(2 of 2)
The union grew to 150,000 members in half a dozen industries. Despite his crude ways and old-fashioned views, Mike could have been a power in the national labor movement, but he elected to oppose the merger of the A.F.L. and C.I.O. and to plead the cause of Jimmy Hoffa, whom he called "the cleanest man in the U.S." When a splinter union called an illegal wildcat subway walkout in 1957, Quill cheered lustily from the sidelines as the Transit Authority broke the strike and jailed its leaders. Last month, with equal relish, he tore up an anti-strike injunction against his own union and marched off to jail, announcing "Jays-us Chri-ist, I haven't felt so good since I left the other-r side." Hours later he collapsed and had to weather the strike ingloriously in a city hospital bed.
On his release from the hospital last week, he donned all the familiar props —shamrock cuff links, horseshoe tie pin, blackthorn walking stick—and held his last press conference. He joshed and cussed, berated Lyndon Johnson and Nelson Rockefeller, and predicted that he would be back two years hence for the next round of contract talks with the official he sometimes called "Mayor Lindsley." Waving goodbye to reporters, he announced grandiloquently that he had to go to the "tylet." He died three days later. For all the glowing eulogies—many of them from officials who had had only enmity for Quill a few weeks earlier—he had long ago pronounced his own epitaph: "I was never equipped to be a labor statesman," said Mike. "I drank too much Scotch, ate too much roast beef. I'm not suited for it."