Labor Disputes, Bombs, & the Fair
Pillars of Salt, Post Eight
We stopped in Bobby F. Ferguson Park, on the northeast side of Texarkana, sometime around 10:30 in the morning. A trail wound from the parking lot, across a wooden bridge spanning a long, snaking pond filled with ducks, and back away to several playgrounds toward which Wendell ran, looking back over his shoulder from time to time to make sure we still followed behind him. Across the calm water from the bridge was a little building with a dock and some bathrooms, which were closed. Around the playgrounds, down to the edge of the water, tall pine trees provided shade and made the ground soft with fallen needles.
Wendell chased the ducks, pointing and calling “Duck! Duck! Duck!” as he ran, stopping along the waters edge with us looking warily over him as he proclaimed, “I want to go in!” gesturing generally at the water.
The park was named after a former mayor of Texarkana, a graduate of the local high school who attended both Texarkana Community College and Oklahoma Baptist University before being drafted into the military. He met his wife, finished out his military service at Fort Riley in Kansas, before returning to Texarkana to take a position with the Walsh-Lumpkin Drug Company where he worked for 44 years as a pharmaceutical salesman.
He would have still been associated with Walsh-Lumpkin in 1987 when the drug company’s president, 36 year-old Darryl Crouch, was killed by a bomb rigged to explode when he attempted to start his car. His wife and daughter were both severely injured, but survived. Surrounding cars were destroyed and buildings shook, causing people to come running to see what had happened. No one knows who placed the pipe-bomb that killed Crouch nor what could have motivated them to do so.
Twenty-eight years prior, Walsh-Lumpkin had been involved in a labor dispute with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, Local 878. The drug company eventually lost a lawsuit, appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, which upheld the original ruling on October 6, 1960.
The labor dispute began when the Board’s Regional Director certified the Teamsters as the exclusive bargaining representative of the company’s employees on January 30, 1959. But by July, the company was refusing to bargain with the Teamsters and engaged in a series of union busting activities between July 22 and August 3 of that year. These anti-union shenanigans included the usual interference, restraint, and coercion, but also involved attempts to circumvent union representatives and bargain with ad-hoc groups or else with individual employees. Workers went on strike beginning August 3 and held the line until December 1.
At the time, Walsh-Lumpkin was headed by the brothers William Pearson Walsh and Ben Pugh Walsh who served as the secretary-treasurer and vice president respectively, while their father, William P. Walsh, remained as president in semi-retirement. A similar leadership hierarchy arose again in 1987, when William Pearson Walsh owned the company and his son-in-law, Darryl Crouch, was acting president. At the time, Crouch was also serving as the vice president of Humco Emerson Laboratories, Co. and president of the Tristate Surgical Supply Co. based in Joplin, Missouri.
Back in ‘59, Pearson Walsh was personally involved in the labor dispute, having called employees Howard, Blankenship, Davenport, and Moore individually into his office to confront them over whether or not they had signed union cards. All of the men affirmed that they had signed cards, and were reminded of their pay and benefits and were warned said benefits would be imperiled if the union came in. They were accused of being ungrateful — Davenport was told by Walsh that if Walsh felt toward his employer as Davenport apparently did, then he would quit. Indeed, perhaps Davenport should quit, if he knew what was good for him.
Negotiations over a 5-cent raise reached a stalemate. Pope Walsh, Pearson’s son, occupied a managerial position similar to that of foreman and ran interference for management in their attempts to persuade employees to drop the union. Sometime in late July, Pope approached Donny Fulenwider with the idea that workers could get a 10-cent raise if they followed Fulenwider in abandoning the union. It was part of a broader extortion strategy to undermine negotiations. Fulenwider questioned Pope, pressing management about recent hires brought on at a higher rate of pay. Pope was believed by employees to be pressuring his father to raise wages to $1.25 an hour because both men believed the minimum wage law would be amended soon and the company would have to marginally raise wages anyway.
Meanwhile, another foreman and accomplice of Pope, a man named Melvin Gentry who had been working in the shipping department for 17 years and made $1.89 — or 25-cents more an hour than the other employees — enlisted Kenneth Pirtle, a checker in the shipping department, to meet with Pope. Union employees had been slowing the pace of work to pressure management to raise wages. Pope was hoping to entice Gentry and Pirtle to form a company union and draw members and thereby power away from the Teamsters. The company was offering, through Pope, to pay the lawyers fees that would accrue from breaking the Teamsters and forming a company union. Pope disparaged the character of the union workers, saying they should stand for themselves instead of bringing someone else in to speak for them.
About 15 employees met at Gentry’s home the evening of August 1, representing a cross-section of roles in the company’s warehouse — truck drivers, order fillers, packers, and checkers. They heard the company’s offer. The proposal for a company union. The promises of wages based on those of competitors with higher pay scales, some of which were themselves represented by a union such as McKesson & Robbins where wages were as much as 30-cents higher per hour than at Walsh-Lumpkin. But Pope had not gotten his father’s agreement to these terms. He could only promise to talk to his father. That he was sure he could convince the old man to raise wages close to their competitors.
No one bought it. All 15 workers stood with their union.
Pope went to his father with the news. On the morning of Sunday, August 2, procedures began within the Teamsters that would result in the lawsuit against Walsh-Lumpkin. The strike began August 3.
The Walsh’s and management refused to negotiate with the Teamsters, attempted to get the strikers to drop the union once more while Pugh Walsh personally handed out reinstatement forms as his brother and father looked on, and brought on scabs. When the strike ended and the workers applied for reinstatement, the Walshes said there was no work for them, that they had been replaced during the strike.
Part of the ultimate ruling was that the striking workers would be fully reinstated and made whole for lost wages resulting from the discrimination against them. The Walsh family had made it clear that they were fighting the union more than higher wages. The wanted the union out, and target its individual members to break it.
Aside from his career-long association with the union busting Walsh-Lumpkin Drug Company, Bobby Ferguson also spear-headed the relocation of the Four States Fair from Spring Lake Park in Texas to it’s current location adjacent to the park named in his honor, in Arkansas.
It had begun in 1940 as a rodeo held at the Texarkana Baseball Park. By 1945, it was the Four States Fair, dedicated to the “scientific and educational encouragement of Agriculture, Horticulture, Livestock, Poultry, and Farm Products by maintenance of public fairs and expositions and promote generally the welfare of the same in the state and nation.” Year after year, the fair expanded its scope and built facilities in Spring Lake Park. A permanent building was commissioned in 1949 to house the merchants selling their wares at the fair, which was completed in 1950 when ticket booths were also added at the entrance to what was becoming a fairground. The next year, foundations were laid for a Fine Arts building. Approval was also granted to expand the equestrian programming with a Quarter Horse show in addition to the rodeo. The Fine Arts building was finished in 1952 at the same time that asphalt streets, curbs, and gutters were constructed within the fairgrounds. A stage was put up in the arena to host the Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey Show in 1953.
The Dorsey Brothers are perhaps best known for hosting Elvis Presley’s first television appearance on January 28, 1956. Elvis was a regular performer at the Arkansas Auditorium, playing some nine shows there between 1954 and 1955. At his last show there, November 17, 1955, the King was joined by Johnny Cash. Cash was surprised to find Presley hand-washing his cherished pink and white Cadillac, the performer’s primary mode of transport at the time, which had famously caught fire on the road to Texarkana after a show in Hope, Arkansas. The car had been damaged again in an accident just 15 miles south of town when steel-guitar player Scottie Williams drove head on into another vehicle as it attempted to pass a pick-up truck. The accident caused Presley to be late to his September 2 performance in town.
It was 1979 when Bobby Ferguson proposed to move the Four States Fair to its present location — a 104 acre plot that would be deeded to the Fair for free.
That is where I stood, chasing ducks and my kid while my spouse searched for a bathroom. There is the history we know, the one that makes us feel good and encourages us to shake, rattle, and roll. The local girl who kissed the King in his pink Cadillac. The one who received her lost purse back and convinced herself she started all the other girls to screaming when Elvis gyrated his hips.
Then there is the labor that built these towns, buried in the legal record. Arkansas is one of the first two states to enact so-called “right to work” laws in November, 1942. The other was Florida. The Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation partnered with the American Christian Association to petition the Arkansas General Assembly to enact the law. The Farm Bureau in particular was interested in destroying the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, which would organize agricultural workers including or especially Black workers. Vance Muse, a Texan who lobbied successfully for corporate interests across the South, was proud that he and his group helped “peace officers to quell disturbances and keep the color line drawn in our social affairs” and “protect the Southern Negro from communistic propaganda and influences.” Of course, this campaign was kicked off on Labor Day, 1941, by an editorial in the Dallas Morning News by William Ruggles, who actually called for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would outlaw any contract that required employees to become union members. It was Ruggles who coined the term “Right to Work,” a euphemism for the anti-union legislation he was modelling for the country in Texas, Arkansas, and elsewhere.
A woman walked her granddaughter around the playground. Birds chirped in the trees. Away across the gently rolling field was the big building with “Four States Fair” boldly printed above the large sliding barn-doors. As we left, a pair of Black men, father and son perhaps, gathered fishing gear from the trunk of their car, talking boisterously about their problems at work, the petty tyrants they worked for. Hidden labor, always, in this country, bound up with race, what Vance Muse called “the color line.” It has been drawn in anti-union laws. It has been given harmless sounding names, even favorable sounding names. On the surface, in the stories that are easy to access, it all shimmers like a dream.
We left in the high sun, the car slowly cooling inside as we sped on to Memphis.
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