Marie Taylor, Ink

“The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for – not by labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.”

George F. Baer, President, Philadelphia & Reading Railway

I have already written about Rocco who was one of two borders linving in my childhood home. The other border was named Vincenzo, but his nickname was Jimmy. In contrast to Rocco who was short, square, red and silent, Jimmy was tall, thin, dark and talkative. He would stand in the kitchen and tell about his day with one hand waving a cigarette around and the other jingling the coins in his pants pocket.

Jimmy was one of the hundreds of immigrants worked on the railroad that delivered coal to the Shenango Iron Works just down the hill from our house. He would leave in the early hours of the morning wearing his heavy denim overalls and jacket; he would return in the evening, his clothes and face dark with the oily soot of the furnaces.

In those days, soot was everywhere. The front porch would covered with a fine oily black film every morning, belched from the giant smokestacks of the local mills. There was a saying that a clean porch meant an empty table: no soot meant no work which meant no food on the table.

Every Friday. Jimmy would line up at the window of the payroll office and get an envelope with his week’s pay in cash. Not many people had checking accounts then; there was still a mistrust of the banks left over from the Depression.

On his way home on pay day, Jimmy would stop at the local news stand and pick up a carton of cigarettes. His brand of choice was Lucky Strikes in the white package with the big red target. Once home, he would put the carton on the top of the white metal cupboard by the door. Each morning on the way to work he would take a fresh pack.

One summer afternoon, when I was about six years old, I stood on the chair next to the cupboard, reached into Jimmy’s carton of Lucky Strikes and extracted a pack. As I snuck out the back door, I cruised by the gas stove and picked up a book of matches.

Before you could say “Be Happy, Go Lucky!” I was in the backyard under the pear tree carefully peeling the cellophane. I pulled out a cigarette, rolled it between my fingers, smelled it, and got flecks of tobacco on my tongue when I put it in my mouth. The aroma of tobacco called to me like a Rhinish siren and I had longed to explore its mysteries.

I burned my fingers a couple of times trying to light it but was finally able to take a few experimental puffs. My head whirled and my stomach heaved. I snubbed the cigarette out in the grass and gasped. 

When I returned the pack to the top of the cupboard, I hoped Jimmy would not notice it had been tampered with. One night a general announcement was made at the dinner table that whoever was fooling with the cigarettes had better stop. My smoking career was nipped in the bud and it would be fifteen years before it resumed.

Jimmy lived with us another two years. Late one night there was a lot of hustling and bustling going on and I woke up to see Jimmy standing by my bed. He shook my hand and said he was going away for a little while. I said a sleepy good-bye and closed my eyes.

Jimmy never came home again; he died of bleeding ulcers in the hospital. There was permanent stain on the gray linoleum of his bedroom floor from the blood and stomach acid after the night he took sick. Just a few friends attended his funeral. 

Jimmy was the first person I knew who ever died. The next death would be my father’s mother. One day I walked into the dining room and saw my father sitting hunched over in a chair; one hand covering his face and the other holding a letter from Italy on thin air mail paper with a black border.

Jimmy was just one of the many nameless men who labored in America’s industries. He never made enough money to buy a house, or have children of his own; there was not even the hint of a girlfriend. His big recreation was the Saturday night card game at the Italian Home. There is no one who remembers him now, except maybe me.