By the mid-1950s it was apparent there was no shortage of rising young stars on the horizon. Still, none shone brighter than Ely Trachtenberg.

The youngest of seven children, Martha Straus grew up on the Lower East Side. "There was no starvation but there were no luxuries either," she says. Her father and older brother took part in the 1910 cloak makers strike that came to be known as "the...

If your idea of an accountant is a conservative, number-crunching nerd, you should have known Dave Wittes.

Born in 1866, Henry Richardson Linville grew up in St. Joseph, Mo., and earned his Ph.D at Harvard before moving to the city and becoming a biology teacher at Jamaica HS. That’s when the newly formed Teachers Union chose Linville as its head.

When the union needed a sharp lawyer, it didn’t have far to look as long as Jules Kolodny was around.

Brilliant and articulate, no one ever doubted that Rebecca Simonson had a way with words. But it wasn't so much poetry as strategy that led the leader of the Teachers Guild in the 1940s to compare organizing to "opening a flower one petal at a time."

In 1960, Si Beagle was one of the city's few supervisors to go out on strike, walking the picket line alone at Bronx's JHS 113. "I had no choice. How could I look in the mirror and rationalize it. Here Mr. Big Shot. Talks, talks, talks, but he ends...

Alice Marsh, the UFT's first legislative rep in Albany, was the only child of a working single mother who insisted she go on to high school while the rest of her elementary school graduating class went off to work.