Profiles and Interviews: Ernie and Butch Crofoot

(Ernie Crofoot Sr. addresses AFSCME Local 1834 members at Garrett County Courthouse on bullhorn. His son, Butch Crofoot, a former B&O Railroad worker, plays a labor song.)

The Glenn L. Martin aviation factory in Middle River, Md. (Baltimore County) provided a rich source of AFSCME talent and leadership at the union’s local, state and national levels. Ernie Crofoot, Ed Mohler, former coal miner Tom Rapanotti and legendary organizer P.J. Ciampa, a key leader in the Memphis sanitation strike, all worked in the plant that employed more than 52,000 workers during World War II, all production employees belonging to the United Auto Workers.

Ernie “Butch” Crofoot Jr. said his father, who helped negotiate AFSCME’s first agreement with the Garrett County commissioners, grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore the son of German immigrants. Crofoot, who spoke fluent German, had attended high school at Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school in nearby Delaware, his tuition paid by a friend’s father, a physician.

Ernie Crofoot Sr. tried to enlist in military service, putting his German language skills to work, but was rejected three times due to a childhood case of tuberculosis. After getting a job at Glenn L. Martin, Crofoot was quickly assigned as a UAW shop steward and rose to the position of International Vice President of AFSCME, simultaneously leading the union’s powerful Council 67 based in Baltimore.

Ernie Gregg, a Garrett County pharmacist who, after the strike, served a total of 24 years on the Garrett County board of commissioners, negotiated with Ernie Crofoot Sr. He said, “Ernie was kind of tough, but reasonable.”

Butch Crofoot recalled accompanying his father to Oakland during the strike as part of a caravan bringing food and clothes for the members’ families.

The younger Crofoot had quit college in 1967 during his sophomore year at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He got married and began working at the B&O Railroad’s freight yard. He arrived in Oakland carrying a guitar. “I sang “Links in the Chain,” Phil Ochs’ song about workers who were mechanized out of their jobs,” said Butch Crofoot, who remembered the “impressive crowd” that had gathered to greet the caravan as he sang: “Come you ranks of labor, come you union core and see if you remember the struggles of before when you were standing helpless on the outside of the door and you started building links on the chain.”