Editorial
The Citizen Newspaper
Editor: Virginia Rosenbaum
(August 6, 1970)
The scene in the Oakland Parking lot of Union men lined up on one side and strike-breakers lined up on the other side with police protections reminded your editor of a scene she witnessed some forty years ago when just a child. It happened at the old Taylor Tin Mill in South Cumberland. People lined both sides of the streets yelling, “Scabs, scabs,” at the men marching down the middle of the street to work under police escort.
This kind of thing didn’t work forty years ago and it isn’t going to work today in Oakland, despite the stubbornness of Commissioners John Ross Sines and Hubert Friend.
These two Commissioners are ably supported by another who has been deemed “agitator” by many with whom your editor has talked. This is Mrs. Martha Glotfelty who was a member of the House of Delegates representing Garrett County until B.O. Aiken beat her out in the last election.
Mrs. Glotfelty wound up with a job in the office of the County Roads Garage, and from this vantage point, it appears that she has been aiding the two Commissioners to the best of her ability in their 40-year-old thinking.
Oakland is just now experiencing the pains of growth. Garrett County, by its nature, is an isolated area, except for the Eastern area with its many men employed in local factories who have been exposed to today’s world with its fast pace and its unions and its many and sundry other ideas and problems.
With the opening up of Garrett County to new industries, naturally unionization follows. It is only natural, then that men who have been subjected to low wages for years and who now eye others in other areas who are making much more for the same kind of work or related industries want some of the goodies for themselves.
This has been going on all over the United States, and will not be stopped by two Commissioners and an agitating backer who are forty years behind the times.
Mrs. Glotfelty yelled at your editor “Be sure to get the facts straight,” and we are trying to do just that. It’s a fact, Mrs. G…your kind of thinking is arcadian and has no place in today’s fast-moving, modern world.