AT&T Long Lines had its headquarters at 32 Sixth Avenue in New York City. At its peak, that building housed about 10,000 employees with telephone operators accounting for about 80% of that total. Because the operators and the telephone craftsmen worked around the clock, the Company provided two cafeterias and one dining room. The dining room doesn’t figure in this story so we can forget it.
The main cafeteria was on the 9th floor. It provided 24-hour service. There were no places to eat anywhere close to 32 Sixth Avenue, particularly at night, so the cafeteria was the only place to go. Operators and craftsmen who worked evening and midnight tours relied on the 9th floor cafeteria for a hot meal. All of these conditions applied up to about 1970. Conditions changed during the 1970’s, but that is part of another story.
The 9th floor cafeteria had rails to support the trays. It was about 70 feet long to get from the soup at the start to drinks and the cashier at the end. This was a busy place all day long what with meals being served and rest breaks as well.
When I met Lila in 1950, she always seemed to work at the far end of the line, near the cashier. From that vantage point, she could see how the line was moving and if needed, Lila would move somewhere up the line to help out. In baseball terms, Lila was sort of a utility player.
Lila was a black woman. She was self assured and quite comfortable talking to customers and the other members of the dining service staff. In short, Lila was a proud person who felt she was as fine as any of the big shots she served. And she was. The only drawback about Lila was that she lived in Brooklyn and was a ferocious booster of the Brooklyn Dodgers. As a devotee of the St. Louis Cardinals, I saw Lila’s devotion to the Dodgers as a serious character flaw. What she thought about my devotion to the Cardinals was expressed in loud terms as I pushed my tray down the 70 feet of the cafeteria line.
I first showed up in Lila’s cafeteria line in 1950. At the time I was President of the Long Lines Telephone Workers Union (Local #5) in St. Louis. That spring I had been elected to one of the five memberships on the national contract bargaining committee. The talks in 1950 were only about a week long as we bargained a new military leave agreement.
When I first met Lila, I was accompanied by Averill Hildebrand, a Traffic representative on the Bargaining Committee. Averill came from Kansas but had worked at 32 6th Avenue for several years. Averill introduced me to Lila and told her that the members of the bargaining committee were in New York to try to make things better for Long Lines people. Word about what brought union people to New York spread quickly up and down the Dining Service line. Whenever we came there for lunch, the servings were quite large and we were greeted with big smiles.
Lila wanted to know if we could get her a big raise that year. I explained that in 1950, we were only dealing with the Military Leave agreement, but that if she wanted to join the Army, we would see that she would be cared for. Next year, 1951, was when we would deal with wages. Lila filed that away in her head and when I showed up to bargain again in 1951, she was all over my case.
As soon as I met Lila, she asked where I came from. I knew where she came from. When I told her St. Louis, she asked about the Cardinals. I told Lila that I hoped the Cardinals would win every game, especially against the Dodgers. Well, that started the uproar that lasted until I left New York in 1963.
During that first go around with Lila in 1950, a very embarrassing misplay happened to the Cardinals during a game at Ebbets Field. For many years, the Cardinals employed Mike Gonzales as their third base coach. Mike came from Cuba and returned to Havana after the season. Obviously, this was before Castro came to power. Mike had previously been a catcher for the Cardinals and, one way or another, had never really mastered the English language.
In a game with the Dodgers at Ebbets Field, a Cardinal base runner reached third base. The next batter hit a short fly to right field. I suspect the Dodger right fielder was Carl Furillo, the strongest arm in the league. In any case, the fly was so short that anyone could have thrown out the runner trying to score.
Gonzales saw the short fly to right and yelled to the runner, “No Go.” That was Mike’s way of saying hold the base. Unfortunately, the runner heard only the “Go” part of Mike’s instructions and took off for home. He was thrown out by 15 or 20 feet. That story got to the Daily News, the Mirror and all the other New York papers. So when I started down the line at lunch the next day, Lila started berating me. “Doesn’t anyone in St. Louis speak English?” That was the start of all the abuse and Lila never let me up.
In the bargaining on the big contract in 1951, everyone joined with me to see that the Dining Service workers were treated better than in the past. Averill Hildebrand, Ernestine Locknane from Cincinnati, Joe Darling from Utica, New York and Carl Peters, the National Director all said that we wanted fair treatment for the dining workers. After the bargaining ended, it was about 7:30AM. We had been up all night. Some of us went to the cafeteria for breakfast. Lila, who didn’t know the terms of the new contract, left her station and came out to sit with us and to thank us. That made the whole bargaining experience worthwhile.
Ah, but that didn’t stop the abuse. I was gone from New York for four years and had been promoted to a management job. I had moved from St. Louis to Kansas City and then on to Chicago. In the spring of 1955, I found myself again in New York. When lunch time rolled around on my first day back, my colleague John Finn and our boss Dick Dugan suggested that we eat in the 9th floor cafeteria. With moving to New York and a new job to master, I had for the moment forgotten Lila. But not for long.
As soon as I put my tray down on the rails at the start of the serving line, old Lila yelled, “What? You back?” That was followed by loud cackles. She hadn’t seen me for four years but Lila was all over me. I didn’t know John Finn or Dick Dugan well at all and I was a little concerned what they would think of Lila’s needling. I was much relieved when both men said that Lila had been picking on them for years and that it was a pleasure to give her somebody else to bite at.
Lila, as I hope you can tell, was one of my big friends in New York. We often talked about going to a Dodger-Cardinal game together but I’m sorry to say, it never happened.
At the end of the season in 1958, the Dodgers announced that they were moving to Los Angeles. They had experienced two or three bad seasons before Walter O’Malley, the owner, decided to look for greener pastures. Ordinarily, this would be a reason to even up with Lila but the fact was – and is – that baseball belongs in Brooklyn. Even now, the Mets have a new Class “A” club there, the Cyclones, and they sold out their new stadium (7500 seats) every game. So far from wagging my finger at Lila, I felt almost as bad as she did. So I put my arm around her shoulders and told her that maybe things would get better. I even offered her a chance to root for the Cardinals. She politely declined.
When the Dodgers left town, Lila felt as though she had been disowned. But she still greeted me with the same old style and the same old cackles. Sometimes she would yell to me, “Here come Stan the Man” (a reference to Stan Musial) or maybe it would be “Hello big man.”
I left Long Lines in 1963 and the Company greatly reduced the Dining Service hours a few years later. I’m sorry to say I don’t know what happened to Lila. I hope that she got a pension and naturally, I hope that she is doing well. For all those years that I knew Lila, she added a lot of sparkle to my life. Wherever she is, I am indebted to her for that.
E. E. Carr
September 10, 2001
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Daw. I don’t have too much to say about this one, aside from the fact that this is exactly the kind of friendship that Pop was always making. His ability to recall decades-old baseball stories is also striking. Similarly, it’s nice that even though she served thousands of employees, Lila still remembered Pop after several years.