Profiles and Interviews: Hollie Atwood

(Hollie Atwood, in rear, who worked out of the Grantsville garage, was a popular leader among members of AFSCME Local 1834.)

“Before he was hired on the roads, my husband worked in mines in Pennsylvania and Allegany County,” said Doris Atwood Ray, whose husband, Hollie Atwood, was a leader of Local 1834. “Atwood, who was born in North Carolina where his family worked a small farm, was used to making more money, said Ms. Ray, “but the county was steady income and it was feast or famine in the coal mines.”

As the strike drew on and workers qualified for food stamps, Hollie Atwood tried to convince them to accept the help. “Some of the guys were reluctant to take food stamps. They were ashamed,” said Doris Ray, whose sister, Mabel Butler, was married to striker Berman Butler.  “But Hollie convinced them to take the stamps,” said Ms. Ray. “I tried to convince him to take them, too, but he wouldn’t,” she said.

While her husband wouldn’t accept food stamps, Doris Ray fondly recalls getting help from the union. She was pregnant at the time of the strike. “I was tickled pink that the union supplied baby clothes from a new baby shop in Baltimore,” said Ms. Ray.

Bill Klotz, who was hired in the Grantsville garage a year after the strike, remembers Hollie Atwood. “He ran an old D21 Allis Chalmers bulldozer. He had a thermos of coffee every morning and would sip out of it all day and a pipe that he would smoke. He had to keep lighting it. All the guys liked him. He’d always help out if he could,” said Klotz.