Michael J. Quill

Mike Quill
Born	Michael Joseph Quill September 18, 1905 Gortluchura Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland
Died	January 28, 1966 (aged 60) New York, New York
Occupation	Union Leader of TWU Local 100
Spouse(s)	1) Maria Theresa O'Neill, 2) Shirley Quill
Children	John Daniel Quill

Michael Joseph "Red Mike" Quill (September 18, 1905 – January 28, 1966) was one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU), a union founded by subway workers in New York City that expanded to represent employees in other forms of transit, and the President of the TWU for most of the first thirty years of its existence. A close ally of the Communist Party USA for the first twelve years of his leadership of the union, he broke with it in 1948. He drove his former allies out of the union as they tried to control the union rather than continue to help it.

Quill had varying relations with the mayors of New York City. He was a personal friend of Robert F. Wagner, Jr. but could find no common ground with Wagner's successor, John Lindsay, or as Quill called him "Linsley", and led a twelve-day transit strike in 1966 against him that landed him in jail. However, he won significant wage increases for his members. He died of a heart attack three days after the end of the strike.

Quill was born in Gortloughera, near Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland. He was a dispatch rider for the Irish Republican Army from 1919 to 1921 while still a teenager; then a volunteer of the Anti-Treaty IRA in the Irish Civil War that followed. One canard has him robbing a bank to raise funds for the IRA. Quill worked as a carpenter's apprentice, then a woodcutter after the end of the Civil War. He was brought to the United States in 1926 by his uncle Patrick Quill who was a conductor in the subway and got him his first job. He followed his brothers, Patrick and John. In New York City Quill first lived with his O'Sullivan cousins in upper Manhattan. Quill's IRA record of service was confirmed by his commanding officer John Joe Rice, Kerry 2nd Brigade years later to Quill's widow Shirley.

Through his uncle Quill got a job on the IRT later that year, first as a night gateman, then as a clerk or "ticket chopper". Moving from station to station, Quill got to know a large number of IRT employees, while using the quiet of the late hours to read labor history and, in particular, the works of James Connolly. The name that Quill and others chose for their new union was, in fact, a tribute to the Irish Transport and General Workers Union led by Jim Larkin and Connolly twenty years earlier.

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