The Girl in the Grass Skirt Believed in “Sticken’ With the Union”

by Kenneth L. Warner, New York On The Line

Not everyone has a picture of their Mother in a grass skirt. I think she’s 12 in this photo.

My Mother lost a 7-year battle with breast cancer when she was just 62 years old. Too damn young to go in my opinion.

I found this picture well before that while rummaging through old boxes in the attic of our tiny Sears and Roebuck House when I was a pre-teen and curious about things other than the girls I become obsessed with just a few years later. I’ve treasured it ever since.

My Mother, Margaret Mildred Berge, was born in 1928, a half-breed Japanese-American from Honolulu, Hawaii. She had an eighth-grade education. Yet she could zip through the daily crossword like a Wellesley graduate, having expanded her vocabulary by looking up the words in an old black Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary that was never far from the kitchen table where she sat in the mornings, dressed in a well-worn, blue and white cotton kimono. She would have loved having a smart phone, that’s certain.

For most of my life she was the only woman I knew who survived a bombing. She was 13 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 and she and her family lived in the Heights near the United States Army Air Corp Base at Hickam Field.

She was quite beautiful, dark eyed, raven-black hair, high cheek-bones and breasts coveted by every man who knew her. She was a great dancer, a voracious reader and a quick study with intelligence far beyond her 8 years of school.

She was a factory worker for most of her life. And, believed in “Sticken’ With the Union”. Starting at a Dynacolor plant in Brockport, NY where she spent 8-hour days mostly in the dark packing film canisters, I think. Then to the Owens-Illinois glass plant where she and dozens of other local women got jobs and worked on the line. When they figured out they were being paid for less than the men doing the same job, they took their grievances to management.

This was brave stuff for the 1960’s. And, as you might guess, not really met with enthusiasm by their manager.

He sat quietly across the table from them, arms folded, staring intently at the strange oriental looking woman who was the spokesperson. And, when she finished, he politely thanked them for their input and sent them on their way.

My Mother was a hero that day. But the awe and adulation was short-lived. Within a week he summoned her and the rest of “the committee” to tell them that he was grateful for bringing this matter to his attention. Their grievance had been reviewed and it was discovered that none of the women had graduated from high-school and therefor, not only could they not earn what the men were earning … they shouldn’t be working on the line at all. Consequently, they would all be “demoted” to inspection, where they earned less than what they were even taking home prior to the grievance.

Needless to say, my Mother went from being a hero, to pariah. Their job action had been a disaster. Management’s argument left them with no recourse but to take their lumps, be happy they were working at all, and stop all this equal pay nonsense.

This was in 1966 and my brother was a senior at Brockport High School, on his way to graduation.

My Mother — much to the displeasure of my father who agreed with management and told her that she should just keep her issues to herself — decided that she, too would get her high school diploma. And so, in an age where no-one did it, she started studying for her GED, which she earned at the same time my brother graduated.

She took her diploma to the glass plant, marched past her astonished co-workers who had been fore-warned of her conspiracy into the manager’s office, slammed her diploma on his desk and demanded she put back on the line at the same rate the men were earning.

He escorted her past her astonished co-workers, where they walked up to the line and he put her back on her old station, saying something to the effect of, “Margaret, I don’t like it — but you’ve earned it.”

She got applause from the factory floor, just like Norma Rae.

She went on to work at both Delco and finally Rochester Products where she was an active and proud member of the United Auto Workers Union — and where she spent the rest of working life except for a year-long stint at Kodak where, she told me, “You can’t even pee without getting an ok from the President of the company. Don’t ever work where there isn’t a Union.”

It was an early and important lesson.

Much of what I learned growing up I absorbed either by watching my mother iron my father’s National Guard Uniforms in the middle laundry room of our house or sitting on the red, vinyl covered step stool we had next to the stove while she cooked.

“It’s a man’s world,” she often told me. “They treat women like dirt. But you aren’t going to be like other men. You’re going to be different.” And she set out to make it so.

She taught me how to iron. She taught me to do my own laundry. She taught me how to dance. She taught me how to shop for food, share the household chores, and how to dust, vacuum, and wash my own dishes. And, she taught me manners, and respect. To open doors for old people and women, pull out their chairs, walk on the side of traffic when walking on a sidewalk with a girl, and to never, never, never, never hit a woman. “Only cowards do that,” she said.

There are a lot of times when I think that anything I learned after that, was pretty much bullshit.

But of all these lessons, perhaps the two most important was that she taught me to cook and she taught me to read.

Around our house, my bedtime was 8:30, my brother’s at 9:00. But, you could stay up an extra hour if you read which I did voraciously. My first “real” book was the House on Pooh Corner which I absorbed like a sponge — and I went on to read from the extensive library we had. We had so many books that our big purchases from the S&H green stamp store were most often metal black bookshelves with brass-colored frames to hold the hundreds of books that came from my grandmother. Mysteries, mostly — but classics as well. And over the years, our library grew from Book-of-the-Month Club selections, and rummage sale finds at the Methodist Church around the corner.

She bought encyclopedias from the supermarket — one volume a week — through the alphabet. Some families got dishes or sets of tableware this way. We got a giant dictionary — purchased single letters of the alphabet at a time over 26 weeks and bound with a screwed together binder. We had newspapers, which she and I read together — both the morning Democrat & Chronicle and the afternoon Times Union.

While she may not have known a lot — she knew that what you didn’t know, you could learn from reading a book. And, I’ve been learning this way all of my life.

“This is not a dress rehearsal,” she often told me. “You only live once, so make the most of it”.