Against the Wind - National Air Traffic Controllers Association

ential Air Line Pilots Association endorsed their cause.
“We don’t wish to see a return to old attitudes,”
ALPA President Henry A. Duffy said. “To prevent
that, the controllers must be recognized by their
employers as the professional group that they are,
and must be provided with the work rules needed to
exercise their judgments free of fatigue and overburdened
working conditions.” 4
Like sparks from a prairie fire, pockets of interest
ignited rapidly. Drives sponsored by AFGE spread
south into West Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida,
where former PATCO controller Art Joseph at Miami
Center was collecting signatures. They took flight in
the Midwest under Fred Gilbert’s stewardship at Chicago
Center and at Indianapolis Center, where Mike
Ford—one of the strikers who’d successfully appealed
his firing—formed a loose-knit group with
some colleagues called the Professional Controllers
Alliance. Out West, veterans Phil Greer at
Oakland Center and Anthony “Skip” Skirlick
at Los Angeles Center sounded the call.
In New England, Howie Barte, who’d
refused to strike in Rhode Island, heard about
the Washington Center effort earlier in the
spring. Barte, with warm green eyes punctuated
by dark eyebrows and a face framed in a Dutch boy
haircut, was no stranger to union activism.
A former pilot for three air taxi outfits in
Puerto Rico, he joined the FAA during a hiring binge
1984
10
Apr.
in 1970 and later served for eighteen months as the
local PATCO president at the tower in New Bedford,
Massachusetts. Barte transferred to Quonset TRA-
CON in 1978. After barely finishing classroom training,
he demonstrated his characteristic feistiness by
successfully challenging management’s decision to
reschedule developmentals who were supposed to
work on Labor Day, robbing them of holiday pay. He
later became editor of the Quonset TRACON Tabloid, a
PATCO newsletter.
Now, however, Barte was reluctant to jump into
the fray again. “I really didn’t want to have anything
to do with unions because of the fear and anguish
that PATCO put me through,” he says. “But the FAA
made me realize how shortsighted that was.”
He, too, phoned Kerr and
subsequently received a call
from John Thornton. At a
meeting in May, Thornton
met Barte, Donna Gropper,
who was a controller at
Providence Tower, and eight
or so others from Quonset,
Providence, New Bedford,
and Groton, Connecticut. Once
again, Thornton mapped out the road to a union.
After returning to Washington, Thornton called
Barte to ask if he’d serve as the New England organizing
representative. With 8- and 11-year-old daugh-
Retired Navy Vice Adm. Donald D. Engen takes over as FAA administrator
from J. Lynn Helms, who resigned two months earlier. Engen received
twenty-nine decorations for flying in World War II. He also flew combat
Chapter 3: A Long and Winding Road
55
Dynamic duo: Controllers Donna Gropper
and Howie Barte led the drive to
organize facilities throughout New England
during the summer of 1984. / NATCA archives
missions in the Korean War. After retiring from the Navy in 1978, he
worked for Piper Aircraft Corporation and the consulting firm Kentron
before becoming a member of the National Transportation Safety Board.