Hammond drove down to Front Avenue, a street that passed through warehouses, oil terminals, and factories along the river. When he arrived at the factory for the first time, he was put to work right away. He learned how to drive a forklift and started working the night shift. He made $5.05 an hour.I This was more money than Hammond’s dad made as a public school teacher with decades of experience. The money was simply amazing, and the jobs were plentiful. Hammond kept coming back.
He and the other warehouse workers were organized under a particularly fierce, energized union with a funny name: the Inlandboatmen’s Union, named after the river barge workers who plied the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Everyone called it the IBU for short. Hammond had never seen anything like the IBU. On Sundays, the union held an open meeting for its members at the union hall in downtown Portland. About two or three hundred members showed up, and those who hadn’t already been drinking began drinking immediately. The meetings were long and spirited and social, and the sense of solidarity was electric. “You could always count on a good fistfight or something for entertainment, you know,” Hammond recalled.
The union guys tended to give each other nicknames—there was Dodger and Magneto and Gary the Anarchist—and Hammond later earned his own nickname, the Hammer. He wore this nickname uneasily. It must have been a little bit ironic, like calling a very skinny man “Fatty.” Hammond might have been many things, but he didn’t seem like a hammer. He was a quiet guy, with wide brown eyes and delicate features that could only be described as regular. When Hammond imitated someone screaming in anger, he still managed to do it with a whisper. Hammond was congenial and got along with the people he worked with, including the managers and supervisors. He repeatedly described the warehouse as being like a family, and it was clear that he aimed to get along with his relatives as best he could.
Hammond wasn’t militant. He didn’t have to be. The union took care of that part for him. The union negotiated relentlessly on behalf of its members. It boasted about its past labor disputes during the 1930s, which were characterized by strikes, violence, and intimidation. Using this history as a lever, the union won remarkably generous terms for its workers: a pension plan for their retirement; a health insurance plan with no employee premium payments; generous sick leave and absenteeism policies; great starting pay; and seemingly permanent job security.
“Once you got in there and working—I was working right alongside guys that were schoolteachers and things. It just paid so much better—they’d gotten like a job in the summer, when there was no school, and it paid so good they just stayed,” Hammond recalled. “So we had quite a few guys that were college educated and working in there.” Hammond didn’t want to drive a forklift his entire life. He left the job briefly, tried other things, but then returned in 1981 because of the good pay and benefits. He didn’t leave for another thirty-five years.
In the mid-1980s, Hammond started hanging around with a pretty girl named Carla Hogue. They drank a lot and partied with friends. Then, Carla Hogue got pregnant. In 1985, she and Steve Hammond had a daughter named Sarah. Steve and Carla later got married and had a second child, Stephanie, in 1989. The Hammonds bought a small home in Vancouver, Washington, just north of Portland. They settled there in part because the property was cheaper than in downtown Portland, although it made for a long commute. Their house payment was about $650 a month, a burden that was easy to meet because he and Carla both worked: he at the warehouse and she as a medical assistant.
Life wasn’t easy for the Hammonds. While work was steady at the warehouse, it was also organized along strict lines of hierarchy and seniority put in place by the union. Hammond started at the bottom of this hierarchy when he returned to work in 1981, which meant that he got stuck with night shifts. He worked for twenty years before he earned the seniority to work days. When his daughters were young, Hammond left for work in the afternoon. He got off his shift around one in the morning and drove home, passing the baton to Carla, who left for her job around four thirty. Steve got to bed around two thirty, slept until the girls woke up at six or so, and then took care of them in the mornings. Hammond usually worked seven days a week, volunteering for overtime shifts to earn the extra pay.
The schedule began to grind away on Steve and Carla’s relationship. The bars and partying receded, although the drinking continued. The fun drained out of things. Hammond felt like he was being pushed by Carla to achieve the milestones of middle-class life. They bought a bigger house, and their monthly payment jumped to $1,300 a month. Now the bills were hard to meet.
The tension culminated, and their marriage dissolved during a trip to one of the most stressful places on earth: Disneyland. Carla bought a package trip to the theme park using the family credit card. Steve felt like they didn’t have the money to take a vacation, let alone a trip to California. To help cover these costs, Steve went down to the union hall and cashed out a special emergency account that he kept there—it was common back then for workers to set aside cash to cover costs if they went on strike or suffered an injury that kept them off the job. His account had accrued about $1,200 over the years, and he spent it at Disneyland. It was quite possibly the worst trip of his life, although he and Carla tried to give the girls the full Disney experience.
“It was a miserable time. Her and I didn’t speak hardly for the whole time down there—just kind of keeping it away from the kids,” Hammond said. “I was so pissed off. We didn’t have any money.”
Steve and Carla divorced not too long after that. They sold the big house, and he moved in with his mother. They juggled responsibility for the girls. He continued to work odd hours at the warehouse, and the girls figured out how to get themselves to the school bus in the mornings.
The one thing Steve Hammond didn’t have to worry about during all of this turmoil was losing his job, his health insurance, or his retirement pension. It is unclear, exactly, what Hammond would have had to do to get fired from the warehouse. The culture there would have been familiar to the unionized OCAW workers at Koch’s Pine Bend refinery in the 1970s. Workers weren’t afraid of their bosses. It wasn’t uncommon for a forklift driver to share a slug of whiskey with a manager on the warehouse floor. Everyone laughed when a driver named Kerry Alt accelerated his truck too quickly, and an oversized bottle of beer came careening off the back, where it had been stowed for safekeeping. Alt jumped out and scrambled after the bottle as it rolled across the concrete floor. The bosses looked the other way. If a supervisor had chosen to discipline Alt, he would have had to do so through the union’s grievance procedure. It wasn’t worth the trouble. In this environment, Hammond was a straight arrow, and he was promoted up the ranks through the years.
One of Hammond’s close friends was promoted even faster and left the union ranks to become a manager. He was Dennis Trimm, an imposing man standing six foot six. Trimm became foreman in the 1990s and was then promoted to supervisor, putting him in the ranks of management and cutting his ties with the Inlandboatmen’s Union. Even then, when Trimm “went company,” as the union members called it, he and Hammond remained friends. They still drank together on their time off, still joked on the warehouse floor, and still visited each other’s families. There might have been a bright line between the union workers and their supervisors, but there wasn’t animosity between them.