Pilfering Peter
and the TKO
by Don Drewniak
When war broke
out on the Korean Peninsula, I was seven-years
old. I completed first grade two weeks earlier
while attending the Laurel Lake Elementary School
in Fall River, Massachusetts, and was blissfully
unaware of world events. It was my maternal
grandfather who first made me aware of the
conflict in Korea. That would prove to be the
first of many lessons at “Grandpa John’s
School of the Real World.
Grandpa John
was born in Poland in 1891 and christened John
Lenartowicz. He immigrated to the United States
shortly after the turn of the century and found
work in a cotton mill in Westport, Massachusetts,
a town located southeast of Fall River. It was
there that he met Zofia Monastynska, a Ukrainian
immigrant who was to be his wife for over sixty
years.
Although born
in Poland, and Lenartowicz was a Polish surname,
Grandpa John spoke Ukrainian and claimed to be
Ukrainian. The family changed its last name
during the 1930s to Lenartowick in order, as my
mother told me years later, to make it sound
“less Polish.”
Fall River was
one of the leading manufacturing cities, if not
the leading manufacturing city, of cotton goods
on the planet from about 1870 to the early 1920s.
As a result, both of my future grandparents were
able to find work in the city’s cotton mills.
Fall River’s population was approximately
120,000 at the time.
Upon marriage
in 1915, the couple moved into a small apartment
located at 431 Globe Street in Fall River. It
consisted of a combination dining/living room,
two bedrooms, a tiny pantry, and a “bathroom”
with nothing more than a toilet and a sink.
Dating back to
the Great Depression through the early 1950s,
toilet paper was rarely used. In place of a
holder for toilet paper, there was an L-shaped
hook onto which roughly six-inch by six-inch
pieces of paper cut from newspapers were punched
into place.
Baths were
taken in a large, circular metal tub that my
grandfather hauled up from the basement. Water
was poured into the tub from pots that were
heated on a combination coal and wood stove. The
stove dominated the small dining/living room both
in its size and its importance, as it was used
for both cooking and heating of the apartment.
There were no
houses across the street. Instead, there was a
series of mills, some made of brick and some of
granite quarried in Fall River. They were set
back no more than two hundred feet from Globe
Street. Directly in front of the apartment was an
enormous brick chimney located approximately
twenty feet from the opposite side of the street.
It was more than three times the height of their
tenement house.
I often
imagined the chimney collapsing and burying me in
a tomb of bricks. With the advent of the Godzilla
movies in the mid-50s, I pictured Godzilla
destroying the chimney along with the rest of
Fall River. That is, I pictured that happening
until I found out Godzilla was an actor in a
rubber suit crushing and destroying cardboard
models of buildings, bridges, trains and power
lines
The apartment
was sufficient in size for the newlyweds, but not
once they brought three children into the world
— Antone (1916), Catherine, my mother-to-be
(1919), and Stanley (1921). With my grandmother,
Zofia (commonly called Sophie), no longer able to
work because of child-rearing duties, the
financial responsibilities devolved solely to
Grandpa John.
Jobs began to
disappear and wages remained flat or decreased.
Even before the Great Depression, the family
could not afford the cost of a larger apartment.
Fall River’s
economy was heavily dependent on the
manufacturing of cotton textiles, in particular
cotton-print cloth. During its high point, it was
home to over one hundred twenty cotton-textile
mills. At the close of World War I, the number of
such mills had dropped to a still impressive
forty-nine.
Unfortunately,
the city witnessed a rapid decline in its textile
industry beginning in the early 1920s. To save on
transportation costs and to avail themselves of
cheap labor, textile-manufacturing companies
began building mills in the South. To compound
the problem for Northeast cotton-manufacturing
cities like Fall River, these mills featured new
equipment that was far more efficient than the 19th
century equipment of their aging Northeast
counterparts.
The number of
textile mills prior to the start of World War II
in the city dwindled to seventeen. A few of these
managed to continue through the War and into the
1950s.
The house in
which the family lived consisted of two side-by-side,
bottom-floor and upper-floor apartments. My
grandparents lived in one of the bottom units.
Above them lived Grandpa John’s arch-enemies,
my grandmother’s sister, Pelalia (changed to
Pauline) and her husband, Peter. They had one
child, a boy, John, who was born in 1922.
By 1950, I
came to understand that Grandpa John would have
nothing to do with them. According to my mother,
she could not remember either one ever being
allowed to step into my grandparents’
apartment. Unfortunately, I never had the
presence of mind to ask her why.
The
TKO
Above each
second-floor apartent were four attic rooms, two
of which belonged to my grandparents. One was
used for storage. The other became my grandfather’s
second bedroom after the birth of their third
child. The only external ventilation was a window
no larger than three feet by two feet. Lighting
consisted of a single bulb dangling from the
ceiling. Heating was non-existent. For
approximately twenty years, Grandpa John spent
many nights sleeping in the cold during the
winter months, and enduring heat and humidity in
the summer.
Grandma Sophie
was no more than four feet, ten inches in height
and probably never weighed more than ninety
pounds. Her sister, who was called Titka (Ukrainian
for aunt) by my mother and her brothers, was
about eight inches taller and, in her later years,
close to twice her weight.
It wasn’t
until I approached my teenage years that I found
the name Titka to be amusing. Her husband, Peter,
barely topped five feet in height.
Below the two
apartments was a dirt-floor cellar. It included a
community room that, to the best of my
recollection, was usually empty except for two
bathing tubs that were stored there when not in
use. In addition, there were two padlocked rooms,
one for each family. Both rooms included coal
bins.
Grandpa John
came home early one day from work and discovered
Peter stealing coal from his bin. He had a
substantial size and strength advantage and also
possessed a temper. As a result, he gave his
brother-in-law a just short of a hospital-visit
beating.
Neither family
ever had automobiles, nor did they get telephones
until a year or two later. Titka walked to a
nearby police station to file a complaint.
The
investigating officer was an acquaintance of my
grandfather as they both frequented the
Knickerbocker Cafe, a nearby watering hole. After
speaking briefly with the two principals, he
informed Peter that he was guilty of burglary and
Grandpa John had the right to defend his property.
Titka and Peter dropped their complaint. Peter
was ordered to return the coal he had taken. He
ended up returning appreciably more than he stole
as Grandpa John exaggerated the amount that had
been expropriated.
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