For Wendell

Wendell Young 3^rd got himself elected president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776 in the Philly area when he was 23 years old and held that job for 44 years. He died in 2013.

The UFCW mostly represents grocery store workers, and I once asked Wendell how he got elected at such a young age.

“I knocked the other guy out of the box,” he said. How he did that was by getting the part-timers behind him, an idea nobody had before him. Wendell was a tough, very compassionate, very bright dude who got himself an MBA along  the way and didn’t stop learning and putting that knowledge to work until his passing.

I got to know Wendell when I was editor of a trade paper for the supermarket industry. He was a Philly guy, and it took a lot of knowing before he trusted you enough to be his friend. But when he did, it was all the way.

The last time I saw Wendell was at the bar of the Lobster House in Cape May not long before he died. Our conversations were out of a Russian novel once we became friends – no bullshit, truth upon truth, mostly from Wendell. He was dyslexic and not the most eloquent speaker, but he got his points across because of the passion and street smarts with which he made them. I learned a lot from Wendell.

What would he have made of Trump and how would he have reacted to the presidency of such a dangerous fraud?

Back in the day, I was publisher of one so-called “underground” paper and editor of another, and wrote for them both and another one, to boot.  One of the stand-up writers back then was John Meyerson, who went on to spend his whole career working with Wendell at the local. He’s sort of retired now but still deeply involved in things as Consultant on Legislation & Political Action for UFCW Local 1776.

John knew Wendell a hell of a lot better than I did, so I asked him how Wendell would have reacted to Trump.

“That’s an interesting question,” John said, “since Wendell appeared to some to be the same ‘type’ as Trump. The difference, of course, was that Wendell was the real deal, the genuine article, while Trump is a phony and a blowhard.

“I believe that Wendell would take Trump head-on. He would call Trump out in every way he could: letters to the editor, his radio program, and directly with his members and others in the labor movement. I believe that Wendell would be a resister. He would not wait and see what Trump would do before taking the offensive. He would tell anyone who would listen to look at how Trump ran his businesses and say that’s how Trump would run the country – for his own benefit without regard to the well-being of the nation or its workers.

“Wendell would use every tool in his arsenal: Thomas Jefferson to Walter Reuther and from Pope Leo X to Dorothy Day.

“Wendell couldn’t stand and wouldn’t abide a bully.”

Thanks, John. This column’s for Wendell.