Copyright 1994 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.  
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
October 7, 1994, FRIDAY, FIVE STAR Edition
SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. 1C

LENGTH: 758 words

HEADLINE: LABOR LEADER TENDS HIS SOUTH SIDE ROOTS - AT ST. RAYMOND'S LUNCH

COLUMN: PHILIP DINE ON LABOR COLUMN

BODY:
As he made his meandering way to his seat for lunch, Jim Norwood worked the cavernous room, seemingly knowing everyone and just what to say to each.

He paused to greet Eddie Dorsey, a low-key fellow whose period heading St. Louis' Teamsters was sandwiched between the high-profile tenures of Harold Gibbons and Bob Sansone.

We finally got to our table, just ahead of the cabbage rolls and stuffed squash and chicken & dumplings.

But people kept stopping by to pay their respects to Norwood, 62, a neighborhood boy grown into a powerful labor leader - as general secretary-treasurer of the Laborers' International Union of North America.

"Are you Jim Norwood, by chance?" asked a most deferential man who works for a union investment firm, and who already knew the answer to his question.

In that trademark St. Louis institution known as Wednesday lunch at St. Raymond's - somewhere between the colorful characters and spicy aromas and talk of ancient family recipes - matters of labor organizing and political action committees and labor-management cooperation just seemed too, well, stuffy to bring up.

I finally shoved aside my faxes and newspaper printouts and just went with the flow. Just in time to meet Pauline Norwood as she sat at our table. "I met Jim Norwood when he was in 8th grade. It was 1945. He was the star ballplayer," she recounted. "I fell in love with him."

She volunteers Mondays to help bake the Lebanese bread that people wrap around the food, and Wednesdays to help serve it to the hungry crowd. "There's labor people, politicians, judges, businessmen," her husband said, gesturing.

Jim and Pauline Norwood have attended the church "since the late '40s, when there was nothing here but a four-family flat that had been made into a church." He joined Laborers Local 110 in St. Louis in 1949. After 21 years in Washington with the 690,000-member LIUNA, eventually as an international vice president, he moved back to St. Louis in 1991.

The old ties remain firm, as shown when Theresa McDermott, sister of Judge Paul Simon and wife of a retired 30-year pipefitter, joined the table. She and Pauline Norwood debated whether their grandmothers, Lebanese natives who moved to Hickory and Chouteau here, used lime juice or tomato juice to cook stuffed grape leaves. "Our grandmothers were sisters and they cooked alike" - so they wouldn't have used different ingredients, Pauline insisted.

Raymond Slay, nephew of Brother Leo Slay and son of Francis Slay, who runs the Cedars restaurant at St. Raymond's and whose son is a candidate for aldermanic president, ambled over, followed by trucking company owner Eugene Slay.

Norwood and Brother Leo, who "bummed together as school kids," will be honored Oct. 16 at the first annual Cedar awards dinner - chaired by Eugene Slay - for their neighborhood and church work. The banquet committee has names like Gephardt and Musial and Bosley and Danforth.

The dinner is a fundraiser to help St. Raymond's Church on Lebanon Drive turn a building next door into a multi-use center. "What we want to do is develop this into a South Side anchor to regenerate our neighborhood," Norwood said. "We want youths to have something more to do than stand on street corners, and make sure our elderly have a place to go and socialize."

That kind of community involvement is something labor needs to continue - and tout - Norwood preaches. His own union is seeking to alter a long-troubled image. Norwood and new LIUNA president Arthur Coia have set up an aggressive public affairs staff of nine.

The Laborers, who number 32,000 in the Springfield, Ill.-based region that includes St. Louis, were perhaps the most active union helping last year's flood victims in St. Louis. Coia and Norwood - both survivors - were honored recently in Washington by the National Leukemia Society for raising $ 300, 000.

The union has prevailed upon the Labor Department to create the job rank of construction craft laborer, instead of simply laborer. "It recognizes us as a craft, rather than a ditch digger," Norwood said. He hopes this will end use of the term "common laborer." It takes skill and training, he maintains, to work on highways and bridges, handle toxic waste - or function as "sand hogs" in the muck of New York's sewer and drainage and transit tunnels.

After a few minutes of such talk, the bantering resumed and more respects were paid and a debate erupted over the proper pronunciation of koossa (stuffed squash) - and St. Raymond's returned to normal.