UNION BINGO

A lot of people who leave the southern mountains and the Midwest end up in the cities - Chicago, New York, Cleveland - trying to find a place in the factory system. In New York City there's an open front cafe at West 93rd Street and Broadway. I used to eat there at least once a day during the two or three months I had to be in New York City. I ate there because the special almost every day was meat loaf, two vegetables, coffee and dinner roll for a dollar. You don't find that very often in New York.
The guy who owned the place had been a mill hand outside of Youngstown, Ohio, a long time before. The mill closed, so he moved to New York to try to get a taxi route, and he found out it took about $50,000 bonding. Being from out of town, he couldn't get anybody to float the loan. So he wound up doing other kinds of jobs until he could save enough to get himself into this little cafe.
I never met anybody in that cafe who had been born or raised in New York. They were all from little towns, and all they ever talked about was what it would be like to go back to that little town. They all pretty well realized the hopelessness of it all.
The other unusual thing about this cafe was that it was the only public place in town where people would talk to you. These guys were not city people. They were used to going to a beanery back home and gabbing with each other. It's out of their conversations that I put together this song.
I asked the owner, "What about your union, when the mill closed - didn't they have a retraining program? Wasn't there any other kind of job you could move into through your union? "
He said, "All I ever remember about the union, from the time I was a little kid, was that every Wednesday night we'd play Bingo down in the union hall."
Some union.

It's fifty years of living in a town we never owned,
Working for a man we never knew;
We played our union bingo and made our mortgage loans
And wondered why the unemployment grew.
Now there's no smoke a-rising from the chimney at the mill,
The busy make-up yard is almost gone;
The old town looks so faded, the streets are dark and still,
With no one but the old folks hanging on.

There's a place beyond the window of this dingy little room
That's always in my heart and on my mind,
And I wonder if the dogwood and the mountain laurel bloom
In that little town I left so far behind.
I'm up here in the city trying to earn my subway fare
At a job that makes me wonder why I came;
And everyone I meet is from a little town somewhere,
And the stories that we tell are all the same.

Copyright ©1973, 2000 Bruce Phillips

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