THE EASTERN BANKRUPTCY : The Loyalists : A Few Stalwarts Stay on the Job

To maintain the pressure in their war of nerves with Eastern Airlines, striking workers have been snapping photographs of Eastern shuttle flight crew members as they arrive at Boston’s Logan Airport.

But if the strikers’ goal is intimidation, it has not worked on Capt. Walt Shivers. The exuberant veteran pilot taxied his plane in front of the strikers’ telephoto lenses this week with a sign perched jauntily in his cockpit window: “Flying & Love It.”

“We’re not making friends of those people by being here,” said Shivers, one of 200 pilots still working since Eastern filed for bankruptcy court protection Thursday. “But this is the hard core.”

About 1,500 of Eastern’s hardest-core employees have worked to keep the beleaguered airline’s planes flying this week, enduring resentment, harsh words and even threats from the union mechanics and pilots with whom they have long worked side by side. The mechanics went out on strike a week ago, and most of the pilots have refused to cross the picket lines.

Jobs at Eastern have not been easy since the airline flew into heavy weather a decade ago. The airline’s mounting financial problems have forced pilots and flight attendants to give back a portion of their salaries and to work in an atmosphere often poisoned by acrimony between labor and management.

But if some people think that deregulation and Frank Lorenzo, chairman of Texas Air, Eastern’s parent company, have taken the fun out of the airline business, the Eastern loyalists who have kept working still think they have pretty good jobs. Many accept the company’s assertion that radical cost cuts are necessary for the airline to survive and say the strike was the last thing Eastern needed.

“When the union told them to go on strike, it was like Jim Jones trying to get his people to drink the poison Kool-Aid,” said Shivers, who was interviewed during a layover at New York’s La Guardia Airport. “We’re not drinking it.” His reference was to the mass suicide-execution of more than 900 religious cultists in Guyana in 1978.

Outside the La Guardia terminal of Eastern’s New York-Washington-Boston air shuttle, a picket line of striking mechanics and pilots stood in front of huge placards reading, “Save Eastern” and “Stop Lorenzo.” A striker with a bullhorn was trying to persuade travelers on the flights--with fares now cut to $12--that the planes were unsafe and the flight crews inexperienced.

During 1986 labor trouble at Eastern, Shivers had an argument over the phone with another pilot, who he said threatened to “come down and get me.” Since then, Shivers has kept a sawed-off shotgun at hand at his Miami home, illuminated his house with special lights at night and bought a guard dog.

Shivers said he had a vigorous exchange of opinions with some strikers at the Atlanta airport the other day. He had ventured into the terminal’s waiting area to buy a pack of cigarettes, trying to hide his identity from the strikers by putting a wind breaker over his pilot’s uniform.

But they may have noticed his regulation black trousers and shoes, for he was soon surrounded by three angry flight attendants and a half-dozen pilots. Still, “it was all very civil,” Shivers said.

He regrets that the strike has probably hurt his relations permanently with other union pilots. “I know I’ll probably never be able to sit in the jump seat of another union carrier,” he said, referring to the cockpit seats where off-duty pilots are sometimes allowed to travel as a courtesy.

Another working pilot, Capt. Steve Glasgow, had to ask Eastern to provide a security guard for his home in Charlotte, N.C., because of the reaction some colleagues have had to his outspoken anti-strike opinions. For about a year, Glasgow has mailed out a newsletter called “Pilots With Another View” to get across his opinion that the Air Line Pilots Assn. has been pursuing the wrong strategy.

Glasgow said he and his wife have received a number of vaguely threatening anonymous calls, including one in which the caller told his wife, “We know your husband’s away and that you’re alone.”

Glasgow, a 22-year Eastern veteran, said of his fellow non-strikers, “I’m proud of the people who are here today.”

The Eastern loyalists recount how the periodic flare of labor troubles has been making their jobs harder for a long time.

Flight attendant Ann Roever joined the airline in 1961 after graduating from college, turning down a number of teaching jobs. She had been on the job only six months when a strike caused the airline to abruptly uproot her from Chicago to New York.

Since then, said Roever, who continues to work during the strike, “it seems like there have been so many labor problems.” Among them have been slowdowns in which pilots intentionally fell behind schedule and job actions where ground crews would leave full planes stranded on runways, or leave unloaded baggage on the tarmac.

But recently, the problems have gotten worse. “Eventually, you’re just crisised out,” Roever said.