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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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To: frankw1900 who wrote (12828)10/18/2003 12:51:43 AM
From: LindyBill  Read Replies (1) of 793615
 
I know an English fellow whose older brother stopped talking to him when he took up the grammar school scholarship because he'd become "a traitor to his family and class."

Well written piece, Frank! My Father was born in Montreal in '05 to a very poor family. Irish Father from County Cork and an English Mother. He got to about 3rd grade before he went to work. His first trip to the US was in 1920, driving a truck full of Whiskey in a booze convey for some "Joe Kennedy" type. He then followed the Harvesters across the grain belt.

By the time he was 20 he was a stock boy in Chicago for Babcox and Wilcox, a steam boiler manufacturer. They sent him out to repair Boilers, and then to erect them. He married my mother in '33 and when I came along a year later we were traveling the Midwest putting up large boilers to provide steam power for electric generation plants. He had become an American citizen by that time.

He spent his entire career with B&W, forty five years. He educated himself, learned to read blueprints and welding x-rays, and retired as a Vice President of the Company. I told the gathering at his Funeral that he and men like him had electrified America. That every time they flipped a light switch they should thank them.

We visited his family at Christmas of 1951. He had five brothers and two sisters still living in Montreal. They were still living at the level they were at when Dad left Canada. He had done better economically than any of them. He often said that progress was stopped in Canada because it was either too "English" or too "Catholic" to do something.
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