GrandDads

GOD, I remember picking beans down at Cogers farm and I still can feel the heat and the bugs crawling up my body and the thirst as the guy came around with the bucket of warm water and the dirty ladle. Do you remember the foreman or waterboy shouting “pick beans , boys” repeatedly. I remember them stopping the truck at their farm stand and in just a few minutes most of us spent the money we earned under the hot sun at their store. Where we live, just a few miles away is one of the largest areas of black dirt farming in the US of A. I see these people, men, women and older children busting their asses for a piece of the American dream..... I have an old photo of my dad’s dad at work in the early thirties. He came over from Russia along with my other grandparents in the early 1900s.he worked in a chrome factory and died at 54 of lung disease. You remember those poles who snuck in thru Canada a few years ago and because of the language barrier were hired to rip asbestos out of old apartments without any protection. The pictures of both granddads. they were in their late 40s; early 50s.they were laborers.it took them years to become citizens. Grand mothers died young. They lived in cold-water flats.

Joseph R. Stanaitis