Waterfront Conchie

As he toiled amid swaying cargo nets, blue-eyed, 50-year-old Charley Ross* looked like the prototype of all San Francisco longshoremen. He weighed 185 pounds with a bailing hook in his hip pocket; he had broad, sloping shoulders, stubby hands, and a stevedore's pugnacious attitude toward bosses and beer. When Harry Bridges told his boys to hit the bricks, Charley was always up front in the longshoremen's wall of flesh. His picketing record in the bloody dockside strife of 1934 and in the all-out strike of 1937 was perfect.

But after the 1937 strike was settled, Charley changed. To the Embarcadero's profane amazement, he became a follower of Father Divine. He ate a chicken dinner, got his soul shampooed and his past washed away, and was reborn as Brother True Knowledge. His wife was reborn, too. She was christened True Obedience and became his sister. When they moved into Father Divine's "Peace Mission" in the Negro section of Oakland, he slept in the men's dormitory, and True Obedience in the women's quarters upstairs.

The waterfront didn't know quite what to make of all this heavenly refurbishing. Brother True Knowledge refused to accept pay checks made out to Charley Ross. He signed True Knowledge on his union card, income-tax returns and his waterfront pass, but refused to have his name legally changed, on the ground that he had not existed before his rebirth. But since longshoremen were badly needed during the war years. True Knowledge went on working despite the cries of pay clerks, wharf guards and union officials.

Rolled & Wrapped. When the postwar maritime strikes erupted last year, however, the union was horrified to discover a more basic change in ex-picket Charley Ross--as True Knowledge, he was a conscientious objector to strikes. He not only refused to picket, but did not turn up for alternative jobs--working in soup kitchens, handing out pamphlets or working on a sick committee. After the strike was over he was kicked out of the union by the picketing committee.

Strong in his faith--he had just returned from Philadelphia and a look at "the body of Father Divine in person"--True Knowledge appealed to the union rank & file. But only 20 of the 3,100 longshoremen who gathered to hear his case felt that he should be allowed to keep his card. Then the union went further. It set out to cancel his registration as a longshoreman, and thus boot him off the waterfront for good.

Last week, as a West Coast waterfront arbitrator considered his case, Brother True Knowledge still hoped to work on the waterfront, but he was learning how to be a carpenter--just in case. He was also deriving comfort from Loving Jeremiah, a four-year-old Negro boy he had adopted three years ago. Sang Loving Jeremiah: "I want to be rolled up, I want to be wrapped up, I want to be tied up in his will, and let the rest of the world roll by."

*Not to be confused with flaxen-haired, four-year-old Charley Ross, who disappeared in 1874, victim of a widely heralded Philadelphia kidnaping, or with President Truman's press secretary, no kin.

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