We Who Are Alive and Remain Read Online Free PDF Page A

teach him. All the kids in the neighborhood could speak English, so that’s how I learned. I spoke fluent Polish as well.
    As a kid, Dad had been sweet on a girl—they had both grown up in the same town in Poland. Unknownst to him, his family came to the United States on the same boat as her family did. They met again in the States. They were still in love, so they got married. That was my mom and dad.
    In the early 1920s and ’30s, everybody was poor in Erie. Everybody looked for money and food. Nobody had much. You saw maybe two or three cars on the streets. You saw an airplane maybe once every two or three years. We had a place in one of the city’s parks with a big building in it. The people who didn’t have anything to eat went there—morning, afternoon, and evening, and could eat. It went on like that until the late 1930s.
    From the time I was about thirteen years old onward, I did a lot of running. I ran from my home to Presque Isle Bay and back home again—ten miles round trip. I did that three to four times a week. Most of the kids in the neighborhood ran like that. We were very conscious of our physiques. In summers we went swimming across the channel, about four hundred to five hundred feet wide. We were all in pretty good shape.
    I graduated from Erie Technological High School in 1939. You could study a lot of trades there: printing, drafting, woodworking, electrical engineering. I studied electricity and ran all the machines. I was taught to run any machine we had in our school building. For a year after graduation I worked in a CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] camp on Bull Hill in Sheffield, Pennsylvania. They trained us in the CCC camps just like in the army. Each morning we got up early and ran five miles. We trained in close order drills with wooden rifles. They really put us through it. That helped put me in a good position to go into the service. I was able to get right to work after the CCC camps with General Electric, where I was a tool and dye maker for a year. Then I decided to volunteer for the army.

Ed Joint
    I was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1923. Yeah, I know Joe Lesniewski pretty well [also from Erie]—he followed me all around the war [laughs].
    My father delivered coal. In those days they didn’t have furnaces, they had coal stoves. As a little kid the truck used to come and dump it by a chute down in the cellar. It was a pretty dirty job. It was during the Depression when I grew up, hardly anybody was working. You didn’t see cars on the road or big stores or anything. Everybody I knew was poor.
    We lived in the middle of the city—in those days Erie wasn’t as big as it is today. My family was very poor. Yes, we always ate, but they had a food bank and we used to go up and get food for free. It was tough. You just didn’t have stuff. You couldn’t get a job. In my family there were eleven children. I was third from the last, nearly the baby. Rough as it was, we all got along pretty well. We made up our own games—kick the can, we always seemed to have a football around, maybe a baseball. We usually made our own baseballs.
    We were Catholic and all grew up going to St. Patrick’s Church and School. We had a nun for a teacher. You had better do your work or she’d crack you over the head or hit you on the shoulders with a stick for talking or fooling around. She’d crack you really good. Everybody was scared of her. I played a lot of sandlot football and a little bit of basketball—never in school, though. I liked sports and always played as much as I could. In high school I was about 5½ feet, maybe 130 pounds.
    I used to help my father delivering ice. You picked up 25 pounds of ice with these prongs. If he had to go someplace he always called me to help. He sold the ice for 50 cents. He cut the ice up. That was the refrigerator—you had a big box in the house and you’d put the ice on top. Near the lake they had a little shack, two or three blocks from the ice. The ice