Wilmington, Delaware, anchors Frank Sheeran’s account of building and leading Teamsters Local 326, and later becomes the setting for a labor dispute that affected the 1972 Senate campaign. The city appears not merely as a place on the map but as a working base: a union charter gave its members an organization of their own, an office near the railroad station served their daily business, and a picket line in Wilmington stopped newspapers from reaching readers in the final stretch of an election. The narrative links these local institutions to broader questions of union authority, labor politics, and electoral influence.

Wilmington in Delaware’s political geography

Wilmington lay in the northern part of Delaware, which the account describes as more liberal than the state’s southern counties. Delaware was small, with a population of perhaps 600,000 at the time; more than half lived in the northern county, while the rest lived in the two southern counties. The Mason-Dixon line ran through the state. The account also notes that schools remained segregated in the two southern counties and that segregation existed in the north as well, though there it more often took the form of customs resembling those of a northern city such as Philadelphia. These regional differences help explain why a Senate contest in Delaware could involve distinct local political constituencies rather than a single uniform electorate.

The city also concentrated the state’s daily newspaper readership. Wilmington’s newspapers, the Morning News and the Evening Journal, were published by the same company and were described as essentially the same paper. Because they were the only daily newspapers in the city, and nearly every newspaper buyer in the state read the Wilmington paper, the circulation of campaign material there carried consequences beyond the city itself. The account’s later description of undelivered papers thus rests on Wilmington’s position as a media center for a small state.

The creation and work of Local 326

Wilmington’s place in Sheeran’s career began with a restructuring of the Philadelphia union organization. About a year before Jimmy Hoffa went to prison, Hoffa divided Local 107 into three locals, believing that doing so might reduce violence. He gave Sheeran the charter for a new Wilmington local, Teamsters Local 326. Sheeran became its acting president until an election could be held and the membership could vote him into office. The charter changed the local organization’s relationship to Philadelphia: before it had its own charter, Wilmington’s members were run by Philadelphia.

Hoffa’s first assignment to Sheeran was to go to Philadelphia and dismiss five disruptive organizers whom Local 107 president Mike Hession was afraid to fire. Sheeran drove up I-95 and fired Johnny Sullivan and Stevie Bouras, along with three others, including Big Bobby Marino and Benny Bedachio. He stayed in Philadelphia for a time afterward to guard against backlash, then returned to Delaware to learn his new position. The episode shows that the Wilmington appointment brought responsibility beyond the city: the new local’s president was entrusted with a difficult personnel task in the larger organization before he settled into managing his own membership.

Sheeran also made a point of learning the work represented by different kinds of Teamsters jobs. For two weeks he drove a car hauler at the Chrysler automobile plant in Newark, Delaware, although his prior experience had been with freight hauling. He wanted to understand car hauling well enough to handle members’ grievances competently. As president, he visited the trucking companies, which he called barns, every morning, met with workers, and checked that employers were contributing to the pension fund and honoring their obligations. In his account, respect came from showing up and doing the work, not simply from holding office.

An office, a membership, and a lasting headquarters

Before 1979, Local 326’s office stood at 109 East Front Street, in what Sheeran described as a rundown neighborhood by the railroad station. That address gives the union’s work a specific urban setting: close to transportation infrastructure, in an area that the account says later improved. In 1979, Sheeran obtained a new building for the local, which remained its headquarters at the time of his account. The move marked a visible institutional change from the earlier office and gave the Wilmington organization a durable base of its own.

Sheeran recalled his presidency of Local 326 as his favorite of the jobs he had held. The local made him Honorary President for Life while he was incarcerated, a distinction he connected to members’ respect for the work he had done rather than any obligation to like him. He said Local 326 had more than 3,000 members when he went to jail, compared with roughly 1,000 at the time he was recounting the history. His description emphasizes both the scale the local had reached and its later contraction. Wilmington’s union story therefore includes not only the grant of a charter and the establishment of a headquarters, but also a continuing membership whose size changed over time.

The 1972 campaign and the newspaper picket

Toward the end of 1972, a prominent lawyer whom Sheeran knew visited the old East Front Street office with a person who worked inside the company that published Wilmington’s two daily newspapers. The visit concerned the coming United States Senate race. Earlier that year, incumbent Caleb Boggs had asked to speak to the Teamsters membership. Sheeran considered Boggs too favorable to corporations and took the request to the executive board, which decided not to invite him. When Boggs’s opponent, Joe Biden, requested an opportunity to address the members, the board raised no objection. Biden, then a young county councilman, spoke in favor of labor, answered questions, and said that the Teamsters could reach him.

By the time the lawyer came to the office, Sheeran says he already supported Biden. He agreed to arrange an informational picket line and promised that no truck driver would cross it. Such a line was not formally a strike: it could be used to organize workers, protest an employer’s conduct, or challenge pressure against union membership cards, but calling it a strike before union recognition would violate National Labor Relations Board rules. In the episode, the Teamsters’ support for another union’s informational line became a means of stopping the newspaper company’s distribution.

The papers were printed, but remained in the warehouse and were not delivered. The company called Sheeran and asked for his men to return to work. It also asked whether he had anything to do with the bombing of a railroad car carrying materials intended for printing—possibly paper, ink, or other supplies. Sheeran did not claim responsibility; he answered that the Teamsters were honoring the picket line and suggested that the company hire guards for its railroad cars. No one was injured in the bombing. The account distinguishes the union’s stated action from the unexplained attack rather than establishing who carried it out.

The picket line came down the day after the election, after which the newspaper returned to normal. Delaware had a new senator. Later accounts, Sheeran noted, often credited the maneuver with helping Biden win: Republicans argued that delivery of Boggs campaign inserts could have damaged Biden too close to Election Day for him to respond. Sheeran said he could not know whether Biden knew the picket had been organized on his behalf, but that Biden kept his promise to remain accessible to the Teamsters after taking office. Wilmington’s labor action thus became attached to a disputed claim about electoral effect, while the account leaves Biden’s knowledge of the maneuver unresolved.

The city as an institutional base

Across these episodes, Wilmington is presented as the ground on which organizational independence became practical. The Local 326 charter separated its members from Philadelphia’s administration; the office gave Sheeran a place to handle grievances and contracts; the new headquarters embodied the local’s longer-term presence. The city’s concentration of newspaper production and readership then made it a point from which labor action could reach a statewide audience. The same urban base supported both routine representation and an extraordinary intervention during a close political contest.

The narrative’s emphasis is on the mechanisms connecting place to power: a charter, a street address, daily visits to trucking workplaces, a union picket, and newspapers held back from delivery. Wilmington’s significance comes from that sequence. It is at once a labor organization’s home, a center of Delaware’s public information, and the setting where Sheeran’s union authority intersected with state politics.