Episode 14 - Blanche Copenhaver
Members of the Mill and Smeltermen’s Union and the Women’s Protective Union
Welcome to Mining City Reflections, where we illuminate the history of Butte, Montana through the stories and observations of 20th century women who lived there. I'm your host, Marian Jensen. This episode highlights the working lite of Blanche Copenhaver, who was involved in the Women's Protective Union in one role or another for forty years. Her oral history was taken in 1980 by Professor Mary Murphy as part of the Butte Oral History Project, organized by the University of Montana.
The interview focuses on Blanche’s time as a working waitress, who moved up the ranks of the Women's Protective Union to become one of its key leaders in the 1950s. A transplant to Butte, her exploitation in nonunion work environments elsewhere made her doubly appreciative of what the WPU had accomplished for its membership. Eventually, her leadership and keen understanding of the role of the union in the community guided the organization in an era that saw the stabilization of the work environment for women.
Born in 1900, Blanche cut her teeth on hard work in the Big Horn Valley in Wyoming farm country. Like many young people eager to leave the farm and get to town, she left as soon as possible.
“I wanted to get away from home so I went to the little town, it was a big town then as the county seat, in Basin, Wyoming, and I went to work in a boarding house. I worked there all through World War 1. I was there when the armistice was signed.”
She worked seven days a week, helping out in the kitchen and waiting tables for $30 a month. When she was 18, she moved on to the bigger city of Casper to work in a restaurant.
“My dad did try once to come over and get me back and we had quite a battle, but I stayed!”
Eventually she joined her older sister to follow the oil boom in Texas. Living on the border near Amarillo, the city grew from 200 to 100,000 in 3 months. Blanche and her sister worked seven days a week with no overtime in one of the city’s two restaurants.
Tiring of the dust storms in Texas, the pair moved on to Phoenix where they worked only in the winter. In the sweltering summer, they returned to the cool of Wyoming to visit their parents. Her sister remarried and Blanche found herself back in Casper. Securing a waitressing job wasn't difficult, but the working conditions had not improved.
“I worked in a hotel there as a waitress. It was the largest hotel in Wyoming, the Henning. It’s since been torn down; urban renewal fixed all of that. I went to work at 6 o’clock in the morning. I worked until 10, then went back home until 11:30, an hour and half space, you can’t get any rest in that length of time. I went back at 11:30 and worked till 2. And I didn’t have to come back till 6 at night, and I stayed until 10. We call it a three-split shift. And if there were people in the place at 10 o’clock at night when I closed up - there were other waitresses, but that was my shift - people in the house, it was a very high-powered place. You didn’t run them out, you stayed until they left. And for all of this, we got the very large sum of $45 a month.”
Eventually, as the country began to come out of the depression, Blanche decided to look for greener pastures.
“That continued for possibly two years. I was thoroughly disgusted. You never had a day off - any of these places that I worked that I mentioned before - if you were off a day, you were short a day in your pay. There was no sick leave, there was no anything but work, seven days a week. No vacations. So the head waitress there decided - she’d read some articles about Butte and what a wide-open town and lots of activity and lots of work. And she was having a few of her own problems. And I still have the car - and she said you’re sick of this and I’m sick of it. She said let’s go to Butte. We can get work because we’re both service waitresses. So we came to Butte!”
Once she arrived in Butte, Blanche got her first exposure to working in a unionized work environment.
“I came to Butte in March 1937, Thelma and I did, this friend of mine. We went to work finally. She went to work right at in Gamer’s. It took me a little bit longer to get a job because I didn’t belong to the union. There were no unions any of the places that I worked. I never heard of a union and nobody knew of one in the towns. So, the town here was just coming out of that 36 depression and they were putting their own people to work, but we were out of towners, but we did finally get work and then that meant joining the union.”
Finally, at the age of 37, Blanche had found a place where women's work was respected. She snagged a waitressing job in Meaderville, an area in Butte where several Italian restaurants were considered among the best in the west.
“When I first went to work, it was straight shift, 8 hours. And when that 8 hours was up, I went home. That, to me, was the most unusual thing I’d run into in all those years that I’d been working. But I didn’t have to stay overtime for nothing.”
Relieved of relentless hours of work, Blanche's appreciation for the rights won for workers translated into interest in how the union was run and how she could become more involved.
“That I could have a day off to myself, and the fact that if the boss tried to make me work over my 8 hours, the Business Agent was in to see him promptly. She kept good track of things. And I just thought, my god how long has this been going on! I could have been doing this all the time! So I had time to myself and boy - that union - that’s something else. And it got me interested in it, so I started attending the meetings and finding out things in my books and got interested. I though everyone should have a union, because I’d been exploited all those years.”
By 1944, Blanche had gotten appointed to the union's executive board, the first of many positions where she would serve in the union’s hierarchy.
“And it wasn’t an election, it was an appointed deal at that time - the President appointed me - and I’ve been on it either as a board member or as chairman of the board ever since. I’m still on it. We were an original union. We were very proud of our title, the Women’s Protective Union, because it was formed more or less to protect the working women in Butte, and it carried that. But as I told you the other day, when they merged us, we had to change the title.”
Copenhaver became a primary decision maker in the union's activities, overseeing problems between union members and employers, and among union members themselves.
“The Executive Board duties are also spelled out in the Contract. They are the legal body of the union; they pass on all expenditures other than routine office work. They set the salaries for the office help, the Secretary and Business Agent and all. They vote on all expenditures like, we get lots of letters asking for donation to this that and the other, civic-wise. Then we get lots of letters asking for help from other unions from out of state, or some in-state. We act on those; we either pay them or place them on file. We have helped many unions in Montana when they’re on strike. We send them money. There’s a central body in Helena that takes care of it, strike funds. But the Executive Board also set up - they act on quite a few things: grievances, people that haven’t got their proper pay, or their vacations, that’s all brought into the Executive Board. The most typical kind [of grievances] are not paying their vacations or not giving them their proper scale, which is in the contracts, it’s all spelled out. There’s many employers that try to get away from it. Then we have grievances with our own members that want to work two shifts in a day, work in this house and then work in the other another 8 hours. And we have to straighten them out on that because we have a 40-hour week.”
Interviewer (Mary Murphy): “Do you consider your union one of the strongest in the state?”
“I really do. Although in all honesty I can’t say it’s as strong as it was back in the 50s and 60s. But we have this whole Silver Bow County under contract, anyone that works in our craft.”
The Women's Protective Union's strength in organizing resulted in their needing to strike only once in its history. In 1948, the union's negotiation with the Butte Employer's Association broke down.
“We were in the negotiations and the employers wouldn’t give us a raise. And we met many many times. God I spent half my life up there in the negotiating committees it seems like. And couldn’t get anywhere so we took a strike vote and the girls voted to strike. We took it back to the Employer’s Association and they said ‘go ahead.’ They thought it would be easy. They found out it wasn’t. They had bartenders in the Finlen Hotel for instance. The musicians, they all walked right out. The Finlen was a big hotel, very deluxe.”
Interviewer (Mary Murphy): “And what about some of the other workers in town. Did everybody honor your picket line?”
“Everybody honored our picket line. The Teamsters wouldn’t deliver. The Labor & building trades wouldn’t do any work in the places. One place try to fly open, we call it fly open, open up Uptown, and we were walking along the street from the Union Hall. We kept a kitchen open at all times - people could come up and get donuts and coffee and sandwiches and it was all free. And some of the merchants in town, the bakeries, gave us a lot of support. But we were walking along and we saw the shades pulled in this restaurant. We peeked through the crack. The family was in there painting the building inside. So we just picked up the phone, called the Painters Union. Believe me, they laid their paintbrushes down. We had tremendous support from the other crafts.”
As picket captain, Blanche organized the membership to create a presence on the streets. This included a twenty-four hour picket in front of Butte's largest hotel, the Finlen.
“The members had to picket. We had a picket list that had hours, it had charts, the days - they were all assigned. If they didn’t picket, we could fine them. But no one was asked to picket over once a week or over two hours a day. We kept a 24-hour picket line on the Finlen.”
While the effort was serious for everyone, Blanche's personal experience would lead to one of the more memorable events of her life.
“I was working practically 24 hours a day up in that union office on assigning the jobs and taking care of it and keeping the engine running and so forth. But something happened - one of the pickets didn’t show up at the Finlen. We had to picket the front and the side - there were two entrances - one of them didn’t show up. So I had to fill in. If you can’t get a picket right away, I had to go down and get under the banner. And I was picketing with this girl. And we saw a big car, and another big car right behind it, pull up across from the Finlen, where the Acoma is. And this gentleman and his entourage get out of the car and start across the street and I heard him say, ‘My god it’s a woman’s picket line! We’re not staying there!’ It was Bing Crosby. [laughter] Ah, to me that was the biggest thrill. I wrote him a letter and thanked him. That’s all I saw of him. I recognized him and recognized his voice." He said, "‘My god it’s a woman’s picket line! We’re not going there!’”
The strike ended after seven weeks.
“But getting back - the employers got sick of seeing their places deteriorate and get dirty and locked up. No business. No money coming in. Nobody was going hungry, they were all eating at the fair houses - we call them fair houses - the ones that’d signed up. They were getting food and a little bit harder to get at - there wasn’t anything Uptown. But they finally gave in.”
Blanche Copenhaver became president of the Women's Protective Union in 1950 and served in that capacity for twenty years. Membership grew. The union supported other unions on strike and gave money to striking miners. During a miners' strike in the late 50s when there was no unemployment, help came from all over the state when Butte retailers had to lay off workers. The Women's Protective Union made sure no one went hungry.
“There was truckloads of food that come in from all over the state. There was truckloads of clothing; ranchers donated whole beefs, butchered ‘em for us. This food and clothing that was coming in - I think I mentioned that - we couldn’t store it in the Carpenters Hall - it was all stored in the third floor of the old city hall. Anyone in need could go up there and get their food or clothing for their kids. And with the cash - I remember we bought $140 worth of shoes. That was a lot of shoes in those days. Kids shoes weren’t what they are now. We bought $140 worth of shoes for kids in Sacred Heart Parish. That’s down about where the pit is now, just in that one area. There were privations of course, but nobody went hungry and everyone had the clothes that they needed.”
Blanche became involved in the Women's Protective Union's leadership during its heyday in the fifties, but then witnessed its decline after the fight was won. Despite this, she became the first female vice president of the Montana AFL-CIO in 1978.
“People were more interested in the union then because they had come through a serious Depression. And they were protected in that union. They knew they could get their money and the knew they didn’t have to work overtime, and many other good features of organized labor. They took an interest in their union. Now they’re born into it. They don’t realize - most of them - what the union really does for them. In fact, you hear that quite a bit: ‘what the hell has the union done for me?’ But they get that nice negotiated paycheck that’s quite a bit above minimum scale, plus vacations, plus holidays double time.”
Married for a few years in the early forties and then divorced, Blanche Copenhaver never had children of her own. She readily admitted that instead the union was a big part of her life. She was as devoted to it as she felt it was to her. In retirement, her reputation as a strong, knowledgeable leader led to several State-appointed positions for the Governor’s office. Blanche died at the age of 94.
“It’s the old gals like myself that had to fight for everything that appreciates them. But you’ve got to really work at something before you can appreciate it and realize what it’s doing for you.”