Before he left town Pat saw to it that I was fixed up with a job. Pat had contacts all over the labor movement. A friend of Pat's named Frank Sposato had just muscled into the Portwatchers ' Union.

The portwatchers were retired longshoremen and small time seafarers off towboats and barges who acted as watchmen on the wharves. Most of them were elderly men. It was responsible and sometimes dangerous work because the thieving is awful in the port of New York. They weren't as well paid as they should have been. One reason the portwatchers let Sposato take them over was to get the protection of his musclemen.

Sposato needed a front, some labor stiff with a clean record to act as business agent of the Redhook local. There I was a retired wobbly and structural iron worker who'd never gouged a cent off a fellow worker in my thirty years in the movement. For once radicalism was a recommendation.

Sposato couldn't wait to get me hired. With my gray hair and my weatherbeaten countenance I certainly looked the honest working stiff. The things a man will do for a woman.