Too Good

Few men can knock a wall down the way Big Jim Allit can. Big Jim, a fat-cheeked Irishman, has been a demolition craneman for 27 years. His specialty is battering buildings apart with a 2,800-lb. steel ball. The ball swings from a cable at the end of a 100-ft. boom, and Big Jim, by deftly whirling his crane cab and boom, can send the ball crashing into a target with bull's-eye accuracy. Many a major Eastern wrecking project has had an Allit touch.

In September, the Manhattan demolition firm of Lipsett, Inc. sent Big Jim to Pittsburgh to help clear away the wreckage of the Pittsburgh & West Virginia Railway's old Wabash Station, which had been swept by an $8,000,000 fire in 1946. With his 40-ton crane and his wrecking ball, Big Jim was the delight of Pittsburgh's sidewalk superintendents. Every day, hundreds of people gathered to watch him work. The Pittsburgh Press ran a Sunday feature story about Big Jim. The story said that he was "the best free show in town."

That was too much for Pittsburgh Local No. 905 of the A.F.L.'s Union of Operating Engineers. Last week it peremptorily ordered Lipsett, Inc. to take Big Jim, a good union man himself, off the job and replace him with a Pittsburgh craneman. Cried Local President P. Wharton: "He had too much publicity. The [newspaper] story focused attention on him and the fact that he was from New York. It also called him an expert. We've got 2,010 members in our union, and they're all experts. We just had to show him he wasn't the only man who could run a crane and a wrecking ball."

Bowing to the union, the company sent Big Jim back to New York.

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