Owney, the renowned United States Railway Mail Service traveling mutt from Albany, even visited Winnipeg in June 1895

Between 1888 and 1897, Owney, the renowned United States Railway Mail Service unofficial but beloved mascot dog, traveled by mail car around the United States and Canada, then by steamer to other countries including Japan, China, Singapore and elsewhere.

Owney was apparently attracted to the texture or scent of the mailbags and when his master moved away from Albany, New York’s post office, Owney remained behind with his new mail clerk friends. A decidedly scruffy little Irish-Scottish Terrier mongrel mutt, Owney became a regular fixture at the Albany, New York post office in 1888. His owner was likely a postal clerk who let the dog walk him to work, figures the United States National Postal Museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

At first, he followed them onto mail wagons and then onto mail trains. And then Owney began to ride with the bags on Railway Post Office (RPO) train cars across New York state, and then the rest of the contiguous 48 states. Owney usually slept on the mail bags.

In 1895 Owney made an around-the-world trip, traveling with mailbags on trains and steamships to Asia and across Europe, before returning to Albany on Dec. 23, 1895, after his world tour. He traveled over 140,000 miles in his lifetime. One of his stops was right here in Manitoba in Winnipeg on June 27, 1895. We even gave him the gold dog tag to prove he visited us. And because his mail clerk friends back home collected them for him. Even United States Postmaster General John Wanamaker was one of Owney’s fans. When he learned that the dog’s collar was weighed down by an ever-growing number of tags, he gave Owney a harness on which to display his travel badges of honor.

“Railway mail clerks considered the dog a good luck charm. At a time when train wrecks were all too common, no train Owney rode was ever in a wreck. The Railway mail clerks adopted Owney as their unofficial mascot, marking his travels by placing medals and tags on his collar. Each time Owney returned home to Albany, the clerks there saved the tags, says the United States National Postal Museum, located in the historic City Post Office Building, which was constructed in 1914 and served as the Washington, D.C., post office from 1914 through 1986.

Owney was a faithful guardian of railway mail and the bags it was carried in, and would not allow anyone other than mail clerks to touch the bags.

On April 9, 1894, a writer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that “Nearly every place he stopped Owney received an additional tag, until now he wears a big bunch. When he jogs along, they jingle like the bells on a junk wagon.”  The National Postal Museum opened on July 30, 1993. It was created on November 6, 1990 in a joint agreement between the Smithsonian Institution and the United States Postal Service. The United States National Philatelic Collection, however, dates back to 1886 – just before the dawn of the Owney-era dog decade appropriately enough – and was established at the Smithsonian in 1886 with the donation of a sheet of 10-cent Confederate postage stamps. From 1908 until 1963, the National Philatelic Collection was housed in the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall.  And then in 1964, the collection was moved to what is now known as the National Museum of American History, before moving to its current home almost 23 years ago.

Now sadly (citing my wanting to let Budderball be cut loose for disobedience during a spacewalk in the 2009 Disney movie Space Buddies, Jeanette says you can’t do this in a dog story without leaving kids in tears, but it has to be done in this case,  I’m afraid) in June 1897, Owney boarded a mail train for Toledo, Ohio. While he was there, he was shown to a newspaper reporter by a postal clerk. Owney became ill tempered and “although the exact circumstances were not satisfactorily reported,” the United States National Postal Museum says in its account, “Owney died in Toledo of a bullet wound on June 11, 1897.”

Of course the dog became ill-tempered being shown to a newspaper reporter? Wouldn’t you be?

Well, actually, in the confusion it seems Owney may have bitten a mail clerk, not the reporter! And it appears it was Toledo Postmaster Rudolph Brand who called for a policeman to come to the scene and that an officer named Fred Free (you can’t make this stuff up), shot and killed Owney while he was chained to a post (the dog, not Free).

The Chicago Tribune called it an “execution.”

Other newspapers spun the story many different ways. One account says that Owney detested being tied up or restrained and started protesting loudly and when the clerk tried to get him to quiet down, Owney bit him on the hand. Other stories said Owney had been running loose at the time.

One suspects, however, Owney’s place in history may rank higher than the newspaper reporter or the police officer, whatever happened in Toledo in 1897. Owney’s life and travels have inspired several children’s books. Elementary schools across the United States continue to use the story of Owney as a way to connect their students with those in other states by sending stuffed toy dogs from school to school through the mail accompanied by messages from students to one another. Owney was featured on his own postage stamp by the U.S. Postal Service in 2011.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

 

Nova Scotia’s epic management versus union newspaper war between the Chronicle Herald and Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130

I wrote elsewhere on Jan. 25 that the Chronicle-Herald newspaper strike in Nova Scotia, which had been launched by Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 two days earlier, was a “battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle.”

That was a month after Christmas. Sixty-five days and 10 weeks later, winter has turned to spring. Tomorrow is Easter.

My time at the CH was brief and 16 years was a long time ago.

But I do remember from that time, which coincided both with me serving as vice-president for Eastern Canada for The Newspaper Guild Canada/Communications Workers of America (CWA), as well as working briefly in the Truro bureau of the CH, the courage of several of their folks, at least one of whom is on the picket line now 16 years later, in them fighting, along with the local, national and international union in the spring of 1999 (when I was still working at the Peterborough Examiner in Ontario, before moving to Nova Scotia and the CH that fall) in a hotly contested hearing at the province’s Labour Board, to be rightly included in the newly-formed editorial bargaining unit, as the Chronicle-Herald spent a fortune trying to exclude them in an expensive battle in which the union ultimately prevailed.

What struck me most was their true sense of solidarity with their brothers and sisters at the paper. These were journalists high enough up the CH newsroom hierarchy to be evidently worth the time and expense on management’s part to fight so desperately to exclude them from the newly-formed bargaining unit; they weren’t trying to join the union to win a first contract that might add $20 more to their weekly pay. They were already well compensated relative to their colleagues at the paper and their career trajectories in the spring of 1999 presumably had nowhere to go but up, based on their employment histories and achievements with the paper. There was relatively little personal gain in sight for them in joining the fledgling union bargaining unit. If anything, the opposite was more likely to be true; they risked being blacklisted by CH management and having their career paths frozen. Yet they did fight. On principle. And they won.

“Keep your eye on the strike that started Saturday in Nova Scotia when Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 struck the Chronicle Herald at 12:01 a.m. AST, the minute they were in a legal position to do so,” I wrote Jan. 25.

“While most of the recent attention has been on Postmedia, management proposed more than 1,232 changes to the now expired old contract. All the big issues are in play here. The CH wants to eliminate its digital deskers and outsource the work to Toronto. Other work is being outsourced to Brunswick News in New Brunswick (i.e. Irving). Scab journalists are now producing the local CH news. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Newspaper Guild sector’s union parent in Washington, D.C. have very deep pockets, but whether this is the fight they want to stand or fall on in terms of newspapers, which is only a small part of their representation, is hard to say. Sometimes those type of choices are forced on you. As for the CH, it is controlled by the Dennis family, and has been for years, making it the last independent daily of any note in Canada. This is not Postmedia or Glacier or Transcontinental chain ownership. What it is though is a battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle in an industry where I wish I could say I’ve seen some successful newspaper strikes. Truth is, I haven’t, I’m sorry to say.”

I was working at the Peterborough Examiner when Chicago Typographical Union No. 16, Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 and Chicago Mailers Union Local 2 struck the Chicago Tribune on the evening of July 18, 1985 when their contracts with the Chicago Newspaper Publishers’ Association, a collective bargaining association to which the Tribune belonged, expired. The unions were fighting the introduction of new technology and changes in work rules the company sought, including demands for more control of hiring and assignments. In response to the strike, the Tribune began hiring permanent replacement workers. “Violence ensued shortly thereafter,” wrote the Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in a March 1996 decision related to enforcement of a National Labour Relations Board order. “Incidents ranged from the relatively benign, such as unsolicited orders for food deliveries or magazine subscriptions, to more dangerous activities such as the slashing of tires, death threats, and the stabbing of a Tribune delivery driver.  On one occasion, mounted police were called to disperse a mob that had obstructed the path of the Tribune’s delivery trucks.  Stones thrown by the mob injured one of the truck drivers, a policeman, and other Tribune employees.”

The striking Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 unconditionally offered to return to work on Jan. 30, 1986.

The printers’ strike, however, continued and lasted 40 months.

Little more than a decade later was the Detroit newspaper strike of July 1995 to December 2000.  Teamsters Locals 372 and 2040 and allied AFL-CIO unions, including the Newspaper Guild of Detroit Local 34022, making up the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions (MCNU), struck the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA), as it was known in 1995, which ran the non-editorial business and production operations of the Detroit Free Press, owned at the time by now defunct Knight-Ridder, and the Detroit News, owned by Gannett, under a Joint Operating Agreement  (JOA), on July 13, 1995, with about 2,500 members of six different unions going on strike. Joint Operating Agreements came about as a result of the federal Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, which allowed for the formation of JOA’s, as they are commonly known, among competing newspaper operations within the same market area. It enshrined in law special exemptions, dating back to 1933 and the E.W. Scripps Co.-owned Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico, to antitrust laws that ordinarily prohibit such co-operation between competitors, based on the theory it would allow for the survival of multiple daily newspapers in a given urban market where circulation was declining. In practice, however, noble their origins may have been, JOA’s haven’t had that intended result in many cases, especially by the time the 1990s rolled around.

By the seven-week mark of the strike in early September 1995, about 40 per cent of the unionized editorial staff had crossed the picket line to return to work, including Mitch Albom, the Detroit  Free Press sports columnist, who was the newspaper’s best known and most popular writer, and who two years later in 1997 would go onto publish the landmark bestseller, Tuesdays with Morrie, about his dozen or so Tuesday visits in the fall of 1995 in suburban Boston with Morrie Schwartz, a former professor of his at Brandeis University, who Albom had lost touch with until he saw him interviewed about his Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, by Ted Koppel on ABC News Nightline. Schwartz died on Nov. 4, 1995.  Albom began his Sept. 6, 1995 column about the newspaper strike with one word: “Enough.” But he also wrote that he would remain a member of the Newspaper Guild and “give much of what I earn to the people still on strike.” Albom said in an interview, “Newspapers are fire stations, they are police stations, and they should not be shut down.” Albom, “who tried to broker an agreement that would return strikers to work during negotiations,” reported James Bennet of the New York Times on Sept. 6, 1995 in a story headlined, “After 7 Weeks, Detroit Newspaper Strike Takes a Violent Turn,” said that he “thought both sides in the dispute were wrong and that he did not want to be seen as supporting either. ‘I didn’t want to be waved as a flag,'” Albom said.  Ten years later in 2005, Albom and four editors who had read the column and allowed it to go to print were briefly suspended from the Detroit Free Press after Albom filed an April 3, 2005 column that stated Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson, two former Michigan State basketball players, who had gone onto the NBA, were in attendance at an NCAA Final Four semi-final game on, when they were not.  The players had told Albom they planned to attend, and filing Friday before the game, Albom wrote as if the players were there, including that they wore Michigan State green. But Cleaves and Richard’s plans changed at the last minute and they never attended.  Albom was in attendance at the game, but failed to check on the two players’ presence.

Nineteen months after it began, the union leadership said it would call off the strike on Feb. 14, 1997, if the two papers would rehire striking union members. The companies rejected the offer for the most part, saying they would only rehire a fraction of the striking workers, as new vacancies allowed, because they wouldn’t let go of they any of their replacement workers hired during the 19-month strike, resulting in the strike being transformed into a lockout, which continued for years. On July 7, 2000, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. overturned earlier decisions by the National Labor Relations Board that the unions and their members were the victims of a series of unfair labor practice actions committed by the newspapers during the labor dispute. The last of the six unions settled in December, 2000, and, more than five years after it began, the Detroit newspaper strike was over.

And the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild Local 37082 49-day strike against The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000-2001 took place at a time I sat on the Newspaper Guild’s Washington-based international sector council. At the time of the strike, the two papers had been operating under a JOA since May 23, 1983, with the Seattle Times owned by the Blethen family’s Seattle Times Co., and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer owned by Hearst Corp. When the dispute ended, the Seattle Times newsroom employees wound up settling in terms of wages for what the company was offering when the strike began, but the two-tier pay system was eliminated as a result of the strike, and the amount the company paid toward health insurance premiums went up from 66 percent to 75 percent, so one might argue the union won at least a marginal victory. The Hearst Corp.’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, or P-I, as it is known in Seattle, ceased print operations on March 17, 2009, becoming an online only publication with a vastly reduced news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting. The JOA ended with the cessation of the P-I print edition.

Parker Donham’s March 9 post on his Contrarian blog (http://contrarian.ca/2016/03/09/why-the-herald-workers-are-losing-and-how-they-could-win/), headlined “Why the Herald workers are losing – and how they could win,” where he writes the “notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional,” is probably a hard analysis for the striking HTU workers to read, but still not without merit, in my view.  A look outside the box is often a good thing even if you don’t see the box.

Wrote Donham in part in his post earlier this month: “The striking journalists have also picketed various Herald advertisers – as if driving revenue away from a business whose problems stem from an industry-wide hemorrhage of revenue somehow served their interests.

“The frustration and fear workers feel as they watch their livelihood – their calling – slip away is understandable. But the notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional.

“Whatever faint hope the strikers have rests in part on public opinion. It does not help their cause to construct artificial tests in the form of secondary picket lines, then condemn as enemies anyone who fails these tests. It would make much more sense to court Herald readers, including the mayor and the members of the Greater Halifax Partnership, by demonstrating what journalistic craft and talent means to a modern city.

“Chances of a six-day-a-week print edition of the Chronicle-Herald existing in 2020 are next to nil. Everyone involved – workers, owners, readers, community leaders – must adjust to this new reality.

“That’s the one shining light in this dispiriting conflict. When they aren’t wasting their time on picket lines and posting gratuitous insults, the striking journalists have been producing a creditable daily news website.

“News stories in Local Xpress (http://www.localxpress.ca/) have consistently set a higher journalistic standard than the strike-breaker copy that fills the Herald’s pages. No surprise there. The best Herald writers and editors are very good at what they do.”

So all of that about newspaper strikes remains true. Recent newspaper strike history is clearly not on the side of the Chronicle Herald newsroom strikers from Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 But does that estop them from winning this fight? Not necessarily. Winning against long odds is not impossible or we wouldn’t have David victorious over Goliath, the champion of the Philistines; United Automobile Workers (UAW) besting General Motors in the Flint, Michigan Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37; Mahatma Gandhi outlasting the British Empire; or Nelson Mandela triumphing over the former apartheid state of South Africa stories to tell. The Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 is receiving support not just from their parent union and newspaper union locals far and wide, but also from the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour and the wider public and private sector labour movement in Nova Scotia.

And then there is the matter of resolve, hard to quantify perhaps, but which was in evidence in the kind of resolve that saw one or more of these pioneering picketers exhibit at the provincial labour board in the battle with CH management for inclusion in the new editorial bargaining unit of Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 in the spring of 1999.

Mark Lever, president and chief executive officer of the Chronicle Herald, and a former tennis coach, might think twice or three times before betting on his high-priced legal advice over that.

Resolve: Advantage, HTU Local 30130.

A former vice-president for Eastern Canada for The Newspaper Guild Canada/Communications Workers of America (CWA), and president of Peterborough Typographical Union Local 30248, chartered in 1902, John Barker currently belongs to Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) Component 11, Post Secondary Education, Local 70, University College of the North (UCN), Area 8, where he is a rank-and-file member, working as a library clerk on the Thompson campus of UCN, speaking only for himself in the views he expresses here, there or anywhere. You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

Vocations hotspot on the media map again: Welcome to Fowler and Westphalia in Clinton County, Michigan in the Diocese of Lansing

First it was the New York Times in June. Tomorrow it is CNN. Fowler and Westphalia, two small farming communities, eight miles apart in Clinton County in Central Michigan, have both produced 22 priests for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lansing. Fowler, the slightly larger village with a population of 1,224, had been trailing by two in the ordination derby until June 14 when 26-year-old identical twins Todd and Gary Koenigsknecht from Holy Trinity Parish were ordained as priests at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in East Lansing by Bishop Earl Boyea, Jr., the fifth bishop of Lansing.  Three other deacons –  Daniel Westermann, James Rolph and Vince Richardson – were ordained by Boyea at the same mass.

On Aug. 16, Santa, Monica, California broadcast journalist Lisa Ling, host of the original CNN documentary series, This is Life with Lisa Ling, arrived at Holy Family Parish in Grand Blanc where Father Gary Koenigsknecht is assigned and St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in Ann Arbor where Father Todd Koenigsknecht is now based to begin filming “Called to the Collar” her last show this season for  This is Life with Lisa Ling, being broadcast on CNN Nov. 16 at 9 p.m. Central Standard Time and at 10 p.m. EST and PST. You can watch a 30-second YouTube trailer for the episode here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeJlWpUHtuY

According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University there are 38,275 priests in the United States compared to 58,632 when the Second Vatican Council ended Dec. 7, 1965. Ordinations in the United States have fallen from 994 in 1965 to the 494 expected this year. Those figures and other Catholic data, statistics and research can be viewed on their website at: http://cara.georgetown.edu/caraservices/requestedchurchstats.html

While some have expressed concern about Ling’s revisiting the perennial hot-buttons issues of clergy sex abuse and celibacy, Father John Linden, the Diocese of Lansing’s director of vocations and seminarians, has said he’s optimistic about the CNN segment airing Sunday:  “The New York Times did a fantastic job… We thought this was a good opportunity and that Lisa Ling would do something along those lines,” he reportedly told Patti Murphy Dohn, recently retired campus minister and religion teacher at The John Carroll School in Bel Air, Maryland and a blogger for The Catholic Review, the newspaper of record for the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

The June 16 New York Times story, “In Two Michigan Villages, a Higher Calling Is Often Heard,” was written by Christina Capecchi, owner of Ries Media in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, who is a Catholic syndicated columnist and journalist from just south of St. Paul, and who has written for MinnPost.com, the Chicago Tribune and Medill News Service, as well as the New York Times.  Capecchi has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and did her undergraduate degree at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Her Times story can be found online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/us/in-two-michigan-villages-a-higher-calling-is-often-heard.html?_r=1

Linden told Dohn that during Ling’s filming questions surrounding clergy sex abuse kept coming up, and the priests and seminarians who were interviewed tried to eventually lead the conversation away from this topic, but found that they couldn’t get away from it.

Linden explained that though the topic of clergy abuse was brought up in each of the interviews done for “Called to the Collar,” it is his hope that Ling’s program will “open the door for people who are searching for answers and who might take another look to the Church and see why someone might seek out the Catholic faith.”