Word: becking
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...exhilarating and heady experience for Dave Beck, a man who is fond of recalling that he had come up a hard and rocky road. He was born in Stockton, Calif, in 1894. His father, a Tennessee-born carpet cleaner named Lemuel Beck, brought his family to Seattle four years later, seeking a handhold on the better life. Lemuel Beck never found it. As his growing son soon discovered, he was the "world's worst businessman...
...energy, enthusiasm and his loud, table-thumping speeches caught the eye of Michael ("Bloody Mike") Casey, the famed leader of San Francisco's teamsters. Casey recommended him to Dan Tobin, and in 1926 Tobin made Beck a teamster organizer. It was a wise, decision...
When redheaded Dave Beck took office, the gusty breath of all this excitement still hung in the air. The headsaws of lumber mills screamed along almost every lake and waterway. Loggers, fishermen, sailors and bums lounged by the hundreds beside the Skidroad's missions, hash joints and flophouses. Seattle's tough cops still took pride in using force sufficient to make an arrest, and dragged in many a prisoner by the heels...
...education, community clubs, home cooking, Sunday automobile trips to Snoqualmie Falls, and solid construction in municipal buildings. The core of its population was composed of thrifty, churchgoing Scandinavians who enjoyed the rain and yearned to own their own homes. It was a city which liked rose bushes. Dave Beck mirrored its conflicting personality. But for years, Seattle was indignant at its own reflection...
...Beck thought the Wobblies were crazy. He considered them dynamite-loving, song-singing romantics who bayed for the class struggle, but never seemed to know where they were going. But employers who had pistol-whipped Wobblies out of town had no more charitable reaction to more sensible union men with sensible ideas. In the hard world of labor organization there was no substitute for power and little power without violence...