Toward a Better Life

by Peter Morton Coan

  For special meals, my mother made chicken; if she had a big crowd, it had to be a turkey. We raised them. We raised chickens and everything. We only had a small place, though.

  In my school there were two teachers and a big room and a smaller room and outside toilets. They taught us the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic. That's about all. They didn't teach Gaelic. I couldn't speak a word of it; neither could my parents. Just English. Later on, my husband—his folks came from the south of Ireland where they used to teach Gaelic, he could speak it.

  We were a very religious family, my father especially. We had to go to church, and you had to be good. Caught swearing or anything and we'd get a good whipping for it, or a “good clout,” as they say. [She laughs.] We used to say the rosary in Lent time and special times. We went to church every Sunday; it was three miles away, and we walked it. The church and the school were in Tullamore. It was a nice little town with a tavern. Of course, my father went there to get a drink occasionally, but he'd always come home. [She laughs.] He was a good father. My brother Rex, he used to work outside with Father, but the girls didn't. We all stayed home, indoors, with Mom, helping her.

  We came to America because my father had two brothers and their families were already here. They had originally come after the famine in the 1850s. My older brother Rex and myself—he was one year older—came to America together. I was thirteen, he was fourteen, so we came. We were the eldest children. My uncles in America paid [for our passage]. I went to live with the one in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and his wife, and Rex went to the other aunt and uncle in Providence.

  The day we left for America, the farm neighbors and all the school kids came to see us. We somehow got a jaunting car and a horse. [She laughs.] We had a long ride to Queenstown [now called Cobh, its original name]. My father went with my brother Rex and me, and one of our neighbors joined us. My mother couldn't come because she had all the other children to take care of. We stayed overnight there in Queenstown in a pension [hotel or boardinghouse] and then got the boat the next morning. I don't remember the name.

  I remember we had to get on a tender [supply ship] to go out to the big boat. It looked to me like a million dollars, it was so big, so grand, and they were playing music on board. It was great. I could see my father waving from the deck, as we were on the tender going off. Rex and I went steerage, third-class. The boat ride took over two weeks and I was sick all the way. I nearly died, but Rex didn't get sick. He took care of me. I wasn't able to get on my feet the whole time. It was terrible. I remember there were a lot of kids and their families, a lot of people sick, vomiting, crying….

  I remember seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time when we came into the harbor. It looked like a big statue of a man. [She laughs.]

  When we arrived at Ellis Island we had to take a physical. My aunt and uncle, the ones that lived in Providence, they came with a cousin, and they were waiting for us and took us right off the boat. It was crowded, jam-packed. And I saw all the people that were all around. It was dizzying. [She laughs.]

  I had never seen a black person before. I never saw a black child till we came off the boat in New York, and I saw a bunch of them, you know, on the sidewalk, playing ball and skipping. I thought it was great. And Rex was, of course, with me, and my aunt and my uncle to bring us home.

  We took the train north. I remember looking out the window amazed at America, such a big place, so many tall buildings, so different than Tullamore and the life I knew back in Ireland.

  My uncle took me back to his brother's house in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Rex went to the aunt and uncle in Providence. My aunt and uncle in Pawtucket had kids about my own age. I lived in the house with them and they treated me like one of their own, all very loving, everybody helped each other. I went to Catholic school. There were nuns. I think they put me in the third grade. And I was older than most third graders, but it didn't bother me a bit. [She laughs.] I was a pretty happy-go-lucky kid anyway. I was almost fourteen. And I loved it there. I was used to living in a cottage in Ireland.

  Well, the house in Pawtucket was big, and it had electricity, which was a first for me. There was the kitchen and three bedrooms, two on one side of the kitchen and one on the other. And then we had a couple of cots for anyone that wanted to stay if they came to visit. We lived right in the city. My uncle was a real estate man. His wife, my aunt, she was Irish, too. But they were born here. I didn't have to work or pay them anything at all. I had room and board, but my uncle would never have taken anything from me. Never. Neither of my uncles. We were family. Everybody helped each other.

  I stayed with my aunt and uncle for a little over a year, and then I wanted to work. I wanted to go and make money. I also missed my brother. So after one year I went to Providence to be with Rex and my other uncle and his wife. He was a policeman. Then my uncle got me a job in Providence Hospital in the linen room where they used to put away the clean linen. I got a job there. My uncle knew the laundress there, and she said, “Bring her in and I'll give her a job somewhere here.” [She laughs.] Rex got a job working with my uncle in real estate, a good job.

  We both sent money back to Ireland. The job paid me eighteen dollars a week or something like that, and that was good money then, but we sent most of it back to Ireland because that's why we came to America: to help out, as we were the eldest children, the first in line, so my sisters could come. And so that's why my uncle brought us here. As time went by, all the sisters came here except my father and mother; they stayed in Ireland. They were happy there. But they wanted a better life for my brother and me and the rest of my sisters, and America was where the opportunity was….

  Rex eventually got married. I became a domestic for a rich lady. I did housework. She was a rich old lady, and she could be mean as a hungry dog, but she was good to me. She also had another girl working for her, from Donegal, from the north and west of Ireland. She would do the cooking, and I'd do the rest of the housekeeping and such. A lot of Irish women did domestic work in those days.

  I met my husband at church. I remember that was the first time I ever saw him. I was about seventeen. He came from Providence. He was a bus driver, or a motorman, as we used to call him. He came from the south of Ireland, near Cork. He had been in America before me. Not too long before me. I forget now. We had a boy and three girls….

  I love America. I'm glad I came. I'd be a farmer's wife digging ditches in a little garden over there. [She laughs.] They didn't have much work for girls then, not in the rural country where we came from. They were all farmers. And that means lot of digging, and I never could do that. I didn't like it much either.

  She traveled with her sister and maternal grandmother to America. For reasons unknown, she was processed at Castle Garden, not on Ellis Island, where she met her mother for the very first time. “I remember seeing the Statue of Liberty when the boat was coming into the harbor and saying to my grandmother, ‘That is not my mother.' What did my mother look like? In my imagination as a child I thought, ‘Well, maybe that's her {the Statue of Liberty}, made in her honor,' because my grandparents told me she looked like a queen…. And then I saw her! She was a beautiful lady. She had on a big fancy hat with a feather and, of course, a long flowing dress. She certainly looked like a queen to me!”

  I was born February 12, 1903, in Iasi, Romania. I never knew my father. He died of pneumonia before I was a year old, and I was brought up by my maternal grandmother and grandfather. I remember where we lived, you came into a yard and there were apartments on the ground floor and there was a balcony with apartments overhead. On the right side as you came in from the gate was the toilet, and it had two foot marks in ceramic and a hole. It was a big yard, and maybe once a month gypsies would come, and if you had copper pots they used to shine them for you.

  My grandfather was a sexton for a big temple, the biggest temple in Iasi. In America you would call him Gerald, but his Jewish name was Gedalia. My mother's parents' last name was Markowitz. And they
raised us, my sister and myself. My sister was two years older than me. It was just the two of us.

  I remember that we lived in the middle of the block and at the end of the block was an avenue and a lot of stores. I remember there was a hayloft across the street. There was a store where they had a big window where I saw them make matzos. And on the corner there was a bar, and opposite that was a big fruit store.

  I got in trouble at the bar. It was Passover and my grandmother and grandfather were at temple, and my sister and I were supposed to be very nice young ladies. And somehow or other I found a gold piece, and I went into the bar, and I said it belonged to Grandpa and I asked him if he could change it. And then I took all my friends on a binge.

  Of course, we were only supposed to eat certain foods at that time. And I don't remember how many blocks away was a square, and around that square they had a movie, and they had a two-tier merry-go-round, ice cream soda, they had a sideshow, so I took my friends. We went on the merry-go-round. The show was a snake that sleeps in a bed that is almost human, and we were screaming because we thought the snake wouldn't go where it was supposed to. But the snake went up on the bed and, with its head, pulled the cover over. And we bought a lot of candy, which I wasn't allowed to eat. And while we were on the merry-go-round, I saw my sister and her friends. And I called them over and I told them they could have a ride, too. But when I got home, she snitched on me, and I got a beating. [She laughs.]

  My grandfather was very strict. He was worse than a general in the army. Everything had to be just so. We couldn't do anything wrong. But he liked to tease us, too. That was all right. Like putting hot pepper in our soup. We weren't allowed to pick up our spoon before he did, so it was safe, you know, when he picked up his spoon, and then he just got a kick out of seeing us run around with cold water trying to put the fire out in our mouths!

  In our school, the Christian children had one period for them and the Jewish children had a period to learn Hebrew. But I got in trouble all the time because I used to love sugar. And at that time they used to eat those square sugar lumps. So I used to take a bunch of them to school, and it would crunch, and the teacher would always punish me for that because it was crunching and would disturb the class. So, in order to punish you, they took a paper and they cut it, folded it, and then cut out the center a little and left like two horns and then they, with a string, they tied it on your head and you had to walk through all the classes. So you ended up in the principal's office. If my grandfather didn't catch me there, then my sister would tell him.

  I don't even remember my mother because when I was one year old my aunt was supposed to go to America to marry a man. The man was going to America to get a job because he couldn't get one in Romania, and he sent her a ticket. But my aunt had trouble with her eyes and was sent back from Ellis Island or Castle Garden or wherever she was—and my mother went in her place, so I don't even remember my mother. I never even saw a picture of her!

  Since she was a widow and being that it was so hard for a man to get a job, let alone a woman, she had no way of making a living, no way of paying my grandmother and grandfather for her staying home and doing nothing and taking care of the children. But when my aunt was supposed to go to America to marry and was sent back, my mother figured maybe she could get a job in America.

  So she came to America, and she got a job in a factory and she worked for seven years and saved up money that my grandmother should bring my sister and me to America. My mother bought the tickets and sent it to us, but my grandmother decided with my grandfather that she, my grandmother, would stay in America for a year and then go back to my grandfather, so as not to leave him alone for too long—that she was coming just to bring us over.

  My grandparents didn't tell me and my sister that mother worked in a factory and things like that, but that she was very well off and that the streets in America were paved with gold, and so they tried to paint this beautiful picture for us. I remember that we were worried about going because my sister got sick with typhus.

  At that time we lived in a different house. It was a private home that was divided into four apartments. And there was a cellar where we kept barrels where the people who lived in the house made sour pickles, sauerkraut that I stole a lot of. The other half of the block was like an orchard. So I remember that my sister got typhus and they had to take her away in a wagon to the hospital. And I missed her very much, and I remember running after the wagon as they were taking my sister away. And when it got too far away, I ran back to the house and got into her bed and covered myself with her covers and eventually landed in the hospital with her! But they didn't have enough room, so they put me at the foot of her bed, so that she was at one end of the bed and I was at the other. I was maybe about five or so.

  I remember from Iasi we took a wagon with all our possessions and that led us to a train. It was me, my sister, and our grandmother. I don't remember packing anything. I know that we didn't go to stores to get a dress or a coat or anything—it was always made by hand. My grandmother made it. And I don't remember too much about the train, but I remember that we went to Le Havre in France to get the boat to America, and while we were on the train in the station there, I remember a man putting his hand through the window and handing me a box of cookies. Whether they knew that these people were going to America or not, waiting to board the boat, I don't know. But that I remember very vividly.

  I remember being very seasick on the boat. I remember eating delicatessen salami and bread and upchucking a lot. We were in steerage. We went to Castle Garden, I distinctly remember, not Ellis Island, and we were there overnight.

  I remember seeing the Statue of Liberty when the boat was coming into the harbor and saying to my grandmother, “That is not my mother.” What did my mother look like? In my imagination as a child, I thought, “Well, maybe that's her, made in her honor,” because my grandparents told me she looked like a queen. So naturally that's the attitude I took. Then, when I came into Castle Garden and I saw all these people who came to pick up the immigrants, they didn't look like rich people to me. And then I saw her! She was a very beautiful lady. She had on a big fancy hat with a feather and, of course, a long flowing dress. She certainly looked like a queen to me!

  At Castle Garden all I remember was that they looked at my eyes and somebody put something to my chest, so I gathered it was the doctor. And we passed our examinations, which was the next day.

  This was the first time my grandmother had ever been to America either. But she tried to calm us down, that our expectations shouldn't be more than we see. Evidently when she was younger she had gone to large cities and saw things, so she knew.

  But my mother was there to meet us, and I don't know whether the baggage was sent to the house or what, but my mother took us to an apartment. To get there, we rode an elevated train. I was sitting by the window, and my mother met us with a box of chocolate-covered cherries, which I had never tasted before and I ate like a pig. And I remember putting my head out the window, and my mother said, “You don't do that!” The train seemed to be so close to the buildings, the houses, that at times it scared me that if I put my hand out I could touch the house. But then I was afraid my hand or arm would fall off because the train seemed to go so fast. But then it stopped and I looked and everything looked so dingy, so dark. And then we walked to the house.

  I remember it was 117 Avenue C between Seventh and Eighth Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was a tenement. When you walked in you came to a large kitchen. To the right was a living room, to the left was a bedroom, no windows. She got it [the apartment] just before we came. It was in the same building that my aunt lived in. And I remember there was a couch that was contoured so you could sleep on it, and my mother had two boarders besides us—a brother and sister. I think they were Romanians. My mother and this sister, she was a young girl, slept in one bed. The brother slept on a folding bed in the living room. My grandmother slept on the couch. In the kitchen there was a co
al stove, and two chairs were put together in front of the coal stove, and feather pillows and things were put on there, and that's where I slept.

  There were two toilets on each floor. There were four tenants on each floor, so two tenants used each toilet. We had gaslight. The bathtub was next to the sink, and it had an enamel cover on it. Every Friday my mother cleaned the house. And because Saturday would be the Sabbath, she made what some people jokingly referred to as “Jewish rugs” and put newspaper on the floor on Friday so it should be clean for Saturday.

  I was enrolled in Seventh Street School. My mother worked in a factory and she worked sometimes nine hours, sometimes ten hours, sometimes eleven hours. She made $3.50 a week. She spoke some English, but it was broken English because she only worked with immigrants. And she didn't go out very much so it was very hard for her to learn. Grandma would've liked to learn, but she said it didn't pay for her to try at her age, that she was too old to learn a new language.

  I wanted to be an American, and fast! So I learned the language, but I also went with a bad bunch of cliques in the street. If they stole a banana, I did the same thing. If they shimmied up the pole, I did the same thing. And the horses drew the trolley cars, so if they went up the lampposts and threw a bag of water at them, or flour, I did the same thing—to be an American!

  This decade marked the high point of Italian immigration to the United States. Immigration inspectors had decided to divide the influx into two groups: southern and northern Italian. In 1910, the Mexican Revolution began south of the border, the twentieth century's first modern social revolution. The resultant economic and social chaos pushed many Mexican natives north. The railroads hired most of them for construction and maintenance. While more than 185,000 Mexicans came here legally, it is conservatively estimated that more than one million Mexicans actually crossed the border.