Jeannette DiLorenzo, was a champion of worker and senior causes who helped organize the UFT before serving as an officer of the union for many years.

In 1962, Al Shanker was after Sol Jaffe's job. The two had worked together closely in the Teachers Guild and the early UFT, with Shanker supporting Jaffe in his first bid to become the UFT's secretary. But now Jaffe had sided with the "militants" and...

It was the Depression and even the salesgirls at Macy's were required to stand 5-foot-5 and have a college degree. Rose Schuyler had the diploma, but not the reach.

Like the others who gave up their nights and weekends for the collective bargaining campaign in 1961, June Temple was a dutiful foot soldier. She could live with the long exhausting hours and no pay — not even car fare. But for some there were worse...

He hated supervisors with a serious passion. To him, all the raises in the world wouldn't change the fact that teachers were forced to work in a system he called "a thinly veiled despotism."

It's your typical August day in Washington, D.C.: One of those patented pool-of-sweat afternoons when most people have peeled off as much clothing as good taste — or at least the law — allows. But here in his small Georgetown apartment, propped up in...

Militancy lost its romance early in Fanny Simon’s life. Only a teenager, she found out that a strike doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. Her father lost his job and the family was uprooted when a strike by glove cutters was crushed.

George Altomare, a founder of the UFT who led with insight, devotion and a great deal of heart, died on Aug. 20, at age 92 after a long illness. He loved teaching and dedicated his life to improving public school education for New York City students...

They made for an odd couple. Henry Linville, soft-spoken and almost courtly, with neither the temperament nor talent for personal confrontation. Not so his longtime and much younger sidekick Abraham Lefkowitz. “He was a fighter,” remembers Ruben...

Born in 1898, Layle Lane was a toddler when a vow to lynch her Congregational minister father forced the family to flee their Marrietta, Ga. home. A graduate of Howard University with a master's from Columbia, she became a high school social studies...

By the mid-1950s it was apparent there was no shortage of rising young stars on the horizon. Still, none shone brighter than Ely Trachtenberg.

If your idea of an accountant is a conservative, number-crunching nerd, you should have known Dave Wittes.

The youngest of seven children, Martha Straus grew up on the Lower East Side. "There was no starvation but there were no luxuries either," she says. Her father and older brother took part in the 1910 cloak makers strike that came to be known as "the...

Born in 1866, Henry Richardson Linville grew up in St. Joseph, Mo., and earned his Ph.D at Harvard before moving to the city and becoming a biology teacher at Jamaica HS. That’s when the newly formed Teachers Union chose Linville as its head.

When the union needed a sharp lawyer, it didn’t have far to look as long as Jules Kolodny was around.

Brilliant and articulate, no one ever doubted that Rebecca Simonson had a way with words. But it wasn't so much poetry as strategy that led the leader of the Teachers Guild in the 1940s to compare organizing to "opening a flower one petal at a time."

In 1960, Si Beagle was one of the city's few supervisors to go out on strike, walking the picket line alone at Bronx's JHS 113. "I had no choice. How could I look in the mirror and rationalize it. Here Mr. Big Shot. Talks, talks, talks, but he ends...

Alice Marsh, the UFT's first legislative rep in Albany, was the only child of a working single mother who insisted she go on to high school while the rest of her elementary school graduating class went off to work.

Fifth disease, usually a mild rash illness with low or no fever, is caused by a human parvovirus (B19). For many years, fifth disease was viewed as an unimportant illness of children. Recently, studies have shown that the virus may be responsible for...

Group A streptococci are bacteria commonly found in the throat and on the skin. The vast majority of Group A Strep infections are mild illnesses, such as strep throat and impetigo. Occasionally however, these bacteria can cause much more severe and...

Roger Parente still gets up early. Only these days it’s to get in a game of tennis before the stifling mid-day heat of the Southern California desert sets in. Approaching 70, Parente is surprised how well a decade of retirement has agreed with him...

For Milton Pincus, the decision to call off the November 7th strike in return for Mayor Robert Wagner’s promise of a fact-finding committee loaded with the leading lights of the city’s labor movement, was a no-brainer. From where he stood — outside...

Nat Levine will never forget the time his principal made the mistake of tangling with a young union organizer.

Within months of the end of World War II the country was convulsed in the greatest wave of strikes in its history, before or since. With the memory of the Great Depression still fresh in their minds, many workers saw the huge post-war layoffs as a...

The Big Bang theory may be right about the origin of the universe, but it isn’t much help when it comes to explaining the making of a union. Like other unions, the UFT didn’t just explode onto the scene in 1960.

Ever the agent provocateur, Al Shanker reminded the large UFT Teacher Union Day audience last fall that in the 1950s there was no shortage of naysayers who said teachers would never get their act together: “Can teachers ever be organized? Well, no...

The UFT turns 36 this year [1996]. As unions go, that makes us a fairly new kid on the block. But the reality is that our labor roots stretch back to 1916 and that most of our founding mothers and fathers have either retired or passed on. Even those...