He pleaded with hospital administrators to arrange free eye surgery for a Latin American boy with cataracts who was living illegally in Rhode Island.

He found cars so homeless people could drive themselves to work.

He asked physicians for drug samples for people who couldn't afford their own prescriptions.

And he led one of the most bitter strikes in Rhode Island history.

John Coen worked and struggled for the unfortunate and the powerless. "He's the first person to give me a chance," says a woman, speaking at a memorial service, who met Coen at the Woonsocket Shelter after her release from a drug treatment facility.

Coen, 63, a former Project Hope staffer, director of the Woonsocket Shelter, and president of the Machinists Union at Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company, died December 15 of cancer. He will be remembered Friday, January 3 during a concert featuring Bill Harley, Kate Katzberg, Charlie King, and Karen Brandow at 7 p.m. at Hillsgrove United Methodist Church in Warwick.

Born in Ireland, Coen came to the US at the age of 20. After a stint in the Army, he went to work at Brown & Sharpe in North Kingstown as a skilled machinist. Coen was a union steward and newsletter editor when the Machinists struck the company in October 1981. Three months later, the company signaled its desire to crush the union when it hired strikebreakers. Using pepper gas to ease the entry of strikebreakers in March 1982, state police rendered mass picket lines ineffective. It was the first time police had gassed strikers in Rhode Island since the 1934 textile strike.

The strike radicalized workers and they turned to Coen, electing him union president. Despite gloomy prospects, Coen rallied the members to pressure the national union to maintain its corporate campaign, recalls Rick Brooks director of United Nurses and Allied Professionals. The union targeted Rhode Island Hospital Trust, demanding it remove Brown & Sharpe president Donald Roach from its board of directors, and urging Rhode Islanders to close their accounts at the bank. In the end, however, the strike was lost.

Coen later worked for CLOC, a community-labor activist group and then Project Hope, frequently walking picket lines, lamenting the AFLCIO's lack of militancy, and helping with demonstrations in small ways. "He was so self-effacing. It was never about John," recalls friend Mary Curtin.

Unable to survive on his Project Hope salary, he took a second job on the night shift at the Woonsocket Shelter and later became its director. Coen was "a gentle soul, incredibly caring, incredibly hard working," says Darlene Magaw, director of Family Resources Community Action in Woonsocket.

In addition to his duties as shelter director, Coen started a Girl Scout troop this year, Magaw relates, for girls living at the shelter. It was typical of Coen's belief that shelter staff should help residents with more than their immediate needs. Another worker, Harry Diarbian, says Coen found federal regulations this fall that enabled a disabled shelter resident to stay in school in Massachusetts, despite school officials' efforts to make her attend in Woonsocket because she lived at the shelter.

Coen realized back in 1982 that the Brown & Sharpe strike was merely part of an era of greed and union-busting that began when President Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in August 1981. "We don't want to go back to the good old days," he wrote in a book on the strike, "back to the brutal working conditions that kept our forbears in semi-slavery. With the force of organized labor, the People's Lobby behind them, working Americans, both union and nonunion, can live their lives with some measure of dignity and self-respect."

Issue Date: January 3 - 9, 2003