Re: Sewing At the Triangle Waist Factory...

In article <44bbd5ab$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Pogonip <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Phaedrine wrote:

I'll have to watch for that but I don't think they've ever run it here
where I live. Young people today, I'm sure, could scarcely imagine such
a thing. When I hear people criticizing unions, I remind them how
unions came to be to put things into perspective. It wasn't just
serendipity.

I think I've told this story here before, but my maternal grandfather
was employed by one of the big coal mining companies in western
Pennsylvania,...

Frick perchance? That's where my paternal great-grandfather,
grandfather and great uncles worked. Among others, they lived in a
patch house in Grindstone and stayed mostly within Dunbar Township. My
grandmama was one of eleven (one girl died). Great-grandfather died in
the mines leaving nine school-age children. The older boys had to leave
school to work in the mines. Only the youngest boy escaped from mine
work.

...and he and my grandmother and my mother lived in a "patch"
house owned by the company in the coal patch. When he was 19, he was
killed in an accident one morning - he was a mule driver and his mules
balked. When he got down to lead them through a gate, they moved
forward, crushing him between the side of the mine and the wagon they
pulled.

The company police came to the house that afternoon and put everything
in it into the street, because it was housing for company employees, and
my grandmother was no longer married to a company employee.

My mother was a year old, and my grandmother just that morning had told
her husband she was again expecting - which delighted him. My
grandmother was 17, with one child and another on the way.

Those companies were vicious. I once read a book about Henry Frick and
how he and other mine owners were so ruthless with the miners and their
families. My grandmama told me many similar stories. It was a very hard
life but, incredibly, she was never bitter about it at all. She talked
a lot about the mines and the strikes; those incidents were as vivid to
her when she was 80 as when she was a girl. Her mother and dad came
over sometime in the 1880s when they had only one child. As you know,
lots of immigrants worked in the mines and when you look at the Western
PA censuses, those towns were filled with people who were or in the
process of becoming naturalized citizens. I'm so grateful to my
grandmama for giving me the background to comprehend our industrial
history and all the related social outcomes and events. All the women
sewed of course. It's such a small world.

Phae

--
I fear me you but warm the starved snake
Who, cherished in your breasts, will sting your hearts. (Henry VI,Shakespeare)
.