Bryan: `I feel I was responsible . . . and I let everybody down'

The former president of South Florida's District 100 of the Machinists union spent most of the 1980s in the maelstrom that was Eastern Airlines' labor dispute and eventual downfall. His life today couldn't be more different. He plays a little golf, but mostly he keeps to himself. ``My kids don't understand me,'' he said recently. ``They can't figure out why I live like I do, kind of like a hermit.''


By TED REED
Herald Business Writer

Now there is no crowd.

Bryan, 62 and twice divorced, spends most of his time alone. He putters around his house in Cutler Ridge fixing items ranging from the garage door to the mail box; he volunteers as a golf course ranger and a Better Business Bureau arbitrator, and he reads the Bible.

Occasionally, he plays golf, often with strangers.

The former president of now disbanded District 100 of the International Association of Machinists has three children, all in Florida, and six grandchildren -- including a 13-year-old boy named after him -- but he doesn't see them much.

``My kids don't understand me,'' Bryan said recently. ``They can't figure out why I live like I do, kind of like a hermit. I'm basically a lonely person, although I'm not depressed about it.''

Bryan rarely associates with anyone from Eastern, where he led a strike by 9,300 Machinists in March 1989. Pilots and flight attendants, united in their antipathy toward Frank Lorenzo, joined the Machinists on the picket line. In 1991, after trying for two years to rebuild, the airline shut down.

While Bryan enjoys talking about the Eastern days, he doesn't seem to miss them.

``My sons ask me: `Don't you miss the recognition?' and I tell them not one bit, not at all, and I'm as sincere as I can be,'' he said.

He concedes that seems paradoxical, because throughout his years of running the district at Eastern he never took a vacation.

``It's not that I felt I was all that important,'' he said. ``I just felt compelled to stay on the job constantly. I couldn't bring myself to separate from what was happening at Eastern and Alitalia and Viasa and all the other airlines I was responsible for.

``I used to tell everyone that all I really wanted to do was let the right people run Eastern while I went off into the sunset. That was my big ambition in life and I've finally fulfilled it, at least the second part of it.

``I used to envy guys who I would see doing yard work, out in the open air. I thought people like that had it made. Now, I'm one of them.''

Bryan concedes that, at the end, he was somewhat embittered by the Machinists union, which shut down his district (which still had 3,500 members) and retired him in 1992, the year after Eastern folded.

In general, he says, unions find a place for longtime leaders whose principal companies have gone away.

Bryan said he ``raised hell'' when he didn't get that chance, and considered filing a lawsuit before deciding that would have been contrary to his lifelong aversion to airing intra-union disputes in public.

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Bryan went on unemployment briefly, then signed up to receive his union retirement benefits. That, combined with his investments and his lifelong pursuit of a minimalist lifestyle -- he lives in the house he bought for $15,900 in 1958 -- has left him comfortable. Most days, the televised financial news on CNBC drones in the background at his home.

Financially, Bryan is able to help people out. He has helped to bankroll his two sons' used car business in Cocoa Beach, has lent money to various friends and has provided a room in his house for his granddaughter while she attended medical training schools in Dade.

``I'm not much of a doting grandfather,'' Bryan said. ``I don't pick up the grandkids and go fishing with them and get involved in their lives. But I do try to help out.''

Bryan said he has just one regret about all the decisions he made at Eastern.

In December 1983, he was negotiating the terms of the airline's 25 percent employee ownership arrangement. The talks were going so well that -- at the last minute -- Bryan dropped a condition requiring that employees have the right of first refusal if the board ever decided to sell the company. Three years later, Frank Lorenzo bought Eastern.

``It was an open item we dropped in order to close out the deal,'' he said. ``It turns out to have been the most significant item there was, but at the time no one gave it any thought. Back in 1983, no one on either side thought the directors would ever sell Eastern.''

At times, Bryan also feels a general regret for what happened at Eastern.

``To an extent, I identify with James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, in the way that everybody was counting on him,'' Bryan said. ``I kind of feel that I was responsible for everybody at Eastern -- not just the union people, but the noncontract people, too -- and I let everybody down.

``I do have some sense of depression about that. I'm not about to jump off a bridge or anything, but I do feel an enormous sense of responsibility and disappointment in not being able to work things out.''

Bryan dismisses the now widely held view that Eastern Chairman Frank Borman should have let the Machinists go on strike in the fall of 1983, when the two other unions seemed prepared to keep working. Instead, Borman gave the Machinists a pay raise, even though the pilots' union had accepted cuts.

``People say that contract was the death knell of Eastern, but it's a smoke screen,'' Bryan said. ``They don't look at how successful we were in 1985. Eastern had record profits in the first nine months of 1985.''

But increasing competition from low-cost carriers caused the airline's fortunes to decline sharply late in 1985, leading quickly to the 1986 sale to Lorenzo. Once the sale occurred, Bryan said, a strike was nearly inevitable.

After Eastern shut down, Bryan was invited to speak at several colleges, including Duke and Northwestern, on the thing he considers his greatest achievement: helping to set up the employee ownership plan at the airline.

``I think that for workers to start being paid in equity is the model that would be the biggest cure-all for management-labor relations in this country,'' he said. ``I hope I planted that seed with people who will become leaders of our economy.''

Nevertheless, Bryan doesn't speak to colleges anymore.

``I felt like I was living in the past, talking about someone who died,'' he said. ``Who the hell cares about Eastern Air Lines anymore?''