By David Harry

Staff Writer

Helen DesRoberts and Ruth Goodall Pistick died within three days of each other in 1997.

How they lived will be the subject of a talk on the working class perspective of history by labor historian, teacher and union official Peter Kellman at the Sanford-Springvale Historical Society March 19.

Kellman said he will use the Sanford women’s obituaries to depict two very different lives.

The obituary said Pitstick, who was 71 when she died, was born in Hollywood. She was an heiress to the Goodall family fortune built on the textile mills in Sanford. She traveled around the world four times with her husband, Virgil Ian Pitstick, and she enjoyed ballooning over the African serengeti.

According to the obituary, the Pitsticks donated the Goodall Mansion in Sanford to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“It is Helen [DesRobert’s] house that should be on the historical register,” Kellman said.

DesRoberts was 97 when she died, according to her obituary. Born in Quebec, she worked at Goodall-Sanford Textile Mills, worshipped at Holy Family Church, survived two husbands and enjoyed sewing and crocheting.

“Pitstick gets the credit for the work others did,” Kellman said. “How many places in town are named Goodall?”

Kellman asked the question in the kitchen of his rural home in North Berwick. On the table next him were file folders stuffed with stories and facts about the working class he said media never fully covers.

“It is about what is of interest to the ruling class,” Kellman said. “The big news is about the stock market, not what is happening to everyday people.”

He said he and his wife Rebekah raise vegetables and chickens and cut the wood that heats their home. They host meetings for the York County Organic Farmers and Gardeners. But Kellman said his life is anything but self-sustaining.

“Things others make are always needed,” Kellman said. “We are all tied together.”

Getting the best for the people who work has been a long task for Kellman, 63. He is working on a book entitled “Back to the Future - Labor’s New Day,” and said he knows organized labor has seen tough times now and in the past.

Statistics cited in his book “Building Unions,” show union membership peaked in 1953 when there 16 million union members in a U.S. population of about 153 million.

A U.S. Bureau of Labor survey released Jan. 28 shows union membership increased in 2008 by 428,000 to 16.1 million. The current population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is more than 305 million. 

The percentage and number of union members in the workforce is down from 25 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor survey. The initial survey made by the bureau in 1983 counted 17.7 million union members comprising 20.1 percent of the workforce.

Kellman was born in Brooklyn, where his parents met while working at the Naval Shipyard. Kellman said they found Brooklyn to expensive to live in, and moved first to Salem, N.H., when his father got a job in Lawrence, Mass.

The family moved to Springvale in 1959, when his father got a job at Wasco Products Inc, a skylight manufacturer in Sanford.

Kellman graduated from Sanford High School in 1963, and played football at the University of Maine in Orono before leaving school in 1964.

“School was not a place to learn anything,” Kellman said.

After joining the Committee for Non-Violent Action, a group formed in 1957 to protest nuclear testing, Kellman said he was sent to Alabama to help organize civil rights protestors.

He was often moving ahead of marchers seeking civil and voting rights for blacks because he was in charge of finding secure campgrounds. The job included looking for weapons hidden around potential sites, Kellman said.

When he returned to Maine, Kellman said he was the first man to register as a conscientious objector at a draft board in Kennebunk because of his opposition to the Vietnam War.

Opposing the war also emphasized his upbringing in a progressive family, Kellman said.

“It was OK for me to be different,” Kellman said, adding that while he was taking a pre-induction physical in Portland, his mother was photographed outside participating in an anti-war demonstration.

To avoid the draft, Kellman said he “went into exile in Canada in 1967.”

In October 1973, he returned, turning himself in at the U.S.-Canadian border, Kellman said. 

“The federal attorney for Maine agreed with my attorney that I had refused an illegal order in regards to the draft and charges were dropped,” Kellman said. 

He began a series of blue-collar jobs when he returned to Maine and first tried to organize a union for employees at the Converse shoe factory in North Berwick in 1976. His union memberships span the alphabet soup of organized labor acronyms. 

He said he is a past-president of the Southern Maine Labor Council and has taught labor history at the University of Southern Maine and the Heartwood College of Art.

With union membership came involvement in a number of strikes. The longest and most notable came in 1987-1988 when he helped organize paper workers in a strike against International Paper Company in Jay. That strike failed, but despite the fact union strikers were replaced, Kellman said it is inaccurate to believe labor in Maine has not been organized.

Kellman said union membership extended from mills and shoe manufacturers to public service employees, police officers and teachers.

But as a rapid response coordinator of the Maine AFL-CIO since November, Kellman said he has seen the effects of the recession.

The union rapid response team works with a team established by the Maine Department of Labor and the Maine Career Centers to help laid off employees cope with job losses, find new work and get new career training.

On the team, Kellman said he consults laid off or soon to be laid off workers about the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act - commonly called COBRA plans - that allow laid off workers to buy health insurance coverage - eligibility for the MaineCare health program.

He said in one week last month, he conducted four sessions for workers at the New Page mill in Rumford, along with sessions in Skowhegan and Augusta. Kellman said he has assisted workers at Hutumaki in Waterville, where paper plates are made, and the childcare workers facing layoffs at the University of Southern Maine.

Kellman also recalled a session where union and nonunion employees were meeting from several different companies.

One nonunion worker told of being immediately escorted from the building after getting laid off with no notice.

“In a union, they have to give you notice,” said a union member, Kellman recalled.