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Today the McDonalds live in a seven-room, three-bath fieldstone house in Mt. Lebanon, eight miles south of the Golden Triangle. They live unpretentiously, do little formal entertaining. But informal callers, mostly union men, are constant. At his office, McDonald exercises a prodigious memory, is a stickler for detail. His office furniture includes a dial-studded electric massage chair into which he sinks to be vibrated when he gets fatigued. His staff boasts that he "can work 35 men to exhaustion, but he irritates union wives by insisting that aides stay at home Sundays to be on call if he needs them. He needs them frequently; e.g., the high-powered union staff spends nearly a year preparing contract demands before negotiations begin.
Hopes for Coal. Dave McDonald's proudest achievement since becoming president is knocking the wage differential from the contracts of southern Steelworkers, who since 1953 have been getting the same pay as northern workers. Another sizable achievement is that, behind the scenes, he had much to do with arranging the tricky merger of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. last year. Ahead he has two strong ambitions, 1) to be invited to address the United Mine Workers, and 2) to bring John L. Lewis back to the newly united house of labor.
McDonald has small regard for the auto workers' Walter Reuther, once described him privately as "that redheaded, socialistic s.o.b." But he has become a good friend and admirer of George Meany, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. He has no designs on Meany's job, wants only to run his own union according to his own ideas. Even his critics agree that in the years ahead he will run it substantially as 1,200,000 Steelworkers want it run. And probably, in these changing times, better than it has ever been run before.