The need to transport troops increased the availability of on-board service jobs and Tyler joined the Marine Cooks and Stewards of the Pacific (MCS) in search of new experiences. The onset of World War Two changed the course of Tyler’s life by offering him the opportunity to go to sea. Utilizing his talent for writing and storytelling, Tyler published numerous short pulp stories and served as a writer for a local community college newspaper during this period. I can’t do it.” Shortly after his stint in the National Guard, he moved to San Francisco and worked as a waiter at the well-known nightclub Goman’s Gay ‘90s for the remainder of the 1930s. When the California National Guard, which Tyler had just recently joined, was ordered to break the 1934 general strike in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tyler refused to go on the grounds that, “my old man was a working stiff and I’m a working stiff, and here I’m going to go over there and stick a bayonet in some other poor working stiff. Tyler was largely apolitical at this time, recalling that, “I couldn’t see what a working stiff had to do with politics.” Nevertheless, he instinctively possessed a notion of working class solidarity. University of Washington Special Collections. On the air: "Trudy" Strong Kirkwood, Jerry Tyler, and Paul Robeson in the radio station Jerry Tyler photo collection: here are photographs of Tyler's radio program, the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union and Harry Bridges Hear original recordings of some shows and transcripts of many others from the Jerry Tyler Collecton, Labor Archives of Washington State, University of Washington Libraries. In part 2 of his essay, Leo Baunach examines this influential and controversial radio program. Jerry Tyler's "Reports from Labor" was a fifteen-minute, biweekly labor radio show that aired in Seattle between July 1948 and October 1950, making it a rare pro-labor voice during difficult times for working people and progressive politics Tyler became a member of Waiters Union Local 30, his first experience with organized labor. Tyler eventually gravitated to California where he gained steady employment in Modesto, first on an orchard and then as a nightclub waiter in 1933. For two years, Tyler drifted around the western United States in search of work, often hopping on railroad cars with crowds of people from a similar socioeconomic quagmire. However, the Great Depression began in earnest and there were few options in Iowa for Tyler, whose nascent boxing career ended by his susceptibility to injury. Tyler was also employed at an industrial vegetable cannery and went on from high school to a nearby Iowa Community College in 1929. Tyler worked from a young age, first on his family’s farm and then as a stoop-laborer in a nursery. Many in the area, including Tyler’s family, were small farmers who struggled to stay afloat amid the high expenses of farming and fluctuating corn prices. Jerry Tyler’s remarkable life began in the small Iowa town of Shenandoah in 1911. Today, Reports from Labor stands as a testament to the fighting spirit of labor’s left-wing in the face of an anti-communist onslaught, and provides an exceptional record of a tumultuous moment in the Northwest labor movement. This meant privileging the voices of everyday bus drivers, cannery workers, and others in advocating for labor unity and militancy. Tyler presented information in a straightforward manner that appealed to the common-sense style of working people. The radio show made Tyler one of the few pro-labor voices on-air in the late 1940s, and he used this unique platform to combine in-depth coverage of Northwest unions with progressive commentary on issues including civil rights and unemployment. The years Tyler worked as a broadcaster were defined by red-baiting, the impact of the Taft-Hartley Act, and the acrimonious breakup of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The radio voice of organized labor in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, he is most remembered as the host of Reports from Labor, a popular radio show in the Seattle area which ran from 1948 to 1950. Maritime worker, labor activist, and radio personality, Jerry Tyler was a Seattle labor celebrity from the 1940s until his death in 2009.
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