John McNay
I have to call your attention to this Montana Standard article about John McNay, an Anaconda native who is back in his home state to address the AFL-CIO convention at Fairmont Hot Springs today.
A history professor and union leader at the University of Cincinnati, John is going to talk about the successful fight by people in Ohio against Senate Bill 5, a union-busting piece of legislation, back in 2011.
I knew John when we were both students in the journalism school at the University of Montana, and he later worked in Butte and Anaconda, as did I. He bailed out of the biz years ago, earned a Ph.D. in history and has been happily perched in academia ever since.
He paid us a visit in Billings earlier this week and we did a lot of catching up, but in his typically modest way, John didn’t say anything about the large part he played in the fight against Senate Bill 5. And though I was familiar with some of John’s family history, I was still surprised by his genetic background as a union man, as laid out in the Standard article:
Both his grandfathers retired from the smelter. Uncle Frank McEachern on his mother’s side retired as an arsenic plant foreman after 50 years. His father, John T. McNay, Sr., worked 42 years on the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railway.
His great aunt, Kathleen McGuire, longtime Anaconda Junior High librarian, was a Montana Federation of Teachers founding member. His great uncle, Tommy McGuire, was a Mine, Mill and Smelterworkers Union organizer.
While Friday will be McNay’s first time speaking at an AFL-CIO convention, his uncle Joe Crosswhite was AFL-CIO president in the 1970s.
