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CounterPunch
September
21, 2002
The Life of
a Real American Hero
A Memory
of Jim Cummings
by
THOMAS CROFT
Jim Cummings, former Executive Director of the
Worker Center of the King County Labor Council, and the Calumet
Project, passed away on April 28th, from complications from
an amputation and long-suffered effects of diabetes. In some
of my conversations with some of our mutual buddies, this much
became clear as we talked about Jim Cummings: Jim was a hell
of a guy, an exceptional and loyal friend, and a tremendous fighter
for people from all walks of life who may have fallen on hard
times. And we know that Jim cherished his family, and the gift
that becoming a father brought.
For me, Jim was truly the older brother
I never had. Because he had ploughed the ground in front of
me, he both helped set me on my path, and made my path easier.
Jim was someone who always seemed to put the concerns of my
life and my family above his, even after, as we all know, he
faced what seemed like an eternity of pain and suffering.
I wrote this for the memorial, which
I couldn't attend. Tom Lewiston, a shipyard worker who, as
a former staffmember with Jim and I at the Worker Center continued
the fight against the Lockheed Shipyards lockout of 900 workers,
read it during the reception.
The Redwoods
Days
I met Jim a few years after moving out
west from the south, having migrated to a little town called
Eureka, California, a quiet-looking place in the northwest of
the state, close to Oregon, stuck between the rocky cliffs of
the sea and the redwoods. The Northcoast of the 1970s was like
the Barbary Coast, an outpost of hippies and earth children
that had fled the Bay Area and other parts, complete with rough
bars on the waterfront full of boisterous fishermen and loggers,
vegetarian health bars for the ecotopians, as we called them,
and newly opening fern bars and coffee shops catering to the
hip professionals who had moved in.
The craziest of them had moved "back
to the earth", in communes or in trailers, vans and tents.
Many lived in the large Victorian houses that graced the region,
or the many small cottages. They started growing some of the
best marijuana on the planet.
Jim had co-launched a legal services
program at the Open Door Clinic, a health clinic and incubator
of many innovative initiatives in Arcata, the college town in
Humboldt County. Jim was the co-founder of Redwood Legal Services,
an organization that was one of the last in the country to be
run by paralegals.
I first met Jim just prior to being hired
at RLA, by then a bustling organization with several lawyers,
paralegals and support staff, housed in a re-habbed building
in Eureka's waterfront old town. I was hired as a paralegal,
my first break into a more professional life. I came to know
and befriend Jim at RLA.
Jimbo, as I sometimes called him, was
a sometimes mercurial soul and methodical mind living in a tall,
lanky, slow and often awkward body. While normally easy-going
and often displaying a caustic, joking manner, Jim could get
hot, but it would be a slow boil.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Irish-American,
Jim, having grown up in and become a reporter in the LA area,
worked as a journalist in Ireland during the early 1970s for
a period of time. He always maintained that keen ability of
all good reporters to detect bullshit.
Besides the normal course of addressing
the legal crises of people, whether disability, unemployment,
marital problems and violence, housing issues, etc., we often
took on, through class-actions and public campaigns, the slum-lords,
powers-that-be, and neanderthal bureaucrats that were, then,
running the government of the county.
The region was quickly slipping into
a severe recession in the late 1970s, throwing thousands out
of work from the lumber and fishing industries. Jim connected
us to a statewide network of progressive legal services groups
and support organizations that made some pretty big waves in
those days, waging innovative multi-forum campaigns that were
often victorious on behalf of our clients or some critical social
issue.
I will never forget the client case review
meetings at RLA, with 8-10 lawyers and paralegals held around
a long table in the conference room, with all of us presenting
our cases, and trying to come to resolutions. I remember one
day that John Cumming would be trying to professionally present
a legal issue. Nancy Studhalter, a great woman who could drink
a fisherman and anyone else, under the table, and a fellow para
like myself, would stand on her head sometimes during the meetings
because, she said, it helped with blood flow to the head, and
therefore, allowed her to concentrate better during the meetings.
And, she felt it would help get in touch with her ghost ovaries,
ovaries she said had mysteriously grown back after a surgical
procedure.
All of a sudden Jim, bursting with frustration,
climbed up on the long table, pacing back and forth, waving
his arms, his voice moving from a slow introduction to his way
of thinking, into a long staccato of reasoned attacks on both
the faulty conclusions to that point and against the unfair forces
arrayed against our clients. I would sit in my chair and, eventually
like the rest, break into hysterical laughter at the absolute
ridiculousness of Jim's actions, but also his brilliance, whether
or not we agreed.
Later, a new lawyer came to town to run
the organization, partly as a result of rules imposed by the
Reagan Administration. David Lowe was an extremely effective
trial lawyer, an older pro and loud courtroom presence, who had
been a prosecutor in one of the U.S. protectorates in the Pacific
Islands, an equally rough place. David and Jim didn't exactly
get along. One day, many, many weeks later, Jim brought a bottle
of Johnny Walker to David's office, and said, alright, clear
a desk, we are going to drink this bottle and arm-wrestle until
we get a few things straight. They arm-wrestled for hours.
Jim had an undying dedication to the
cause of justice for poor people, and despite all the antics,
RLA was an extremely effective organization, and it grew to four
counties, serving people from inner city settings, to poor mountain
towns, to the reservations. Despite the various forms of stress
relief, often necessary due to the fact that many of us were
carrying over 100 cases, RLA was a family, one that I remember
fondly and still miss today. I think Nancy once called us the
MASH unit of legal services.
Redwood sponsored me as I helped set
up the first center for dislocated lumber workers in the west,
with Jim acting as my constant advisor, even though he had moved
on to the California Federation for Community Development in
Sacramento.
The Early Seattle
Days
When Jim was still working at the California
Federation, he continued assisting me in conceptualizing the
creation of the Seattle Worker Center. Later Jim moved to Connecticut
and was a senior manager of a program to employ seniors. On one
of my trips to New York for the FIRR sessions, I took a train
up from NYC to Bridgeport to convince him to consider moving
back to the west coast, to manage a new re-employment program
funded by the State of Washington as a result of a statewide
labor and church campaign that put the Center on the map. That's
where he met Katie. I remember he lived in a tiny apartment,
his only entertainment a small radio. Jim was sometimes frugal
and self-sacrificing, as most of you know.
After much deliberation, Jim agreed to
the move and job. He came to Seattle, Katie later joining him,
to become the director of the re-employment center of the SWC.
Jim beefed up the re-employment center, and gave it structure
and mission, and became a constant irritant or ally to the city,
county and state fathers, depending on their willingness to cooperate,
linking the center to the employment and training policy frameworks
of the region.
Jim loved the original close-to-the waterfront
offices we inhabited at the time, a funky one story building
up the street from the Pike Place Market, in Belltown, and close
to the waterfront bars where he would sit with us and have a
sip of Jameson's Irish Whiskey, his favorite.
And later, when I moved to Pittsburgh
to manage the Steel Valley Authority, I encouraged him to take
the position of director, which he was awarded, and did a wonderful
job. Later, Jim geared up the shipyards commission with Tom Lewiston
and John Murray, two former shipyard rank and file leaders who
launched the successful labor campaign mentioned earlier. This
campaign, fueled as a result of the lockout by Lockheed Shipyards
of 900 workers, won help for locked out and dislocated workers,
and resulted in a state-managed retention initiative, and the
re-employment program that Jim had come to town to manage.
Jim also helped move the Center to the
umbrella of the King County Labor Council. Today, as you know,
the Center, having won national awards and recognition, is busy
today responding to the massive dislocations rocking the Puget
Sound area. Workers in the Seattle area have an advocate, partly
thanks to Jim's leadership.
Calumet and
FIRR
Jim's last job was in the Gary, Indiana
area, near Chicago, as the Executive Director of the Calumet
Valley Project. Calumet is still going strong, by the way, and
has carried on, as a result of Jim's leadership, many of the
remarkable programs to address the environmental clean-up needs
of the brownfield communities of the region. Calumet has also
continued waging economic and environmental justice campaigns
on behalf of the many dislocated steelworkers and low-income
and minority populations in the area.
Like Seattle and Pittsburgh, Calumet
was a member of the FIRR Network. FIRR was initially funded
by progressive churches in New York, where we would get together
in a large religious house in Greenwich Village, and later brainstorm
and b.s. into the night at an infamous bar, the White Horse Tavern,
where Jack London drank and supposedly fell dead, a police drawing
of his body on the floor preserved for posterity. People from
Seattle and California joined people from Chicago, New England,
Pittsburgh, and many other communities of the country suffering
from economic shocks of the 1980s and early 1990s. We would
see Jim on a regular basis at the FIRR meetings.
Our rabble-rousing helped usher in new,
if too-modest, federal policies and programs, including the 60-day
WARN notice on plant closures, and a national re-employment program
for dislocated workers, and many state and city programs.
In 1989, we organized the Industrial
Heartland Renaissance Conference in Washington, D.C., one of
the first collaborations between our regional economic democracy
groups and the international unions. One of the planks in the
conference planning was a major chapter on the need for a national
industrial bank, financed by workers' pensions, connected to
regional economic democracy groups. I helped write part of this
program, as I was leaving Seattle for Pittsburgh. Jim helped
me with the writing, as usual, through a slow and methodical
process of talking out the possibilities, putting it to paper.
Today, we have made tremendous breakthroughs, as a result of
the Heartland Network in the U.S. and Canada, in gaining control
of workers' capital, and developing a long-term, domestic and
sustainable investment strategy. Jim knew, like so many other
times, a good idea when he saw it.
In Conclusion
Jim had a major stubborn streak, as some
of you may have discovered, and I remember getting a call one
day at the Seattle Center, barely understanding the person on
the line. It was Jim, asking me to bring over candy bars, and
I rushed over to his apartment in Seattle, before Katie had arrived
to town, bringing him a couple of candy bars, as he was out on
the floor, having neglected his routine.
He struggled for decades with diabetes,
as you all know, a struggle that would have easily defeated me.
The struggle later caused him to leave Calumet and move back
to Seattle to await a double transplant. His stubbornness also
may have kept him going a lot longer than many of us would have.
I watched that stubbornness take on some truly difficult adversaries.
Jim would take them on, not by belittling them, but by picking
away at point after point, in his slow, methodical manner that
would drive the other side up the wall, until they caved. It
was a thing of beauty to watch.
Jim Cummings was a powerful force for
change, and his work and actions helped tens of thousands of
working people and poor alike, from one coast to the other, to
obtain access to survival services, retain their job or win new
employment opportunities, and maintain the dignity that comes
from not being relegated to being a second-class citizen. He
pounded away at the bad guys on behalf of average Americans,
on behalf of people and families down on their luck, on behalf
of whole constituencies and communities in-stress. He formulated,
created and launched new initiatives, programs and public policies
that are not only still going today, but have been replicated
all over this country.
Jim railed against an America where millions
of workers and their families have been cast to a laissez-faire,
new world order that has harmed real people and families, and
communities, and is not representative of what we were taught
America would be. I only wish Jim was still able to fight with
us today, in this uncertain new erahe would have said, that,
remember, brothers and sisters, we can still build, with our
brains and brawn, all of us, a better society, a better world,
a peaceful world, one that supplies people and families with
the employment, food, housing, transportation, education, recreation
and future that we need as a peoplein other words, life, liberty
and happiness. I can almost hear him saying it, can't you?
If this is not the story of an American
hero, I don't know what is.
Albert Pike said that "What we have
done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for
others and the world remains and is immortal."
But I am having a hard time ending with
this notion, as true as it is, for I prefer to think of my buddy
and my mentor, Jim Cummings, not as someone who has passed, but
as a prince of a man who simply needed to rest for awhile. And,
along those lines, I'll leave him and all of you, my friends,
with these parting words, slightly modified, from Marcus Aurelius:
"Men seek retreats for themselves,
houses in the country, seashores, and mountains; and he too was
wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether
a mark of the common sort of man, for it is in your power, whenever
you shall choose, to retire into yourself. For nowhere with
more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than
into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts
that by looking into them he is at once perfectly tranquilConstantly
then grant yourself this retreat and refreshment."
And, as I say goodbye for the last time,
my brother Jim, I am glad you have been able to grant yourself
this retreat, and I pray you have a good rest.
Thomas Croft
is the Director of the Heartland Labor Capital Network. He can be reached
at: t.w.croft@att.net
© TW Croft, 2002. From the Unauthorized
Autobiography of T.W.Croft
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September
20, 2002
Joan Hoff
Debating
War:
the Forgotten Tradition
Norman Madarasz
Lessons from a Cyncial Master
Jean Chretien's New York
State of Mind
Mitchel Cohen
Toxic Wastes
and
the New World Order
Peter Lee
Why Bush
Wants This War
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20 Questions
About Bush's
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Bush Senior:
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Jeffrey St.
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