July 6, 2026

The Cook Who Died for the Longshoremen

He was not a longshoreman. He was a Greek immigrant cook bringing food to picketing dockworkers when San Francisco police shot him dead on July 5, 1934. For ninety-one years the ILWU has claimed him as one of its own, because that is what a union is.

The soup kitchen was at 84 Embarcadero, one block off the water. Inside it, in the summer of 1934, a Greek immigrant named Nicholas Counderakis, who went by Nick Bordoise, was cooking for longshoremen he had never worked beside. Bordoise was not a longshoreman. He was a member of the Cooks and Waiters Union. He was also a member of the Communist Party, which he did not hide and which no honest telling of his life should soften. He showed up at the soup kitchen because the dockers were on strike, and strikers need to eat.

The 1934 West Coast waterfront strike had been running since May. Longshoremen up and down the coast had walked off the job demanding a union-run hiring hall in place of the shape-up, where foremen handed out day-work to whichever men had paid them off that morning. By July the San Francisco Industrial Association, the city's employer bloc, had decided to break the strike by force. They ordered the port reopened under police escort.

On the afternoon of July 5, 1934, Bordoise went from the soup kitchen to the picket line at the intersection of Mission and Steuart Streets. San Francisco police, escorting strikebreaker trucks off the docks, opened fire. Bordoise was shot. At the same intersection that afternoon, longshoreman Howard Sperry was shot and killed. Sometime that day, in the street where the two men fell, someone wrote in chalk that two men had been killed there by police. The day is remembered on the waterfront as Bloody Thursday.

Four days later, on July 9, 1934, San Francisco buried its dead. A silent funeral procession moved up Market Street behind the two coffins. As many as 40,000 marchers walked in it, with tens of thousands more lining the route. A single muffled drum set the pace. There were no speeches on the march itself. The press had been promising a riot for weeks. What they got was a city that had decided, together, to refuse them one.

Bordoise was buried at Cypress Lawn Cemetery outside the city. His service was openly a Communist burial, what contemporary accounts called a "red funeral." Sam Darcy, the California Communist Party leader, gave the eulogy. Harry Bridges, the longshoreman who led the strike, walked in the march. The verified funeral oratory that survives is Darcy's, not Bridges's.

Seven days after the funeral, on July 16, 1934, San Francisco shut down in a four-day general strike. The longshoremen won the hiring hall. Two years later, the coast longshoremen split from the East Coast-led union and became what is today the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The ILWU has commemorated Bloody Thursday every July 5 since 1935. Every year, the union names two men. One was a longshoreman. One was a cook.

The marker at Mission and Steuart today reads: "In memory of Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise, who gave their lives on Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, so that all working people might enjoy a greater measure of dignity and security." At the bottom of the plaque is the line the Industrial Workers of the World put into their 1905 preamble and that the waterfront has lived by ever since: "An Injury To One Is An Injury To All."

A union that will remember a cook who died for longshoremen is a union that understands for whom it is fighting, and who is fighting for it.

Sources

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