Holland: Trumka 'made you feel like you could go out and set the world on fire'

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

“He always made you feel bigger than you were,” Joe Holland said of his longtime UMWA brother. “He made you feel like you could go out and set the world on fire.”

Retired in Owensboro, Holland meant AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who was UMWA president before he became head of the country's largest union federation.

Trumka died last week of an apparent heart attack. He was 72.

“Rich had a special liking for Kentucky,” added Holland, 72, a Muhlenberg County native who held a number of UMWA offices, including president of the union’s District 23, and was the AFL-CIO’s Kentucky state director. “Even when they would be saying, ‘Well, you know we can’t play in Kentucky--we don’t need to be in Kentucky.’ He would say ‘Yes we do.'”

Holland remembered those who fretted that Democrat Paul Patton was bound to lose the governor’s race to Republican Larry Forgy. It was 1995 and Kentucky was tilting Republican.

“People said Patton couldn’t win,” Holland said. “Rich came in and went around with him just a few days before the election.”

The union-endorsed Patton beat Forgy and was reelected with union support in 1999.

Holland said Trumka, elected AFL-CIO president in 2009, was a powerful public speaker in the mold of UMWA Presidents John L. Lewis and Cecil Roberts, the current UMWA president.

“Rich had that special voice,” Holland said, adding that Trumka never failed to inspire those around him. “Brad Burton was his chief of staff. He, [UMWA  director of organizing] John Cox and I were the ‘Three Amigos.'"  

Trumka started out as a UMWA staff attorney. His lawyerly skills never failed him, Holland said. “He wasn’t going to get stumped. He wasn’t going to let anyone be able to say, ‘Man, we really got old Trumka to where he didn’t know what to say.’ That just wasn’t going to happen.”

Trumka was elected UMWA president in 1982 on a slate with Roberts, who won the vice presidency, and John Banovic, who was voted in as secretary-treasurer. Banovic died in 1996, a year after Roberts became UMWA president.

"It was Richard, Cecil and John,” Holland said. “Now Cecil is the only one left.”