The Book: The Kohler Strike Of 1954; Health Warnings For Cigarette Advertising; The Teamsters And Jimmy Hoffa’S Personal CPA

Epilogue

I AM A KOHLER STRIKER’S DAUGHTER

Ann knew a lot about unions even though she had never been a member of one. She learned the hard way about them, by growing up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin during the 1954 Kohler strike. Her Dad was a Kohler Company striker, and an accused strike agitator.

Wind is always brutal and never stops whipping up waves on Lake Michigan. Its pristine dark-blue waters appear endless, with mysteries of sunken bodies, lost ships, broken dreams and secrets as prodigious as any in history.

On a clear summer night, the moon and stars reflect off the water and glisten, in the distance, but in winter as a young girl when Ann walked along its shoreline, the air was so cold she feared it would freeze her lungs at each breath she took.

Her compulsion to discover what was beyond that lake would lead to many unimaginable experiences for her. Unlike some of her family and beloved lifelong friends, who chose to travel on safer or less daring roads, she was quick to embrace risk and change.

Streets, houses, grocery stores, schools, churches, taverns and even people in Sheboygan, Wisconsin don’t ever seem to change much. The harbor was always beautiful, and clean with small fishing boats docked near magnificent yachts owned by wealthy adventurers. Sheboygan is a community of mostly German heritage. About fifty thousand people lived there when Ann attended school; that number included nine members of her immediate family.

Ann’s mother Ruby and her step Dad Norman Schreiber met during World War II while he was serving in the American Air Force. Ruby was as beautiful as her name implied. She was a youthful red-headed widow who already had a son and daughter, living in a tiny dusty west Texas town. He was a good-looking soldier stationed at a nearby military base and had two adolescent sons of his own who lived with his first wife in Sheboygan. After the War ended, Norman returned to his hometown and took Ruby, three-year-old Ann and five-year-old Joe with him. About a year or two later he officially adopted Ruby’s children. By the time ten more years passed, her parents had five more sons of their own.

Being the only daughter in the family was sometimes fun for Ann, but mostly it was challenging. It taught her how to fight for survival at a very young age. The boys seemed to discover new ways to tease her unmercifully. Crying or running to parents for help was out of the question because that would only make matters worse. They would wait patiently to surprise her with a new form of childhood torture when their parents were not home. One of the most creative tortures was to tie a rope around Ann and secure her to the old oak tree in the back yard for several hours with their neighbor Louie’s German Shepard dog Skippy growling and guarding her so that she could not escape. It was harmless for Skippy, Louie and her brothers, but not so much for Ann.

Visitors to Sheboygan today would never suspect that locals were once credited with being instrumental in the changing of labor laws for factory workers throughout most of the free world. The city’s amazing industrial history began when a strong, smart and handsome man named John Michael Kohler moved to Sheboygan from Austria in the late 1800s. He bought a large plot of farmland a short drive southwest from the city. He started a foundry, and machine shop and appropriately named it Kohler Company. It became well known for making plumbing products.

Ann laughed out loud when she was told this company got in the bathtub business by inventing a watering trough for horses that also doubled as a family bathtub. That first tub was sold to a farmer for one cow and fourteen chickens.

John Michael set high standards for all future Kohler family generations. They became successful industrialists who moved forward with steadiness of a freight train that could not be stopped. The entire family realized tremendous influence in social and political circles while Kohler Company evolved into a business with enormous impact on the community’s economic life in America and abroad. Kohler family men became globally respected for leadership qualities along with their business expertise. Many likened the Kohlers to the Rockefellers.

When farmers and factory workers began arriving in Sheboygan from Europe to work at Kohler plant in the early 1900s, they did so for economic reasons as well as to escape from tyranny surfacing with great force in their homelands. A lot of the workers were born in Holland, Belgium and other European countries but the relocating Germans far outnumbered all others.

It is safe to say that men who had relocated from Europe to work at the factory were promised a great life in America. They were told the company would give them good wages and benefits. Such a life was previously only a dream for them. Many men did not hesitate to board boats destined for Southeast Wisconsin.

After their arrival, a few of the more creative skilled workers dominated other smaller businesses like building furniture, baking bread that had the aroma of heaven, making sausages from family recipes, or brewing beer. Ann always thought the smartest entrepreneurs were those who created products in the brewing industry, including Blatz, Miller, Pabst and Schlitz beers.

Kohler Company hired so many European men that locals enviously whispered, You almost have to be a foreigner to get a job at the plant. In a public display of pride and support for their foreign workers, a member of the Kohler family hierarchy or an appointed upper level executive accompanied men from their new jobs at the plant to the Sheboygan County Courthouse to apply for citizenship papers. After being naturalized the company held large banquets in their honor. Guests always included new arrivals so they would work harder and faster when they saw what their future could hold.

If the truth were known, Kohler Company hired foreigners because they worked harder and cheaper than labor forces on this side of the ocean.

Hallways in the company’s main office display murals. In the early 20th century, a famous muralist by the name of Arthur Sinclair Covey was hired to paint seven very large mural panels depicting laborer’s toiling at work with furnaces spewing fire in the background. One panel is inscribed with the words, He Who Toils Here Has Set His Mark; the other is inscribed with the phrase To the Men Whose Cooperation Has Made This Organization/This Hall Is Dedicated.

The murals impressed Ann when she saw them. She was fourteen years old when she saw them for the first time but forever she was awestruck with the artist’s creations. There was nothing else like those paintings in Sheboygan. There were days when she stood in the hallway staring at the paintings for such a long time that the company guard was ordered to ask her to leave.

Kohler Village was incorporated in 1912 and is located only a few miles west of Sheboygan, near the plant that encompassed several hundred acres. This village was developed as an outstanding garden industrial community for housing company executives and workers.

John Michael’s son Walter J. Kohler traveled to Europe on a family project to study other garden communities. After returning home Walter received family and government approval to proceed with bringing to life his own vision for a garden village. He hired Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape architect who designed Central Park in New York City and the Biltmore Estate grounds, to help him design one of the greatest planned communities in America. Walter named his beloved project Kohler Village.

The American Club on Main Street in Kohler Village was strategically constructed across the street from the factory. It was designed and built to accommodate immigrant workers. It featured sleeping and dining rooms, a pub, bowling alley and other facilities where workers could relax, study or exercise.

It has since been renamed American Club Resort and is now recognized as one of America’s most luxurious resort destinations.

While Kohler Village is possibly one of the world’s greatest planned communities, it is not where Ann’s family lived.

They lived on County Trunk Y; a desolate and quiet road located a few miles north of Sheboygan.

Almost all men in southeast Wisconsin wanted to be employed for Kohler Company at one time or another. During the Great Depression and following the Second World War, able-bodied men in Sheboygan dreamed of having jobs there so they could provide adequate food, housing and education for growing families.

Norman wanted to work at Kohler. He talked about it to anyone who would listen. After several years of being able to only work at odd jobs like mowing grass or collecting trash on road sides, the day came when he was thrilled to finally get the job he wished for. When Ann looks back at that day she also remembers something her mother taught her and she never forgot, Be careful what you wish for, wishes have a tendency to come true.

Kohler Company business prospered greatly through federal contracts and housing booms. Public buildings, government structures, factories and homeowners all needed plumbing fixtures. However, when the housing boom declined, Kohler was swift to let workers go or give them fewer hours to work.

Indeed Kohler Company employees had jobs with minimal benefits, but those jobs came with attached challenges. The company was quick to hire hungry men who were unemployed. There was always a job for laborers like that even though they were often given unbearable piecework assignments that pitted them against fellow workers in an effort to produce more and more output. Workers who were outdone by another always stood the risk of being fired.

Conditions such as those made for unhappy workers but maximum productivity for the thriving Kohler manufacturing factory.

When it became necessary for layoffs due to the nation-wide economic depression of the era, Sheboygan men were among the first to be laid off as most men living in Kohler Village had mortgaged their homes with the company’s Building & Loan Association and signed agreements that authorized payroll deductions for payments. Complaining was of little or no use and more often than not resulted in repercussions such as longer layoffs, harder work, and less pay.

In early 1950, workers expressed a strong desire to unionize. That was the alarm bell Kohler Company owners never wanted to hear.

In a display of self-defense along with a massive public relations campaign, the company formed its own union, Kohler Workers Association (KWA). They reasoned that a company union would fulfill all obligations to represent worker grievances and they thought workers would agree. It was actually a surprise to the Kohler family when they learned their expensive public relations campaign failed, leaving few people to believe the KWA was in their best interests.

Workers as well as area communities became anxious over what might happen if disagreements between the company and its workers could not be resolved. The sad and true fact is that the fate of employees was entirely dictated by the company. They would surely be ignored or fired if they became suspected of stirring up support to a union other than KWA.

Resentment towards the company began to fester in the minds and hearts of workers. That included Norman.

Norman had come from a large family with many brothers, sisters and in-laws who frequently joined him in taverns to drink beer and talk about unions and discuss what would happen if a union was former and it called a strike against Kohler Company.

When they went into a tavern and if Ann was lucky and quiet, she’d get to go along and read Wonder Woman comic books while listening to the men talk. Although it is difficult to explain why, from the time she could first remember, she genuinely enjoyed hearing about unions. She greatly respected hard working people. Their work ethics had a lifelong impact on her and instilled in her the same traits.

Ann became particularly engrossed in an interesting conversation Norman and his brothers had about the Kohler Company strike of 1934, which happened a full seven years before she was born.

Bennie was her favorite uncle, and he talked more than anyone Ann ever met in her ten years of living in Sheboygan. In fact, he rarely stopped talking except to drink his Kingsbury beer.

Bennie explained that the plant had a railroad entrance for trains pulling cars filled with coal that was used to keep furnaces fired up. When that strike started, he said, Pickets stopped trains from going on the plant grounds. They told police that were standing beside the tracks that no train would be able to enter until the train conductor received entry permission from the union. Bennie proudly added with a wry smile, Even the Vice President of Kohler was unable to get that train through.

All of the strike talk mesmerized Ann. Her uncle Bennie said the Kohler Village Chief of Police threw tear-gas bombs at the picketers. He made her laugh when he told her about the men in the picket lines who had vinegar-soaked sponges to hold over their noses with one hand while they caught the bombs and threw them back at the Police Chief with the other hand. That story was told often and each time it was met with laughter and somebody buying another round of beer for the men and a Hires Root Beer for Ann.

Ann listened attentively to many other stories, including one about a secretive narrow section of piping in the utility tunnel between the American Club and plant powerhouse that had been enlarged for company use. Several Kohler executives were said to have used this tunnel and spent 12 days locked inside the plant, but they still had to eat and sleep. That tunnel was then used to take food supplies into the plant for them, but in fact, it was used for much more than transporting food. It was also used for passage of ladies who helped the men sleep and arms carriers who brought in guns and other weapons for protection.

No matter what room or tavern they were in, Norman and his brothers would look around the room to make sure no one was listening to them before discussing strikes. Ann tried to act like she could not hear them but in truth, she heard every single word they said.

The locals voiced differing opinions about striking or not striking. No matter what side they were on, absolutely everyone vehemently agreed they were prepared to support their stand for as long as it took to win or lose a strike.

Norman’s emotions became fueled by anger on many occasions during these discussions, and that was when Ann’s uncles spoke more softly, and she had to edge her way closer to the table to hear what was being said and she had to do it so she was not noticeable to her step Dad. Sometimes she would crawl beneath the table and sit quietly so she heard more clearly.

Ann felt like she was listening to a spellbinding ghost story. Her uncle Bennie said to his brothers, I was in Kohler Village one night in thirty-four when it overflowed with spectators and strikers. Village deputies were right there among that crowd. Suddenly, missiles, stones, sticks, bricks and anything anyone could pick up from the street were thrown at windows of the plant offices. Ten or fifteen minutes later, shots were fired from the direction of the American Club and tear-gas bombs were thrown by cowardly men who had been hiding inside the offices that lined the street opposite to the plant. Guns were used after they ran out of tear-gas.

Everyone within ear shot in the tavern became still. Norman took a long sip of his Kingsbury as Bennie continued, It was a full-on riot; I was even scared to death because I knew Kohler Company had a stockpile of weapons, powerful ones, and its deputies showed no mercy.

Ann’s heart pounded harder and harder as she listened. The picture of such a riot made her shiver with fear. But then the story got even worse.

That same night, Bennie declared as he slammed his bottle of beer down on the bar table, two family friends who were strikers were simply walking on Main Street in the village when they were shot dead, in their backs.

Ann simply could not imagine anyone being shot and killed if they did no harm to anyone or damage to anything and were only walking alongside the street. She knew that wasn’t right, no matter how anyone else looked at it.

Her uncle described that night as being nothing but chaos, After the shooting, everyone trampled over each other in efforts to leave the scene. Hell, I ran half-way from the Village to Sheboygan in order to get away from there.

Norman said that it was never determined who shot those two men, and no one was charged with the crimes so whomever did it got away with murder. Everyone in southeast Wisconsin referred to it as a case of "Murder on Main Street.’ There was little anyone could do about it.

Such is the power of money coupled with industry, backroom and courtroom friendships.

Murder trials were necessary to try and get down to the truth but they were little more than a farce and were held simultaneously in an effort for the city and company to save time and money.

The two men’s funerals took place on two successive days in Sheboygan. During their funerals, Bennie said, thousands of people looked like zombies as they marched silently on downtown streets to mourn their union brothers. Young women held hands of their little children as they wailed loud enough to drown out the sounds of the tugboats docking at the harbor. Ann cried when her uncle finished telling that story. In her heart she knew those two men had been murdered and she wondered who killed them. She wondered if she knew the killers and if they were sitting at the bar.

No one wanted to hear more about those murders and funerals, maybe out of fear it might happen again.

Norman announced to Ann that it was time for them to go home.

In the car, he explained that first big strike took place nearly twenty years earlier but if a Kohler strike happened again, it would be really bad for the company, and it would be terribly disastrous to the family.

It was not out of the ordinary for Norman to take Ann and her four younger brothers (soon to be five) with him to his favorite tavern after he was through work on that day. That was his idea of entertainment. After all, movies were expensive and there were no television sets, computers, cell phones or electronic games.

Ruby was rarely with them when they went to taverns because she believed drinking beer was an evil thing to do, and she never liked to be present anywhere liquor was served. Ann’s older brother Joe didn’t go with them because he liked to cruise