Obituaries : Thomas (Teddy) Gleason; Longshoremen Chief

Thomas W. (Teddy) Gleason, the squat, tough-talking head of the International Longshoremen’s Assn. for 24 years who presided over the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in the glory days of the dockworkers but stayed in power long enough to see containerization make sharp inroads into labor’s gains, has died.

Gleason died Thursday at a Manhattan hospital. He was 92.

When Gleason retired in 1987 at 86, he was the nation’s oldest union president. He was known internationally for having negotiated guaranteed annual incomes for the 110,000 men in his branches of the longshoremen’s union, down from 250,000 before containerized shipping. Many of his members were guaranteed $30,000 or more a year for not working after their jobs had been eliminated. (West Coast dockworkers are affiliated with another union.)

He also was the last of the old-time dockworkers personified in Elia Kazan’s film “On the Waterfront,” which helped make a star of Marlon Brando when it was released in 1954.

Gleason went to work alongside his dockworker father for 35 cents an hour when he was 13. When he retired, his men were earning $17 an hour and their leader was credited with bringing not only prosperity but also peace to the strike-prone dockworkers.

Gleason joined the ILA in 1919 and by 1932 had become a dock superintendent. Blacklisted by the shipping companies because of his unionism, he worked in a factory during the day and sold hot dogs at Coney Island at night to support his family.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration began to restore labor’s image, Gleason returned to his union activities. And when several locals of the ILA merged in the 1940s, he became president of the combined Local 1.

Gleason became ILA president in 1963.