HARRY TOLAND was a most unlikely labor reporter.
Chestnut Hill born and bred, Episcopal Academy, Yale University English major. But when Stanley Thompson, the Evening Bulletin's city editor, broached the idea to him on, oddly enough, Groundhog Day in 1952, Harry mumbled an uncertain yes.
Tall and gangly, impeccably mannered and gracious, Harry was no Vic Riesel, the labor activist and columnist. Nobody was going to throw acid in his face.
Besides, this was Philadelphia. The boys might get a little excited and shout a lot, but they didn't resort to violence.
The beat turned out to be a little more dramatic than simply trying to talk with the Transport Workers' salty Mike Quill as he stumped along a hotel corridor with his blackthorn walking stick during a transit strike.
In 1952, Harry found out that a man named Abraham Goldberg, who had been convicted of extortion and barred from union activity for two years, was trying to organize workers in a Camden toy factory for a union run by notorious racketeers.
When Goldberg found out that Harry was writing a story about him, he told the reporter that if the story ran he would jump off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
Harry went to Stanley Thompson and asked what they should do. Run it, Thompson said, and if he jumps, "that'll give us a second-day story."
Goldberg didn't jump.
In a collection of Bulletin reminiscences called Nearly Everybody Read It, Harry wrote: "Given a choice of beats, mine at that moment would not have been labor. But for the seven years I covered it, I found it the pick of the lot, the place to be in the 1950s."
Harry G. Toland, who went on to excel at other positions at the Bulletin, including editorial writer, and wrote a number of books in retirement, died Jan. 31. He was 89 and lived in Wallingford, Delaware County.
Thompson, one of the last of the cranky old city editors, assigned Harry to cover the CIO convention in Pittsburgh in 1952, at which a new president was to be elected. Harry asked Thompson what he was looking for.
"The juicy, inside stuff," Thompson replied.
Harry wound up hiding in a closet with a Wall Street Journal reporter to listen in on a secret meeting with Mike Quill, who was trying to work out a deal to have Allan Haywood elected against the United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther.
"Hiding in this stuffy cubicle and scribbling notes in the dark, we had no trouble picking up the unionist's piercing County Kerry brogue booming through the wall," Harry wrote.
