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First, a disclaimer here. What I'm telling you is a combination of
stuff that I was told by Babci
and Dziadzi, stuff that I have learned
since, and stuff that I have concluded by putting two and two
together.
It is true to the best of my knowledge, but there may be
some inaccuracies in it. There will also be some degree
of a Polish
lesson here, but I will try to keep that to a minimum. I'm also going
to CC the others, since
they may have some interest in this matter and
I probably would not be able to do this twice.
Babci was born Teofila Genofefa Lukowska (Loo-KOFF-ska --and the
Polish "o" without an accent mark
is pronounced like the English "o"
in "core." This is always the case.) on approximately Oct. 31, 1895.
The
day was never clearly known. Here is a birth certificate that was
issued in 1954 and which was obtained from Poland
with some
difficulty, by the way.
It says that she was born in Nowo Wies (NO-vo VYESH -- it means "New
Village") in the jurisdiction
of Bialystok (Byah-WEE-stock) Her father
was Andrzej Lukowski and her mother was Wiktoria Lukowska (AND-zhay
and
Victoria. Polish is an inflected language and noun endings change
depending on whether the subject is masculine or
feminine.) Wiktoria's
maiden name seems to be Danilow or Damlow. I can't make it out.
Bialystock,
in 1895, was in that part of Poland that was a part of
Russia, so she would have been born a subject of Czar Nicholas
II.
This is the same czar who was overthrown in the 1917 Revolution.
Nonetheless, Babci would not have been
considered Russian. Russia has
always respected nationality (they still do) and she would have been a
Polish
citizen of Russia. She went to Russian school. She had a
second-grade education. At the time, this would probably
have been
considered exceptional for a peasant girl.
I know she had brothers and sisters, but I don't know how many. I do
know that some of them
stayed in Poland, but an older sister emigrated
to the United States and married a man by the name of Jan Kozicz
(Yahn
KO-zheets). I do not know this sister's name. The Koziczes at some
point lived in upstate New York
between Buffalo and Syracuse. Some
stayed there. I met them only once around 55 years ago. Jan Kozicz,
for
some reason or other probably related to employment, ended up in
Webster, Massachusetts. Another of Babci's brothers,
Bernard Lukowski,
also emigrated and ended up in Webster (or Dudley -- the towns are so
close that the names
are practically interchangeable). He is remembered
as Uncle Benny.
Anyway, Babci came over to this country in 1911. Here is a copy of the
receipt
for her passage.
It reads:
HOLLAND AMERICA LINE
New York, May 31, 1911, Received
of Mr Jan Kozicz, forty-six and 70/00
dollars ($46.70) in part for ocean passage of one passenger from
Rotterdam,
Boulogne-Sur-Mer to New York as per contract ticket No.
D334 this day delivered to, accepted and signed by
said purchaser for
said passenger; and in part to be applied to procuring transportation
for said passenger
from ---- to Rotterdam and from New York to Webster
Mass. and for headtax and payment to passengers as mentioned
in said
ticket. And I further acknowledge that said ticket has been delivered
to me by the purchaser to
be forwarded to the company at Rotterdam for
delivery to said passenger, but to be deemed in force from date
hereof.
Henry J. Schitzer, agent.
So. Babci made her own way to Rotterdam, probably by rail from
Bialystok, but I don't know that.
Her brother in law paid -- probably
as a loan --for her transportation from then on.
The reason she left
Poland may have well had to do with the lack of
opportunity there and the promise of opportunity here, but it is
also
my understanding that she left to get away from her father, who
apparently was a cruel, abusive taskmaster.
I believe Wiktoria had
died by then, but I'm unclear on that.
The cost of this trip, incidentally,
would have been paid in currency
backed by gold. Gold was valued at $20 an ounce, so you can go to the
business
section of your newspaper, look at what 2-1/4 ounces of gold
are worth now and get an idea of what this trip cost
in today's money.
It will surprise you.
She sailed in the steerage section of a Holland America
ship. This was
the lowest class passage. Basically it was a spot on the floor of the
hold of the ship with
hundreds of other frequently seasick immigrants
all around you. No sun, no fresh air. The trip was miserable. She
often
recounted how awful the experience was.
But then she arrived at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, getting
her
first look at the Statue of Liberty --which always impressed her.
Immigration was pretty much
unrestricted then. If you weren't blind,
obviously insane, or obviously suffering from tuberculosis or
syphilis,
you were quickly allowed in and sent on your way. At least
this was the case for Europeans, and these were the years
when people
from all over Europe came to America by the millions. And when they
came here, they settled
in places for various reasons, but a lot had
to do with established communities of people from the same area so
that
they had some language and customs cohesion among themselves, and
also there was the matter of making a living. Jobs
were available for
different types of occupations and different peoples tended to
gravitate toward something
they were at least familiar with in the Old
Country. To this day, many towns in the Northeast have large
populations
that are from one or two ethnic groups. Webster has a
large Polish population and a large French-canadian population.
The
Polish came to work in the textile mills; the French to work in the
shoe shops.
Babci
proceeded to Webster. The transportation from New York to
Webster, by the way, was by street railway. Trolley, in
other words.
You got on a trolley and rode it to the edge of town, then you got on
the next town's trolley
and rode that one to the end of its line, and
so forth. I don't know if the entire trip was accomplished in this
way,
but I know a great deal of it was.
She was sixteen years old.
Weaving was a common household
occupation in rural Poland and Webster
had a lot of textile mills a hundred years ago. She worked in linen,
wool
and cotton mills. A couple of the cotton mills were owned by the
Slaters. You may have heard of Samuel Slater in
your history class. In
the Eighteenth Century, England had a monopoly on the power loom and
the plans were
closely guarded. Samuel Slater memorized the plans,
came to New England, built looms, started the Industrial Revolution
in
America, lived in Webster (founded the town, as a matter of fact) and
made lots of money. He is buried
in Webster, not far from our family
plot. (I also understand that your cousin John Buckley's widow is
somehow
related to him). Work was long, pay was low, and employment
was unsecure. If business fell off at one mill, there
would be a
layoff, but there were lots of mills, so you would just get a job at
another mill. The Slaters
in particular owned a lot of mills, and
somehow or other, Babci ended up working at the Slater Mill in Jewett
City,
Connecticut, a section of the Town of Griswold (about 30 miles
from Webster) around about 1914. Like almost all New
England textile
mills, the Jewett City Slater mill has long been out of business.
Dziadzi was born Aleksander (or Alexander) Stawiecki (Sta-VIET-ski)
near Suwalki, Poland, on Feb.
13, 1890. He seemed certain of the date.
If you look at a map of Poland, you will see that Suwalki (Su-VAHL-ki)
is
not very far from Bialystok, and like Bialystok, it was part of
Russia then.
A little bit of Russian
history: Nineteenth-century Russia was
probably the last place in Europe to operate under the feudal system
that
governed most of Europe through the Middle Ages. The serfs (the
peasants) were literally owned by the landlords (or
by the state if
there were no landlord) and they were property to be dealt with in
whatever manner the landlords
chose -- however brutal or exploitive
that treatment might be. Serfs were born into serfdom and in serfdom
they
remained for life. It was a situation not entirely dissimilar
from the conditions of slavery in the Americas, and
it ended at about
the same time when, in 1861, Czar Alexander II emancipated the serfs,
beating Abraham
Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves by a couple of
years. Twenty years later, Alexander II was assassinated in a
bomb
blast and was succeeded by Alexander III, who ruled until 1894.
Alexander III, remembering what happened
to Alexander II, clamped down
on his subjects severely. He was a tyrant and a despot.
Dziadzi
was born a subject of Alexander III. He was from a rural place
and apparently was part of a reasonably large family
by today's
standards. I seem to recall him telling me that at least one of his
parents died when he was
quite young, but I'm not sure which. Father,
I think, but I'm not sure. He did not go to school. When he was old
enough
-- and that would not have been very old -- his job was to take
the sheep out to pasture every day.
So,
you can see that it is quite clear that the Stawieckis were serfs,
and if his father was too young to have experienced
the feudal
system, certainly his grandfather and those who came before him lived
their lives as property
of the landed lord. (Interestingly, the name
Stawiecki comes from the Polish word "staw,' meaning "pond." A
Stawiecki
would have been someone who built ponds -- presumably by
damming streams -- so there was some type of trade or industry
that
they practiced. If anyone ever asks you, tell them you come from a
long line of hydraulic engineers).
My mother once had a picture of the
family homestead and family members gathered for a funeral in the
1950's.
It may not still exist, but if I ever find it, I will of
course send it out. The place looked pretty grim, as I recall.
There's
a lot I don't know about his early life. Babci had more time
to talk about hers to me, after all.
I
do know that Dziadzi came to America at some point in the early
years of the Twentieth century. My guess is that
it probably was
around the same time as Babci's trip. Certainly it was not too much
before that. As far
as I know, he came alone, though at some point his
brother Wincenty (Vin-SEN-ty) came and settled in Webster. Another
brother,
known as Frank (but probably properly Franek) also came
sometime after World War I, didn't like it, and returned
to Poland.
Frank also apparently left a small family behind in America when he
went back.)
I
know that Wincenty and Frank were in Webster at some point, but I
don't know if they went there first. Dziadzi went
to Pennsylvania --
presumably Scranton or Wilkes-Barre and worked in the coal mines. It
was miserable, extremely
dangerous work and he got out of there as
fast as he could.
He then went to New England and worked
the textile mills. Sometime
around 1914, he was working at the Slater mill in Jewett City,
Connecticut.
There he met and married Babci. Their first child was
born in 1915 and he was named Ryszard (later Richard).
World War I broke out in Europe in 1914. The United States kept out of
it long enough for President
Woodrow Wilson to win re-election on a
"He Kept Us Out Of War" slogan in 1916 and, after being sworn in
again
in March, 1917, he asked Congress for a declaration of war a
month later. Even though Dziadzi was not an American
citizen, he was
subject to being drafted into the army and had to register. Here are
his draft cards (the
scanner blows them up -- they are wallet-sized
and he had to carry them with him at all times) He was placed in
category
4 which probably meant that he was exempt because he was a
father. So World War I didn't have a big effect on the
family, and as
far as I know, the family in Europe came through it all right too.
Following the war, Poland
became an independent country. No more
Russian domination. Not for a while, anyway.
A second son, Edmund was born in 1918. He was baptized by and
Irish priest.
Sometime after Ed was born, the family moved to Chaseville, a section
of Webster and Dudley. (Many
towns in New England, especially in
Connecticut, have these "sections," small communities that formed
around
factories or other commercial or geographic entities. Some of
them split off and became towns outright. Others just
retained their
names as terms of convenience. Chaseville was one of the latter.)
Anyway, either Babci or Dziadzi must have been working at that mill in
1921 because they were living
in company housing. These were apartment
buildings that were available for employees to rent (at rip-off
prices,
usually) and there were a half dozen or so of them on both
sides of the street. Here is a picture of the one they
lived in as it
appears today. Four -- or maybe even eight -- families lived in each
one of these.
Babci
and Dziadzi's daughter, Janina (later Jeanette) was born here in
August, 1921. Babci had a history of miscarriages,
and this was to be
the last of their children.
Babci and Dziadzi both bounced from job to job, from mill to mill.
There were a lot of mills and
there were a lot of layoffs. There was
also a lot of labor unrest in those days in Webster and there were a
number
of violent strikes that sometimes descended into riots. It was
sometimes dangerous to work at one mill or another.
I don't know that
they participated in any of the strikes, though they may have, but
they wouldn't have
crossed a picket line either. Even if they had
wanted to, they wouldn't have dared to. Of course, when they weren't
working
at the Chase Mill, they couldn't live in the factory housing,
so they rented at the house marked 2 on the map. This
was -- and still
is -- a very low-budget section of town.
If you look at a copy of the Constitution
of the United States, you
will find the Eighteenth Amendment. Passed after the war, it made
beer, wine and
liquor illegal anywhere in the United States. This was
called Prohibition and it lasted for about thirteen years.
People
hated it and regularly violated it. It was a major issue in the 1928
Presidential contest, but Al
Smith, the "wet" Democratic candidate,
lost to the "dry" Republican, Herbert Hoover for a number of reasons
including
a fight over religion.
A lot of people made beer and wine themselves. It usually wasn't very
good
beer or wine, but they were relatively easy to make. Whiskey was
harder to make. You needed lots of time and lots
of equipment,
including a still. And the procedure produced a smell that woould give
you away to the neighbors
or to the police. Besides, you had to know
what you were doing. Bad whiskey can kill you, or it can cause
blindness.
Dziadzi knew how to do it. He made whiskey and he sold it.
And he made a lot of money.
At some
point during this time, they moved across the street to the
house marked 3 on the map. In later years Babci's brother,
Uncle
Benny, lived there, so I have been in at least one apartment there.
His had a kitchen and a bedroom,
a small cooking alcove, and a
bathroom.
When the Stawieckis moved there, it represented a big
step up. This
was the first place they ever lived that had a toilet. Everyplace else
had an outhouse in
the back yard.
Dziadzi operated his still at a farmhouse just over the Connecticut
line in Quinebaug,
a "section" of Thompson. Thompson didn't have a
police force -- it still doesn't -- so all he had to worry about
was
the state police there. The whiskey was sold out of the houses on
Central Ave. And Dziadzi got busted
a couple of times. I think he had
to pay a couple of fines, that's all. Here's a picture of the
farmhouse
as it looks today. It was owned by a family named Ryszewski
(Ri-ZHEF-ski) and we used to go visit Mrs. Ryszewki and
her son, Tony,
throughout Babci's life. I hated that, because Mrs. Ryszewski spoke
only Polish and so I
basically had to sit and be quiet for the visit.
sometimes Dziadzi would take me for a walk around thb farm. It was
a
pretty large piece of property. where that shed is now, there used to
be a barn. There was a cow pasture
in back, and there was a bull
there. I was repeatedly warned that the bull was dangerous. He may
have protected
the still, i don't know, The farmhouse had no running
water, just a pump in the kitchen sink. Bathroom facilities
consisted
of an outhouse in the barn. I don't know what they did with their
portion of the profits. Probably
paid for the farm. There was a Mr.
Krupinski in Dudley who was also in on this, and he bought a nice farm
in
Dudley. He died when I was very young, so I don't remember much
about him except that he still had one cow and I
got to drink a glass
of her milk. Unpasteurized.
The kids continued to grow. Here is a picture of Ed and Dick in the
Twenties. Actually, it's a
picture of a picture. Cousin Karen has the
original and I have a similar one of Jan. They are large,
hand-colored
portraits. This was something of an extravagance in those
days, but the Stawieckis were doing well
The three children went to parochial (Catholic) school at St. Joseph's
Church in Webster. This
was a Polish church with masses in that
language and Polish nuns did the teaching, most of it in Polish. The
school
was probably a two-mile walk each way from Central Ave., and
walk it they did -- rain, snow or cold. The Irish, French
and Slovak
communities in Webster also had their churches and schools. So did the
German Lutherans. The
Polish operation is still going strong.
In October, 1929, the New York Stock Market crashed. there was a money
crunch and it spread all
around the nation and all around the world.
Banks failed, and when they failed all the depositors' money was lost.
Factories
and mills and stores closed because people didn't have the
money to buy their products. People by the millions lost
their jobs
and there were even fewer people able to buy things. People who were
lucky enough to have a job
might make nine or ten dollars a week, and
with that they had to support their families. Farms couldn't sell
their
crops. The situation kept feeding on itself and things got worse
and worse, The whiskey business was still doing
pretty well, though,
and Dziadzi was becoming quite a wealthy man.
It was time for Babci and Dziadzi to build a house of their own. They
bought a large (3-1/2 acre)
piece of land in Chaseville. Much of the
land was not suitable for building. There was a huge ledge running
through
it, and it was also on the right-of-way for the Grand Trunk
Railroad. The railroad was planned to connect New England
with
Montreal, but for a variety of financial reasons it was never built.
To this day, however, there is
an abutment for a trestle across the
street.
The house itself was built in 1932 and 33 and it
was an 11-room
mansion. It cost about $10,000 to build, which was a lot of money
then. The craftsmanship
was impeccable and it could be seen everywhere
from the hardwood flooring to the cabinets. This was quite out of
character
for them, as they were ordinarily rather frugal people. Part
of it was probably that they decided to "do it right."
After all, they
could afford it and they would only do it once in their lives and,
really, they didn't mind
paying extra for quality. But part of it also
had to do with the Depression. They were appalled at the poverty they
saw
around them, and they wanted to put people to work. The cellar
hole was not dug by machinery. Dziadzi hired men with
shovels to dig
it. It cost more, but it gave people jobs. A number of people in
Webster were able to feed
their families because of this, and they
never forgot him for it. They didn't tell me this, incidentally, I
heard
it from the widow of one of the men he hired.
By this time, Dick and Ed were in high school (Bartlett High in
Webster -- I went to the very same
high school nearly forty years
later) Dick graduated in 1933, and Ed in 1935. Jan would graduate in
1939.
Dick subsequently went to college at the Worcester Polytechnic
Institute and Ed to the Massachusetts and later Iowa
state college and
university systems. This was a very big deal by the way. Nowadays,
nearly everyone has
an opportunity to go to some sort of college, but
then it was very rare for -- not one, but two -- sons to go off
to
college. Even to have three kids graduate from high school was an
accomplishment.
In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President. He immediately
began a wide range of federal
programs to put people to work and to
provide security to the monetary and banking systems. Some of the
programs
worked very well, some didn't work at all. Ones that didn't
work were replaced by new ones, and eventually the Depression
started
to lift. Life started to get better for the people of Webster and
Dudley. Babci and Dziadzi loved
Roosevelt for this.
Roosevelt also brought about the repeal of Prohibition. This put an
end to
the homemade whiskey business. Dziadzi decided to open a bar.
It was called the Back Bay, and it was across the street
from where
they were living until they were able to move into the new house.
We don't know where the name Back Bay came from. Back Bay is the
name of an upscale neighborhood in Boston, but if it came from that --
and if so, why -- we don't know.
There was also one other catch. In order to obtain a
liquor license,
you had to be a United States citizen. Dziadzi wasn't. He went into
partnership with a man
named Filipski, who apparently was a citizen,
and about whom I know little, while he applied for citizenship. It
was
granted in 1936.
The next step was to build a bigger Back Bay. I was never in the
original one, but I'm quite sure
it was small and seedy. It appears to
be a residence now.
They borrowed $2500 to build at the
spot marked 5 in the map. Here are
the loan instruments. The Webster Credit Union, by the way, was a
Polish
bank. You had to be at least one-quarter Polish to open an
account there and this policy continued until 1962 or
so. The reason
was so that the mill owners and other wealthy townspeople couldn't
deposit enough money there
to gain voting control of the bank. It's
nowadays a very large financial institution in central Massachusetts.
Note,
incidentally, that the money -- and again, this was a lot of
dough in that time -- was borrowed on the last day of
January, 1939
and was repaid in a little more than a year-and-a-half. In full!
World War II started in Europe in September, 1939, when Germany
invaded Poland. Shortly thereafter,
Russia (or more properly, the
USSR) invaded the eastern part of Poland and the people of Suwalki and
Bialystok
were under Russian control again. The United States didn't
join the war for more than two years, but the world was
becoming
dangerous and war work was definitely putting an end to whatever
remained of the Depression.
People
had money. They spent it. Some of it they spent at the Back
Bay. There was also a Navy base in New London Connecticut
. Trains
from there passed through Webster several times a day and Webster was
know as a big party town.
Lots of bars, gambling, pool halls, etc.
Cops generally looked the other way. Many of them were on the take.
The
Back Bay was in Dudley. It was a somewhat classier place. It had a
long bar in the front, but there was a kitchen
there too. Light fare
of the time was served (hot dogs, hamburgers, pickled eggs, kielbasa,
etc.)
In the back room there was a stage and large dance floor with
booths and table service. There were bands on Saturday
nights. You
could take a date there.
Sometime around that time, Babci and Dziadzi and another
couple (The
Dugases -- they owned a vending machine company that, among other
things, operated the juke
box in the Back Bay) went on a road trip to
Niagara Falls. Maybe they stopped in Auburn, New York, to visit the
remaining
Koziczes. It was probably the only true vacation they ever
took in their lives. They did not cross to the Canadian
side of the
falls for fear of not being allowed back into the USA.
With the war coming, Dick went
to work at Harvey Wells, an electronics
place in Southbridge. He was now an electrical engineer. Jan also went
to
work in Southbridge at American Optical. This was probably all
defense work. Jan had to wear a badge.
With the entry of the US into the war, Ed joined the Navy He was a
lieutenant and he served as
a gunnery officer on the USS Ackenar in
the Pacific. It was a transport ship. Cargo, I think.
In
June, 1941, Germany invaded the USSR. One of the columns, on its
way to Leningrad, passed through the Suwalki-Bialystok
area. They
would be driven back through the same route. The families were able to
survive this, but it must
have been pretty bad. They surely saw some
heavy fighting -- especially as the Germans were being pushed back. No
one
ever talked about it.
And it looked like Jan would be the first one to get married. She and
Harry
Clark, a friend and classmate of Ed's were engaged in January,
1943. Harry was in the army, and he went off to participate
in the
invasion of Italy.
Uncle Benny's son, Joe was also a lieutenant in the Navy. He was a
flight
instructor. Something went wrong on one of his training flights
and the plane crashed, killing both him and his student.
He is buried
in the family plot, next to Uncle Benny.
Later in the war, the Ackenar was hit by
a kamikaze, a Japanese
suicide bomber. Ed was safe, but the ship was heavily damaged. He was
able to come
home for a leave, and while he was there, Dick married
Pat Whiteoak, a girl he met at Harvey Wells. Not too long
after that,
Ed married Clara Pepka, another Bartlett 1935 classmate. Ed was still
in the navy and Jan and
Clara went by train to San Francisco for the
wedding. It was a great adventure for them both.
Harry
stepped on a mine at Anzio, and that was the end of Harry.
After the war came grandchildren. First Lauren, then Ron, then Ann.
They were ecstatic to have
grandchildren.
In 1948, Jan married Andy Lamy. Andy was from Fitchburg and his father
worked for
the John Hancock Insurance Co. He was transferred to
Webster while Andy was in the army, so Andy was discharged to
come
home to a town where he knew no one except his own family. Somehow or
other, he met Jan.
More
grandchildren: Jay and Karen, and then a few years later David
and Lynn.
One problem was that
no one was in Webster anymore. Dick and Pat were
in the Marblehead area. Ed and Clara in Northampton, and Andy and
Jan
moved to Fitchburg. Within a couple of years, Ed and Clara moved back
to neighboring Oxford, then to
Webster (or it may have been
vice-versa). Eventually, Ed got a job teaching German and then Russian
at the
University of Massachusetts and he returned to Northampton
permanently.
Jan and Andy returned
to Dudley in 1951, and they and I lived with
Babci and Dziadzi for the next couple of years. Andy worked part-time
at
the Back Bay for nearly a decade. Mostly Friday and/or Saturday
nights.
Since Babci never became a citizen, she was required to register with
the government every January.
This was something that was started just
before the war, so that the government could keep track of the
whereabouts
of nationals from other countries that the United States
could well find itself at war with. Later during the Red
Scare and the
Cold War, terms and punishments became even harsher. Remember that
birth certificate
from 1954 that I said was obtained from Poland with
great difficulty? That was necessary because of all this rigamarole.
For
a time in the late Forties and Fifties it was politically
profitable to holler loudly about disloyal immigrants posing
a threat
to the security of the United States. This continued into the early
Sixties. I think it was President
Johnson that ended the annual Alien
registration. Of course, that hasn't stopped the immigrant-bashing to
this
day.
At some point, probably right after the war, Wincenty's son, Tony,
came to own the New England
Cash Super Market (marked 6 on that
Chaseville map). By today's standards it wasn't much of a super market
at
all, but little more than a large convenience store with a meat
counter and a produce section, but for the time it
was a typical-sized
neighborhood grocery store and it provided a good living for Tony and
his four (I believe)
brothers. It is still in operation today, now
owned by some Greek immigrants. It hasn't changed all that much. It's
a
lot messier, but I could recognize it easily. Some old-timers in
Webster still call it Stawiecki's Market
As the Fifties and Sixties went on, Dick worked for General Electric
and lived in Marblehead, then
Milton, Vermont, then back to Marblehead
and then to Florida to work on the space program.
Ed
continued to teach at UMass throughout his career. He spent a
period of time in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar and
was planning to
try to look up Uncle Frank, but apparently Uncle Frank had died by
that time.
Jan
stayed in Webster and Dudley.
The family got together from time-to-time, usually for the "Big Three"
holidays
(Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter) and occasional other
visits. At first, most of these would be at Babci's, but soon
the
holidays were held on a rotating basis. When held in Marblehead or
Northampton, the visits were always
day trips. Babci and Dziadzi never
spent a night away from home. For one thing, they couldn't do that
when
the weather was cold. The house was heated with a coal-fired
boiler and it had to be stoked daily or the fire would
go out. The
central heat was state-of-the-art in 1932, but antique a dozen years
later.
In
1963, Dziadzi sold the Back Bay and retired. The Back Bay's glory
days were over. There were regulars who would
come over for a couple
of glasses of beer or a shot of whiskey, but there were no more bands
on Saturday.
The kitchen and table service were gone too. He was 73
and he didn't really have the energy anymore to promote a
nightspot.
The guy who bought it couldn't make a go of it either and it
subsequently became an auction house,
a Baptist church, an optical
instruments factory, a vacant building, a gym, and now it is once
again a bar.
A sports bar, as a matter of fact.
A year later, Dziadzi quit driving. He had a 1946 Pontiac and he got
his
money's worth out of it. He drove it for eighteen years. And he
was a horrible driver incidentally (by no means the
only
automobile-impaired member of the family, by the way) He seldom
exceeded 25 miles an hour and he never
signaled a turn in his life.
He parked the Pontiac in the back yard and there it stayed.
From
then on, they were pretty much homebodies. Jan would take them on
errands. I was driving in 1966 and so I started
doing that too.
In July, 1968, Babci wasn't feeling well and she asked me to take her
to see the
doctor. She got progressively worse and the problem was
diagnosed as multiple myeloma, an incurable blood disease,
a bone
marrow cancer. She died on Oct. 25, 1968, a few days shy of her 73rd
birthday. This is the last picture
taken of her. She is sitting with
Pat's mother, and I think it was at a Buckley family picnic in
Scituate,
Rhode Island. It was only a day or two after this that I
took her to the doctor.
Dziadzi was devastated by this. He was not able to manage the
household by himself, but he didn't
want to leave, so Jan, Andy and I
(to the extent that I was home -- I was a college student in New York
by
this time) moved in with him. He seemed to be doing all right
physically, but we knew something was wrong when he
didn't eat his
dinner on Thanksgiving, 1970 (And this guy could eat!). Jan took him
to the doctor and a
far-progressed gastro-intestinal adenocarcinoma
was found. He died of complications of that on Dec. 8, 1970. He was
80.
Well, that's the history, at least as best as I can tell it. Let's try
to color it in a little
bit.
To say that Babci was an overachiever does not even begin to state the
case. She definitely
ran the family and the household.
That house was huge, with all kinds of closets and nooks and crannies.
You
could eat off the floor in any room. Furthermore you could eat off
the shelves of closets that never even got used.
She had enormous
gardens, both flowers and vegetables, and she tended them all
diligently. she had fruit
trees and ornamentals and dozens of rose
bushes. She kept chickens and ducks for eggs, meat and -- in the case
of
the ducks -- for down for pillows and featherbeds that are still
being used. She canned the extra vegetables and
fruit in glass mason
jars for the winter.
She picked mushrooms in the woods. She canned
those too. I probably
was a teen-ager before I had a mushroom from the store (and didn't
like it).
She cooked three meals a day from scratch. She seldom
opened a tin can. She obviously had a stove in her kitchen,
but she
would usually only use that to boil water for tea or coffee or the
like. Heavy-duty cooking was
done on another (gas, always gas) stove
in the cellar so as to keep the kitchen clean. I don't recall ever
seeing
so much as a dirty fork in the sink overnight.
As a cook, incidentally, she was very good as long as she
was cooking
traditional eastern European food. Soups, poultry, pork, lamb, most
vegetables, and all
sausages were great. We, the grandchildren, still
remember some of her meals. No one could cook a better ham, and
the
leftovers were served on rye bread with freshly grated beet
horseradish. On the other hand, she was
not an innovator. She tried
spaghetti once in a while but not often, and that was fortunate. With
beef,
it was usually a shame that the cow had to die for this! If you
think about it, Poland has no beef cattle. People
ate beef when it was
time to slaughter the village dairy cow before it died of old age, and
good luck chewing
that! So Babci cooked all beef as though it were
pretty tough -- and like all meat, she made sure that it was
thoroughly
cooked. She would take a porterhouse steak, put it in a
skillet with onions, peppercorns and water, bring it to a
boil and
poach it for an hour. Not good. The roast pork shoulder, the beet
soup, the leg of lamb,
the roast duck, and fifty other things more
than made up for it.
She would get up around 6:30 or 7 in the morning, make coffee and
breakfast (usually eggs or pancakes),
do the dishes, and proceed with
her chores. One a week she did laundry. She did it in the cellar and
she
never owned an automatic washer. She would then lug baskets of
laundry up two flights of stairs to the second-floor
porch where her
clothesline was. She thought nothing of this. Along about noon, she
would sit down in her
rocking chair and drink a highball (a tall glass
with a shot of bar whiskey and filled with ginger ale). This was
generally
her only rest break of the day. She would either continue
with chores or go out and work in the gardens or the yard
until it was
time to make supper. sometimes one of the old Polish ladies in the
neighborhood (including
some of those whose husbands worked on that
cellar hole) would come over for a visit and they would sit and talk
for
a while. Some spoke only Polish. As they got older and got sick or
died off, the visits became less and less frequent.
She might spend
the afternoon in the cellar braiding woolen rugs, or she might
occasionally walk to the
store, She never operated a motor vehicle. At
night, she might make a batch of tea and sit in her rocking chair
crocheting
or she might lie down on the sofa in her parlor and read
the paper. This would often be a Polish newspaper published
in
Wisconsin which she got by mail. Another neighbor got a different
paper and they swapped. She would go
to bed early, usually before
nine.
Dziadzi's routine was somewhat different. He was by no means
a lazy
man, but he didn't believe in wasting effort and he was very slow.
He'd get up the same time as Babci.
If it was winter, he'd deal with
the boiler and take out the ashes and, after breakfast, he'd go and
open
up the Back Bay. He would tend the bar and the business until 5
or so when the hired nighttime bartender came on
-- and a couple of
nights a week this was Andy. After supper he would go to his separate
living room and
listen to the news on his radio or read the paper. In
winter, it was time to deal with the boiler again. In summer,
he might
become involved with some task outside, or he might go for a walk
--preferably with a grandchild
in tow. He was a great walker. We would
often just go for a walk, he and I. Three or four miles, no particular
destination.
In the summer, he might also mow that very large lawn.
For the longest time, he did this with a hand mower. He finally
got a
power lawn mower when he was in his mid-sixties. it was still a task.
He also liked to simply sit
in the shade outside, alone with his
thoughts.
They did not have a television until their last
few years. Someone --
I think Dick -- gave them one. Like most sets of the day, it was
black-and-white and
there were only four or five stations available.
They watched once in a while, but not every night.
They
spoke Polish at home. They would speak English if they had to,
but it was not the language in which they felt comfortable.
They spoke
English to the grandchildren, in business dealings and in social
conversation with those who
didn't speak Polish. Their English was
accented and ungrammatical, but we had no difficulty in understanding
them.
Verbs in particular were almost always in first-person, present
tense. (For example if Dziadzi went to Tony's store
to buy groceries,
but Tony was out of coffee, when he got home, he would say: "I go
store but he no have
coffee" instead of "I went to the store, but he
didn't have....") By the standards of their peers, this was pretty
good
English. Some of these people spoke none at all and in their late
years became miserably isolated as a result. Their
homeland,
incidentally, was always referred to as "The Old Country."
There were a couple of social
organizations that Dziadzi belonged to.
One was the Polish National Alliance, a nationwide Polish club, not
terribly
unlike the Elks or the veterans' organizations. Until
recently the PNA even operated a college in Cambridge Springs,
Pennsylvania.
There were also a number of strictly local clubs that
were more designed toward providing social opportunities and
support
in time of hardship to members who, it must be remembered, had mostly
arrived in America alone and
without. any resources to fall back on.
If a husband and father died, the family was in a tough spot. The
other
members of your club would chip in to pay funeral expenses and
look after the welfare of the family. Dziadzi wasn't
socially active
in these, but he would go once a year to the meetings and pay his
dues. A lot of them still
operate, but they are little more than
neighborhood bars now. David and I had a beer in one last March ......
after
we had a beer in the Back Bay.
Dziadzi liked to go fishing. He used a cane pole, baited with a worm
saved
from digging in the garden (one of his chores). Mostly it was
panfish, but if he caught a bass it made his day. And
we ate what he
caught. He fished for food; he would have thought fishing for sport
was cruel, and cruel
was one thing he wasn't. He would put walnuts out
in the snow for the squirrels. Walnuts are expensive and squirrels
are
pests, but he felt sorry for them and he fed them. It was his job to
dispatch the chickens and ducks
whenever Babci was ready to cook one
up (cleaning it was her job). He hated that. He did it, but he didn't
like
it. I think that's probably why they stopped keeping poultry in
later years.
He was very proud
of his pear trees. He grafted them himself, trading
shoots with a guy up the street. He had mixed success, but when
they
lived, he was proud of them.
They went to church every Sunday. I don't think Dziadzi much
cared one
way or the other, but it was what you did. Babci was a devout Catholic
however. She would get
down on her knees at the dining room table and
pray -- maybe not every day, but often. She could also swear like
a
trooper. Usually, but not always, she did this in Polish. That's how
come I know all the good words. If
she saw a stray dog in the yard,
she would run out the door hollering a stream of Polish invective such
that
that dog actually understood what was going to happen to him if
he peed on her rhododendrons.
We
heard little of the people left in Poland. In the Fifties, Babci
used to send huge packages -- at great expense --
back home. These
would be filled with clothing, shoes, soap and other such things. They
always wanted buttons
for some reason or other. Poland was still under
Russian Communist control then and the war's devastation was still
afresh,
so all kinds of stuff was useful to them. When I was little,
one of my jobs was to cut the buttons off old dresses
and shirts and
string them together to be included in the packages. Probably they
sold them.
The Back Bay looks pretty good once again. There is a large
function-room addition to the side.
The bar is now where the old dance
hall used to be and the original bar area now has billiard tables.
David
and I were there on a friday night last month and there was a
good crowd.
Created February 25, 2008
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