The Times from Shreveport, Louisiana • Page 62

4-F Sumlav. Nov, 18, 1962 Imk Siik mok Timks UNION MINISTERS TO 'BODY AND SOW Electricians -Hour The 1 1 i i i iwwaMwiM, By JILES LOFI AP Newsfealurei Writer NEW YORK Like many another industrious young American, John George worked his way through college. After 7Vi years of part-time school, winter and summer, he got his degree in electrical engineering. But he also acquired a wife and four kids along the way and the inevitable demands on time and paycheck that go with such a collection. Graduate school would seem, under the circumstances, clearly out of the question.

But when the new semester begins in February at City College of New York, John George will be back at the books. He has the time. His family lives comfortably. John George, 35, is a member of a unique body of laboring men Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the only labor union in the land to negotiate successfully a basic 25-hour 1 After School at Union Estate, Workers Play Croquet on Lawn After Negotiating a 25-Hour Work What Do the New York Electrical Workers Do With All That Free Time? Well, They Work, for One Thing. They Also Go to School and Join in a Number of Union-Sponsored Diversions.

The Union Hails Its New Contract as an Answer to Automation and a Route to Full Employment; Some Employers See It Differently. ''v a- i 1 -Pal T-i taken this course have gone out and enrolled in adult education courses somewhere else afterward," he said. Emphasis on education is almost an obsession with business manager Van Arsdale, whose own formal schooling ended after second year high. He is now a director of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and a trustee of Carnegie Hall. A standing feature in his union's newspaper is titled "A City of Noble Culture," and points out places for members to visit with their families during off hours.

"I look forward to a new kind of eight-hour day," Van Arsdale has said. "Four hours of work, four hours of formal study in schools or colleges. Today, compulsory schooling ought to go beyond 17." Random interviews with electricians on the job and in their homes showed intense loyalty to Local 3 almost to a man, and esteem for Van Arsdale bordering on veneration. When Van Arsdale was elected in 1960 to his eighth term as the union's top paid official the vote was 19,147 to 892. 100-HOUR WEEK On an hourly basis, Van Arsdale earns far less than his Class-A members.

His salary was frozen five years ago at $200 a week plus $77 for using and maintaining his own car. Normally he puts in close to 100 hours a week. He scoots around town either in his own Chrysler sedan or on the rear seat of a motor scooter belonging to Local 3 newspaper editor Arnold Beichman. He usually winds up at midnight, signing checks at union headquarters with a shiny purple pen a keepsake given him when he signed the certificate as a New York elector for John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Every expenditure, from $2 to $200,000, passes Van Arsdale's scrutiny and, in -turn, is reported meticulously to the members at monthly union meetings. The local, incidentally, has a 50 to 60 per cent turnout at every meeting with no more incentive than a 50-cent fine for those who fail to show up. In his first speech to the membership when he was elected business manager in 1954, Van Arsdale issued a challenge which has remained before them to this day. "You produce more," he said, "and I'll get you more." The response has resulted in the paradox of the union contributing to the automation problem it is pledged to help solve. A wire-pulling device which does the work of seven men is the product of a Local 3 man's ingenuity; and three years ago, after winning a 50-cent pay raise, Van Arsdale set up a seminar on efficiency for his members.

The day the local won its fight for a 25-hour week. Van Arsdale's electricians were told: "The most important thing to remember is that our job now is to see to it that in every possible way production and productivity will increase." Significantly, Van Arsdale never speaks of "labor saving" improvements, always "time-saving." The economic effects of the shorter work week remain to be judged. Contractors still are opposed to the shorter week, some of them bitterly so, and a few are disenchanted with the union which many had openly admired. "They just went too far this time," said one general contractor who preferred not to be identified. "This cost increase is going to be passed all down the line not just in the construction business, but to everybody.

Why didn't Kennedy make Local 3 hold the line like he did the steel industry?" The union offers about a dozen courses directly related to job improvement (blueprint reading, wire splicing and the like) plus others, such as "Current Labor Problems," "Contract Analysis" and "Automation," designed to prepare members for more intelligent union participation. Only two courses are mandatory, though there are other inducements. Taking the course in citizenship, for example, qualifies a member for a $15 stipend every time he loses a day's work because of jury duty. One of the mandatory courses Is the once-a-weck class for apprentices. The other is a lecture series for the union's officers, who study current world problemseconomic, social, political, educational.

"We don't attempt to offer solutions," explained Harry J. Carman, dean emeritus of Columbia College and educational adviser for Local 3. "We try only to study these problems historically. By knowing the background, the men can better understand the nature of the problem." The course is an outgrowth of a foreign travel program begun several years ago. Each year at least two union officers make three-month trips abroad, with their wives.

According to Local 3, the aim of the trips is to broaden their executives culturally and to study the labor movements of foreign countries. So far 26 Local 3 ambassadors have visited more than 20 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. The union also encourages reciprocal visits, and has opened a labor center at the United Nations. Probably the most intriguing course the union offers is one which bears the imposing title "Critical Thinking in Human Relations," but is known familiarly as "the Bayberry course." Bayberry is a 314-acre estate on Great Peconic Bay, Long Island, which the Joint Industry Board bought with funds in 1950 to use as a convalescent home for elderly members. The estate, once the summer playground of millionaire tennis cup donor Dwight F.

Davis, has a mile of beach, rolling lawns, an eight-room chauffeur's cottage and a manor house with fireplaces in its 16 bathrooms. HOUSING PROJECT (Incidentally, Bayberry is only one item in the Local 3 property portfolio. Another is a $20 million cooperative apartment house development which provides low cost housing to 2.100 families, about a fourth of them Local 3 members whose main complaint seems to be that families with two cars can't get enough garage space.) The need for a convalescent home failed to materialize and so Harry Van Arsdale the union's business manager, proposed turning Bayberry into a school. "Nobody in this union has read anything since television came out," snorted Van Ardale five years ago. He asked Dean Carman to devise a program "which would teach our men how to think." Each week 30 Local 3 members pack their grips and travel to Bayberry for six days of discussions and lectures on the rudiments of psychology, logic, semantics, economics and history, all aimed at giving them a more questioning attitude, developing their critical faculties, making them more anlytical in their judgments.

Nearly all the class-A members have taken advantage of the course at least once, some twice. Each time they go, they receive $140 to make up for lost wages. Donn Coffee, a former student of Carman who teaches the course, points to at least one striking result, "Twenty-five per cent of the students who have 1 Manager Travels on a Scooter the "Class division, the 8,000 skilled workers employed by the 600 contractors in New York's $125 billion construction industry. They earn $4.96 an hour, and guarantee their employers they will work a sixth hour every day, if needed, but no more than 15 hours of overtime a week. Formerly they worked a basic six-hour day plus a seventh at time and a half.

Thus the basic 25-hour weekly paycheck is $124. With an hour of overtime daily it would be $161.20, and with the maximum 15 hours $235. This doesn't include fringe benefits which make a $161.20 paycheck actually worth more than $200. JOINT BOARD The benefits are administered by a Joint Industry Board. The board, made up of 10 representatives of management and 10 union members, handles the funds which provide pensions of $220 a month (including social security) at age 65, free dental care, a variety of diagnostic services, up to 120 days hospitalization for every member of the family, full wages for the first 15 weeks in the hospital for any man injured on the job, plus paid vacations, a revolving fund that provides interest-free loans, an annuity plan that grows at the rate of $4 a day, and scholarships which so far have sent 277 children of Local 3 members to colleges and graduate schools.

In winning its new contract. Local 3 agreed to take on 1,000 new apprentices and so far has admitted 800. All the applicants were nominated not by Local 3 members, the traditional union method, but by the NAACP, the Urban League and similar organizations. Local 3's efforts to steer members toward productive use of their off hours are as elaborate as its welfare benefits. There's a perpetual round of parties, baseball games, bowling tournaments and turkey raffles, and the union sponsors 13 Boy Scout troops not for members' children, but for boys in underprivileged neighborhoods.

COURSES OFFERED But these are only incidental diversions. An educational program, presided over by a full time (eight-hour) paid official and promoted by committees in each of the 19 divisions, focused attention on Local 3 among students of the labor movement long before the 25-hour week put the union in the headlines. work week. Local 3, of course, had made its mark in the labor movement long before its latest contract went into effect last July 1. Benefits such as a day off with pay on a man's birthday, a chance for college scholarships for his youngsters, an interest-free $10,000 loan to help him buy a a house, a $250 check with no strings attached every time a baby arrives, and the replacement cost of his tools if they happen to get stolen, are more or less taken for granted by the union's members.

As for the five-hour day, one veteran Local 3 electrician remarked: "What's so great about that? Hell, we've had a six-hour day for the past 26 years." In practice, Local 3 electricians still work a six-hour day, or even seven. But after the first five hours they receive time and a half pay. For this reason some of their employers call the five-hour contract a sham, a pure and simple and clumsily disguised way to wrangle more money. 'JUST A RAISE' "In effect," said electrical contractor Saul Horowitz "all the new contract does is give them overtime pay for one of the hours they used to work at straight time. It was just a way of getting a larger pay raise than the 56 cents an hour raise they got." The union insists its motives are far nobler.

In its view the contract is a logical answer to automation and worthy of eventual nationwide imitation if the country is to enjoy "a full employment economy." Local 3 members look at it differently. There's more to a short work day than getting off at 2:30, they insist, and for this reason other unions "not as enlightened as ours," as one member put it, might not yet be ready for such an advance. The remark manifests a certain smugness characteristic of Local 3 members not so much for the contract they have won, but for the union which won it. In its concern over welfare and education, Local 3 is a modern day reflection of the craft guilds of the Middle Ages. 1 in 111 111 iiti'Bk tmmmmmA i iii i'n I There is nothing medieval about its new contract, however.

The local consists of 31,000 members in 19 job categories, but the 25-hour contract and certain other benefits cover only AP Photos John George Leads Class, Part of Diverse Union-Made Program MIDDLE YEARS 'WE SEVEN' Routes of the I) IX i "1 Testing of Henry James: Bookmobiles-1 Dorothie Erwin Sunday Editor 1 vo Parts of Biographical Odyssey U.S. Space Pioneers Speak for Themselves WE SEVEN, by America's first seven astronauts. iS'mnn Schuster, $6.50 You'd think that after the millions of words that have poured forth from all the media of communications about the astronauts, little would be left to sav. HENRY JAMES, by Leon Edel, Vols. 2 and 3.

(Lippincott, 465 I ARCHAEOLOGY i Aided by Interpreter swamped the narrative. Naturally, its appeal will be primarily to male readers, but everyone can find in it an inspiring narrative of ultramodern pioneers. Miles A. -Smith Greek Stones Talkative THE GREEK STONES SPEAK: The Story of Archaeology in the Greek Lands, by Paul MacKendrick. St.

Martin's. 470 $7.50) Those ancient stones that seem so voluble to classicist Paul MacKendrick don't have much to say to the untutored observer who yawns at them in museums. But with Professor MacKendrick as an interpreter, putting words into their crumbling mouths, they can become positively gabby. The author, professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin and a veteran observer of the archaeological diggings, has a Notes on Books of Note what Europe will always mean to him, he is bored and restless, but not to the point where he fails to write brilliantly of the American scene for The Nation. The hostility-rivalry re-lationship with his older brother William (a.

major theme of "The Untried continues, but to his advantage, since it underscores his determination to control his own destiny. He returns to Europe, and the pattern of his life comes to him fully in Rome: to be a pagan in spirit, a puritan in fact, and to find in art the meeting ground of those seeming opposites. His themes and general interpretation of character established. Mr. Edel then goes about weaving a kind of biographical tapestry, shuttling back and forth between actual event as James experienced it and the use he made of it in fiction.

Was he in love with Sarah Butler Wister, Fanny Kemble's daughter? Perhaps he was, Mr. Edel suggests. If so, James characteristically determined to "channel his passion into art," as he may have done again in the case of Constance Fenimore Woolson "one attachment in Henry James' life which has hitherto remained way with words-his own as well! discovered and dupli- CITY BOOKMOBILES wnitt MONDAY Atkins School. 9-11 30; Lynbrook (LvnbrooK and Jeanne), 1.30-4. TUESDAY Riverside School, 9 Broadmoor Terrace (South Shrev.

Baptist Church), 30; Shrev. Island Shopping Center, 12 WEDNESCAY In the otlice. THURSDAY Holiday, FRIDAY E. Wilkinson (100 Block), 9 30-10: Madison Park Shopping Center, 10 30-12; Werner Park School, 1-4 30, Nesre MONDAY Stoner Hill Elementary School. Valencia, Carver Terrace, TUESDAY First Baptist Church, 9 15-10 15; Zion Baptist Church, 30; West 58th Street (1500 Block), 15; Union Spring Church, 2 30-4 45.

WEDNESDAY Canaan Elementary School. 9 15-11; Our Lady of th. Blessed Sacrament. 11-30 2: Douglas Street (200 Block), 45; Pickett Street. 3-4 30.

THURSDAY Holiday. FRIDAY Ingersoll Elementary School. Hatti. Perry Park, PARISH BOOKMOBILES While MONDAY South Cross Lake Trip, Western Hills Subdivision, Laguna Drive, Wallace Road. 11 05 Shorewood.

50; White Pines Road, Sandra Drive, Gorton Road, Ford Park Baptist Church, TUESDAY North Highlands School Trip, North Highlands School, Risinger Woods, 2 Irving Bluff, 55; Wilton Place, 4-4 25. WEDNESDAY Bookmobile In for Servicing THURSDAY-Thanksgiving Holiday. FRIDAY Trees City Trip, Superior, Trees City, 10 15-10 50; Leach's Store. Bveriys. Myrtis.

1)45-12; United Gas Com. pressor Station, 12 20-12 35; Adcock's, Broadwell Road, 1:45 Zel-lers, 2 05-2 20; Smith's, 2 Windham's. Dennison't, Negr. MONDAY Herndon School Trip, Dixie, 45-915; Herndon School, 9 45-2 45; Gann Road, 2 55-3 10; Dan White Community, 35; Booker T. Washington Street.

3 415-4 TUESDAY Pine Valley School Trio, Gilliam. 9-9 30; Pine Valley School. 10-2 45; Hosston. 3.15-3 35. WEDNESDAY Carver Trip, East 70th Street Entenslon.

I 45-9 05; Harts Island Road. Carver School, 9 45-1; Caspiana, Mt. Pleasant, Hood Subdivision, THURSDAY-Thanksgiving Holiday. FRIDAY Bookmobile In for as tne imagined messages oi and 408 $8.50. When we last saw Henry James in Leon Edel's company, as Vol.

1 Untried of Mr. Edel's four-volume biography concluded, the year was 1870, "the artist had been formed," the artist's maturing and testing lay just ahead. The rich maturing, the triumphant testing, are the materials of Vols. 2 and 3 of this superb portrait of James as he lived and wrote between 1870 and 1895: a Jamesian odyssey that, Mr. Edel has made his own' in a way that no one before him has done.

Is Mr. Edel's Henry Jams everyone else's? Mr. Edel would be the first to deny it, and for the very reasons that made James what he was: the subterranean complexity of his inner life, the self-protective formality of his outer life. One's Henry James is in part what one brings to him. THE PORTRAITIST What Mr.

Edel brings to him is the scrupulous scholar's devotion to facts, the true critic's instinctive understanding, the disciplined artist's way with style, narrative, structure. Make no mistake about it: this is literary biography in the great tradition of Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Strachey and other mas cated so convincingly that forgery is now possible; and how it was an unlettered workman who solved a puzzle for scholars by identifying an unusual set of superimposed clay jars in the Athens diggings (the find, it turned out, was a child's potty chair). wholly concealed," but now is examined speculatively and in fascinating detail by a biographer who has read no less than 12,000 of Henry James' letters. Burn, Burn," James adjured the recipients of his letters. Fortunately, they did not.) FRIENDSHIPS Mr.

Edel may or may not always be correct 'who is to say?) in his psychoanalytic guesswork, but in any case he is provocative and illuminating. He is unfailingly so in his account of James' literary admirations and friendships, what they meant to him, what they said about him. "The father of us all," he called Balzac. His feeling for Turgenev was not less than hero worsip. He shied away at first from Zola's extreme naturalism, then came to respect it.

For all his occasional petulance and small vanities, his generosity to fellow authors was warm and consistent, especially to the younger generation that was making its way. That he hesitated to give freely of his basically emotional self is obvious. What matters is that Mr. Edel explains why James made the choice he did a choice whose result was a new shape in the novel, a new tone and sensitivity in criticism, and countless smaller literary pleasure. Had his career ended in 1895, where Mr.

Edel's Vol. 3 leaves him, his achievement would have been monumental. Twenty-one years and great work remained to him. The biography that completes his story will also be a monument, and justly so. John K.

Hutchens Colossi and temple frieze figures. He so demonstrated in "The Mute Stones Speak," a fine popular account of archaeology in Italy which he published two years ago. He does the same workmanlike job of translating for the antiquities of Greece in this new volume. He writes not for beginners but not for professional archaeologists; rather, for the student And what a lot of "stones" and bones have been found and are still being found. This account be gins with bchlierrann at Troy and for the general reader with a serious interest in the subject Yet this volume has a worthwhile place in the chronicles of Project Mercury, as a collection of first person stories about how the seven men reacted to their training and their missions.

John H. Glenn leads off with the background information about his experience, selection and early training, followed by each ol the other bix. Then comes a section on the team aspects of the training and flignt proerams. by Ueke Slay ton. Gordon Cooperand Walter Schirra.

Glenn, Schirra and Scott Carpenter discuss the equipment of the space capsules and ground stations, after which Slayton, Glenn. Carpenter, Gus Grissom and Alan Sheparrl pile up detailed descriptions of the many training techniques that prepared the astronauts for space, and Glenn talks about some of the glitches 'flaws' that had to be cleared up. Shepard describes the first American suborbital flight, and Grissom the second, after which Glenn, Carpenter and Shepard build up the details-technical and psychological which surrounded the first orbital flights. The book ends with graphic, running accounts of the orbits of Glenn and Carpenter (Schirra's came too late for press timet. The reader will be impressed not only with the technical competence of these men, but also with their balance, their devotion to the over-all objectives of the project, and the little touches that show how they let off steam with pranks and small jokes.

Glenn emerges as the dedicated, avuncular type with a thorough grasp of every problem; Carpenter is pehaps the most articulate in describing the emotional and psychological reactions to space flight, and Schirra probably has the saltiest personality. The book is a model of clarity in a field where technical jargon might easily have land concludes in mid-1961 with diggings that are still in progress. What the stones tell, helped out 'by the educated guesses of and some command of its terminology. Not the stones themselves, but New Books -At the ShreveJ Foiu; new and sometimes fresh appraisals of the theater's state of health in the United States, and England are on the autumn book lists. Gerald Weales in "American Drama Since World War II" Harcourt, Brace World, tackles his topic with vigorous, sardonic severity.

His chief concern is works that have loomed large, because of the authors' reputations, box-office successes or intrinsic merits. Louis a in his "American Drama" "University of Oklahoma Press, traces modern allegorical trends. From Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee Williams. Broussard believes, allegory has become the dominant motif for what is called collectively the greatest outburst of parable playwriting since the Middle Ages. "The Angry Theater." by John Russell Taylor (Hill Wang, surveys England's new-wave authorship that began in 1956 with John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger." Television and screen writers are included in fine-drawn subdivisions.

Taylor fleshes out criticism with biographical notes on the large gallery. Another British writer. Allar-dyce Nicoll, examines trends on both sides of the Atlantic in "The Theater and Dramatic Theory" i Barnes and Noble, Noting over-all shrinkage of the public's interest in stage productions, Nicoll concludes that too many ideas and not enough action in contemporary works are largely to blame. He contrasts this dra- the inferences that can be drawn from them by patient and ingenious and painstaking students these are what he seeks to explain. His intent is to show how archaeology illuminates history, and what the crumbling relics can say about the lives and activities, and even the thoughts, of those who made them.

scholars, provides a humanized story of archaeology. Reconstruction of an ingeniously-contrived Athenian mechanical device revealed how citizens' names were drawn by lot for jury duty; inscriptions in the sanctuary of the healer-god Asclepius recorded cures for afflictions ranging from ninW.pvp in harrennpss to lice: the i fahiilniit "Tnmh nf rivtpmnestra" HOW IT'S DONE In the process of that explana- yielded not only a treasure of tion. Professor MacKendrick ex-! early weapons and jewelry, but tidbits such as a child's gold rattle WHITE'S ESSAYS In his first book since 1954, E. B. White has collected his articles and essays that have appeared in the New Yorker in recent years for publication under the title of "Points of My Compass" Harper and Row).

ters of the school which has held that a writer's life and work are inextricable and mutually revealing. Here, as in his opening panel (with which readers of Vols. 2 and 3 would of course do well to be acquainted), Mr. Edel is at pains to go far back beyond the later, more familar image of his subject: the public character, the old master, the mandarin. For all his inward-looking secretiveness.

here is the exuberant young man, the seeker after experience, the intense observer of places and people, socially "correct" and rather grave but happy and increasingly self-assured in his chosen profession. He works easily. He is, in the best sense, business-like. Back in Cambridge in 1870. fresh from the awareness of and thin gold curlers, and human skeletons which revealed that one Bronze Age Greek unquestionably suffered from callstones.

suggest FICTION DEVIL'S YARD, bv Andric, Ivo A HOUSE POSSESSED, by Torday, Uriuia NON-PICTION SOUTHERN PLANTATION, by Htifc ohn, Lillian TARTANS, by Htskath, Christian MATHEMATICS FOR PLEASURE, by Jacobv, Oswald WESTERN UNITY AND THE COMMON MARKET, bv Lipomann, Waiter TRAGEDY IN bv RusMll, Francis THE SOUTHWEST IN LIPC AND LITERATURE bv SonnichMA. Cnarkts IOORAPHV FENOLLOSA AND HIS CIRCLE, by Brooks, Van Wyck THE TRIAL. OF MRS. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, by Crev. Homar, CONCORD REBEL, by Darlctn.

August CMILDRIN BOOKS LAURIE AND THE YELLOW CURTAINS, bv Ashcron, Sara GRANDPA'S WONDERFUL CLASS, kv Em'tin, Samuel SEATTLE AT THIS MOVENT, by Inotrtolt, Rax E. THE SURPRISING PETS OP SILLY BROWN, bv KIH. Tamara POLICEMAN SMALL, by LTOI. THE KITTEN WHO SARKEO. by Untonrwvar, Louis tLBest Sellers-1 PICTION ing a rich diet, and another had! plains some tricks of the trade that that are interesting for their own sake.

He relates, for instance, how an English scholar worked for 16 years to decipher a Minoan script on a tantalizing set of clay tablet fragments that turned out to contain a useful inventory of commodities and persons, an achievement that provided the most important breakthrough in early Greek archaeology. He explains how the red-figure drawing technique which enriched the art of Attic pottery had his fractured skull neatly trepanned. A couple of hundred illustrations, including photos, maps and drawings, depict the archaeologists' spadework and what it has turned up the "speakers" of Professor MacKendrick's antique cast. D.E. i maturgy with what Shakespeare and his Grecian forbears offered, and urges a return to yesterday's big-think.

Together, these four books are a provocative course in contemporary drama for the fireside show fan. William Glover. A SHADE 0 DIFFERENCE, Drury. SEVEN DAYS IN MAY. Knabtl and Baifcv.

SHIP OF FOOLS. Porter. The Thin RED LINE. Jonas. THE PRIZE, Wallace.

NON-FICTION SH.ENT SPRING. Caron TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY. Steinbeck. YE JIGS JULEPS. Hudson.

The BLUE NILE. Moo-eaa4. MY LIFE IN COURT. Niiar..