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With the passion of his father cracking his teeth into raw coal, Jimmy took a hungry bite of victory. Within two years he had acquired an A.F.L. charter, moved his boys into the Teamsters Union, taken over the trusteeship of debt-ridden Teamster Local 299 in Detroit. Singlemindedly, he shoved ahead. "In those days," says Hoffa in his rough, staccato voice, "Detroit was the toughest open-shop town in the country. It was like a dime crime novel, with all the shootings and slug-gings. I was hit so many times with nightsticks, clubs and brass knuckles that I can't ever remember where the bruises were. But I can hit back. Guys who tried to break me up got broken up. It was no picnic, but I gave as good as I got."
He gave service too. In the dreary Depression days of strikes and lockouts, Hoffa's springy figure and his vibrant personality (expressed with a wealth of the four-letter words) became a familiar sight. His commodity was spirit. He found men to form picket lines, sometimes scraped up money to pay for their bread. He toured meetings of locals like an itinerant troubleshooter ("I know how to coordinate all the locals, how to use them to give full strength wherever we need it"), wore out his share of shoe leather on countless picket lines ("I was picked up [off a picket line] and put in jail 18 times in 24 hours. Every time I went back").
It was on a picket line that he met Josephine Poszywak. She was a striking laundry worker, and he was an interested Teamster; they were married in 1936, have a son, James Phillip, 16, and a daughter, Barbara Ann, 19. Jimmy doesn't expect Josephine to do picket-line duty now. When he took the stand before the McClellan committee, he said: "I asked my wife not to watch it [on TV]. It would just upset her. What's the use of her watching things she doesn't understand?"
Power & Push. His first successful reach for big power came in 1940, when he was made negotiating chairman of the Central States Drivers Council, for which he talked contract for over-the-road drivers of twelve states. This kind of power was there for any aggressive man to grab. International President Dan Tobin, growing ineffectual after more than 30 years in office, was little more than a figurehead ruler of a vast, decentralized realm of baronies. In the Far West a redheaded baron named Dave Beck was already capitalizing on organizational weaknesses that fairly cried for a strong hand; stealthily Beck's hand reached out. In the Midwest roughhousing, baby-faced Hoffa was doing the same. He got caught a couple of times: in 1946 he was indicted, eventually assessed costs of $500 for eliciting "fees" from independent grocerymen, who, rather than hire union drivers, were hauling their own provisions; in 1942 he was fined $1,000 for his part in a conspiracy to restrain trade among Detroit's wholesale paper companies.