On behalf of the Natchuras family, I want to thank Region Nine Housing Corporation for honoring the memory of my father today. This dedication ceremony is especially meaningful to me, to my brother Mark and my sister Mary. Throughout our father’s life, he was dedicated to the pursuit of social and economic justice, and he instilled these values in us at an early age.

Two important factors shaped my father’s life. First, he was the son of immigrants who came to America for a better life. Second, he was very much shaped by the calamity of the Great Depression. As a child, he faced economic deprivation that we today tend to forget. In President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Second Inaugural Address he said he saw “…one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished.”

This is the world in which young Tom Natchuras came of age. His family lost their Buffalo home in a bank foreclosure. They had to retreat to a farm on the shores of Lake Ontario where they could eek out a subsistence living. I recall stories my father told of struggles just to get food on the table for their family of 5. The tires on their truck that they used for transportation had so many patches that one of his daily tasks was to pump these tires full of air by hand every morning. If FDR set the scene of the Great Depression Era, he also set the theme for what we needed to do. Again quoting from the Second Inaugural Address, FDR said: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

It is these words that I believe shaped my father’s world view and led him to the struggles of the labor movement. He saw labor unions as a way to balance the playing field between those that had much and those that labored for so little. He began his union involvement as a welder in San Francisco after World War II. He moved to Buffalo in the late 1940’s where he worked in several more union jobs until the mid-1950’s, when he went to work at the Chevrolet Division of General Motors. It was at this point that his union activism really took off. He was elected President of UAW Local 846 in 1959.

Soon, his passion for the movement, his grasp of the issues, and his leadership abilities were recognized more widely, and he became an International UAW Representative, followed by a promotion to Sub-Regional Director, and he ultimately rose to the position of Director of Region 9. Though he retired at age 65 from the Region 9 directorship, he wasn’t ready to sit around the house. Instead, he became executive director of the UAW’s senior housing program here in New Jersey and nearby Pennsylvania.

He felt that taking the helm of the housing corporation was a continuation of his lifelong commitment to social and economic justice. He believed everyone had a right to a decent place to live. I recall going with him to visit some of the buildings and talking with residents. Most of the residents knew him and welcomed him to the apartment buildings. They trusted that even the smallest problems or complaints would be heard and that he would work to find a solution.

Given my father’s passion for the housing program, I know he would feel honored and humbled by this building dedication today. We are so grateful that Region 9 Housing is remembering the legacy of our father, Tom Natchuras.