Then-Coast Committeeman Joe Wenzl and International President Bob McEllrath present clerks’ Local 34 retiree and President of the Copra Crane Labor Landmark Assn. Bill Ward with a check for $35,000 from the Coast Pro-Rata Committee to be used to restore the Copra Crane. From left to right, longshore Local 10 retiree Joe Lucas, Wenzl, retired shipwright Archie Green, Ward, carpenters’ Local 2236 retiree Chester Chan, Local 34 retiree and Secretary of the CCLLA Don Watson, McEllrath and ILWU Historian Harvey Schwartz. Not pictured: Ironworkers Local 377 John Ford and John Rocha.  Photo by Tom Price.


Harry Bridges sailed the copra-laden ship Ysabel through San Francisco Bay in 1920, on his first visit. Copra, or dried coconut, once was a thriving industry in San Francisco. Now, on forlorn, rotting pilings in San Francisco’s Islais Creek, the last vestige of those days, the five-story tall Copra Crane, sits waiting for repairs.

But that wait is nearing an end. The Longshore Division voted $35,000 for repairs during its May caucus, and on June 21 International President Bob McEllrath and then-Coast Committeeman Joe Wenzl presented the check to Bill Ward, President of the Copra Crane Labor Landmark Assn. (CCLLA). Ward is also a former Coast Committeeman and a clerks Local 34 retiree.

“This crane gives younger workers a chance to look at some of the equipment we had to work with, and we plan on making a pictorial museum there,” Ward said. “It gives them a good idea that the work we used to do wasn’t just running machines.It was hard manual labor that really wore a fella down after a few years.”

For many years ILWU workers discharged copra from ships into the shed on Pier 84. Some of the pier can still be seen, decaying among the tilted pilings.

“They chopped the copra in the ship’s hold with picks and shovels,” Harvey Schwartz, Curator of the ILWU Oral History Collection, said. “They shoveled it into a blower system that sent it into a shed where it was processed by [warehouse] Local 6 members. The copra had to be squeezed and chemically treated to get the oil out. The after-product, a squeezed coconut pellet used for animal feed, would be blown out to the crane and longshore workers would load it into the vessels through the crane’s big spout.”

The check will go to Phase 1 of the repairs, according to Local 34 retiree Don Watson, secretary-treasurer of the CCLLA.

“Phase 1 means repairing the pilings under the crane,” Watson said. “That’ll cost around $35,000. In Phase 2 we will repair the platform. We need to get new wood decking and a steel brace around it. Phase 3 is sandblasting and painting the crane.”

There is hope there may be a museum site near the pier, Schwartz said. It could display photos and docker memorabilia. The crane represents the labors of sailors, longshoremen and all the workers in Pacific plantations who picked, processed and packed the copra. To the ILWU Bay Area Pensioners, it represents their labors in building the industry and their union.

“The main thing is to honor the old waterfront,” Watson said.

—Tom Price