It may be cliched to end a dinner dance with the band playing “My Way,” but when the classic Frank Sinatra made famous was played last Monday night at a reunion here of Chicago firefighters some 1,500 miles from home, the lyrics captured the very spirit of the event.
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The reunion brought a group of Chicago firefighters to the Stardust Casino to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1980 firefighters strike, an event that not only remains a defining moment in their own lives, but one that continues to influence the internal dynamics and politics of the Chicago Fire Department.
Two decades ago, as they walked picket lines outside the city’s firehouses, the strikers dubbed themselves the Brotherhood of the Barrel, a reference to the fire-stoked cans that warmed them in the frigid winter days. And members, many of them now retired, cling to that label like an ultimate badge of honor. A red-and-white banner above the entrance to the Stardust’s Grand Ballroom read “Welcome B.O.B.,” and almost all of the 600 or so men and women who attended the weeklong reunion wore a golf shirt, hat or lapel pin with “B.O.B.” stamped across it.
But while some of the firefighters look back on the 23-day strike as a noble battle to a hard-won victory, others in the department lament the deep divisions between strikers and replacement workers hired during the strike that continue to polarize the department. The strike also engendered a lingering mistrust between the union and the administration, critics say.
Members of the Brotherhood of the Barrel have gathered here every year for the past 12 years, and this year, in addition to this event, 20th anniversary parties also were held in Florida and Chicago.
But the reunion at the Stardust was the biggest to date, with a week of golf outings, shopping, cocktail parties and plenty of reminiscing. About two-thirds of the participants in the reunion were retired, and they traveled from as far as Florida, California and Montana to attend.
But others, like Rich Diver, remain on active duty.
Diver said the reason the strikers remain so unified and righteous about their cause even 20 years later is simple: They collectively risked their careers to improve the working conditions in the Fire Department.
“There isn’t a guy here who thought the strike would last 23 days,” said Diver, a lieutenant and part-time travel agent who helped organize the reunion. “And there’s not a guy here who wasn’t scared. They took a risk. It created such a bond, whether you call it a Brotherhood of the Barrel or a friendship or whatever.”
Nancy O’Connor, whose husband, Joe, is now retired from the Fire Department, remembered the strike as a rough time when families struggled to pay bills and fretted about an uncertain future.
“It had never been done before,” she said of the strike. “And the guys were under a lot of stress about what they were doing. Twenty years later, and there’s still hard feelings.”
Some of those lingering effects of the strike were documented in a consultant’s study of the Fire Department, authorized by Mayor Richard Daley last year after a spate of embarrassing racial incidents.
“The strike has drawn a hard line between individuals and groups in the department and embedded the element of conflict into department culture and practices,” noted the report by the consulting firm TriData Inc. “When non-strikers are transferred to a strike crew house, they are met with subtle or openly hostile behaviors.”
Some members of the Brotherhood of the Barrel downplayed the tensions, insisting that they have largely dissipated as more and more strikers have retired. But others maintain that there remains a strong disdain toward firefighters and paramedics who were hired during the strike. Even today, fliers for retirement parties are marked with “B.O.B.” to make it clear that only strikers are welcome.
“A lot of guys put it on the line during the strike,” said Dan McGuire, a 21-year veteran. “When a guy comes in and takes your job, you’re not going to open your arms and say, `My friend.’ “
Tension had been building for years between the firefighters union, called the Chicago Fire Fighters Union Local 2, and the mayor’s office, before the firefighters struck on Valentine’s Day 1980.
Under the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, the union always had agreed to handshake deals. When he died in 1976, the union sought a formal contract from the city that included provisions for holiday pay, overtime, staffing levels on engines and a formal grievance procedure.
The city steadfastly refused. When the firefighters held their first strike vote in 1978 during the tenure of Mayor Michael Bilandic, the vote was narrowly defeated. During a hard-fought campaign for mayor that year, candidate Jane Byrne won the support of the city’s firefighters by promising to ratify a contract once she was elected.
But after Byrne won, firefighters accused her of reneging on the deal. By the time the union held another strike vote, many firefighters were enraged, and they overwhelmingly approved the walkout.
The strike ended after more than three weeks of on-again, off-again negotiations, with the city capitulating to many of the union’s demands, most notably a signed contract. But Byrne and some others continue to argue that the strike was unnecessary and irresponsible.
Attorney Roger H. Williams represented the estate of a woman killed in a fire during the strike. Though his lawsuit against the union was ultimately dismissed, he insists that his client was killed in part because the replacement firefighters were “inept.” In all, 24 people died in incidents involving calls for help from the Fire Department during the strike.
“Clearly, if not in a direct way, the strike was certainly a proximate cause of the death,” Williams said. “It’s just a shame that some people had to be sacrificial lambs who were totally outside the scope of this dispute.”
William Kugelman, the current union president who was the strike chairman in 1980, denied that the strike caused any of the deaths.
“I think some buildings burned down because of ineptness (on the part of replacement firefighters), but not any deaths,” he said.
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Byrne said she thought it was odd that the strikers celebrate an event that she remembers as the darkest days of her administration. She insists that the strike was unnecessary and that the firefighters eventually would have gotten a contract anyway.
“I have found the whole thing kind of braggadocio and silly,” she said. “It isn’t silly when you think of it as an illegal strike and breaking the law and leaving the citizens unprotected.
“The sadness to me was that they broke their oath (as firefighters) and they walked,” she said. “I think to many of them, that must weigh as heavily on their mind as some of it weighs on mine. They can pat themselves on the back all they want. But it was unnecessary.”
But at the Nevada resort featuring keno, slot machines and Wayne Newton, the members of the Brotherhood of the Barrel had little doubt that they did the right thing. One of them, Bill Cosgrove, even wrote a book about the history of the department that chronicled the 1980 strike and titled it, “The Noble Breed.”
Copies of the book, at $20 apiece, sold briskly near the entrance to the grand ballroom.
“It was a helluva thing to go through, but a necessary thing,” said Tom Bahr, 79, who retired immediately after the strike ended. “All of these guys made it a good job.”