Profiles and Interviews: Ray Artice

(Ray Artice, left, playing horseshoes with co-worker George Vitez, walked the picket lines in 1970 and picked up work to make ends meet cutting pulpwood and installing a sewage system at Deep Creek Lake State Park.)

Lonnie Artice, the son of AFSCME Local 1834 member Ray Artice was 15-years-old at the time of the 1970 road workers’ strike. His father began working on the roads in 1954. Lonnie remembers great uncles who worked on the county roads as members of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal. “They broke rocks right on the road bed,” said Artice.

Before he was hired on the roads, Ray Artice, a Friendsville resident, cut timber to supply a sawmill.

After his father was hired by the county, Artice remembers him being sent home from work without pay when it was raining, thinking his father had a “lot of vacation time.” The workers wanted to get AFSCME recognized, said Artice, “so it wasn’t a buddy system.” Seniority, he said, “meant nothing before the strike.”

Artice remembers an explosion [during the strike] at the Sang Run Bridge, near White Rock or Salt block. Has father and a co-worker, Danny Uphold were arrested on suspicion of setting the dynamite charge. The State Police took them to Cumberland and administered a lie detector test and exonerated them. Artice says they were suspected because they were in the area cutting pine pulpwood for a “little extra money.”

Ray Artice also worked during the strike for a contractor putting in a sewage system at Deep Creek Lake State Park.

“My mom never complained [during the strike],” said Artice. “But I remember her saying, ‘We’re going to lose our house,’” he added.

Lonnie Artice, who is retired from the county roads department, remembers a support caravan for the strikers in the late summer of 1970. “They paraded through Oakland blowing horns around the courthouse. They never met with anybody [commissioners] that day.” He remembers going to the union store to get Shredded Wheat cereal and toilet paper.

John Ross Sines, the commissioner most opposed to granting union recognition, was nicknamed “Hard Times Coming,” said Artice, who remembers hearing during the strike that Sines told strikers they could eat “groundhogs and dandelions” if they got hungry from not having pay checks.