Public Employee Press

Aquarium worker, poet and cyberactivist

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

When a co-worker lost his job as the Wildlife Conservation Society laid off 50 employees last year, Ralph Ramos, a Supervising Maintainer at the New York Aquarium, launched his own war in cyberspace.

Outraged, he set up a mini-theater in his Brooklyn home with an American flag on the wall of an improvised stage. Then Ramos, a 21-year employee at the aquarium, filmed his own YouTube video with a camera tilted upward in a shoebox on the floor.

Co-worker Bill Sheehan has his job back, thanks to the efforts of DC 37 and Local 1501. But Ramos’s manifesto, “New Union Creedo,” (“thedoubler1965” on YouTube) still rings true in this era of high employment and stagnant income:

We were taught to work hard to earn our prize,
Unfortunately, the wool was pulled over our eyes.
They’ve replaced pensions with tensions and health care with welfare,
Denying us of what we have worked for, but why should they care?

Ramos — a filmmaker, poet, author, illustrator, union delegate, former shop steward and doting dad — calls poetry “musical words in your mind.” His wife, Barbara, a registered nurse, occasionally jokes that he needs his head examined.

A collection of over 80 of his poems, “From Within the Boundaries,” is in the Library of Congress. Ramos, 44, wrote the poems — mainly musings about the travails of everyday life — years ago on napkins and scraps of paper. He can recite many of them from memory in a rat-a-tat delivery.

Ramos also has penned 15 children’s stories. He wrote his latest, “The Wonderful Box of Crayons,” in just a few minutes after he quelled bickering over a crayon between his children, Ella, 5, and Daniel, 3, by splitting the crayon.

The book, which he illustrated and is trying to self-publish, is a tale about bickering among crayons of varying colors that come to appreciate their diversity — a message the idealistic Ramos hopes our society will someday embrace.