Life on the line

David Renzi

Thursday, Jan. 29, 1998 | 12:34 p.m.

It's 2 a.m. Wednesday and it's cold on the Strip, though not as biting as the previous morning, two days before Thanksgiving, when it was cold and windy.

No, this morning it's just cold. Feet are numb, breath's visible.

All you can see of Bessie Brown is eyes poking out of a wool scarf wrapped bandit-like round her face, the hood of a jacket pulled tightly over her forehead.

She's standing in a makeshift shelter in front of the Frontier Hotel with five or six others, trying to convince herself that she's warm.

"I got on five pair of pants, five shirts and two hats on my head," Brown says.

She's not cold, she says, but her sideto-side dance on the sidewalk contradicts her words.

Brown was a Frontier employee for 23 years. Line call. She's been a striker going on 15 months.

"We've been out here so long we done forgot why," she says.

But she knows. Everyone knows.

It's the Culinary Workers Local No. 226 protest of the labor practices of the Elardis - patriarch mother Margaret and sons Tom and John, real-life Bobby and J.R. Ewings, the hotel owners.

As the strike nears another Christmas, appearing no closer to resolution than when it began on Sept. 21, 1991, the pickets remain unified. Despite nights like this and a hot summer just passed, they continue to walk the line 30 hours a week in four shifts round the clock. Of the 550 union members who walked out, none have gone back.

They explain to tourists the reasons behind the strike and bash the Elardis. Some berate customers who cross the line.

"I'm very good at what I do," says Terry Lemley, a former cocktail waitress who works into the graveyard shift. She doesn't apologize for her abusive behavior and there's a hint of pride when she says, "I've been arrested more times than I can say."

"Scab!" Felka Matic screams (three times) at the driver of a car pulling into the parking lot on the hotel's south side.

"We should be aggressive," she explains later, "because most people, they don't have respect for us. Why they want respect from us?"

"Everybody is out here fighting for their lives," says Barry Siegel, a day-shift striker and a former Frontier bartender. "Personally, I can get worked up once in a while and I get nasty, but if you pat everybody on the back that goes in you'll be out here for the rest of your life.

"I hate being nasty. I don't like it, it's not my nature, but the strike is a very personal thing. Not against the people that are going in, but against the family that owns this place. It's a very personal thing to everybody here."

He estimates that 75 to 80 percent of the tourists have been supportive of the strikers.

"There's a lot more nice people than there are jerks," Siegel says.

Cost of unity

Outwardly bolt and boastful ("We want to last one day longer than they do," goes the strikers' maxim), the strike has wrought emotional and financial concerns and changed lives.

Although some employees who worked low-wage jobs make more on the picket line ($200 a week), many who worked for tips are taking substantial losses.

Siegel was making $90 a day in salary alone. He walked out not because of his salary, he says, but because of pay cuts, lack of a guaranteed work week, low starting salaries for new employees and obliteration of the pension fund and the Culinary Union insurance program.

There are- other reasons, ranging from allegations of onthe-spot termination to Mrs. Elardi being mean.

Those charges are difficult to answer since the Elardi family rarely makes itself available to the media.

Altered lives

A graveyard picket and former room-service waiter who identified himself only as Bill says the strike has put lives on hold.

"You can't do as much as you did before," he says. "There's a lot of anxiety on graveyard. It takes a lot out of you. Basically, you don't have a life."

Siegel, who works days on the picket line, says he hasn't felt the financial pinch as readily as his fellow strikers. Before the strike, he had paid in cash for a condominium and has no rent worries.

"I don't waste any money and then when I made money, I saved," says Siegel, sitting on a bus-stop bench on Las Vegas Boulevard. "I didn't put my money up my nose and I didn't gamble it. I don't go to the casinos.

"If I want a couple drinks I'll buy a six-pack at the market and I'll drink it at home and watch my television. I've got cable. I went to San Diego last week for a couple days. What I wanted to do was go to Tahiti, but I definitely can't afford it."

"It hasn't affected me because I prepared for (the strike) and I live accordingly" says Ruby Wilkinson, a former waitress and 18-year Frontier employee.

Circus Circus providing free meals three times a day is the nicest thing that's happened to them, the strikers say. For Thanksgiving, they received 550 free turkeys courtesy of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and Nevada Pacific Dental, which has provided the strikers free emergency dental care.

Cheryl Cunningham, a former waitress and Frontier employee for 19 years, says the strike has taught her children the value of money. She had been making about $47 and anywhere from $40-$100 a day in tips.

"It made my kids less spoiled, " she says. "I'm a food server, so if they wanted to go to 7-Eleven I always had my tip money. I always said, 'OK, here you go.' Now my kids have learned to respect money more. Like when they were getting ready to go back to school and we went shopping for clothes, they'd look at price tags and say, 'Mom, no I don't think so."'

for Joan Pascarell, a former waitress, the strike has exacted a physical and emotional toll.

"It isn't exactly fun walking 30 hours every week, because let's face it, I'm used to working all the time. You don't even sleep as good as when you're working a steady job," she says.

It's had some kind of emotional effect all on the strikers.

"Oh, there has to be," says former cook Leonard Beckner. "There's nothing to do. You can't feel like this is your livelihood. You have to end (the strike) and go on with your life, and your life has been cut off until something better happens. I can't go along with this for long."

Owing to the length of the strike, a few say they'd have to think it over before walking out again. Most are adamant and say they would do it again.

"Personally," Siegel says, "I could go for a couple (more) years."

He may have to.