Let me say this about that

JACK LONDON, the man who wrote the famous definition of a scab, was born 123 years ago on Jan. 12, 1876 in San Francisco. London's bloodcurdling definition of a strikebreaker - a person who takes a striking worker's job and goes to work behind a picketline - follows:

"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts he carries a tumor of rotten principle.

"When a scab comes down the street men turn their backs and angels weep in Heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of Hell to keep him out. No man has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his body in, or a rope long enough to hang his carcass with.

"JUDAS ISCARIOT was a gentleman compared with a scab. For betraying his Master he had character enough to hang himself - a scab has not. Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Judas Iscariot sold his Savior for 30 pieces of silver. Benedict Arnold sold his country for the promise of a commission in the British Army.

"The modern strikebreaker sells his birthright, his country, his wife, his children, and his fellow man for an unfilled promise from his employer, trust or corporation. Esau was a traitor to himself. Judas Iscariot was a traitor to his God. Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country; a strikebreaker to his God, his country, his family, his class. "A real man will never scab."

A STORY OF LONDON'S life was printed 30 years ago in the Labor Press. Written by Ruth Jordan of Press Associates Inc., a labor news service in Washington, D.C., the article gave London's definition of a scab, then said:

"The man who wrote those words was a flamboyant American talent - newspaperman, adventurer, fiction writer, Socialist, individualist. Jack London could well understand working-class hatred of strikebreakers. He had been the route - from cannery work, to coal shoveler, to bum. He did not forget where he had begun.

"...His father was a Pennsylvania-born soldier, scout, backwoodsman, trapper and wanderer. His father and his Ohio-born mother met and married in San Francisco, where they had migrated.

"...When he was 10, his parents moved to Oakland, and London got a hard look at urban poverty and working-class life that was to lead him steadily toward his pro-labor philosophy..."

FROM HOWARD ZINN, a Boston professor, came this fact-packed account of London's short life, which Zinn wrote as an introduction to a 1971 Bantam edition of London's novel "The Iron Heel," which was originally printed in 1907:

"Jack London climbed, sailed, stormed through 40 years of life, all ending in the torment of sickness, and the calculated swallowing of a large dose of morphine tablets. Tired, he lowered himself into death, like the hero of his autobiographical novel, 'Martin Eden.'

"He had come out of the slums of San Francisco...By the time he was 15 he had been a newsboy, worked in a cannery, begun to read hungrily the books of the Oakland Public Library, become a sailor and a fisherman, found a mistress, and was drinking heavily. "BEFORE HE WAS 21, he had worked in a jute mill and laundry, hoboed the railroads to the East Coast, been clubbed by a policeman on the streets of New York, been arrested for vagrancy in Niagara Falls, joined the Socialist Party, pirated oysters in San Francisco Bay...shot rapids and climbed mountains in the Klondike gold rush...and sold his first adventure stories to magazines.

"At 31, he had written 20 books, married twice, run for mayor of Oakland on the Socialist ticket, covered the Russo-Japanese War, sailed to Hawaii and Polynesia, made huge sums of money, and spent every dollar..."

London died at age 40 in 1916 at his ranch in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco.