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Bill Knight - June 3

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wium/local-wium-905232.mp3

Macomb, IL – The "V" was for Virginia, but it could have stood for Victory.

When Pearl V. Kidd died this winter at the age of 98, she left behind many members of a grieving family, friends and community, and also a legacy of involvement that serves as a reminder that regular people remain at the root of organized labor - that success for unions is at the retail level, literally in her case.

This Memorial Day and week, it's comforting and instructive to remember people like Pearl, who started the first Retail Clerks Union in Oglesby, IL, in the mid-1960s, helping her peers organize around common sense - and a few cents, too.

Pearl's daughter Sandra Volk, says, "Mom thought the small shops needed to pay their employees a pension so she got together with other employees and formed the Retail Clerks Union there."

The fifth of eight kids born to Italian immigrants Peter and Ginoegga Nico Stella, Pearl married Theodore Kidd in 1935 and they had two kids, Sandra and Ted, and a long life together as active members of the greater Oglesby area.

Her husband, who died in 1992, was a crane operator and worked at Marquette Cement Co., where he belonged to the Cement, Lime, Gypsum and Allied Workers Union, which merged with the Boilermakers in 1984. Pearl herself was employed at Westclox for a decade before becoming a longtime cashier at area grocers.

She'd been a member of the Retail Clerks Union since 1945, when she worked at the local A&P supermarket.

Ted, a Morton resident, says, "I remember Mom working a split shift for a while - four hours on, four hours off, and then back for another four hours on the job. She also worked at Kroger's in Oglesby, Pete's in LaSalle, and Lou's in Oglesby. She was president of her union local."

The Retail Clerks Union for which she started the Oglesby local eventually merged with the Meat Cutters Union to form the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

Sandra remembers, "The Oglesby-LaSalle-Peru area was a labor-friendly area."

However, it was Pearl's presence and indefatigable energy almost everywhere in that area that helped her as an instinctive organizer and successful labor leader.

Pearl was active in the local women's club and AARP, helped with the Nutrition for Older Adults (NOA) program and as a hospital volunteer, packed home-delivered meals with the Illinois Valley Senior Center and square-danced at nursing homes and other events throughout LaSalle, Putnam and Bureau counties, and she was an engaged parishioner at Holy Family Roman Catholic Church in Oglesby - all while running a home on Woodland Avenue across from the library for 60 years - and having a heckuva good time.

She's remembered as an avid baseball fan, knitter and a bowler almost as good as her husband, who once bowled a perfect game in LaSalle.

Sandra says, "She worked for Hubert Humphrey's presidential campaign, I remember, and traveled to Miami on union business in 1967 or '68. And after her work with the union, she got a $200 monthly pension. If she hadn't started the union, they wouldn't have gotten anything."

Pearl V. Kidd had a wonderful life, and made a positive difference to her many families, both blood relatives and the brothers and sisters with whom she formed a lasting bond.

Sandra adds, "She was a great person and a woman ahead of her time."

Pearl was typical of the core of grassroots vitality on which organized labor thrives, an often overlooked strength captured in Bertolt Brecht's 1935 poem "A Worker Reads History," which reads, in part:

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?/ The books are filled with names of kings./ Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?...
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished/ Where did the masons go?...
Imperial Rome/ Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up?...
Young Alexander conquered India./ He alone?