guy when you got him rolling, and evidently Ryan got him rolling because the memoirs are the back-story of a long and truly memorable career in the rough-and-tumble Philly labor and political world in which he made his and his members’ way. When he took over Local 1357 (which he later changed to Local 1776) of what became the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), people coming to the union’s office for the first time thought he was an intern. He looked like a wayward cherub. And yet he went on to lead the local to a membership of 25,000 and speak before 100,000 people in a soccer stadium in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Wendell was in Brazil on a labor tour and he had been designated as the group’s speaker, and he spoke all over the country, ending each speech by giving the old thumbs-up sign. The audiences loved it, cheering and laughing and giving him the sign right back. After the Sao Paulo speech, someone took him aside to explain that in Brazil, thumbs-up was like the middle finger in America. Only Wendell could give the finger to 100,000 people and have them love it.
Wendell came by his brand of social justice unionism though many influences, primary among them his devoutly Catholic family. His father’s three sisters joined what he called “very progressive” religious orders: his Aunt Florence – Mother Mary Benedict – took vows with the Society of Roman Catholic Medical Missionaries and eventually became head of the order’s American Province, his Aunt Virginia – Sister Mary David – and Aunt Jane – Sister Florence Marie – both took vows in the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament Order and Sister Mary David later headed the order’s Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically black Catholic college in the country in New Orleans.
He came up in Mayfair, a white Philadelphia working class neighborhood, and his father’s deep and abiding sense of right and wrong was another major influence on the man Wendell became. At one point, his father was fired from a good-paying job selling insurance because of involvement in union organizing activities.
“Labor and politics are tied together — they can’t be separated,” Wendell said, “and this was what social justice unionism was all about. I believed that labor and politics are involved a struggle for the heart of America and the kind of future we would have as a society. Labor must be involved in shaping the bigger issues; it was more than advancing its own interests.”
He’d actually been involved in politics since his late teens – he said it came “very naturally” – and as his role and reputation in the city’s labor circles grew, so did his political presence in the Democratic Party.
In both spheres, he was a maverick in many respects. He brought an active social conscience to both his labor and political activities, sometimes even alienating his own membership, and often putting him at odds with both the national union and local Democratic Party honchos.
Wendell Young had some powerful allies and some powerful adversaries in his time. He advocated for Caesar Chavez and the grape-workers union by having his local refuse to handle any non-union grapes and enlisted the local Teamsters in the labor boycott of scab grapes. He brought Chavez to Philadelphia and counted him as a friend for the rest of his life.
The French retail giant Carrefour opened a true hypermarket at Franklin Mills in Northeast Philly in 1988. It was so big that the cash “girls” used roller skates. Unlike its European stores, this one was non-union, and Wendell put a trailer out there and picketed non-stop. At one point, Carrefour goons threw a bunch of rotten fish on top of the trailer like it was some kind of Mafia imbroglio. In 1991, the store went union, but that was only a head-fake because the next year they suddenly closed the store and went back to France, leaving 560 jobless union workers. Ironically, they sold the property to Walmart, which Wendell called “the American version” of Carrefour.
Wendell hated non-union Walmart with a union passion. He even commissioned an academic from the University of Pennsylvania to do a study on the deleterious effects of Walmart on local businesses everywhere it opened a store. Walmart was no friend of Wendell’s either. They opened their first urban store along the Delaware River in South Philadelphia not long after Carrefour left to “break my balls,” he told me. There were union pickets there for years.
Wendell didn’t swear much and never used the f-word until he became president of the local and began moving up in Democratic politics. It was part of the lingua franca of both spheres, but he used it sparingly and effectively – or in anger. George Fencl, the head of Frank Rizzo’s civil disobedience squad when Rizzo was Philadelphia Police Commissioner, yelled at Wendell at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration that he wasn’t going to arrest him and give him free publicity. Wendell yelled back, “Fuck you, George. You’re right, I do want you to arrest me and you don’t have the balls to do it.” That’s a long way from St. Matt’s in Mayfair, but that was and is Philly.
Frank Rizzo and Wendell Young never really got along to the point that when Rizzo as mayor wanted to change the city charter so he could run for a third term, Wendell and his political allies went after Rizzo so hard that he had Wendell’s car towed over 70 times. That’s Philly style, baby. They used to sell a tee-shirt in Suburban Station with the skyline and the words: “Philadelphia – You Gotta Be Tough!”
Wendell was the first – and for a long time the only – so called “labor leader” in Philadelphia to come out against the Vietnam War. By 1967, Wendell considered himself part of the Anti-War Movement. “I believed young people could and should make contributions in the political arena and could remake society along more humane ideals,” he said. “Most of the members of the Retail Clerks Union did not agree with me on the war, and I didn’t have much to bring to the anti-war coalition: no financial resources, or even bodies to bring to the rallies – it was just me expressing my independent view.”
Wendell had some very independent views about the United Food and Commercial Workers International in Washington, which in turn viewed him mostly as a troublemaker because of his social justice unionism, which was basically too progressive for these labor traditionalists. By 1979, when he was 41, the UFCW was one of the largest unions in the country and the AFL-CIO, and Wendell was invited to be part of a group of twelve unionists to tour China for 28 days under the auspices of the U.S. China Friendship Committee. Both the UFCW International and the AFL-CIO wouldn’t sanction Wendell’s trip. He went anyhow and when he was in China went his own way among the people rather than following the proscribed itinerary. He’d brought his running shoes and when he was out running he’d look behind him and there would be a couple hundred curious Chinese following in his wake.
Bill Wynn was president of the International then. I saw him speak at the local once and he was almost crude in his presentation, with an undertone of the arrogance that comes with bureaucratic power.
He was succeeded in 1994 by Doug Dorrity, and the next year Wendell went directly against International leadership by backing the breakaway “A New Voice for American Workers” slate in a battle for leadership of the AFL-CIO. The UFCW was behind Thomas Donahue, the organization’s secretary-treasurer. Wendell had jumped on the New Voice bandwagon with both feet from the beginning, and was instrumental in John Sweeney’s victory, which bolstered hope for a resurgence of the American labor movement. It was a hope that remains unrealized.
Wendell felt that the media wasn’t telling the real labor story, so he got himself a radio program called “Talking Unions” whose theme music was Peter Tosh’s version of The Wailers’ “Get Up Stand Up.” Every Friday morning from nine o’clock until noon, Wendell and his guests would talk about labor issues and the concerns of working people. The show was on station WHAT AM, Philadelphia’s premier African American station at the time.
I was a guest on “Talking Unions” a couple times, and the calls we got were knowledgeable and articulate. How often do people get to talk on the radio about how they make their living? Wendell knew almost everybody in Philly’s public life and the guests he trotted out lit up the phones week after week, year after year. It was true talk radio before it became a haven for morons.
One afternoon in September in 2001 I had gone to Wendell’s home in Lafayette Hills outside Philadelphia to pick up some material for a story I was freelancing for the local’s newsletter. I rang the bell and knocked for a long time. The door was open, so I went in. The house was dark inside and I made my way toward the back, calling Wendell’s name. He came out of his bedroom, looking pale, and disoriented. He said he’d been sick. I took the stuff and left. Later that night, he had a stroke.
After a long and mostly successful rehab, he continued to run the local until January of 2005, when he retired and was succeeded by his son, Wendell W. Young IV. The last time I saw Wendell Young was in 2013 when we met in the bar of the Lobster House in Cape May, New Jersey, and cut up some old time jackpots. I mostly listened. Wendell still knew all the back-stories.
He died that year. His legacy lives in his memoirs and far beyond; it lives in the generations of clerks whose lives he changed for the better – and in making social justice unionism a working reality.