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Kenny's Grove.
Cherry Alley?”
Dubik
Dorta.
He said the doctors were angry because Dubik had been taken home.
Dubik died two days later, blind and unconscious. The doctors had filled him with drugs to ease his pain and he died without knowing that Dorta was beside him.
Officially, it was put down as an accident, impossible to foresee or prevent, its horror accentuated by a grim coincidence.
In a larger sense it was the result of greed, and part of the education of the American steel industry. The steel companies were using ever larger percentages of the earthy Mesabi ores, which were cheaper to mine and handle than the massive rock ores but which demanded—as the ironmakers were learning—a variation in technique to prevent choking the furnaces.
It’s all a big experiment costing lives
$2,300 today
Kracha, Dorta and Mike Dobrejcak
the house on River Street.
He paused. Then, “I'm thinking of going into business.” Dorta could not repress a faint smile. “Again, Djuro?” “This time I mean it.” “Joe with his farm—you with your business—” She shook her head in quiet amusement.
it wasn't that he loved the country but that he hated the mills. He never complained to me but I know how he felt.
Work gave him no time to live.”
$19,000 today. A nice chunk, but hardly a retirement fund.
He wanted to live well, to live in a nice house away from the mill, and to give his boys a good education so they wouldn't have to work with shovel and wheelbarrow like their father.
what was the use of coming to America if not to live better than we lived in the old country?”
“I know meat,” he said. “Who did all the butchering and sausage making while we were on the railroad? Give me two weeks behind the counter and I'll be as good a butcher as any in Braddock.”
Willie Behrman.”
Very clever, whether true or not.
I can go back in the hills with a wagon and buy direct from the farmers, do my own butchering. I can make my own boloney, smoke my own hams and bacon. Old-country style. That's the way to make money; sell something nobody else has and sell it cheap.”
Clever
“Ach!” Dorta said. “People always have to eat.” “But they don't always have the money to buy meat, or to pay their bills. Remember that.”
Braddock is no paradise, I'll admit, but have you forgotten how we had to live in the old country?”
“Elena would rather I bought a farm, but I got all I wanted of farming in the old country. And even here in America you can own a farm and still go around with no seat in your pants. When I walked from New York to White Haven let me tell you I saw more than one farm where I knew better than to ask for a bite to eat. There's no money in farming. The way to get rich in America is to go into business. Buy cheap, sell dear. There's your fortune in four words.”
Sometimes I think they got together and figured it out to the last penny, the sonnomabitch bastards.
Good times, bad times, good times, bad times, one after the other. What we save in good times we have to spend to keep alive in bad. Where can we get at that rate?
Painful irony: becoming a businessman does not insulate him from the controlling rhythm.
I have a little money put by, more than I may ever have again because as the girls get older it will be harder and harder to save.
Clever
October, 1895.
$31,800 today. Still not enough to retire on.
He was successful and he enjoyed it.
He liked
He liked
He liked
it wasn't all soup and noodles.
What worries, after all, did a mill worker have?
Haha
8 hour shifts? Question
each time it was almost like the first time. That particular joy never staled,
Publicly, he accepted success as the natural fruit of his own worth and shrewdness,
he would have denied as indignantly as any businessman in America that luck and rising immigration had most to do with it.
So he’s a Republican - haha
he would wonder how long his luck would last.
Francka,
Confronted with a fact whose sheer possibility was, by her logic, inadmissible, Francka did not hesitate. She ignored it.
the new bridge
He let her have the last word. He could afford to. He gave her a small ham to take home.
Elena
What *is* the problem?
What she was thinking or feeling, what emotions were consuming her mind, her worn body, Kracha didn't know and didn't much care,
stirrings of pity for what life had done to her,
it was an election year.
1896:
Electoral vote 271 to 176 (244 needed to win)
States carried 23 to 22
Popular vote 7,112,138 to 6,510,807
Percentage 51.1% to 47.7%
Since the onset of the Panic of 1893, the nation had been mired in a deep economic depression, marked by low prices, low profits, high unemployment, and violent strikes. Economic issues, especially tariff policy and the question of whether the gold standard should be preserved for the money supply, were central issues.
