The Badger Riot (20 page)

“Now, boys, we can't have those camps lying idle. We have men who are willing to work and they aren't signed up with the IWA. We're going to fill up them camps, you know, by hook or by crook.”

Some of the contractors protested, saying that it was a waste of time and money to have untrained loggers up on Sandy; they'd be a hazard to themselves and to others.

But the Company manager wasn't interested in hearing any of this. “My orders are from higher up, gentlemen. The camps will be filled. It will show the public that the IWA has no support. The public will see that there are lots of Newfoundland men willing to work for us without a union. The Company will send recruiters into the outports and snap up anyone willing to come into the woods.”

Rod came out of the meeting knowing there was trouble ahead. As he walked up Church Road toward his home he met clusters of men on the street. They were loggers who had joined the union when the organizers had come through. When the strike began, they came out of the camps, went home to their communities to see their families, and then returned to stand on picket lines wherever the A.N.D. Company had a woods operation. Badger, a central location and the closest town to the paper mill, had four picket lines leading in and out of town. The IWA rented three deserted houses for the out-of-town strikers. The most popular one, owned by Mrs. Noel, was on Church Road, across from the Roman Catholic Church. Here strikers tended to congregate.

The main picket line was at the River crossing, where the Company tried to take scabs across in broad daylight. The strikers stood firm, shoulder to shoulder. The only way to go through them would have been to mow them down with the Company Bombardier, but the A.N.D. Company, as anxious as it was to fill the camps, wouldn't go that far.

Undeterred, the Company went farther downriver, just off the Grand Falls Highway where the Exploits was shallow. Under the cover of night, scab labour was transported across and trucked into the camps. Within two weeks, Rod's camp had forty men again. But
loggers they weren't; many had no idea how to cut and limb the timber, how to pile it, nothing. Some of them were sick and coughed all night long. Rod wondered about TB.

Vern Crawford was a daredevil and had been all his life. He was willing to try anything. He seemed to have no conscience, no remorse. But for all that, there was one thing about Vern that made people who knew him think that he was a half-decent fellow who was just a little crazy. It was his little daughter, Melanie, born in 1950. She idolized her daddy. Vern doted on her. Whenever Vern came to the door, Melanie would run to him with her arms held out to be lifted up. When she'd learned to speak, she'd cry, “Daddy, Daddy.” Vern always had something to surprise and delight her. Some days he would bring her chocolate or candy, other days he might have a small toy or even a larger gift tucked away in the trunk of his car. It warmed Millie's heart to see them together because, by the time Melanie was born, she knew that she had married a “devil-may-care” man.

In the autumn of 1958, Vern heard about a union that was up in the camps trying to sign up loggers. The A.N.D. Company refused to recognize the IWA, even though their certification with the Newfoundland Department of Labour had given them legal right to bargain and to strike. It was no surprise to Vern or anyone else when the union
did
call a strike on New Year's Eve.

When he heard talk that the A.N.D. Company was bringing in non-unionized workers to put into the woods camps, Vern hoofed it on over to the manager's house and knocked on his back door.

“Good evening, sir,” he said when the manager answered the door.

“Good evening, uh, Vern, isn't it?” The manager stepped out onto the veranda and looked at the much shorter man standing before him. What he saw was a slight person with thinning, sandy hair, and small sharp eyes that darted around nervously as he worried his cap in his hands.

“Yes sir. Vern. I drives taxi, sir.”

“Yes. Yes, you do. What can I do for you?” He didn't ask Vern to come indoors.
Not a very friendly guy,
Vern thought. He seemed full of himself, puffed-up, like, but that could be in part to the big round belly that protruded over his belt. The manager had a cigarette fitted into an ivory holder and took long draws from it.
Jesus, what an uppity fucker,
Vern thought.

“I was thinking that you might need help transporting men into the camps,” Vern said. He didn't dare use the word scab. In the A.N.D. Company manager's mind the men were legitimate workers.

“Yes, we do, as a matter of fact.” The manager reached back and closed the door. He only had on his white shirt and the sleeves were rolled up. Vern was shivering with the cold, but the manager didn't seem to mind the dark January evening. As they spoke, their breaths made white puffs in the air. The manager sucked another long draw through his ivory holder.

The A.N.D. Company manager was so tall and large that Vern had to look up at him. “How much will you be paying, sir?”

“We'll give you five dollars a man. More than you get arsin' around in Windsor with groceries.”

Vern knew they were desperate to get the scabs up in the camps. “It's dangerous work, sir. Very dangerous. I'll be going through picket lines wherever I go. Fifteen dollars per man.”

The manager drew in the smoke again, all the while watching Vern with wary eyes.

“Ten dollars,” he said.

“Done, sir!”

Vern held out his hand to shake with him, but the manager ignored him and went back into the house.
Ignorant son-of-a-bitch,
Vern thought. Perhaps he was cold, but what odds if his balls froze and dropped off on the steps. Vern was going to get ten dollars a head. Five men in the car was fifty dollars.

He jumped aboard his taxi and spun the wheels as he raced up the street.

It wasn't that Vern was against the loggers. He understood their
plight. Sure he did.
Guaranteed,
he thought. Hadn't he worked as a logger from the time he left school? Hadn't he suffered the hardships the same as any other logger?

But, Vern reasoned, he had a right to make a living too. He had to keep his family fed and clothed, put gas in his taxi, and he needed money for upkeep as well. But there was more to it than that. Vern looked forward to the challenge and the excitement of what might be ahead.

Alf Elliott and his Brownie Hawkeye were busy during the strike. He took pictures of strikers on winter mornings at the main picket line down on the bank of the Exploits River. They were bundled up against the cold, dressed almost identically in laced-up logans and wool socks, brigs, heavy coats and sweaters and stocking caps. Grim and unshaven, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Behind them was the frozen Exploits, the deep swift River that governed the life of the town.

One night, Landon Ladd, the IWA president, held a packed meeting in the town hall. Ladd was a popular and powerful speaker. Alf, with the help of a couple of men, hitched his gammy leg up on a table at the back of the hall and shot a picture over everyone's head. The photograph captured the backs of the heads of the audience, and on stage, an animated Landon Ladd delivering another inspiring speech.

During February, the violence against the scab workers escalated when a car carrying non-unionized workers was overturned in the centre of town. Alf walked over on his dinner break and took a few shots. Taken against the snowy backdrop, the pictures captured a sorry sight: the car with its windows smashed, its four wheels facing the sky.

In January 1959, Ralph turned thirty years old, as would Jennie, Tom and Vern, later in the year. As he sat with his family having a drink of rum that evening he thought about all the things that had happened in the last decade.

Last year, Grandfather had finally given himself up to the Great Spirit. The family estimated that he was one hundred years old, although he had no birth certificate. He'd outlived his son, Ralph's father Louis, who was found the winter before, dead and frozen up on his trap lines. Missus Annie said she knew it was coming. For weeks she'd heard him complaining of chest pains. The morning he had left to go check his traps she had told him to stay home, but he wouldn't listen. Although Ralph knew she grieved quietly and deeply, she never shed a tear. His death was the way her husband would have wanted to go.

All Ralph's brothers and sisters got married and his ma had grandchildren everywhere. In the past few years he had had a few girlfriends, but could never get himself interested enough in a woman to ask her to marry. Sometimes Ralph felt ashamed to be carrying a secret torch for Jennie all these years, since she was devoted to Tom and would be shocked if she knew. It would destroy their friendship and Ralph wanted to hold onto that.

Two years ago Jennie told Ralph she was going to run for community council and became the first woman ever to sit as a council member. Ralph admired his Beothuk Wonder Woman. He chuckled to himself as he went to refill his glass. He still liked to think of her as that.

Back in 1958, rumblings had started about a union wanting to organize the loggers. The men were all for it, and when the ballot boxes went around, Ralph was among them as they cast their votes.

Ralph had seen Jennie down at the postal office and was delighted when she remembered it was his birthday. They got to talking about the union. Jennie told Ralph how disgusted she was with the way negotiations were being handled.

“What's wrong with men? And how foolish is that A.N.D. Company, dilly-dallying back and forth over whether to bargain
with the IWA or not? My jumpin's, I would've cut right through all that, and said, ‘Listen here: we are loggers; we are the ones getting the pulpwood for that mill; we want better conditions, more pay and a shorter work week. If we don't get it, we don't cut any more wood.'”

Jennie had the kind of voice that could carry far. When she spoke, heads turned, and seeing it was Jennie Hillier, the woman with opinions on everything, they simply nodded and smiled. Ralph could see that they agreed with what she was saying.

Ralph was in a musing frame of mind that evening and, as he sat there, he had a thought that their lives, all of them, were just like the logs on the River, sometimes hitching up and getting jammed, but with a bit of help, or sometimes on their own, they usually managed to get straightened out again.

He drained his glass and sat back to watch his sisters and nieces bring in his birthday cake with thirty candles. He missed Grandfather and wished he were still there, sitting in the old rocker by the stove.

That night Grandfather came to him in his dreams. He was in the old rocking chair, smoking his pipe. “My son, hard times are coming. Remember what I told you about being unable to stop what is happening. You will be caught up in the river of time that flows on and on. Don't let anything drag you under. Care for the young white woman.”

Vern was having a hard time of it. He'd made a couple of trips out around White Bay, Green Bay and Notre Dame Bay, rounding up anyone who was willing to work as a scab. The A.N.D. Company recruiter went with him at first, but he got busy with something else, and Vern was left to scrounge around on his own. The lure of ten dollars for every man that he could coax into the taxi and up in the woods kept him at it.