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Bogey Man. In no small measure Harry Bridges can thank his enemies, particularly William Randolph Hearst, for his rise to national fame. The bitterness of unceasing attacks on him in the West Coast press has undoubtedly gained him more friends than enemies. As in the Presidential campaign last year, the workers began to suspect that if a man was so hated by Capital he must have considerable to offer to Labor. Privately and publicly damned as a communist, an alien agitator, a ruthless doctrinaire, an unscrupulous wrecker with a lust for power, Harry Bridges has become, in three years, the bogey man of the Pacific.
In the previous 34 years of his life Harry Bridges was completely obscure. Born at Kensington, Australia, in 1900, he was christened Alfred Renton Bridges. His father, an estate agent there, explains that his son was called Renton but "this name was a bit too much for his American Pals," who dubbed him Harry. At 17, after a sound schooling, Alfred Renton Bridges got a job as a clerk in a Melbourne firm called Sauls & McDougal, Ltd. It was his father's desire that his son eventually join him in business. But restless young Renton wanted to go to sea, and in the hope that he might be speedily discouraged, his father arranged with the skipper of a little ketch plying between Melbourne and Tasmania to take the boy for one stormy trip. Young Bridges loved it. In the next few years he was shipwrecked twice, being saved on one occasion by the buoyance of his mandolin.
Shipping as a seaman for San Francisco, he was legally admitted to the U. S. on April 12, 1930. For the next two years he shipped from U. S. ports, was arrested once in New Orleans for picketing during a seamen's strike. No charges were preferred and he was released without court hearing. His last job as a seaman was in the Coast & Geodetic Survey as a quartermaster on the U. S. S. Lydonia. It was while serving on the Lydonia that he met his future wife, who was born Agnes Brown in the Black. Craig Hills of Scotland, and brought to the U. S. by her parents at age 12. Shortly after he met her, Harry Bridges gave up the sea, settling down in San Francisco as a longshoreman.
The following were not easy years for Harry Bridges. Twice he was hurt in dock accidents. As early as 1924 he tried to organize his fellow workers but someone embezzled the union's funds. Though always bucking company unions, he nevertheless managed to find work until 1932, when he had to go on local relief for a short time. During the 1934 strike when he was turning back his union salary, he was on Fed- eral relief for about six weeks.
Today Harry Bridges draws $75 per week as Pacific Coast District president of the International Longshoremen's Association. He lives very modestly, moving next week from a five-room flat to a five-room house, for which he will pay $35 per month. He is behind on the installments on a two-year-old Ford, has about finished paying off $600 of hospital and doctor bills incurred for his wife, who fell out of a window while hanging out the wash. Harry Bridges himself has been in the hospital twice in the last two years for stomach ulcers.