 FOURTH
GENERAL SECRETARY TREASURER,
ERIC PETERSON, 1944 - 1959.
Born in Sweden in 1894 Peterson came to Rawlins, Wyoming with
his immigrant family at the age of ten. His father was the town
shoemaker. After completing grade school young Peterson went to work
on the Union Pacific, first as a call boy, (Unlike
a call girl a call boy's job was to get train crews out
of bed) then as an apprentice machinist. Before completing
his apprenticeship and becoming eligible for IAM membership Peterson
found himself in the thick of the legendary 1911 strike against the
Harriman lines. When the shopmen walked out Peterson walked with
them. This was the strike that touched off the Person case and
brought Wharton to prominence in the labor movement. Peterson became
a member two years later, moving to Deer Lodge, Montana where he
went to work as a machinist on the Milwaukee road. In later years,
he recalled that the IAM had just negotiated a 41¢ an hour wage
rate for machinists.
 FIFTH
GENERAL SECRETARY TREASURER,
ELMER E. WALKER, 1959 - 1965.
Peterson's successor, Elmer Walker, was born in Louisville,
Kentucky in 1900, and began his machinists apprenticeship with Swift
and Company at age sixteen. After joining Local Lodge 121 in East
St. Louis in 1918, Walker knocked around the Midwest as a tool and
die maker for the next twelve years. . . After being appointed to
the Grand Lodge staff in 1942, Walker was elected GVP and was
assigned to the Great Lakes territory in 1945. When Hayes became IP
in 1949 he transferred Walker to Grand Lodge to serve as resident
GVP. Ten years later, at age fifty-nine, Walker became the IAM's
fifth GST.
 SIXTH
GENERAL SECRETARY TREASURER,
MATTHEW DeMORE, 1965 -1969.
Born in Cleveland in 1903, Matt DeMore began peddling papers in
a tough East Side neighborhood at the age of nine and was clerking
in a hardware by the time the was eleven. After knocking around at
various jobs, including blacksmith helper on the Michigan Central
Railroad in Detroit and motorman on a Cleveland streetcar line, he
got his growing family through the Depression working as a
maintenance machinist at a company that later became a division of
General Electric.
In 1935, DeMore led his fellow workers into Local Lodge 439. He
advanced rapidly, first to the presidency of the local in 1936 and
to directing business representative of District 54 in 1938. Over
the next twenty-three years DeMore built District 54 into one of the
IAM's largest and most progressive units. In the early 40's he once
had his skull cracked when mounted police charged an IAM picket line
in a memorably bloody strike at the Pipe Machinery Co.
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