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Former Local 6 President Keith Eickman, 1913-2006  Keith Eickman (right) and LeRoy King during the Nestle strike in Salinas, Calif. in 1976. Dispatcher file photo.
By Harvey Schwartz
Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection
The ILWU lost a much beloved leader and life-long activist when Keith Eickman of warehouse Local 6 passed away July 30. Eickman was a politically engaged youth in the 1930s, a warehouse worker by 1941 and a soldier in Europe during WWII. After the war, he helped bring about the racial integration of the local’s leadership. He was also a highly-regarded Local 6 business agent, secretary-treasurer and president, and a respected San Francisco community figure. In keeping with his steadfast devotion to the ILWU, at 92 Eickman was still president of the Local 6 West Bay Pensioners when he died.
One of Eickman’s great contributions was in striving for the full integration of Local 6 on every level at a time when the local’s leadership was entirely white. With a great influx of black workers into the local during and immediately after WWII, black representation among the officers was sorely needed. But the local’s election rules then greatly favored incumbents over minority challengers. So, when he entered office as a business agent in 1958, Eickman allied himself with the local’s young black members and used his position to help reform the electoral system.
“He was the first elected officer who worked on getting representation for blacks at the highest level of the local,” LeRoy King said. King, a fixture in San Francisco’s black community, is a former Local 6 secretary-treasurer who served for many years as ILWU Northern California Regional Director. He is still active with the ILWU Northern California District Council. King came into the warehouse union near the end of WWII. He worked closely with Eickman for 60 years.
“Keith was my best friend,” King said. “He was instrumental in getting Curtis McClain elected as Local 6’s first black officer in 1960 when he broke up the old voting system, with its separate slates for each business agent. It was also characteristic of Keith that he consistently sought equity for us, but never stopped trying to bring all the people in the community together. He was a great humanitarian.”
Alpha Hunter, another black worker of long standing in Local 6, entered the ILWU in 1943. Like King, she was a good friend and colleague of Eickman’s for 60 years. Hunter served long as a shop steward and negotiating team member before her retirement in 1984. She was on the food committee with McClain and King in the 1949 warehouse strike.
“Keith came around all the time to ask how we were getting along during that three month strike,” she remembered. “He was interested in everybody and everything.”
Hunter recalls fondly how Eickman always got the various groups to work with him when he was in office.
“Keith never held meetings with just white people,” she pointed out. “He’d recruit committees of nine or so dependable people and they were always completely integrated.”
When she retired, Eickman recommended her as secretary-treasurer of the West Bay Pensioners. She won that position and still holds it today.
“I thought the world of Keith,” she said. “I don’t know what we’ll do without him.”
Betty de Losada was an active Local 6 adherent from 1946 to 1956. As a board of trustees member, she worked with Eickman and King in the 1950s to bring Local 6’s finances under tighter rank-and-file control. Another long-time friend of Eickman’s, she emphasized that he consistently pushed in negotiations to narrow the gender wage differential in Local 6’s contract that was a hold-over from the lower “women’s rates” of the 1930s. She also remembers that Eickman was concerned about the welfare of the union’s pensioners long before he became one himself.
Eickman was born in Canada in 1913. He graduated from Mission High School in San Francisco in 1932, “right in the middle of the Great Depression,” as he put it in 1981 when I tape recorded him for the union’s oral history project. “I was looking for answers to the problems of society and life,” he recalled. That led him to join the Young Communist League (YCL) in 1936.
Eickman reflected back on the YCL as “the most sectarian group in the world,” but remained a loyal Communist Party member for nearly 20 years before being expelled in 1955 when the CP was purging its own. Eickman, of all people, was charged with “white chauvinism” for debating a point with a black member at a Local 6 stewards’ council meeting. He always argued, though, that the political education he received in the CP was invaluable.
“My life in the Party laid the basis for whatever role I played in Local 6,” he insisted.
An idealist in his youth, and in some ways throughout his life, in 1937 Eickman was a bookkeeper at the Rosenberg Dried Fruit Company in Santa Clara, Calif. He was not a member of the firm’s production staff. Still, he said of himself with characteristic self-reflection and humor in 1981, “armed with the virtue of my beliefs, I announced to everyone in the plant that the cannery workers should join the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO).” Rosenberg, of course, laid him off “for lack of work.”
Eickman collected unemployment, got a job through the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, and did a short stint with Westinghouse Corporation. His date with destiny came in 1941 when he found warehouse work with the Zellerbach Paper Company in San Francisco through the Local 6 hiring hall. In 1942 he became the plant’s steward. He felt, he said in his oral history, that he’d “practically reached glory.”
In 1943 Eickman was elected secretary of the Local 6 stewards’ council. A month later he was drafted. He was in an army railway battalion in Europe when Nazi Germany surrendered in 1945. Eickman was discharged from the military the next year. He returned to San Francisco, Zellerbach and Local 6 and attended classes at the California Labor School.
Throughout 1948 Eickman campaigned zealously for Henry Wallace, the anti-Cold War Progressive Party candidate for the US presidency who received Communist support. Eickman later said he learned a hard but valuable political lesson about believing his convictions were always shared by others when some older Local 6 workers rebuffed him for insisting that they vote for Wallace.
“Fuck Wallace,” one of them said to him. “We’re going to vote for Truman.”
Eickman was active in the Local 6 stewards’ council and on negotiating committees into the mid-1950s. He then won office as a business agent a remarkable nine straight times between 1957 and 1968. Eickman was elected secretary-treasurer of Local 6 in 1970 and president in 1977. He held the latter position and served on the International Executive Board until his retirement in late 1982. After he officially “retired,” Eickman administered the Local 6 Warehousemen’s Welfare Fund for several years. He became an expert on health and welfare and kept this aspect of Local 6 afloat during a time of heavy assault by the employers.
Albert Lannon was a Local 6 business agent through most of the 1970s. Lannon followed Eickman as president of Local 6 and served for six years.
“In the late 1970s and early 1980s Keith and Local 6 went through some hard times,” he pointed out. “Plants were running away from San Francisco or were closing. The situation was beyond Keith’s control, but people were upset. There were a dozen revolutionary groups all clamoring for attention and claiming to know best. Yet through it all Keith kept the local on a steady course.”
Lannon experienced some similar pressures when he was in office.
“Keith bailed me out of political trouble inside the union many times,” he said. “I truly valued his counsel and we became very close friends. It always impressed me that Keith never became cynical and never succumbed to any of the temptations of union office. He remained vitally interested in people, in Local 6 and in his city to the end of his life.”
Fred Pecker, the current secretary-treasurer of Local 6, also knew Eickman well.
“Back when I was a young steward at Guittard Chocolate Company, I was always ready to walk out at the drop of a hat,” he said recently. “Then one day Keith gave a speech that really sobered me up. He explained that in the 1930s you had only your pay check. There was no health and welfare, no vacaation provision, no seniority, no overtime and no pension fund. You didn’t have much to lose, so it was easy to strike. But later there was so much in the package that you couldn’t just walk out whenever you felt like it. I never forgot that lesson.”
“When I needed advice I’d always go to Keith and, of course, my Uncle LeRoy,” Pecker continued. “Keith was a friend and a mentor. He was always concerned about the people around him, about their families and about how they were doing. Keith really didn’t have much formal education, but his interests and concerns in the world were very wide. He was a true labor intellectual tutored by the school of hard knocks.”
Betty de Losada depicted Eickman as a Renaissance man, for his interests truly were boundless. Beside his commitment to politics—he served on the ILWU Northern California District Council and the union’s San Francisco Legislative Committee—he was deeply involved in a variety of community affairs. A conservationist for many years, Eickman was appointed to the San Francisco Parks and Recreation Commission in 1977. He was also a member of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission.
Eickman sat on the board of directors of KQED, Northern California’s public broadcasting station, the San Francisco Exploratorium and the Zoological Society. He actively supported the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University. He also gave the ILWU Legacy Fund $2,500 in 2000 to make possible the re-issue of my then out-of-print book, “The March Inland: Origins of the ILWU Warehouse Division, 1934-1938.”
“Keith set an example of how you can be very strong but very gracious, and at the same time remember what class you are from and be secure in that,” Pecker said.
Eickman was preceded in death by Nina Eickman, his wife, and Robin Eickman, his daughter. He is survived by Kent Eickman, his son and a union engineer, Peter Bissell, his stepson and an ILWU member, Patrick Mulkeen, his son-in-law and a union teacher, Yvonne York, his sister, three grandchildren and countless grateful ILWU members and their families.
Family and friends will hold a memorial for Eickman at ILWU Local 34 hall at 4 Berry Street on Oct. 14 at 2 pm. |
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