Caring for people
“I knew Steve’s father before I ever met young Steve. I started working at Heidrich around 1951, and young Steve hired five years later. We made dies for all of the Big Three.
“Both of us became shop stewards at Heidrich, and we were part of a group of young guys and old guys who went deer hunting and pheasant hunting at Hawk’s Junction near Alpena, Mich. Steve had a dog named Bo, who he fed ginger snaps to. I don’t know if it was the cookies or not, but Bo was always full of gas. We had to ride up north with the windows open.
“Steve was a kindhearted person who cared for people. When Heidrich closed down and I was out of work for two years, he helped get me a job in maintenance at the union headquarters. In 1977 I got promoted to staff. He was a great guy because even though he was an officer of a major union, he always had time for you.”
Quentin Calvert was a shop steward of UAW Local 155 where Yokich started out.
Full of ideas
“You always felt that Steve wanted to do something, not for his own self-aggrandizement, but for something bigger.
We elected him as a delegate to the 18th Constitutional Convention in Atlantic City in 1962 and, sure enough, Steve took the floor to make a speech, endorsing a youth program in the UAW. From that point on, Local 155 made sure we had younger workers in union offices and on committees. We would even bring Steve out of the shop to help man picket lines and organizing campaigns.
Steve was an excellent tool-and-die maker, too. He would be given a blueprint of the job. Then he would step back from his machine like he was lining up a putt and think about what he was going to do.
“Steve thought a lot about politics, too, even then. He would argue with us about how important it was to get behind the civil rights movement. We were nuts-and-bolts guys. We just cared about what was going on in the shop. Besides, what could we do to change society? That’s not how he looked at it, though.
“I remember stopping by Heidrich one morning around 8 for a cup of coffee and to talk to the guys, and nobody was working anywhere. Well, it was an extremely hot day and somehow they figured out how to divert the air conditioning from the management offices to the men’s room and that’s where everybody was. Nobody said whose idea it was, but you knew that anything like that had Steve’s fingerprints on it.”
Bob Mills is a former president of UAW Local 155.
Going in the same direction
“In 1969 when I was at Local 140, our servicing rep, John Cooper, introduced me to this new international representative at Region 1. John said, ‘You’ve got to meet this guy. Your thinking is similar. Both of you are trying to lead the union in the same direction.’
“That’s how I met Steve. We talked for a long while. From then on, he and I and some of his other close friends would get together once or twice a week to talk about the union and where we wanted to go.
“When Steve was elected director of Region 1 in 1977, he was already talking about union and family and getting younger workers into leadership positions. He was also one of the first to recognize that the union has to be as much concerned about product quality as the company.
“He talked about economic and social justice back then and especially about getting national health care for everyone. He would say, ‘Senators and representatives have their national health care, so why can’t workers?’
“One time he told me he was in a drugstore, and an older woman was picking up her prescription. She didn’t have enough money and was going to just buy half of it. Steve dug down in his pocket and paid the other half for her. It bothered him to know that not everybody had the same benefits that Big Three workers had.”
Nate Gooden is a UAW vice president.
