I loved the banter as well as the substantive conversations around the packing table. I loved getting and filling orders, especially from podunk places like where I’d grown up. Most of all, I really liked everything about a print shop, about the skills and knowledge and literacy I was l picking up every day. (I even grew to like the solvent smell.) I felt accomplished and productive and that we were making the world a better place—maybe even changing the world, I thought.

 

I confess some of the first memories of the Press that jump to my mind are of injuries. (If you’re squeamish, you may want to skip ahead a few paragraphs.) A woman whose name I don’t remember, but who may have been Allison Berry, caught her cleaning rag and arm in the Chief 20 one evening. I took her to the emergency room in Roxbury (the closest hospital); her arm was a mess because her hand had been pulled into the rollers up to her wrist. Skin, muscles and tendons were sm­­ashed, and maybe some finger bones were broken. She was in total shock. So was I. She got weeks (months?) of rehab and workman’s comp, and I don’t know if she ever came back to work for the Press.

 

I also remember a man, probably Dan Kiefer, who stapled his own finger in the stitcher. As I recall, it was a weekend night, kind of late, and knowing that the Roxbury ER would be busy with more serious cases, I drove him to Harvard Community Health Center in Cambridge, if memory serves. Jim O’Brien confirmed my dim recollection that NEFP paid for medical insurance with them.

 

The machines we used lacked pretty basic safety equipment. I remember learning of a woman who caught her hair in the folder. Thankfully, someone was close enough to shut down the machine before she was scalped. Jill Goldstein told me the story when we worked together at Abt Associates, and I long envisioned the victim being Jill, but it may have been Meg Costello who, according to Annie Butler, caught her hair in a press at Union Square and was saved by Dickie Williams

 

A happier memory: On an oppressively hot day in August, the clouds suddenly opened and rain poured down. Spontaneously we all looked at each other, in our heads the unspoken, joyful thought: Hey, we own this place! We can do what we want! Someone pointed a thumb upstairs, someone else grabbed a bar of soap, and in unison we shut down our machines and ran to the roof, shucked all our clothes, and showered in the cooling rain. In retrospect, this story is a metaphor for success in a worker-owned cooperative. We worked really hard for subsistence wages, never missing a deadline that I remember. We did it because the work was our contribution to building a movement. And our reward was the occasional rain when we didn’t have to answer to any boss.

 

For better or worse, something else that comes to mind about the Press is the cockroaches. They were rampant. Forget to dump out a coffee mug at night and the next morning you’d find it crammed to the top with drowned roaches. Once, I decided to clean out behind the fridge and water cooler, and when I pulled the water cooler out, the back was wallpapered with roaches that immediately streamed every which way in the hundreds, maybe thousands. I was so shocked I literally jumped back, almost falling on the folder.

 

The Press put a “bug” on everything we distributed. I knew almost nothing about unions, and for a long time I thought our Movement Labor bug was a logo designed in honor of the resident cockroaches. Later I learned it was the logo used by subsistence-wage movement shops to proclaim affinity with union organizing (despite the fact that we were then too poor to join one). The NEFP officially joined the IWW after it moved to Union Square.

 

One final folder memory: on April 15, 1971, the FBI came to the Press to serve me a subpoena to testify before the Federal Grand Jury in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I had been warned that nine men in three cars had been to my house earlier that morning, and I decided to put them off a bit longer so I crawled under the folder to hide. I wrote a press release and later that afternoon accepted the subpoena from three huge, scary-looking men at the RESIST office; six more agents waited 

outside. I took the subpoena and laughed at them for needing nine agents to deliver one piece of paper.

​

One really notable thing about the Press was how many of us, particularly the women, stayed on in the trades or moved on to other traditionally "male" jobs. I left in 1972 to become a "real worker" at the in-house print shop at Boston Children's Hospital Medical Center; later, as a single parent who needed a better salary, I set up and managed the shop at Abt Associates. Jill Goldstein worked there for several years, too, and then got a job with USPS. Hester worked in a carton-making factory after she left the Press. Susanna Cobb was a cameraman (she was proud of the title!) and stripper at print shops in Watertown, MA and Berkeley, CA. When Karen Geise left Union Square, her next job was in an auto repair shop. Meg Costello became a Master Electrician. And Karen Townsend/Mae became the first woman to become a member of the California Printer's Union.

Associates. Jill Goldstein worked there for several years, too, and then got a job with USPS. Hester worked in a carton-making factory after she left the Press. Susanna Cobb was a cameraman (she was proud of the title!) and stripper at printshops in Watertown, MA and Berkeley, CA. When Karen Geise left Union Square, her next job was in an auto repair shop. Meg Costello became a Master Electrician. And Karen Townsend/Mae became the first woman to become a member of the California Printers’ Union.

Claudette Piper

December 2018