- A Hard Man to Beat - The Story of Bill White: Labour Leader, Historian, Shipyard Worker, Raconteur by Howard White (Harbour Publishing paperback, 256 pp).
HE was a communist and a farm boy.
He ripped cockroaches from his food during brief respites from welding in an unventilated area, and he became president of the Marine Workers and Boilermakers Union during the Second World War, an unparalleled period of productivity in Vancouver shipyards.
Bill White's trials and triumphs are recounted with grit and affection in A Hard Man to Beat, recently chosen as a legacy book for Vancouver's 125th anniversary.
The entire book is told in Bill's sometimes profane, frequently insightful, and almost always honest voice.
"They've turned the Depression into an adventure now, but I tell you, it was no adventure. It was - depressing," he declares early in the book.
"That was the secret of that book," author Howard White says. "I didn't try and clean him up too much, just let him talk like he sounded."
The two unrelated Whites met as neighbours on Pender Harbour.
"He was farther down the road," Howard recalls. "He'd retired here and he used to come over and jaw with my father a lot. . . My father was a bit of a troublemaker, too," he adds.
Howard was interviewing British Columbia's pioneers when he first thought about doing a book with Bill.
"I'd discovered there were a lot of old-timers around who had good stories to tell, and that if you just let them tell it in their own words, and did a good job of reproducing their vernacular style, that the readers really appreciated that," he says.
A Hard Man to Beat is full of phrases that seem like they could have only come from Bill: "She'd been over the road before they rolled the rocks off, that one," he says about a woman of ill-repute. When detailing his brief history working for Canadian Pacific Railways, Bill summarizes his relationship with management thusly: "F-ed if we were going to be herded around like sheep."
Although the book has endured for nearly 30 years, Howard says he entertained many doubts about his approach, which was influenced by modern historians like Studs Terkel.
"I'd never seen anyone tell a whole book in one person's voice, and I was not at all sure it would fly," he says. "Bill himself didn't see any particular unifying theme in his experiences."
Looking out over boats bobbing in the Malaspina Strait from a room in Bill's house, Howard says he did his best to steer Bill away from a bureaucratese style of speaking he sometimes slipped into, encouraging him to talk in a "lunchroom, B.S.ing tone."
"We would go and sit there in his living room with sea views on three sides, and Ivy, his wife would bring us coffee and cookies and we would just talk."
As Howard collected 30 hours to tape and Bill recalled his literal and metaphorical tanglings with bastards, the story took shape.
"All the pieces fell together I could see that the story had a good arc to it," Howard says.
Talking about his childhood in Yellow Grass, Saskatchewan, Bill said, "I came off a homestead on the prairies and I knew what a hard time was."
From that beginning as an untutored farm boy, Bill eventually looked for work at the North Vancouver docks and joined the labour movement, a journey that fascinated Howard.
"Just his obstinate personality propelling him to the front of the job agitation and then to the very highest peaks of the labour movement, and then the same qualities of uncompromising, standing up for what he thought was right, propelling him out of the labour movement in the end," Howard says.
Despite the success of A Hard Man to Beat, the two originally got together to write a book about Bill's experience as an RCMP officer in the Arctic.
"He kept breaking away from that story to talk about his labour experiences, which were much fresher in his mind, and really much more important to him," Howard says. Howard says he knew a little about Vancouver's shipyards during the Second World War, but was fascinated by the notion of a workforce so huge it created traffic jams all over the Lower Mainland during shift changes.
"I'd heard rumours of this, but I had no idea of the scale of it, and I don't think many people do, even now," he says, discussing the 300 ships built by more than 30,000 workers during the war.
"I was curious to know how the heck they managed it. I still don't know exactly how they managed it," he says, laughing.
It was while Bill was burning portholes in ships for 90 cents an hour that he became interested in organized labour.
"It was a bloody poor excuse for a union in those days," Bill says.
Particularly memorable is Bill's description of the aptlynamed union representative Lush Campbell, who would conclude a day of collecting union dues by passing out on a ferry and letting the pocketed cash flap in the wind.
Howard says he was too inexperienced at the time to worry about issuing a court-ordered apology at the behest of Lush Campbell's attorney.
"I was at the very beginning of my writing career then and didn't know much about libel laws," Howard explains. "Most of the people he was raking over the coals were safely dead, so he could say what he wanted, not that he would've tempered his comments."
Bill reveled in the publicity the book brought him, according to Howard.
"He just loved the promotion. He got on Jack Webster (TV show) about three times, they just had a great time together, calling all their old enemies names," Howard says.
Despite Bill's numerous exploits, it was the sheer force of his personality that may have left the largest impression on Howard.
"He was a real Apersonality type from hell," Howard says, chuckling at the memory.
"He'd wake up at five every morning and jump out of bed and start chopping wood or he'd get out in his boat for the first bite of the salmon run," Howard says.
"The fires never dampened as far as his social conscience went. He was, to his dying breath, fighting a battle for social justice."
Bill died in 2001, when he was in his 90s, but Howard still remembers his authoritative, gravelly voice.
"Every time we comfortably sat down to dinner it would be a sure sign the phone would ring and it would be Bill, and he would've just finished watching the six o'clock news and he'd be saying: 'Did you hear what those bastards said?' and off he'd go," Howard recalls.
Bill may have left footprints in the spotlight when the book was published in 1983, but Howard is quietly enjoying the new generation of readers discovering Bill White in 2011.
"I always loved that book and was proud of it, and you're always sorry to see a book, any book, go out of print and be forgotten," he says.
The new edition almost feels like a prodigal son, according to Howard.
"It's like having one of your children that's wandered off and got lost suddenly come back into the home and be as good as they ever were," he says.
One of the few criticisms of the book that stopped Howard in his tracks came from Bill's wife, Ivy.
Despite a passage where Bill describes marriage as having "raised its ugly head," and referring to his courtship with Ivy as the "five or so years she wore me down," Ivy's complaint took aim at the book's language.
"He has never once used such dreadful language around this house," she stated, a quote that is included in the book's 2011 introduction.
"It can't possibly be true that she had never heard him use the kind of language that we have in the book because, well, for one thing, she was coming in and out of the room bringing us tea and cookies while we were taping it," Howard says. "But it just shows how even two married people can tune each other out to the point that when they actually see the other's language down in black and white it's kind of a shock of recognition."
Howard also wonders if Ivy's complaints stemmed from a certain loving exasperation.
"She was a very sweet, quiet woman, who was quite artistic. . . and I think she was always a little bit embarrassed about Bill because he was always causing trouble and causing her friends' husbands to come home shaking their heads and saying, 'that goddamn Bill White. . .'"
- A Hard Man to Beat is one of 10 Vancouver 125 Legacy books, an initiative created by the City of Vancouver, the Office of Vancouver's Poet Laureate Brad Cran and the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. to bring back into print a collection of books to celebrate Vancouver's 125th anniversary.
