Organized Labor

John Crowley has left us. This dry spring, too thirsty by far, has taken him away, just 52, with a young wife and with sons rounding the curve of adolescence, in the full of his work not just on behalf of labor, but of so many others. How could we help but be parched by his absence?

When John came to our twice-monthly Board of Business Representatives meeting, he was always early. He would stop first at my office. 

I was always rushing to finish something needed for the meeting – the agenda to be printed, copied, and distributed, or notes for my report, or a flyer to hand out. I rarely had time for more than a few words with John. This was fine by him. "Is there anything I can do to help?" he'd say. That was what he was there for, to help. That was John.

But John was also tough. The perception of many of us not so many years ago was that the Sprinkler Fitters union had little non-union competition to worry about. Then a major national contractor and a major local contractor went non-union. Others followed. This was the situation John stepped into when he began his nine years as a business representative for the Sprinkler Fitters. When individuals or companies have recently decided on a new course of action or a new way of doing business they are unlikely to be dissuaded from it. Only time or a quick and strong recognition of error can soften their attitude. The Sprinkler Fitters would need someone hard-nosed, then, in anything that dealt with these newly non-union contractors. That, too, was John.

I can picture the tightening at the corners of his mouth, I can hear the flattening of his tone as he recounted what he had said and how he had said it in some of his necessary confrontations. Sometimes, in the same tone from the same tightened lips, John would deliver to the other side in these confrontations some dry-witted take on the situation that would often as not, after slowly penetrating the skulls of his opponents, make everyone laugh and relax the encounter.

(Forgive me, those of you who remember his stories in detail; my memory is poor, and so I am failing to convey to readers much of the man and of why we miss him.)
John's toughness and wit informed also his matter-of-fact approach to life and death. When young he went to sea on a freighter that also took passengers. On a tropical passage one of the passengers hung himself. The hanging was typically messy. John's fellow crew members balked at cutting down the body and cleaning it up. Son of a mortician, John had no such qualms. This was the matter-of-fact part. The wit came in John's recounting of the argument that ensued when he tried to use the ship's refrigerator locker to store the corpse.

He took this approach into his final confrontation. At his funeral the story was told of how in the depths of his cancer, as he shuffled through the corridors of the hospital pushing along a rack carrying a bag of fluid feeding into him intravenously, he said to old women also shuffling along, "Wanna race?" … and found takers.

Hundreds attended that funeral. St. Ignatius, no small church, was nearly full. Much of the crowd was Sunset District Irish. John had all the best of that strain. He had the Roman Catholic faith at full strength, and yet not dogmatically, but generously and tolerantly, as befitted a man who carried as a middle name the surname of that complicated Irish hero, Parnell. He came to his confrontations not combatively, but with

firmness of conviction. He was not clannish, but unfailingly loyal. He wanted to help; he always helped.

He was a prize of a man, and now that prize has slipped from our hands.

A fund has been established for the education of Christopher and James, his sons. Contributions may be sent to: John Crowley Memorial Fund, c/o Pacific Service Federal Credit Union, P.O. Box 8191, Walnut Creek, California 94596.