Word: becking
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...Dave Beck-a man who has never been known to brawl himself-used violence as calculatingly as a general uses artillery. His teamsters could take care of themselves on almost any picket line. At one time he announced that hundreds of them were being trained in jujitsu and boxing for the sake of their health...
During the bitter jurisdictional battles of the 19305, Beck's teamsters also gathered a force of "goons"-hefty, beer-guzzling musclemen who wore heavy shoes for kicks to the groin and fought with baseball bats, fists, rocks or whatever other weapons came to hand...
...Wagner Act, the teamsters' pressure on their enemies never relaxed. Price-cutting dry-cleaning establishments were brought into line. This seemed to end an epidemic of mysterious explosions, with which they had been plagued. Laundries formed an employers' association to police their industry and appointed one of Beck's friends, Bill Short, to run it at a fine fee. Taxicab drivers were organized, after they got tired of being rammed by automobiles with steel rails for bumpers...
...Beck, who directed his confused and far-flung battles with consummate generalship, gained himself a magnificently effective ally. He backed a red-faced, ambitious attorney named John Francis Dore for mayor of Seattle. Dore won and said: "As long as I am mayor ... I am going to do all in my power to help the teaming unions...
...Strike. Beck also silenced the carping of Seattle's newspapers. When the American Newspaper Guild (then in the A.F.L.) struck Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Beck came to the Guild's aid. A mob of his hard-fisted cohorts surrounded the P-I building, beat up fleeing nonstrikers and closed the plant up tight as a coffin. Hearst set his writers to beating out virulently anti-Beck radio scripts. General Clarance B. Blethen, corpulent publisher of the Seattle Times, indignantly penned an editorial which ended with the ringing line: "How do you like the look of Dave...