Profiles and Interviews: Leo Rinker

(Leo Rinker, left, a wounded veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, was elected president of AFSCME Local 1834 after the 1970 roads strike.)

Terry Rinker was in eighth grade when his father, Calvin “Leo” Rinker joined his co-workers on the picket lines.

Leo Rinker was hired by the county roads in 1958 and retired in 1984. “My dad graduated high school in Bruceton, W.V. He was in the newspaper for baseball. If they had scouts out, he could have been a professional pitcher,” said Terry Rinker.

Leo worked at the Celanese textile plant in Allegany County, a union-organized plant with a strong history of worker militancy. He enlisted in WWII. A tanker sergeant, he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge when a mortar hit his tank and a couple fellow soldiers were killed. He tried farming, bought a plow and a tractor on a GI loan, but soon went to work on the roads.

“My dad would do anything for anybody,” said Terry Rinker, remembering his father going out to help a driver whose car had broken down near his house and ending up replacing a hose on the car.

“Roads workers had low wages they couldn’t live on,” said Rinker. “One picture of the strike sticks out vividly,” he said. The tables [of food and clothing donations] were covered with blue jeans and Campbell’s soup. It was union food. Solidarity was a word used a lot,” he said.

Leo Rinker was elected president of AFSCME Local 1834 after the strike. Terry Rinker remembers going out to support coal miners on strike with his dad, bringing a 55-gallon barrel for them to burn wood to keep warm. And he says his dad attended AFSCME conventions where he developed friendships with a diverse group of union members.

“A lot of people my father worked with hated the union. They are the ones who benefited the most,” said Rinker, who served nine years in the military and worked as a union ironworker and a self-employed dry-wall contractor.