Rand, Bergoff & Chowderhead

A few knowing brows shot up in Manhattan's Hotel Commodore one day last summer at sight of two well-known townsmen in conference over a lunch table in a dark corner. One of them was James H. Rand Jr., brisk, bulky president of Remington Rand, Inc., world's biggest makers of office equipment. The other was gruff, blocky Pearl Louis Bergoff, No. 1 U. S. strikebreaker.

Last week in Manhattan, red-headed Strikebreaker Bergoff told the National Labor Relations Board some of the things that he and Tycoon Rand discussed last summer. "Most of the time." said he, "we talked about football. Jim [Harvard 1908] was telling me what a great football player he was. He thought he was better than Jim Thorpe in his younger days, and I told him he wasn't." Mr. Bergoff also said they had talked business--the breaking of strikes then in progress at six Remington Rand plants (TIME, June 22). It was in connection with that series of strikes that the NLRB, investigating charges that Remington Rand had coerced employes, fostered company unions and discriminatorily discharged 17 union leaders, had called Pearl Bergoff.

Witness Bergoff, who has supplied strongarm platoons to many a strike-sieged employer in the past 20-odd years and claims to have made millions doing it (lost later in speculations), described a change of technique in his business since the days when he sent out tough scabs ("finks") to take over strikers' jobs. Now, he said, he sends "missionaries" who try to persuade strikers to go back to work.

He sent 60 of them., men and women, to Syracuse for Mr. Rand. There, he and one of his lieutenants explained, the missionaries took false names, represented themselves as members of the "Remington Rand personnel department," called at strikers' houses, started whispering campaigns to the effect that the union heads were selling the strikers out, that the plant would be moved out of Syracuse unless the strike was called off.

Most indignant was Breaker Bergoff at what happened to some of his men at Remington Rand's Tonawanda, N. Y. plant. Tycoon Rand wanted them to walk through picket lines, thus give loyal employes courage to follow. When the Bergoff huskies tried it, they were showered with bricks. "Rand," recounted Bergoff last week, "kind of put it over on me. I didn't know my men were getting into quite such a dangerous spot. He even wanted me to bring women up there, but I didn't do it, and I'm glad I didn't. . . . He said the work was 'very satisfactory.' I asked him if he wanted my men to come up there and be killed, why in hell he didn't tell me that."

Mr. Rand "merely laughed," continued Mr. Bergoff, and explained that everything was fine because he had been inside the plant taking motion pictures of the fracas, which he intended to offer as proof of strikers' violence in seeking an injunction against the strike.

"Are you accusing Mr. Rand of staging this thing?" asked an NLRB attorney.

"I did accuse him, yes," replied Mr. Bergoff. "But I guess everything's all right. Rand's all right." His pay for the Remington Rand job, he said, was $25,850.

Hailed before NLRB as a sample Rand-Bergoff employe was hog-necked, 260 lb., Sam Harris, better known as "Chowder-head" Cohen. A ubiquitous character whose appearance and language have made him the delight of the Press, he waddled into the news last winter as boss "fink" in New York City's elevator strike, again last autumn as witness before the Senate's civil liberties committee, again last month when he was set upon by striking seamen (TIME, Nov. 16). Last week he was quickly entered on the Board's books as a "hostile witness." A strikebreaker for 20 years, he had worked for two months last summer at Remington Rand's Middletown, Conn, plant as a $9-per-day-&-expenses "night watchman.'' Asked what references he had offered, "Chowderhead" Cohen grunted: "They never ask for no references in this line of work. Tell 'em anything. Tell 'em nuttin'!" Witness Cohen flushed angrily when asked if he had ever been convicted of crime. "I got a right to earn an honest living," he shouted. "I refuse to answer that question. They locked me up, this committee here, four times for vagrancy." "What committee?" he was asked.

"This committee here--the National Labor Party--I was locked up 48 hours--on which they had no ground to hold me. They are just driving me to do something wrong. You don't gimme a square deal for my wife and children." "Of course," added the witness thoughtfully, "if the Police Department see I don't make an honest living, it is all right." "Chowderhead" Cohen's police record was found to include 16 arrests for such offenses as receiving stolen goods, burglary and grand larceny; one sentence to Elmira, N. Y. Reformatory, one to a Federal penitentiary, two to Sing Sing.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.