Hotel strike in New York

I found myself the other noon time at a luncheon. I use the French idiom 'I found myself' because I don't go to lunch or take it and before I begin to sound pompous, I'd better say that this is not a moral or a dietary decision, I got out of the habit of a midday meal about 40 years ago when, as a British correspondent here, I was working by the London clock. In other words, my deadline was 6, 7, sometimes 8pm British time or one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock Eastern American time.

I have never regretted abandoning this normal habit. The telephones don't ring, much work can be done. Best of all, I've come to notice, you go through life avoiding, with no effort, half the bores of the world.

But this luncheon was special. It was compulsory, it was a sad duty, it was a wake. But since the friend who had died was a warm, genial, humble giant of a man who had lived a long, full life, had hosts of friends and may have thought mean things but never said them, the lunch was a celebration and a meal with no tears shed.

That the meal was served at all was something of a post-mortem miracle, for it was held in what the old man – a gentleman of the old school – would have called an hotel. As I talk, there are over 60 New York City hotels and all the top ones out on strike, the staff that is, the waiters, the stewards and maids, cooks, bottle washers, the janitors, the lift men, the receptionists, the laundresses, the lot. Most ominous note of all, the union that collects the garbage is honouring, as they put it, the strikers and it's been our experience that strikes which involve restaurants or food stores tend to get broken not by the parties of the first part, but by these collateral sympathisers, although Mayor Koch has declared a health hazard and brought in outsiders.

The church where the memorial service was held was only five blocks south of the hotel, but the skies were dumping stair rods on us in a continuous storm. It was the first real rain we've had in about two months and the mayor has proclaimed a drought emergency which forbids such exercises as watering lawns or golf courses and prohibits the ancient American custom of service ice water automatically with the serving plates.

Most of the people at the church had either driven into town and were sloshing off to garages or were standing around hopelessly hailing invisible cabs. I decided to slog through the stair rods and arrived at the hotel soaked to the toenails but happy and early. I was the first guest there. The main entrance had two triangles of police barricades flanking the entrance. Behind the barricades were more pickets and none of them made rude noises. They just waved placards and hunched against the rain. Inside the lobby I pressed the lift button and waited and eventually the door slid open and a dazed youth wondered aloud where was the private dining or reception room.

After a committee meeting, which took about ten minutes, it was decided that the second floor must be it. So it was. There was an elegant reception room with bottles on a white tablecloth in one corner and through folding doors a glimpse of four or five round tables handsomely laid and dotted with place cards. A couple arrived and we stood and talked for 15 minutes or so before the maître d', clearly an old hand and a new hand, suggested something to drink. By that time, we were ready to respond with Terry Thomas's memorable line, 'What an absolutely priceless idea!'.

The maître d' retired to the white tablecloth, the impromptu bar, and murmured something to two waiters in white coats. One of them, who bore a striking resemblance to Stan Laurel, watched the maître d' perform the remarkable feat of pouring tomato juice and vodka over ice in a small glass and stabbing a sliver of lime on the rim. The waiter took it up at once, but the maître d' hissed, 'A tray! Get a tray!' 'A what?' said Stan Laurel. There were quick, secret masonic signs pointing to doors and, no doubt, to a kitchen. Well, the two waiters got the hang of things in no time and, when we all went in to lunch, it was obvious that the crisis was over. The waiters at lunch were pros and three courses and many bottles of wine were served without a hitch.

The fact is, that in spite of the present, raging prosperity of a couple of thousand New York restaurants, there is still a legion of waiters and hotel help out of work or on hand, anyway, for just such a crisis. Many hotels are advertising by word of mouth, if not in full-page ads, that service is being maintained by what they call emergency personnel – what, in some places, is known as scab labour. So far there's been hardly any unpleasantness, as the managers put it, which, in this day and age, is remarkable.

The Waldorf Astoria, for instance, has been housing – or hosting, if we must – a world congress of about 2,000 cardiologists. They held their meetings, they showed their slides, they had their cocktail parties and dinners in the ballroom and an English doctor, who was interviewed on television, said, 'I've never seen anything like it. Apart from the pickets outside, you'd hardly know anything was unusual. I assure you,' he assured us, 'things would be very different, I'm afraid, in my country.'

I don't know whether this is true or not and, as if to mock him, reports came in that evening of a fight between two pickets and three scabs applying for jobs in one hotel. At another, arriving guests were taunted with catcalls, but no missiles. Over 300 striking kitchen workers paraded or snaked through mid-town banging pots and pans outside various hotels in turn. But, so far, in a city with the staffs of 60 struck hotels, there have been no more than a dozen or so arrests.

Now the quarrel, as usual, is over wages and wage rises but the sticking point seems to be the same as the one that has grounded most of the pilots of United Airlines for going on three weeks. It's the curious new insistence by management on what they call a two-tier wage system, whereby new employees would be paid less than old or regular employees. I may have been asleep for the past year or two through current developments in labour-management relations but, surely, this is a new note? What happens to seniority? I was going to say, what happens to the apprentice system, except that even I know that that has gone with the ten-hour day and children in sweatshops.

At any rate, neither the airline pilots nor the striking hotel workers appear to be ready to accept anything other than a single rate of pay. I don't know whether this tactic is familiar to other democracies but the two-tier principle is evidently here to stay or to be fought.

While I was looking over the reports of this new and, at the moment it seems, insoluble issue in the Metropolitan section of the New York Times, a name in a two-column headline came leaping off the same page. A name I don't think I have seen in a newspaper or, come to think of it, in a literary magazine or a book review, in perhaps a quarter of a century.

The name was there because last Wednesday was the 150th anniversary of the man's birth and a small ceremony to celebrate it had been arranged at a small church down on Lower Fifth Avenue – a church famous in this city because, in the past, so many literary and theatrical stars have been married or mourned there. It has the engaging name of The Little Church Around the Corner.

Well, who was this great man, so completely unsung for so long and, I think, unread that the mere printing of his name was a shocker? When I was a boy, I believed that if you'd quizzed the pupils in any English secondary or grammar school and challenged them to name three American authors, I'll bet that Longfellow would have been the first name – Hiawatha was compulsory reading in my time – then, probably, Mark Twain and then, after a possibly long pause, O. Henry. I wonder how many schoolchildren today or, for that matter, teachers have ever heard of him, let alone read him.

O. Henry. He was, from the turn of the century and on into the 1920s, generally thought of as the master of the short story. Later the popular view was that the surprise endings of his stories had become too contrived and mechanical. At any rate, he fell from favour and vanished into oblivion. His life story is a variation on the Mark Twain type of loner, roamer, during the nineteenth century. His true name was William Sydney Porter, born in North Carolina, worked in a drugstore and then off to a ranch in Texas, then in a land office, in a bank in the Midwest.

What is not typical is that in 1896 when he was 34, he was indicted for embezzling the bank's funds. He fled the country to Honduras, came back for his wife's fatal illness, went to the penitentiary for three years and, while in prison, wrote stories about the south-west and Central America and when he was 40, he arrived in New York. And for the next, the last, eight years of his life, turned out a never-ending collection of stories about Texas, Central America, but more and more about New York which he called Baghdad-on-the-subway. And became world famous. He died, at 48, in 1910.

An astute and exacting critic of literature remarked on the fine accuracy of his Texas stories and, about the best of his work, concluded that 'as much as of any modern writer, it can be said that he had no talent, only genius. I should guess that the time is ripe for an O. Henry revival.'

What brought his name into that headline was the memorial service planned at The Little Church Around the Corner, by a happenstance that O. Henry himself might have contrived, nobody, not even the church officials, noticed that the same day the church had been booked for a wedding. Too late to call off one or the other. The church garden was merry with the greetings and laughter of the wedding guests. Inside the pallbearers were going through their solemn motions.

In what surely would have been the last paragraph of the O. Henry story, there was one lay official who emerged as a model of tact and poise. As each guest arrived at the church door, he politely asked, 'Excuse me! Are you here for the wedding or the funeral?'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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