Class Struggles: The UFT Story
Feb 3, 2005 10:42 AM
Part 2
Though she retired in 1990 after 37 years of teaching, on most days Rose Moran can be found at UFT headquarters in mid-Manhattan. A regular at the Si Beagle Learning Center, she attends workshops in calligraphy, art history, folk dancing, then gets the blood moving with an exercise class. “It’s wonderful,” says the former chapter leader. “The union continues to enrich my life. I’m 100 percent, true-blue UFT.”
Unions are in her blood. Moran’s Irish immigrant parents were Roosevelt Democrats and staunch union supporters — she’d even voted for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight D.
Eisenhower in 1956. “The only magazine that ever came to the house was from Local 488 of the Carpenters’ Union,” she says. “From an early age, I understood my father had a job because of the union.”
Raised in the Bronx, Moran went to Catholic grammar and high schools before going off to Hunter College to become a teacher. One summer in a steno pool had convinced her that she wasn’t cut out for the business world. “I was the only girl in the entire neighborhood who went to college,” she says. “I really wanted to be a journalist, but I didn’t have the means. The only careers really open to women back then were secretarial, nursing or teaching.”
In 1953, Moran’s first assignment took her to the far north Bronx. “PS 72 wasn’t what you would call a radical hotbed,” she says. “I don’t remember anyone from the Teachers Guild ever coming to talk with us. But I’d heard talk that they were communists.
“Not that it would have mattered. Really, it was a very conservative, lady-like environment. Those women wouldn’t have given a thought to joining a union. It was beneath them.”
But on Monday, Nov. 7, 1960, her beliefs collided with her fears. “I was a Depression baby, scared to lose my job.” So with a “twinge of guilt,” Rose Moran went to work, while a tiny minority of teachers went on strike. She didn’t have to cross a picket line. Like most of the city’s grade schools, it was business as usual at PS 37.
