Word: hoffa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...support her family, Viola Hoffa went to work, tirelessly washing and ironing the laundry that her two boys hauled home in a wagon. When Jimmy was about ten, the family moved 20 miles northwest to Clinton, on the Wabash River. The boys chopped and sold wood, set out trotlines in the river, caught catfish, bass, suckers; some were sold, the rest were eaten at home. They scraped the bottom of the Wabash for mussels, boiled them in big oil drums, sold the shells to button makers at the rate of $6 a ton. They learned how to take care...
When Mrs. Hoffa took her children to Detroit's two-fisted southwest side, the boys continued their endless search for a buck. One day they would haul ashes; the next would bring a handsome $2 for passing out handbills (patent-medicine ads) to workers at the Ford River Rouge plant. Soon afterward, Jimmy, who was later to lecture at Harvard, quit Neinas School after the ninth grade...
...tough life. Brother Bill took the crime road: felonious assault (1938), violation of probation (1940), carrying concealed weapons (1942). Today Bill Hoffa is a business agent for Teamster Local 614 in Pontiac, Mich...
Berries & Bruises. Ambitious Jimmy Hoffa, a smarter boy, hardened his muscles on a series of jobs, most of them part-time, until at 18 he hoisted himself into steady work in Detroit with the Kroger grocery chain. The job: unloading boxcars at 32? an hour. Jimmy and his co-workers got paid only for actual hours worked, though they had to stay close by the loading platforms for 12 to 15 hours a day. In 1932 Jimmy organized a strike. Gathering a six-man committee, he made his demands on the management just as a carload of strawberries and cantaloupes...
...cracking his teeth into raw coal, Jimmy took a hungry bite of victory. Within two years he had acquired an A.F.L. charter, moved his boys into the Teamsters Union, taken over the trusteeship of debt-ridden Teamster Local 299 in Detroit. Singlemindedly, he shoved ahead. "In those days," says Hoffa in his rough, staccato voice, "Detroit was the toughest open-shop town in the country. It was like a dime crime novel, with all the shootings and slug-gings. I was hit so many times with nightsticks, clubs and brass knuckles that I can't ever remember where...