b"to. Then after a while, you say: You know what? It's good. I talk to people on the phone, my friends from work, so I havea nice little group. We talk about things and try to catch up. So that's good. I live in Jersey. We moved to Oak Ridge fromNew York to have a young family years ago.There are retirement activities at the union. Are you active in any of those? Yeah. When guys call me from here, I would come in the negotiations and sit in on it as an expert. If I pick up some-thing, I'll give them a tip on that. It's been a year or so now, that I've been active in that. I'm playing more golf. I'll correctthat; I'm trying to learn to play golf.Are there services that are valuable to you that the union gives you as a retiree? I'm a pretty young retiree. I still have the benefits from the union. I have the dental, the eyeglasses, legal benefit,prescriptions. I'm happy. I'm good. I'm fortunate.Is there anything else you want to tell me today about working as a union member or on the job? My head is spinning now trying to recollect everything. It's been so many years, so many different things I do. Well, I was a delegate for the convention. Carl Haynes asked me to be a delegate. Thank you! I was a four-term delegate. Oneof the only, ever. There was only me and another fellow. So that's twenty years. The term is every five years. For the firstterm, Carl asked me if I would be willing to be on his slate to run as a delegate. I said: Thank you very much. We had torun to be the delegate. There were many people running, but Carl's slate prevailed and that was in 1996. That was the25th International Convention of the Teamsters and back then I think Ron Carey was the president of the Teamsters. We went to Philadelphia and I was a young man and boy, that was something.What was exciting about that?The excitement was that Philadelphia seemed to be a real stronghold for James Hoffa Jr. versus Ron Carey, and wewere Ron Carey delegates at the time. That was very interesting, exciting and a little scary, to tell you the truth; but it was all good. I learned a lot. I was blessed to be asked by Carl to do that and I was very fortunate. I enjoyed it very much. As adelegate, you're there to represent the membership of this union. I took it seriously and I enjoyed it and I tried to do thebest job I could. He asked me again for the 26th Convention and I says: Yes, if you'll have me, I'll be very happy and honored. He prevailed again and that time we went to Las Vegas. That was incredible. We switched our affiliations toJames Hoffa Jr. He became the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. After that convention, they had toreconvene. There was a special convention held in April of 2002. We had to go back to Las Vegas. It had to do with union finances. It was a special blue-ribbon committee on union finances, so the delegates had to vote for union finances to getthe Teamsters up and running again because their treasury was in dismal shape. We represent New York City workers andCity workers are not allowed to strike. The union has strike funds, so there was a discrepancy in strike fund union dues forthe City workers versus the rest of the country that were not municipal employees. City workers are not allowed to strike. So, Carl negotiated with the International Teamsters Union to bring a fair agreement to the municipal workers so that theassessments in our union dues were lower per hourly wage compared to the outside who benefited from the strike fund.You want to support your international union, but you also have to protect the people in the Local that you're directly 110 "