Written by Chuck Rubin Oct. 29, 2008

Joe Kielar kept a cat-of-nine tails in his cupboard. He had never used it for whipping. Instead, he would simply hang it on a hook in the middle of the kitchen as a warning to each of his eight children. Keep misbehaving and the leather would fall on someone’s skin. The whip was the easiest way to keep order in his two bedroom home that sat on the outskirts of the mining camp.

Seven times a day the walls of his little, tar paper home would shake as long trains filled with coal passed through his backyard. His children, grand children and eventually great children would all take their turn throwing apples from the lone tree in the yard at the moving box cars. To this day, the sound of the rotting fruit thumping the cars like massive steel drums still fills me with a deep sense of satisfaction. The hunger of the train and its persistence drove Joe’s work. He went deep into the Pennsylvania earth to dig out the coal that filled the rail cars. The black, dusty product of his days passed by on its way to destinations across the Northeast and it dredged up many questions. They came to Joe in the rhythm of the wheels rolling over the rail bed. What if? What might have been? What now? The answers did not come as easily.

Joe left Poland when he was twenty three years old. He was a University Student, but Poland was in the process of preparing for what would be the First World War. He was drafted and he decided it was time to go. Joe got on a ship and sailed for America. He left behind everything. His family, his friends, whatever wealth he was entitled to, were permanently disconnected as he walked up the gang way. He arrived in the U.S, in a sea of immigrants, at New York’s Ellis. He was processed, de-loused, and quarantined for three weeks to ensure that he was not carrying the flu that would eventually kill 30 million people. He took an oath in English, a language he could not understand, and was given citizen status.

Penniless and alone with no options, Joe walked through the crowds of new arrivals. He heard the familiar sounds of Polish being spoken and saw a man standing in a circle of other men talking about job opportunities for the willing. Joe approached and was told he could be working tomorrow. In fact, he had a choice. There was a Job waiting for him at a shoe plant in Utica or he could go to Scranton and work in the mines. The mines paid more, and knowing nothing more than that, Joe got on a train bound for Pennsylvania.

Utica or Scranton? A seemingly innocuous decision with profound consequences. Joe arrived the next evening, at the mining camp. He was told there was a farm a few miles down the road that took borders and whose owners spoke Polish. Joe walked to the farm and was greeted by an ancient man with a shock of white hair that had been stained yellow by cigarette smoke. John Feokavitch ran the farm with his wife and daughters. It included a handful of dairy cows, a cherry orchard, and packs of farm dogs that ran wild over the twenty acres. At dinner that night, Joe would eat his first real meal in days, and he would notice a dark haired girl that looked as though she had been created from the bones of a delicate bird. She was fifteen and by antiquated standards, ready for marriage. In the space of 4 weeks Joe would court and marry Antonia. In their wedding photo, Joe is seated stiffly in a black tailed tuxedo. His expression is stoic as if he could foresee the future and is bracing himself for the hardship. Antonia is striking in her juxtaposition. She is a young, smiling, beauty standing by her husband. It is a disposition she never loses. They spent their honeymoon in the hay loft of the farm and then they spent the next fifty years together. She, warming his clothes on the stove, cooking the meals, raising their children and him, working in the mines and rolling his cigarettes.

The farm would play a critical role in the family’s survival. The Kielars would walk the five miles from the camp to the barn. There, they would eat from the cherry trees and the boys would squirt milk from the cow’s udders into each others mouths. John and his wife always had fresh vegetables and the farm had enough wild rabbits to keep protein in everyone’s bones. Antonia’s brother would inherit the farm and his son would sell it to leave Scranton forever. The farm, the orchard, the garden and the hay loft which put my family together and sustained them through the hunger of the depression is now a small development of ticky-tack houses.

Joe would wake before sunrise and take his clothes off the stove where his wife, had set them earlier. Warming his long underwear and his shirts was one of the many ways she helped him manage the prospect of heading into the mine. She would raise their eight children, clean his clothes, make his meals, and keep his house for nearly half a century. He would remind her too often, that she had never worked a hard day in her life. It’s a terribly sexist and unfair thing to say thing to say by anyone’s standards. But if there was one person on the planet who knew what it meant to work hard, it was her husband.

Joe ate his breakfast off an old card table and headed to the front stoop where he waited. At 5:30am the mine would sound its massive air horn signaling which crew would work that day. Three blasts meant Joe would march with his men from the border of the mining camp into the hole. Any other number of horn blasts meant that Joe stayed home to contemplate how he would feed ten mouths with no money. On the days when he was called, he would descend through nearly a mile of tunnels to begin the dig. The tools were primitive. In the sweat and grime, the miners would remove tons of rock. On days when they removed granite or shale from the tunnels they received no wage. “Pay dirt,” was the coal which ran in long veins beneath the Appalachian countryside. Fill the train with coal and only then, would you get paid.

Cave-ins were common. If you drive the streets of Scranton today, you can find large areas of land that are depressed into the landscape. These are the spaces where the mine walls collapsed trapping the men with little hope of recovery. They are unmarked mass graves. When Joe was forty-two he had logged nearly twenty years as a miner. During that year his back was broken by a collapsing support timber. His life was saved, but this was well before the days of disability insurance. Ironically, Joe had been a founding member of the “Sponja” (Polish for Brotherhood) fund, a fledgling union formed by Polish miners. The fund that Joe had named, saved the Kielars during his convalescence. When his spine healed, Joe returned underground to move the rock and breathe the dust. That is how he lived for the next twenty years.

Christmas at the Kielar house was a serious occasion. Scranton, the city most likely to have invented the color grey, was dull and at Christmas. The smell of wet coal permeated everything. The house was poorly insulated and the children kept warm at night by sleeping six in a bed in a room referred to as the barracks. The two youngest slept with Joe and his wife. On Christmas morning the family would wake at dawn and walk to church. They spent the next four hours in a Polish mass praying for each other’s health and any breaks God could spare. When they returned home, each child received a solitary gift in their stocking, an orange. My grandmother would take hers down the train tracks behind the house to eat alone. The prospect of sharing her treasure drove her into the solitude and the snow.

For dinner they ate ham, their one real Christmas splurge, and Antonia made perogies, and gwumpkies, and homemade coleslaw. The meal was purchased at the “company store” and represented the entirety of their Christmas budget. Even on the holiday, the mine made its profit. Joe made his own horseradish that would make your eyes water from across the room. The family could not afford a tree. To remedy the situation, Joe would stalk the company store on Christmas Eve and take the last scrawny twigs left. At home with his tools, we would begin the process of drilling holes and fitting in the spare branches. When he was finished, there was enough of a tree to celebrate around. At its base was a Christmas vignette that Joe had built. The people were made from clothes pins and the frozen pond was Antonia’s broken hand mirror. The scene was from the village in Poland where Joe had grown up, a place here referred to as the Pine Patch. It was far away in time and in space from the mines, the black lung disease, and Scranton. The evening would conclude with a Polish carol, another prayer, and then Antonia and her daughters would clean the dinner plates while Joe and his suns played pinochle at the kitchen table.

I have faded memories of the man I knew as Dsiadek (Grandfather and pronounced Jahdek). He spoke broken English, strapped his razor at the kitchen table, and chided me for putting sugar on my Corn Flakes. “You put sugar in your coffee?” I responded. “Dahh, coffee is bitter, corn flakes, they are sweet enough.” Joe rolled his own cigarettes right up until the day he quit smoking forever. He shook a forty five year old addiction with one phrase of broken English: “Is finish business.” Many of his habits were typical of the time. However, his perspective hinted at a raw intelligence and the distant education he received at the University of Krakow. His Catholic daughter would marry a Jewish boy much to the shock of the locals. However, my grandfather would refer to his father-in-law as a tolerant man who welcomed him into the family, even though his own children winced at the idea of a Jew at the dinner table. He was gifted in math and spent much of his spare time checking his co-workers paychecks to ensure the mining company wasn’t ripping them off. A frequent practice. He could build anything and once fashioned a house for his sheep dog that was designed complete with awnings and was made from parts that he picked from his neighbor’s garbage heaps. The animal had always slept with its large head extended out into the weather. The awning was supposed to keep him dry. The dog refused the luxury and instead inched his snout out beyond the extension, happily sleeping with his face covered in snow. Apparently, he just liked it that way.

Joe would die in his eighties from pneumonia. The medical cause of his death was the black lung he developed from his years under ground. However, those who knew him well, would say that he died of a broken heart. His son Chester, by all accounts his favorite, was killed in a car accident a month before. Joe’s children would take their father’s death hard. Irene, my grandmother, still keeps his fedora perched on the rear window sill of her car thirty five years after his passing. It was a trick he taught her, to position the hat so that it appeared there was a man riding in the back seat. It would help keep her safe while she drove alone. In reality, the hat would only fool the mildly observant criminal. Irene knew that, but confusing would-be attackers was not the reason the hat made her feel safe.

Antonia, or Bopi (a bastardization of the Polish word for grandmother, Babci) lived in the little house with her oldest daughter Mary, for 11 years after her husband passed. She had raised eight children on a coal miner’s salary. She was a grandmother to thirty, and a great grandmother to nearly fifty when she passed. Antonia would die from a stroke at the age of 85. Mary, would cross the hospital room and remove her oxygen mask ending her coma and her life. Her funeral was the first I had ever attended. Open casket, wailing mourners, and a Polish mass. When the wake ended, the funeral home director walked matter-of-factly up to her casket, pushed her corpse down into the bedding, and dropped the lid. The thud echoed around the church but few noticed. Antonia was dead, and her spectacularly gritty life, closed with an unceremonious shove into the grave.

By modern middle class standards Joe and Antonia’s lives were impossibly difficult. When I stare into my sons’ playroom and see hundreds of toys arranged in Ikea shelving, I would like to be reminded of my grandmother’s Christmas orange. When I drive to work in my shiny new car, I would like to think of Joe riding the mine rail into the black underground. Anytime that I want to complain, or whine, or feel self pity, I would like to be told by their DNA in my bones that I do not know what a hard day’s work is.