- Just a real quick story.
My great grandfather
who came from Buffalo, New York,
was an agent
for his father-in-law's small steamship company.
And part of the jobs that he was involved with
was hiring the stevedores to unload the ships
when they would come in.
In the summertime, that wasn't a problem
because the people were living here and the weather was good.
But in the fall,
these stevedores,
in order to keep body and soul together,
moved into the north woods,
into places...
where they were working as lumberjacks and so on.
Some of them even went as far as the Mesabi Iron Range
up in northern Minnesota.
They would eventually come back in the spring,
but the problem was...
my great grandfather had this job and
he didn't know when these people were coming.
This was in the 1890s.
There were no communications possible and so on.
So the people would come in and
then they would work on the boats.
Well he came up with the idea of keeping the stevedores
in the Milwaukee area on a year-round basis
by working with them during the summer on the docks and
then finding employment for them with other companies.
They were actually still his employee that
he was sending to these companies.
That was probably just like there was in later years,
two pay rates or two rates.
The pay rate to the employee and
then the billing rate to the customer,
which was slightly higher
to cover his administrative costs and so on.
Really don't know a lot of details about
how the business was run at that point,
but anyway,
that kept the stevedores in the city on a year-round basis,
so that the --
when the work started, when the boats came in,
they were readily available.
And the customers that Nugent had sent them to
understood that as soon as the shipping season started,
they had to go back to the dock work.
Well, we said our company started in 1897.
I think Nugent was here, maybe a couple years earlier.
But the idea of taking,
creating year-round employment for the stevedores
I think took place probably in 1897.