Dad

Guest post by James D. Studlo

My father would have been 100 years old on July 22^nd so I thought it would be appropriate to commemorate the occasion in by writing what I knew about him.

I thought it would be best to start with what the world was like that he was born into and how he was fortunate to have been born here in the United States.

• The year saw the birth of some famous people including Gerald Ford, Jesse Owens, Vince Lombardi, Rosa Parks and Jimmy Hoffa.
• Some of the news stories were very similar to ours today. The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, authorizing the Federal government to impose and collect income taxes. The populace protested vigorously,
• The Woolworth building opens in New York City. Designed by Cass Gilbert, it is the tallest building in the world at this date and for more than a decade after.
• The US was fighting a war overseas: Battle of Bud Bagsak in the Philippines concludes with U.S. troops under General John J. Pershing taking Bug Bagsak from defending Moro rebels, killing at least 500. 39^th street in Chicago is named for General Pershing, most people who ride on it don’t have a clue as to who he was.
• The 50th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg draws thousands of American Civil War veterans and their families to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, needless to say there were no veterans at the 150th just celebrated .
• The Lincoln Highway, the first automobile road across the United States is dedicated; I still drive on parts of it today.
• U.S. President Woodrow Wilson triggers the explosion of the Gamboa Dike, ending construction on the Panama Canal, it has since been turned over to the Panamanians.
• The Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line, reducing chassis assembly time from 12½ hours in October to 2 hours, 40 minutes; it takes just under six hours today.
• Surprise, the Jews and Palestinians were fighting in the Middle East, Israel was then known as Palestine.

The Polish people had fallen on hard times in Europe in the 1700 and 1800s. There was no Polish state and many of the Poles were scattered around parts of Germany and Russia. Although they were often tradesman and hardworking they found themselves to be the subject of discrimination so many of them sought better conditions. This resulted in several waves of emigration to the US. My grandfather a bricklayer and grandmother were in one of those waves shortly after the turn of the century and came to the US settling in the Chicago area. There they stated a family. The city was growing rapidly then and there was plenty of work especially for a mason so things were apparently going to plan. My father was born in 1913 and spent some of his younger years in Chicago, times of which he never spoke about perhaps because he was too young to remember. Then my grandmother then became ill with some type of respiratory disease and my grandfather was told by the doctor that it would be best if the family was to move into the country. I presume the city air at that time was filled with smoke and soot. So he bought a farm in Wisconsin near a small town called Necedah. There it was that my dad grew up.

Farm life is tough today but even more so then, especially for children. The children were expected to do many chores including milking cows tending to animals and fields there wasn’t much in the way of mechanization. Then occasionally there was time for school. My dad said when they were able to attend school he and his siblings would walk several miles to the school in town. Sometimes they had to endure hot sun, sometime the rain, sometimes cold and snow of the Wisconsin winter. Often times thought the biggest obstacle to getting to school was human; in this case the German boys. Unfortunately the bigotry of Europe had found its way to northern Wisconsin, old hatred is difficult to eradicate even in a new generation on a different continent. Most of the time he was able to get through to school with only a few bumps and bruises. Despite these obstacles he was able to complete through 8^th grade. He was able to read and write but I always felt bad for him because I could see that he didn’t have much confidence in those abilities.

Life wasn’t all work on the farm and when he was free he would do a number of things depending on the season. In the winter they would fashion skis from pieces of wood bending the front tip upward by heating the wood in boiling water over and over again. Then they would fasten them to their boots with leather straps. From what he said they used them more like what we would refer to as cross country skis. They also created their own ice skates which they used on frozen parts of the river.

In the summer he liked to fish and since the farm was situated with the Wisconsin River a short distance to the east and the Yellow River to the west there were many good fishing sites. On occasion he would set his lines in the morning and returned later in the day to retrieve his catch. His favorite fish to catch was the sunfish pictured below. Along the way he would eat berries which grew wildly along the roads and in the woods. It may have been on one of these trips that he was bit in the leg by a poisonous snake and his friend saved his life by removing the venom the old fashion way. He also said he and his father would hunt sometimes along the river or along the edge of the fields to supplement what food they had.

As my father grew older he set his sights on returning to the city, a goal which was going to take some preparation. He never said how but he got his hands on an old Model T Ford which had fallen into disrepair and didn’t run. With a large dose of ingenuity and some old spare parts he was able to collect he was able to get the thing running again. Then one day he decided it was time and he headed off to the big city with a few dollars in his pocket in the hopes of finding a job. Apparently this was in the winter because he said he nearly froze to death on the trip and if he hadn’t installed a gas heater in the car he most likely would have, I guess the model T did not come with a heater as original equipment. At one point he was really snowed in and had to wait for a plow to come along and he then followed that to safety.

He arrived in Chicago when he was about 18 or 19 years which would have been around 1931 or 32 which was not a particularly good time to look for a job as this was in the middle of the Great Depression. I believe he stayed with relatives and in boarding houses when he first arrived. One of the more colorful stories he told was about a guy he met in one of these places who told my dad about a lead on a job. This job was at a gang distillery somewhere in the Chicago area near a river. For this he was paid 5 dollars a week and a gallon of alcohol. He was positioned near the entrance of the road and his job was to watch for any unusual activity from a tree house lavishly appointed with a wired doorbell button and an old chair. Well as the story goes one day a number of large black cars came speeding down the road a couple of them stopped and were guarding the entrance and the rest went speeding down to the distillery. He pressed the doorbell buttin frantically a number of times and then thought he should get out of there. So he climbed down from the tree house and started walking down to the road and toward home. As he walked past the cars left at the entrance one of the armed men there asked him where he was going he replied in Polish hoping to distance himself from the largely Italian operation. He said that he was going home and they just waved him on. His thought was that they let him go because he was just a young kid.

For a number of years he worked odd jobs and did carpentry while trying to get a job at one of the large manufacturing companies in the Chicago area. Finally after about 6 years he was able to secure a job at Western Electric in Cicero where he began work as a truck driver.

It was during this time that he decided to change his last name from Szczudlo to Studlo. Once I asked him and he said he made this change because it was simpler and that there was a lot of discrimination against Poles at the time and he felt it would make it easier to get a job.

He liked to dance and once told me that he on the weekends he would go to dance halls which were around the Chicago area. The most popular of these was the Willowbrook Ballroom which is still in existence today.

He also liked music and played a concertina and the trumpet by ear. He never said how he learned to play. Occasionally when we were young he would take out his concertina and play polkas on it, a great memory!

This brings us up to outbreak of WWII and he never spoke very much about his life during that time, so someone else may be able to fill in the details.

Technorati Tags: Szczudlo,Studlo,Polish,Chicago,Great Depression