Dutch Schultz in his workshop.by Tom Price
Many in the ILWU family remember Elias “Dutch” Schultz as the guy who told stories at Bloody Thursday picnics about the Spanish Civil War and the old days of longshoring.
But Schultz left behind a much deeper story when he died Aug. 29 at age 96—an eight-decade legacy of longshore history and political activism. The longshore Local 19 retiree also produced many highly acclaimed wood sculptures, some of which grace museums in the Seattle area.
Schultz was born Aug. 26, 1910 in Harlem, in New York City. He studied wood sculpture at a vocational high school and apprenticed as an ornamental carver in a picture frame factory. In order to make money, he started working as a longshoreman in New York shortly after high school.
“On the docks he had a very interesting history,” Shultz’s friend and fellow Spanish Civil War vet Abe Osheroff told The Dispatcher. “He was the subject of silent and sometimes open anti-Semitism. But this little guy stood up to them, just dealt with it very directly and won the respect, not just acceptance, of the guys on the docks.”
Like a large number of longshoremen, Schultz joined 2,800 other Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight fascism in Spain during that country’s revolutionary civil war between 1936 and 1939. In all, about 40,000 volunteers, including 1,250 Canadians, went to Spain in the unsuccessful attempt at stopping fascism.
Schultz survived Spain and joined the Army when WWII broke out. He served in the 87th Mountain Infantry Brigade of the 10th Division, and his unit occupied the island of Kiska in the Aleutians, where he received the Purple Heart for his wounds. The 87th then sailed for Europe to liberate Italy. His unit was among the first to cross the Po River in 1945, one of the last acts in the destruction of Nazism and Fascism in Italy.
He first saw Washington State while training on Mt. Rainier during the war. He met his wife Amelia in a leftist bookstore in Seattle, and they went off to Europe after the war where he pursued his studies in sculpture on the GI Bill. He used his talents in England, helping fix the war damage to the House of Commons. Then he settled in the Seattle area and returned to longshoring, this time in Local 19, in the late 1940s.
“He worked as a trucker on the dock and warehouse, and as a sling man,” his friend foremen’s Local 98 retiree Ray Nelson said. “He was a friend of my dad. I met Dutch two weeks after my dad died and we started a 50-year friendship. He had a strong opinion on everything. He was extremely active in the safety committee. His primary concern in the union was to have a safe work place. If you didn’t have a safe workplace, it didn’t matter how much money you made or benefits. First and primary was a safe workplace.”
Schultz also served on the Local 19 Executive Board and was active in the pensioners’ club.
“Other than being a wonderful friend and a caring person, he was a person who lived his ideals, didn’t compromise his ideals politically or otherwise,” Nelson said. “He was one of the truly dedicated people to progressive causes.”
He had very little formal education, at the same time he possessed an enormous amount of wisdom that came from life experience, Osheroff said.
“He was one of the very few working class artists,” Osheroff said. “There are guys who are poor artists, but Dutch was a working class guy, he worked, not only on the docks, but when he retired he worked every day on wood sculpture.
“Wood is a very hard material to do sculpture. They come out kind of ‘wooden’ and occasionally too stolid. He was able on occasion to make wood almost fly, or gently flow.”
In his sculptures, he portrayed social themes, including a statue of a longshoreman shot in the 1934 strike, dying in the arms of his mates. Among thousands of other sculptures, he did one of his comrades killed in Spain and another of a man holding a kestrel loosely in his hand, just as it flies off.
“I love birds and hate to see them tied up or trapped, just like I hate to see people trapped,” Schultz said in the Fall 1995 edition The Volunteer, a magazine by Spanish war vets. “It’s like having a ball and chain on.”
Dutch Schultz is survived by his former wife Amelia and his niece Mimi.
