Dock workers, East Coast (date unknown). Photograph: SuperStock

I was born in 1937 and grew up in a six-decker in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, in the section of Savin Hill known to the locals as OTB—over the bridge. It was a working-class neighborhood and the only difference, on the OTB side, was we had a large number of single-family homes, which in the 1940s and 1950s were considered quite a luxury.

Back then Savin Hill was the bluest of blue-collar neighborhoods, a tightly packed community of laborers who patronized the local tavern during the week and the parish church on Sunday. The mothers stayed home with their kids, and the fathers took the MTA to work. John Walsh and Mac McCarthy were the only two men I knew who wore suits and ties to their jobs. All the rest were blue-collar. Red Benson worked at a gas station, Buster Connors was a linoleum layer, Frank Kelly was a fireman, Ray Gaudet worked at a factory, Joe Peecha worked at a package store, and Tommy Meehan was a bookie. My father, Les Cotter—5 feet 11 inches, 220 pounds, and a tough son of a gun who could hit like a mule—was a longshoreman.

His father, my Grandpa Cotter, was a veterinarian who had 11 children. One day when my father was still living at home, his youngest brother came running into the house, saying that Uncle Jim had just been beat up by a police officer, a guy with a reputation for being a nasty piece of work. My grandfather told Dad to go down to the corner and “take care of the situation”—and added that he would probably have to get out of town for a while. Dad put the officer in the hospital, and Grandpa Cotter sent him to stay with a former classmate in Washington, D.C., where he had gone to veterinary school. Dad’s exile worked out all right, though: He worked on the docks in D.C. and Baltimore for two years, learning the longshoreman’s trade, until the incident blew over and he could come back.

At some point Dad became a stevedore—the hiring boss. When a ship came in, it was up to him to organize gangs of workers to unload it. In some ways it was a pretty good deal, because the stevedores were on salary and they got paid whether they worked or not. But if Dad could have had his way, I think he would have stayed a gang boss. Then you’re in charge of your gang, and that’s it; there’s no responsibility to speak of.

If a ship doesn’t get unloaded and out of port in 20 hours, money is lost. After a while the pressure got to Dad; he would start drinking as soon as a ship came in. He just needed a little fortification in him, he’d say. He’d go down to the captain’s office for his fortification. The captains knew that without the cooperation of the stevedore, they would never get offloaded on schedule, so they always took good care of him. Many times Dad would be sober when a ship came in and drunk by the time it sailed out.

I was 13 when I started working for my dad. That night a ship had come in carrying bales of wool. To unload wool, you worked with a partner: You’d back a two-wheeled cart into a bale, your partner would hook the bale and move it into the cart, and together you’d pull the cart off the boat. We were down at Castle Island unloading for the Moore McCormack Shipping Company, one of the biggest carriers in the area. I was working with a fellow named Benny Leonard. He kept telling me, “I’ve been away, I’ve been away,” but he never mentioned where he’d been. When the shift ended, I got into my father’s car and said, “Dad, Mr. Leonard kept talking about being away. Where was he?” Oh, Dad said offhandedly, he was in jail. “In jail? What did he do?” I asked. “Oh, he killed a guy in a barroom fight.” I stared at the ceiling all night long, thinking: I just worked with a murderer.

The docks had their own codes and their own set of rules. Each stevedore had a certain number of gangs, 22 men to a gang. When a ship was due in, signs would be posted at some of the barrooms in Southie: “Les Cotter has four gangs, show up at eight o’clock on Tuesday morning.” Les would go down to the ship to see which men from his gangs had showed up, and then he’d come over to the Army base pier [which, after World War II, had been leased to a commercial operator] to fill any empty slots. The process was called “facing,” and it worked just the way it sounds: You faced the stevedore, hoping to be chosen. Les would stand on top of a crate and pick out the men he wanted.

Almost everybody in the first two gangs showed up all the time; they were longshoremen cardholders. The rest of us were scalawags—nonunion. If there were no card men there, or if they turned their backs on Les—if no card men were “facing” him—he could hire scalawags. Later, if any card men didn’t come back from lunch, the timekeeper would pick up scalawags at the ship. There would usually be 10 or 12 of them waiting around.

Some of the guys working on the docks were thieves. They were as bad as bank robbers—in fact, some of them were bank robbers. They stole everything they could get their hands on. I remember one day in particular, when my father made me a lander—a worker who puts a load from the boat onto a pallet, lands it on the back of a tractor, and drives the tractor off the dock. There had just been a dock strike, so a lot of scalawags were working. My father thought there was a U.S. Customs plant on the ship, so he asked me to keep an eye out for guys who might be trying to clip merchandise. Even though Les was tough, he was a champion of the underdog; he wanted me to protect anyone who might get caught. The ship’s cargo was windbreakers, those jackets with the little hood and the pouch in the front. We had gotten three or four loads out when I saw Tommy Benson coming up the gangplank with lots of different colored windbreakers sticking out from under his sweatshirt. I bumped into the guy we thought was the plant, almost knocking him off the gangplank to keep him from seeing Benson. This kind of thing went on all day. At the end of the afternoon we went up to Connors to grab a sandwich and a couple of beers. It was a free-for-all: Guys were yelling, “Hey, give me that red in an extra-large! Toss me that blue in a medium!” They must have had 400 of the things.

Another time, a ship came in with a cargo of expensive Italian shoes. Guys would go down to the hold with flip-flops on and come back up wearing a pair of the new shoes—fancy pointy-toed shoes. Other times we’d unload ships carrying meat, and then guys would come to work in long overcoats and leather jackets, even in the summer. They’d go down to the hold and cut steaks and roasts and stuff them in their pockets. And sometimes the cargo would include cans of tuna fish, which was like gold; back then a lot of people lived off of it. These guys lived hand to mouth, and the pilfering was incredible. That’s why the container system eventually came into being.

Like most fathers in the neighborhood, my dad never had a bank account or owned a home; he didn’t want the responsibility. But working on the docks while I was a student at Boston College led indirectly to me buying my first house. I had some time senior year between my final exams, so I went down and faced my father and the other stevedores. One day I was in the very bottom of a ship’s hold working on 80-pound bales of peat moss. All day long the winch had been buckling. On the last load it gave way, and one of the bales came crashing down.

When you’re in the hold and someone yells “Run!” you don’t stop to look up; you run. I ran right into the bale, and it knocked me out cold. I had nothing more than a bad concussion—but four years later I received a check for $1,500 from the insurance company. The money provided the down payment for the house in Weymouth where I lived with my wife and children for many years. That bale of peat moss was manna from heaven.

Jim Cotter ’59, P’82, ’85, was the head football coach at Boston College High School for 41 years. He passed away on July 20, four years after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. His recollection is adapted by permission from A True Man for Others: The Coach Jim Cotter Story (2009), written with freelance writer Paul Kenney.