California Case

Out of San Francisco one day last week churned the Panama Pacific Liner California, bound for Manhattan. Next day, when the ship put in at San Pedro, her 374 seamen refused to take her to sea again unless their pay was jacked from the Atlantic rate, under which they had signed on, to the Pacific rate, some $5 a month higher. While the officers talked of arresting the entire crew for mutiny, most of the 441 passengers settled down to await the dispute's outcome. A few voyagers, including onetime Dancer Adele Astaire and her husband Lord Charles Cavendish, started East by land.

Two days later, a committee of strikers retired to a Long Beach, Calif, butcher shop, put in a call to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in Washington. Though she was at a formal Cabinet dinner for President Roosevelt, she went at once to a telephone booth in her evening gown, began to argue. Hour later, the strikers agreed to return to the California, await negotiation of their case in Manhattan. Said Madam Secretary Perkins next day: "You can imagine what I looked like when I walked out of that telephone booth."

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