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Saturday, April 24 SKYLINE
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Ron Pearson Boat Works
New Boats Commercial & Pleasure Complete Repairs 30' Plywood Gillnetters under construction 9255 River Rd. Ph. 584-0087 R.R. 3, Delta
DELTA WELDING & MACHINE SHOP
H. JENSEN
Aluminum Winches and
Drums Hydraulic Drum Drives Tanks - Repairs
99561 Gunderson Road
584-4244 R.R. 1, New Westminster
Mickey Beagle Retires
Labor Was Her Heritage
By HAL GRIFFIN
Gillnetters working on their boats and gear at the Steveston floats will miss the familiar figure of Mickey Beagle this season. So too, will the shoreworkers in B.C. Packers' big Imperial plant, but then, her work as shoreworker organizer for the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union was only the fuller extension of her activities as shop steward and local officer during the years she herself worked in the plant.
It was different with the fishermen. At first when she went down to talk to them they were reticent, friendly enough but not inclined to discuss their problems with a woman. Gradually resistance changed to respect as they found she could argue union policy with the best of them. The union vouchers they signed attested to their acceptance of her.
Had they known more of her background, they might have found in it much that resembled their own. Except for the 17 years she lived in the U.S., Mickey's life has been linked to the Fraser River.
Her maternal grandfather, John Earl, a retired Newfoundland
• Here Mickey Beagle thanks delegates to the recent UFAWU convention for their tributes to her on her retirement after 20 years in union office and on organizational staff.
sealer, came to British Columbia in the nineties to settle beside the river. John Sparks, her paternal grandfather, came out from Newfoundland to make his home in New Westminster in 1898 and gillnetted on the river. In 1909 her father, Ben Sparks, built the family home in Queensborough on the lot where the Beagles have their own cottage.
Ben Sparks was a man who could turn his hand to many things. He gillnetted on the Fraser and up the coast — he was in the 1936 Rivers Inlet strike — worked in the shipyards, built houses. And from his experiences he distilled an understanding of society that made him a pioneer in a larger sense.
He was one of the early members
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of the Socialist Party of Canada and a close friend of Bill Bennett, the socialist writer who later became one of the founding members of the Communist Party in this province.
Bennett was a frequent visitor to the Sparks' home during the years that Mickey was growing up, listening to the discussions and shaping her own ideas. Of her five sisters and one brother, only one has not been active in the labor movement.
At the age of 14 Mickey went to work during the summer at the old B.C. Box plant making berry boxes — the "tintops" for which she was paid $1.65 a thousand. "If you were fast, you could make about 1,500 a shift," she recalls.
Like her father, she learned to work at many things, picking beans and berries, serving in stores, "everything except waiting table."
In 1928 she married Mervin Beagle, who was working as a planerman at Fraser Mills, and they went to California .
In the lumber town of Westwood she got her first experience of union organization. Mervin joined the United Woodworkers of America, an independent union that subsequently became part of the IWA, and she became a member of the auxiliary.
STRIKE SMASHED
The CIO was on the march and all across the U.S. big business was using the repressive laws on the statute books, the police, the courts, vigilantes and stoolpigeons, strikebreakers and scabs, to impede its course. Sometimes it succeeded, as it did in Westwood when the workers struck in 1937.
Vigilantes smashed the picket lines and the Beagles were among those forced to leave the town where scabs had stolen their jobs.
For two years Mervin worked on construction jobs. Then, with the outbreak of war, both of them found work in the Kaiser shipyards at Richmond, California, Mervin as a member of the Machinists, Mickey as a member of the Boilermakers.
Returning to this country in 1945, Mervin went to work on the New Westminster waterfront as a member of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, in whose Local 502 he served for some years as executive member and delegate to Vancouver Labor Council, until his retirement last year.
Mickey took a job in the Fraser Wood Products plant, joining the IWA and becoming recording secretary of its Local 1-217.
FIRST WOMAN OFFICER
Her 22 year career in the fishing industry began in 1949, first in the north where she worked two seasons for Canadian Fishing Company on the Skeena Slough, then in the south, in Imperial plant at Steveston.
Over a 10 year period she demonstrated the abilities that impelled the union's general executive board to appoint her as its first woman organizer in October, 1958.
At the union's 1951 convention she won election to its general executive board. In 1954 she was elected second vice-president. As The Fisherman reported in its April 6 issue that year, "Mickey Beagle, who is secretary of the
Vancouver Shoreworkers Local, is the first woman to be elected an officer of the UFAWU."
She was reelected to the office at every convention, vacating it only on her appointment in 1958.
The precedents she set make the work of those who follow her easier. The demands she made of herself and the dedication with which she strove to fulfil them provide at once an example and a challenge.
But, as Mickey herself said in response to the tributes paid her at a gathering in Fishermen's Hall on March 19, she is retiring only in the sense that she will no longer be bound by the exacting demands of an open ended job. "When you need me," she declared, "I'll be there."
THE FISHERMAN — MARCH 26, 1971
9