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Exeunt Doug and Hoda PDF Print E-mail
ImageAt times Doug Perry has seemed to be everywhere, at every labor event and at many others besides. Those readers of this newspaper who do not know him have almost certainly seen him. Think back: He is never without jacket and tie; his slight frame slightly stooped, as though pulled forward by the weight of the camera he usually has slung from his neck, is not at all typical in a Building Trades crowd. Then he takes a seat and as a meeting or speech or rally begins he straightens his glasses, pulls a little notebook from his pocket, and starts to write. So begins work on another edition of Organized Labor. Almost all the photographs in the newspaper come from that camera. Almost all the articles begin in that notebook, whether or not they ultimately carry his byline.

Sometimes Hoda, his wife, will accompany him in his forays; but she is not quite so omnipresent. She does her part in the team more at the office of Union Publications in Oakland. More accurately, she does her parts. She is the necessary grammarian, the indispensable typist, the essential layout editor, the irreplaceable watchwoman of the holy deadline. Without her persistence, some locals might not yet have submitted last Christmas’s column. Without her patience, some of us might deservedly have been flayed and roasted. Without her graciousness…If “Hoda” does not translate to “Graciousness,” then her parents owed her an additional name.

Soon, though, we will have to learn to do without. This will be Doug’s and Hoda’s last Organized Labor. They are retiring. We may hope that what labors they do undertake will be more spontaneous, less strenuous, more liberating, less organized.

The Perrys came to the paper in 1994 to sell advertising. By their account and others, before their arrival the paper’s advertising sales were in disarray, to say the least. Previous advertising salesmen had made such misrepresentations to advertisers that these latter no longer trusted the paper. The Council did not (and does not) have the funds to put out so extensive a newspaper without advertising. Mistrust by advertisers, then, threatened to end publication of a newspaper that even the 1906 earthquake and fire had interrupted only briefly. The Perrys reestablished the trust of advertisers. The Perrys very likely saved the paper.

In 1995 they began producing the paper themselves. Doug began toting the camera and notebook. In that era just before digitalization of images, shelves around Hoda in the little brick Oakland office filled with envelopes of photographs. Organized Labor became what it is today.

We are finalizing arrangements now with others to produce the paper. We are all conscious of the obligation that its hundred-and-six year tradition lays on us. We are all glad for the opportunities it gives us to communicate with each other and with the wider public. You will no doubt see changes in the paper as time goes by. It may stutter and stumble from time to time, like a journeyman or journeywoman trying something he or she knows only from an apprenticeship class. We will learn.

In the meantime, we owe thanks and more thanks to Doug and Hoda, and a truckload of wishes for a long, happy, healthy retirement. May the skyline of San Francisco shine for them.

 
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