Growing up in a Union Family

By Pat Angelo

Growing up in a Union Family is not a book in the usual sense of the word. Its a mosaic of moments, events, impressions and images experienced through the eyes of a boy growing up in a union family. The history of the unions callow years marching toward the threshold of greatness comes alive, personal and touching-real,in the boys presence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 13, 2005
• ISBN: 9781450080620

Pat Angelo

Pat Angelo was born in Johnstown, PA a midsize steel city whose industrial centerpiece was Bethlehem Steel. He grew up in a steelworkers’ family and for a short period worked in the mill himself before going into the service. Taking advantage of the GI Bill, Angelo attended college then embarked on a teaching career from which, after 31 years, he retired from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania as a Professor Emeritus of English. Angelo resides in Edinboro with his wife, Joan, who is also a writer of books about the rise of unions and the spare-living working class cultures from which they were spawned.

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Copyright © 2005 by Pat Angelo.

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CONTENTS

GROWING UP IN A UNION FAMILY

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Antonio Angello, Angeline Vicarro Angello, John and Joseph Angello, Betty Angello Mauro and Ann Angello Leo.

A union family if there ever was one.

GROWING UP IN A UNION FAMILY

None of what’s written here is true except all of it.

Here’s my father coming home, I running down the sidewalk to greet him, face smudged, tobacco-stained teeth grinning and greeting me back and though yellowish his teeth a bracelet of light bright enough to illumine the dirt on his face.

Then handing me his lunch bucket and I unsnapping the clasps rootin’ in, ah there it is in the corner, bright shiny penny (its soaked smell of kerosene) and reaching the steps of our porch, I shove the bucket back into his hand, race across the street to Shaheen’s and buy a penny poke of candy.

Boy on fire. Pre-pre-pubescent drama. Union alive (if not well). Little CIO badge stuffed secretly in my pocket. A man named Lewis. A man named Murray. Watch out you don’t get clubbed to bloody death by some company cop.

*

Outside the Gautier mill gate all hell breaks loose between strikers trying to stop scabs from going in and about 20 of Mayor Shield’s deputies, badged appointees whose wages are being paid by a strike fund secretly bankrolled by Bethlehem Steel but publicly proclaimed to be a civic fund made up of contributions from sympathetic Chambers of Commerce from around the country.

As we are watching strikers getting clubbed on the hands and heads and fists flying into the faces of many of the deputies, Eddie Patera knocks me on the elbow, scaring me, (I thought it was one of the clubbers) and shouts, Holy shit! Look at the blood spraying out of that copper’s nose!

My mother yells from our kitchen door: YOU GET IN HERE! GET IN THIS HOUSE!

She makes me go sit on the couch in the parlor where I can’t see anything and from where I wait for the ritual drama to be over, meanwhile uttering to myself what I think the first names of all the fake cops would be: Farris, Wendall, Sigmund, Leonard, Nathan, Ambrose, Terrance, Quentin, Milton, names I would never come to know or hear and would only be able to find on birth certificates, in archaic stratums of bygone times, history books. Augustus. Hector. Arthur.

Coteries and individuals banded together, separately, oppositely and antagonistically. Unwitting transition teams working the rites and will of history both sides.

*

After a little while, my mother says, It’s OK. You can go out now. Then I go over to Shaheen’s but have to turn around and come back. Didn’t get my penny today. My father’s on strike.

Little CIO badge hidden in the seam of my pocket pricks me on the thigh.

*

What’s a sit-down strike? I ask my oldest brother.

That’s when you stay inside the place where you’re working and don’t go home after your shift is over.

Who wants to keep working without going home to eat and wash?

You can wash in the mill and they take stuff to eat with them when they know they’re going to have a sit-down strike. Fill their lunch boxes and pockets with extra sandwiches, Hershey Bars and stuff like that.

I picture my father with pepperoni sticks and salamis stuffed in his pockets and 50 slices of capicola and provolone stuffed in his BVD’s.

*

One big union family is the street and neighborhood where I live. Thinkers of justice all our fathers are: A fair wage for a fair day’s . . . etc . . . etc . . . etc . . .

Still, heterogeneous elements abound in our homogeneous group. Every father who carries a lunch bucket has his own dream to fulfill, his own batch of kids to feed, the true drama of daily living where psychological implications are always in play.

Dreams float inside some houses more than others. My father dreams constantly though he never tells us what they are unless—since we all play musical instruments—our becoming great musicians is what he’s divined in his imagination.

And remember: Musicians have a union too and it is led by some guy (look at the pride shining in my father’s eyes!) who my father says is Italian!

Bar the way. Yawning and sneezing mill dust. Singing O Solo Mio.

*

It’s Sunday and the Pittsburgh Sun-Tele is sprawled on our couch and there’s a picture of John L. Lewis on the front page, a scowl on his face designed to fulfill obvious functions: Pay my workers or else you sons of bitches will pay ME and receive no insignificant fraction of my wrath!

Where a picture of Christ and the tips of his fingers touching his Sacred Heart hangs on our living room wall, there next to him would this newspaper picture of Lewis hang if it weren’t for my mother and father’s fear of wrathful consequences from God for confusing worldly viewpoints with spiritual, heavenly ones.

The headline above Lewis’ picture reads: ‘Lewis rants against Girdler and the Memorial Day massacre.’

Peculiarly qualified to rant and rave against that ‘massacre’ is Lewis because ten striking workers were shot down in cold blood outside the Republic Steel South Chicago plant gate and many, on both sides of the battle, were wounded.

You can see the merging of images in Lewis’ outraged eyes of strikers being shot to death and his archenemy, Tom Girdler, president of Republic being hanged by avenging strikers from a telephone pole outside that bloodied Chicago plant gate.

The vengeance in Lewis’ scowling eyes a lesion promising terminal anger over the event until the day he draws his last breath on this earth.

*

Eddie and I go to the Strand to see a gangster movie with James Cagney and Humpty Bogart. When the RKO Pathe News comes on between showings, a film of that strike at the Republic Steel plant in Chicago shows strikers marching and then scattering as shots are fired, people falling everywhere, getting beat with clubs and trampled on by other strikers trying to escape. Half the people in the theater are cheering and yelling, ‘KILL THE BASTARD STRIKERS! COMMIES! HOODLUMS!’ and half cheering the strikers and booing the cops, KILL THE BASTARD COPPERS!

Then two men about three rows from the back start going at it their bodies banging off the backs of seats, fists landing on noses, eyes, ears, working their way out of the aisle (blood or no blood flying like sparks) and into the inner lobby, people flocking up close to watch the action yelling and choosing sides. One man’s lip, the bigger, heavyset guy’s, is split open blood pouring down his grey shirt splotching the front of it purple maybe because the skinnier wiry guy has huge hands so when his punches land on the other’s face they tear skin. The big man is definitely getting the worst of it bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and lips while the other has some blood on him but mostly smears from the bleeder’s.

Now one guy among the cheering crowd shouts to the bloodied man, KILL THAT FUCKER, JIMMY, then jumps in causing breakouts, a riot of swinging fists around the two fighters. Here’s when Eddie, eyes all terrored up, turns and screams at me, Let’s scram outta here, and we both bang through the doors of the outer lobby and run for our lives.

*

Doesn’t mean being born in a union family kids just stand around waiting for some action to take place on a picket line or sit breathlessly by the radio listening to Lewis give big hell to slave-driver owners of the steel mills. We still go up to cow hill to play scrub or into the woods to pick elderberries for our mothers or in wintertime hang out in the public library not so much to read books but to mock the distortion of robber barons like Andrew Carnegie who built pyramidal monuments called libraries to his memory like some Pharaoh rather than use the money to raise the wages of workers who pulled 12 hour shifts while working six day weeks in his mills. Fed his workers books instead, a medium of exchange that did not sit well with workers like my father who still lives in a state of terminal tiredness only a stone’s throw away from the edge of hunger.

*

What does your dad do in the mill? The question is asked with psychological finesse. The kid who asks is 10 same age as I.

Psychological finesse I say because in its undertone the question reflects the ever-present perception of class distinctions that exist occupationally within the industrial workplace. More heavy-handedly in that community and with greater savage awareness than the unspoken polite social conceits exchanged on the outside. (Rollers, the worst among them, who bring in whole families, blatant nepotism, treating laborers under their supervision as dirt beneath their feet, holding contemptible attitudes toward laboring underlings to a far greater degree than their own employers treated six-day-week, 12 hour-shift-men earning on average 16 dollars per.)

My dad runs a crane, challenges the boy. What does YOUR dad do? During the asking his eyes flicking in his head with wondrous derring-do. And why not? for man-made destiny favoring him and his father as the rules in the industrial universe go, has sealed their place in that terribly righteous, bourgeois cosmos where, so long as my father remains a molder and his a crane operator, I can never go.

But nevermind because I’ll make the same interrogation of the kid who sits next to me in Miss Prothero’s class whose laborer father slings mud for the bricklayers. Thus sealing our rightful places in the universe by acknowledging them we will celebrate and go out during recess (or after school) and pick up a game of scrub.

*

Everybody’s dying young this year. In my grade Beverly of Diptheria, strikers not much older than kids getting shot to death by police, young cops who don’t know what side they’re on getting shot dead by snipers and now George Gershwin. My older sister says George Gershwin is too young to die. Without his songs, she says, all the fun’s gonna go out of life.

*

We’re just getting back from a Sons of Italy picnic. It was held at Stackhouse Park. Most of the men were talking about the union. They were speaking in hush-hush Italian but what did it matter if I could hear them or not? I would’ve had no idea what they were saying anyway.

My mother picked up on the conspiracy of hushed tones and couldn’t wait to get out of there. The whole idea of a union scares my mother real bad. She’s all the time scared about it. If she hears my father getting involved in union talk with even our compadis, she gives him a signifying no-no look from wherever she’s standing. When my father catches her eye, he tilts his head at her and laughs.

My mother’s afraid of spies. She thinks they’re everywhere all around us. She and my father got into an argument over it one day. She said, Italians (even our compadis) are the worst ones to trust!

My father scoffed. Got mad. Whatsa mattaa wit’ youuuuuuuuu?

Ok, she said, screwing a challenging scowl on her face, Go ’head. Get us all killed! Get our house blown up!

My mother’s face expressed such an urgency of fear and dread you’d think armed battalions of company men and police were on our doorstep coming to hang us from the nearest post.

My older sister says my mother’s scared about it because she grew up in a mining town where my grandfather worked and where there was meanness and killing going on all the time. Include my grandfather in the bunch. When he fell into a bad mood, says my sister, he’d put on a black hood and go out in the pitch of night looking for company men to maim, even kill.

He believed no man on the side of any mining company deserved to live. That’s why no wonder our grandfather was always a suspect says my sister. Company cops and local sheriffs were always on the stoop of porches in the patch where he lived asking his neighbors questions about him.

*

I count the cars pulled by the train that runs on the track beneath our backyard. 119 go by. Most of them are coal cars filled to the brim.

I picture the place where the coal came from. The men beneath the ground gathering it and the place where it’s going.

I see waters muddied black by coal dust. I see faces smudged black by swiped sweat. I see walls of shining coal darkening dim in the distance by a barren light.

Cars filled with coal clankening along a rail echoing early death, early death, early death. Dungeon demonology.

Filled coal cars headed to the point of their arrival. Mills like ours. Factories of all sorts. Dispatch yards. Trucks lined far as you can see.

But who’s this boy about a year older than me picking up a coal piece fallen from a truck rubbing it over his face making a black mask?

His face is now zooming in on mine. Moving in nose-to-nose-menacing. Masked grin stretching ear to ear.

I turn and run. He throws the piece of coal at me, hits me in the heel and yells something at me as the space between us grows.

It’s a curse spoken in a foreign language but not Italian. Racing away I pray none of the curse comes true. He sounds like he really means it.

*

What does a scab look like?

He’s got a subtle nose, clever eyes and an endlessly long face. He is as jaggedly thin and hollow looking as a rusting pipe. He carries a switchblade tucked