Ken Wray, Mayor of the Village of Sleepy Hollow, NY, reflects on his first job out of college working with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and discusses the importance of public art to local community. This interview was recored on February 22, 2020 at the Galgano Senior Center in the Village of Sleepy Hollow, NY.
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Sewing Community is part of ArtsWestchester's Folk Arts Program, made possible in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
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01:27
Good afternoon. My name is Ken Wray. I grew up in San Clemente, California, which is halfway between LA and San Diego. A tiny beach town…was a little tiny beach town. I came to the east coast to go to college. I stayed after I got out and I’ve been here for several decades now. I lived in Brooklyn for 17 years. I’ve been in Sleepy Hollow now for 22 or so. Right now, I am the Mayor of the Village of Sleepy Hollow and I also run a non-profit in the city called the Parodneck Foundation that primarily does affordable housing. When I first got out of school…I ended up getting a job with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, kind of by accident. I worked for the Southern Division of the Union. I was based in New York. I was flying back and forth to the South every week. Typically 150 nights a year on the road. It was interesting because I was thrown into this factory world that I really didn’t know anything about. With the clothing workers in the south, it was mostly shirt factories…pants, jeans, things like that. Clothing in the industry means men’s suits. It was a clothing workers union, but I worked with folks who made Arrow shirts…made men’s dress shirts, jeans and things like that. So I had to learn how all this stuff worked. And I learned it from workers and from staff in the South who had been factory workers. I don’t have a particular fabric fabric story…it’s more how I was around it. I was looking at how Amanda is laying out the stuff on the tables in there and it’s like “Oh, it’s a cutting table.” I’m a spreader almost. “The table is too short. Should be up a little bit more. Where is the machine that runs it back and forth?…None of these people should be doing this…this is a highly skilled…” It took me right back to that. Partly because my job was essentially negotiating contracts. There is a contract renewal. I’d go and meet with a committee of workers. We would then go as a group and meet with the company folks and argue back and forth and eventually get to a contract… most of the time…occasionally not…end up in a strike. So I was that lead spokesperson. That’s how I learned. You would walk through, walk through and you would go to enough different kinds factories. Certain things are pretty much the same in a shirt factory. It doesn’t vary that much. The higher end the shirt is the more operations there are. When you are making a binkie, which I had never heard of until I saw someone making one, is essentially a smock like you wear in K-Mart…two little pockets in the front. It’s for staff people. It is incredibly simple. Boom boom and a couple of side stitches and you are done.
04:38
There was a woman I worked with, Eula McGill. I was twenty two, twenty three. She was in her sixties. Eula went to work in a textile plant when she was 14 years old in Alabama. And back then, you trained for free. They didn’t pay you when you started, because you didn’t know how to do anything. For the first couple months you are working on a machine, you’d get nothing for it. She first joined a union when she was 16. Started organizing when she was 16. Eula, she ran the North Alabama region. So I would be with her all the time and she would tell me these stories about what it was like back then. Because she would drive down…she hated the interstates…so we’d both be smoking away like fiends and she’d drive along and go “oh yeah, once we had a big fight here. The union hall used to be upstairs in that building.”…somewhere on the outskirts of Birmingham. “There used to be a street car that came through here. The company sent the goon squad over. We had bats and we were out in the street and it was so bad the street car couldn’t get through.” And I’m looking at it and going “What? God I hope that doesn’t happen anymore.” I was a history major and she had stuff that I had never heard. There was a bridge some where in South Alabama…not in Selma, not that bridge…and she was talking about the National Guard being called out during a strike and they had machine guns and they used them. I mean this is Americans shooting other Americans in the street with a machine gun. Nobody ever heard anything about it.
06:25
Most of the workers were Black in the Mississippi factories that I had anything to do with. You’d be standing in this small town where the factory was and when white people spoke to them, they would look down. You don’t look them in the face. This is 1979. This isn’t 1949. Or 1929. You show deference. And I’m like “What?! What is going on here.” And then I was in North Florida, outside of Tampa. Early to mid-80s. The factory that made the binkies. I don’t remember the name. It’s not important. But a big place. It had 400 people. Every single worker was black and all of the supervisors were white. The lowest level supervisor was white. No black supervisors anywhere in the plant. We met in the Martin Luther King Hall on the Black side of town. And we are driving over to it, and I am with staff people…two are white and one was black. We go over, and all of a sudden the roads are dirt. It’s like wait a minute, you are kidding me. They didn’t pave the roads in the Black part of town. We get into the union hall where we are talking to folks and having a meeting and then one the guys I was with, Elvin Otem. You think whatever…redneck. South Alabama guy. And he gave this speech that blew everybody away. He identified with the thing that really mattered. We are all workers. We are all being exploited. I did the same thing that you did. I know what this is. You know that I know. I am just standing over on the side and it was like man, stay out of the way, cause there’s a connection going on there that was amazing to see. It still give me chills. So that’s fabric. What matters about the fabric, is the fabric of workers and society.
08:45
In Sleepy Hollow, I’ve got this advantage of being the Mayor, so there are certain kinds of things that we can do…and we have a bunch of artists who live here. So being able to engage with them and show some kind of support for them is really important because artists don’t get enough support. Something like this, combines the art with a community component that is really critical. I live in a community that has been a long-time immigrant community. Most recently it’s Spanish-speaking folks but it was Italians and Portuguese before that. We are proud of that heritage. And I think events like this one show that we think everybody who lives here is a part of our community. You can’t say that. You have to prove it. You have to show it. And so, it’s not a huge thing, but it is another small way of engaging people. Because these folks are all going to go home…these folks who are in the room right now who are immigrants…and say “yeah, I did this, and wasn’t this cool.” And their kids are there and it’s important to see that. And then knowing that when it goes up on your building, we can go down there and say, “yeah, we had something to do with that.”