David Pratt's Steve-Experiences

David Pratt wrote about Steve Kindred: 

I first met Steve when visiting Detroit to pick up Peter Landon for a trip back to Yellow Springs, Ohio or possibly to his home town of Eden, NY. Peter was staying at a house, probably on the northwest side of Detroit but I am not sure and Steve was living there. Walking in, the house was virtually a shell, or at least that is my memory of it, no furniture to speak of and probably well on its way back then in 1979 to a future of abandonment. But it was where they lived. Clearly their real home was in the work of building a rank and file movement in the Teamsters union. 

That was the last time for awhile that I remember Steve living in a house or apartment. I returned to work for TDU a couple of times in the following years and it was during one of these periods that I would get to the office some mornings to find a phalanx of boards propped in the entry to the break room, Steve on the couch, waking from a night of sleep. Fitful or restful I don’t know, but he would start days with more enthusiasm than I could convey after a victory in our work. The boards were an anti-rat device and a fine manifestation of one of the many critical strategies regarding daily life that Steve loved to design and, especially, analyze and discuss. At this time Carol Kirby's daughter Avonda moved to Detroit and at some point she sold or gave her car to Steve. I sometimes see cars like it in New York, every inch aside from the driver’s seat crammed with all manner of things. 

One of my tasks at TDU was to harass people to get their stories submitted for each issue of the Convoy Dispatch newspaper.  This didn’t always go so well with Steve. His space in the old TDU office, above Piaskowski’s Drug Store, was at the very front of the building. The office ran from front to back, essentially one long hallway crammed with supplies, counters, mimeo machine and etc. with tiny offices off to the side. Steve’s office was at the front, and slightly triangulated. Steve was ensconced there at the prow of the TDU ship, accompanied by bags of peanuts, rolling papers and tobacco. At night the Piaskowski sign would blink wanly just outside the window

In addition to whatever other struggles he had to contend with, Steve had to deal with kids like me, full of the demanding TDU organizing style, coming around to bug him about getting copy in on time.  I was a bit surprised but oddly unrattled one time when he jumped up from his desk and yelled “I should throw you out that window.” With the Piaskowski sign in the way it may not have worked. Even in a moment like this I felt a sense of safety around Steve that overshadowed everything else. 

Knowing that Steve was nearby was an immense feeling of security. I think I took it for granted. If Local 337 goons or BLAST threatened to storm the building (which did happen actually) I knew that Steve would be at the “tip of the spear” as Jerry Tucker from the UAW used to say. And while at the tip of that spear, Steve had a unique ability to martial a combination of verbal and physical tactics and to not fall into the kind of bravado and verbal threats so common among men in tense situations. I can’t remember or imagine him ever saying anything more threatening than “listen Bud” to anyone.  But that “listen bud” was serious and was, I thought, modulated and pitched to meet the needs of different situations. 

Steve did not always share this confidence in his ability to fend off the enemy. On the eve of a vote count at Local 337, with TDUers losing in a rigged election, it was reasonably feared that old guard Bobby Holmes supporters would try to storm the TDU headquarters. They did in fact mass outside. Before going downstairs Steve whipped open a file cabinet drawer and pulled out a 45 automatic, not to take but to leave behind with me, to use I guess, if there was a breach and anti-TDU forces stormed up the stairs. Fortunately, the castle walls and doors held and there was no need to use the gun. If there had been I probably would have been multi-tasking and distracted anyway, trying to get in a phone call or two before hell broke loose. 

Steve was always on the front line when dealing with attacks on TDU. When BLAST stormed the TDU Convention in Romulus, Michigan the official policy was that staff and members were to avoid up-front confrontations, leaving it to the rent-a-cops. But there was Steve (and others) at the front doors pushing back against the hordes from behind the glass. There is a photo of this I can't seem to find and you can see Steve's head all scrunched up in the scrum in the entryway. Meanwhile Frank Greco and I were running through the hotel kitchen, TDU membership books in hand, whisking them away from the registration area and into one of the hotel rooms. I'd like to recall this, like a common scene out of a film, of bedlam in the kitchen with pots and cooks flying as we raced by. But there was not a soul in sight, the kitchen as silent and intact when we left as when we entered. Our adrenalin was pumping and even after the room door was closed we lifted the mattress and hustled the books underneath, as if that would provide the critical protection needed to keep them out of enemy hands. Steve's efforts at the front door insured that there was time to protect members and lists. 

My other favorite photo of Steve was taken in downtown Detroit, during a freight strike or rally. Steve is in a huge crowd, calling them to arms, speaking without a mic or megaphone but I am sure heard by all. This was early, maybe even when Hoffa senior was alive, TDU new and under attack and Steve is there seemingly alone in the midst of a vast sea of potentially hostile Teamsters. But unlike the well known image of Lenin exhorting the masses where the leader appears god-like above, in this shot you can feel Steve as part of the whole, pushing and being pushed, leading and being carried by the river of events.

Remembering these things made me remember also how strong Steve was in the face of challenges that had nothing to do with the enemy from without. There is a pervasive style of organizing, compulsive and detail-driven, that has many merits. The problem is, not everybody fits into that square peg, nor should they.  In my mind it took tremendous courage and fortitude on Steve’s part to be himself and the kind of organizer that he was – critically important to the movement – for so many years in the midst of this model. 

Equally fascinating to me was that Steve did not talk or act like many men, did not seem to engage in careless and hurtful male repartee and behavior.  He was an anti-bully day-to-day as well as in his stands against the forces of corruption within the union.

There will be much written in years to come about how and why TDU was successful. Some things, like the structure and functioning of the leadership, will be easy to document and quantify. Much harder will be attempts to gauge the impact of less tangible qualities, like Steve’s ability to convey passion and fire and hope or his uncanny (to someone like me) way of being able to talk to and engage with pretty much anyone. I am sure you can still meet Teamsters who came across Steve years ago in some coffee shop in Flint or Gary or Stroudsberg, recalling the guy on fire who got them to think that change might be possible.

Many difficult assignments and projects were part and parcel of Steve’s work. He worked with activists who were taking on the core of old-guard Teamster officials in Michigan and Chicago. Election campaigns in Pontiac, Lansing and Detroit, the heart of the beast, were part of his portfolio. His work with members to build contract campaigns – in transit-mix, carhaul and other jurisidctions – was legendary. In recent years he had been talking about writing down these battles but I don’t know if he ever was able to. I'd like hear those stories and wish he were still here to tell them. 

I often wondered where Steve got his amazing energy as it seemed that he ate only roasted peanuts and milk from quart cartons. We would often go to lunch across the street at the Starlight restaurant. I can remember eating there with many people, Detroit Teamster Gary Wade for example, when he was laid off and ordered a cup of soup because it was cheap and came with unlimited bread. Now this would be a Steve strategy, but I don't remember ever sitting in a booth with him at the Starlight. In fact but for one time during those years I cannot picture sitting down with him to eat or seeing him eat anything other than his proto-paleo diet at his desk. 

The one exception arose when relatives back home thought it would be great to send live New England lobsters to Detroit for my thirtieth birthday. Without warning they arrived at the ACTWU offices where I was then working. It was clear that they had to be used quickly, not stuck in the back of the fridge for the future. And a crew of folks was needed to eat them. I called Steve, knowing somehow I guess despite all evidence to the contrary that he might like a surprise feast. So this is a great memory to add to others that were so different, of Steve relishing this meal that seemed to have dropped into Detroit from outer space, all of us drinking wine and relaxing as if we were carefree and in Tuscany somewhere, or the coast of Maine, rather than in the shadow of the Ford Rouge Plant and the Marathon Oil refinery. And Steve of course regaling us with stories and observations and ideas. 

Many years later in New York I rediscovered another different thing about Steve, that as it turns out Ruby and I shared with him a love of finding objects on the street. Marsha and Ruby and I had dinner with Steve and Ellen and Ben one night Steve gave us one of his found object devices, a small picture stand for desk top photos that he used to prop up cookbooks in the kitchen. And he told us about a rocking chair he had found on the street, tiny and for a kid. For some reason we couldn't take it with us and he later engineered a way to meet one of his nieces and come to Brooklyn in a vehicle with the rocking chair. I think ice cream was involved as well, at the store next door. This reminded me that for years Steve organized the Detroit TDU Chapter yard sale and that it involved months of work in advance searching for and collecting sale items by ranging around Detroit and cajoling donations out of people. It also inevitably involved the need for Joe Urman's van and Joe, a former baker at Kroger (when grocery chains had real bakeries), was always able to try Steve's patience.

The last time I spoke with Steve, last Summer on the phone, I encountered something different again. We had been talking about going to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden sometime and it had not worked out yet. I can't recall a time when I had a short conversation with Steve, but this time we spoke for a few minutes and then he wanted to get off the phone. Maybe he had to go move the car before it got ticketed, or someone was at the door, or he had come across one of the homeless folks he took care of on the street and he had to talk to them. Or perhaps he was already sick at that time but could not talk about it. But it struck me that he had decided to have a short conversation and that he felt good about it.