of experience. The money was simply amazing, and the jobs were plentiful. Hammond kept coming back.
He and the other warehouse workers were organized under a particularly fierce, energized union with a funny name: the Inlandboatmen’s Union, named after the river barge workers who plied the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Everyone called it the IBU for short. Hammond had never seen anything like the IBU. On Sundays, the union held an open meeting for its members at the union hall in downtown Portland. About two or three hundred members showed up, and those who hadn’t already been drinking began drinking immediately. The meetings were long and spirited and social, and the sense of solidarity was electric. “You could always count on a good fistfight or something for entertainment, you know,” Hammond recalled.
The union guys tended to give each other nicknames—there was Dodger and Magneto and Gary the Anarchist—and Hammond later earned his own nickname, the Hammer. He wore this nickname uneasily. It must have been a little bit ironic, like calling a very skinny man “Fatty.” Hammond might have been many things, but he didn’t seem like a hammer. He was a quiet guy, with wide brown eyes and delicate features that could only be described as regular. When Hammond imitated someone screaming in anger, he still managed to do it with a whisper. Hammond was congenial and got along with the people he worked with, including the managers and supervisors. He repeatedly described the warehouse as being like a family, and it was clear that he aimed to get along with his relatives as best he could.
Hammond wasn’t militant. He didn’t have to be. The union took care of that part for him. The union negotiated relentlessly on behalf of its members. It boasted about its past labor disputes during the 1930s, which were characterized by strikes, violence, and intimidation. Using this history as a lever, the union won remarkably generous terms for its workers: a pension plan for their retirement; a health insurance plan with no employee premium payments; generous sick leave and absenteeism policies; great starting pay; and seemingly permanent job security.
“Once you got in there and working—I was working right alongside guys that were schoolteachers and things. It just paid so much better—they’d gotten like a job in the summer, when there was no school, and it paid so good they just stayed,” Hammond recalled. “So we had quite a few guys that were college educated and working in there.” Hammond didn’t want to drive a forklift his entire life. He left the job briefly, tried other things, but then returned in 1981 because of the good pay and benefits. He didn’t leave for another thirty-five years.
In the mid-1980s, Hammond started hanging around with a pretty girl named Carla Hogue. They drank a lot and partied with friends. Then, Carla Hogue got pregnant. In 1985, she and Steve Hammond had a daughter named Sarah. Steve and Carla later got married and had a second child, Stephanie, in 1989. The Hammonds bought a small home in Vancouver, Washington, just north of Portland. They settled there in part because the property was cheaper than in downtown Portland, although it made for a long commute. Their house payment was about $650 a month, a burden that was easy to meet because he and Carla both worked: he at the warehouse and she as a medical assistant.
Life wasn’t easy for the Hammonds. While work was steady at the warehouse, it was also organized along strict lines of hierarchy and seniority put in place by the union. Hammond started at the bottom of this hierarchy when he returned to work in 1981, which meant that he got stuck with night shifts. He worked for twenty years before he earned the seniority to work days. When his daughters were young, Hammond left for work in the afternoon. He got off his shift around one in the morning and drove home, passing the baton to Carla, who left for her job around four thirty. Steve got to bed around two thirty, slept until the girls woke up at six or so, and then took care of them in the mornings. Hammond usually worked seven days a week, volunteering for overtime shifts to earn the extra pay.
The schedule began to grind away on Steve and Carla’s relationship. The bars and partying receded, although the drinking continued. The fun drained out of things. Hammond felt like he was being pushed by Carla to achieve the milestones