Welcome to strangers from KCW and Radiotopia. I'm Leah Tao. And welcome to Dumb Shit We Do, Number

3, Stow Away. Here is George Finley. In the spring of 1968, I was finishing my second year of college.

And in school, in the humanities class, we were studying the myth of Sisyphus.

And that myth of Sisyphus got to me because it was about this guy who was pushing this rock up this hill.

And at the end of the day, the rock would fall back down and he had to have to do it

again the next day. And it was like my parents. You know, it's like all the adults that I saw,

it was the world the way it was. People pushing this rock up the hill, the nine to five thing.

And it hurt me. And I didn't want to live a life like that. So I got this idea, you know, I'd like to go

to Europe, break out of this mold of conditioning. I figured I knew how to do it because my buddy, Chris,

and I had worked on the railroad. And we used to lay track in the western part of Minnesota.

I said to him, I said, let's go to Europe. We can just hop a freight train down to Chicago and we'll

hitchhike the rest of the way. Get to New York and then what we'll do, we'll work our way across on a ship.

That's what we'll do. We can get a job. So we hopped a freight train from St. Paul down to Chicago, and then from there we hitchhiked out to New York.

So we cruised up and down the docks for, you know, a day or so trying to get a job on a ship.

And then somebody said, you can't get a job on a ship without a union card.

Well, how do you get a union card? And he just laughed at us. You can't get a job on a ship without a union card well how do you get a union card and he just laughed at us

you can't get a union card without having a job it's catch 22 isn't it but then this kid came up to us he said

i tell you what union guys do guys that are already working on ships but they don't have a job lined up right now.

They just pretend that they're part of the crew. And I said to him, are you saying that we could

do the same thing? He said, that's exactly what I'm telling you. And he said, there's a ship

leaving tomorrow from the 53rd Street pier at 11 o'clock. It's the SS United States.

It's the biggest ship in the whole American fleet.

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