On St. Patrick's Day 40 years ago, Michael Joseph Quill, late of County Kerry and the Irish Republican Army, landed at Ellis Island. He had flipped a coin, it was said, to decide between New York and Melbourne, and New York won—in a manner of speaking.
A handsome, burly broth of a lad, he worked hard, organized a powerful national union, shouted and weaseled his way through a thousand fights with Communists and antiCommunists, employers and brother unionists, mayors and Presidents, and finally blundered into the strike that everyone said he lacked the courage to bring off. In the first twelve days of 1966, his Transport Workers Union brought America's greatest city to the brink of chaos. Mike Quill, 60, having thus made his name a household word and almost certainly prompted federal legislation to outlaw future strikes by public-service employees, died quietly last week in the bedroom of his Manhattan penthouse.
Jolly Showman. His doctor attributed Quill's death to a coronary occlusion, the climax of years of heart disease. His condition could not have been helped by his long-run performance as a public scold and Malaprop, whose every appearance was good for scatology and demonology, cracks and castigations, all delivered in a beery Kerry brogue that grew richer year by year. He walked with a limp that he attributed to an English bullet—actually, it was caused by a congenital hip condition later corrected by an operation— and called himself an "elder statesman among public monsters." Mike bluffed so often about striking the city, twinkled so brightly on television as labor's jolly showman, that New Yorkers had ceased to take him seriously until his last and biggest performance. They had forgotten the old Mike Quill.
With pick and shovel, the boy from Gourtloughera helped dig the city's last big subway tunnel. When he worked in a subway change booth—an 84-hour week for a $27.72 pay envelope—the need for a union was obvious. With six others, he started the T.W.U. in 1934 and became its first president. "We were dealing with a lot of young Irishmen who came over from secret organizations," he said. "They liked the secrecy and the intrigue. I liked it too. It never left me."
Reds & Rats. He needed support for the union and took it gladly from the Communists. "I'd rather be called a Red by a rat," he said, "than a rat by a Red." He was "Red Mike" then, one of the most radical of the American Labor Party leaders. By the time he broke with the Communists in 1948, the union was secure. The Democrats who controlled city hall—and the transit budget—were more reliable allies, and Mike became a loud antiCommunist.