46

A. Varesano interviewing Anne Timko -11- 7/19/72
Tape 22-2

get a bag of flour a month, and a bag of flour at that time was four dollars, that was very expensive in 1911. I mean, for the wages and everything, you know. For about six months, I think, she got a bag of flour. The order would come to the store here, and they would deliver it to her, and after that they stopped it. So then one day my mother asked me to go - it was a Davis, from Freeland, that was the Poor Director at that time - so my mother asked me, because she couldn't speak English, so she asked me to go, you know, with her and talk to this man, you know, that why did they stop it? And he says, Well, you have a son working. And she said, Well, my son doesn't make enough to support the family. And if he has to be supporting the family and he won't have anything himself, he'll leave then. And the man says to her, Well, won't he be ashamed to leave you? And they stopped it, she never got it any more. Now some others I heard them saying they got shoes, and they got orders, food, you know, orders, and we never got it.
AV: Why do you think they got some of these benefits from Mrs. Cox?
AT: I don't know. I don't know. Well, I know this friend of mine, this Mrs. Wasko's sister-in-law, the one that is in California now, well, many a time she'd have pretty good shoes, and she would take them off and put on old shoes, and she'd go down to the nurse - she'd tell me this herself - she said, I'm going down to the nurse. I'm gonna show her what kind of shoes I have. She'll give me a ticket to go to the store to get new shoes. And she did! She used to get them! So, I don't know, was it just some people lucky, or did they know how to go about it, or what it was. I don't know. But we didn't get it. I say, for about six months Mom got, well I say six bags of flour, a hundred pound of flour. That was about all, and we never got anything afterward.
AV: Outside of that, Mrs. Cox didn't have any kind of widow benefits around here?
AT: Not that I know of. Some widows got something, but I don't know how they got it.
AV: You know, I heard that one of the things she did, well, somebody said, was to give all the widows free rent, to pay their rent.
AT: Well, my brother was working, so they'd take it out of his check. See, the company would take it off his check.
AV: He was working at that time, where?
AT: In the mines. In the mines, when my father died. Because he was seventeen, and he went in the minds when he was about fourteen.
AV: And that's why they didn't give you anything...
AT: I guess that might have been it, I don't know, but that must have been it.
AV: Oh, boy. I wanted to ask, you know, you spoke about the people having cows and chickens and things like that. They had slaughter day on Thanksgiving, didn't they?
AT: Well, yes, because that was like, you might say, along the weekend, you know, they had time to work with that stuff. And most men weren't working then, so that's the way they used to - and the weather was getting cold already, it was the season for it. So they could slaughter. Even then, many times it would spoil, because there was no refrigeration, you had nowhere to put it.
AV: Who did the killing?
AT: There were some men in town that used to do the killing. And some people would do it themselves, you know, some men from their own family, you know, from the home, they could do it themselves. Usually, there was a Mr. Horvath here, that he used to do a lot of killings through town. And then there was another man, I don't remember his name. But Mr. Horvath was the mine one that used to do a lot of killing, you know, to kill the cows and