79

A. Varesano interviewing Anna Timko
-24-
6/23/72
Tape 16-2

1136 we didn't have this road going through, like I told you. It was down at the
lower end. So they'd come up that corner, and come up this way and then go
around the other way, and go down the other street.

AV: And how much was that?

AT: Fifteen cents.

AV: And you paid cash, right? You didn't have tokens.

AT: Oh, yes. There weren't tokens in them days.

AV: And, what did you do for shoes or boots?

AT: We only had rubbers, there were no boots then. Just rubbers. Just these
short things. Just the rubbers. That's all we had from the beginning.

AV: Well, how did you go across the snow, in rubbers?

AT: You went across it! You got your shoes full and everything else.

AV: I'll bet you did. And you didn't get sick from it?

AT: Well, who got sick, got sick. You'd get sick anyway, whethere you were goin
through it or not! It was a tough life, like I told you, real trying days.
I was telling my granddaughter there in New York, she was saying that Golden
Days. Golden Age. And I couldn't figure that out, I said where'd you hear
that? She says, From a book. We have a book about the Golden Age. Well,
you know, a couple days passed by, wer were talking about it again, and I
happened to think about it. I said, Judy, I said, You know, that Golden Age
was our days, because when she come home, you know, from school, and she was
asking, she said, Grandma, is it true that the boys didn't go to school but
they went to work for ten cents a day? I says, Judy, no, I says, it wasn't
ten cents a day, it was five cents an hour, and they had to work ten hours,
so they would get fifty cents. And you know it's all these things
coming together, I said, That was our age! I said, I was brought up through
these days, because my husband only got ninteteen cents and hour when we were
married, in 1914. He was paid two cents more, because he was working on a
breaker then. And the other guys that were doing the other work were making
seventeen cents an hour. And he got two cents more, because he had more
dangerous work; he had to crawl around this machinery to oil all that machinery,
it's very dangerous. So they were paying him nineteen cents. But from
the beginning, why.... because she mentioned picking slate, that's the reason
I know what she was taling about, she mentioned picking slate. I said, well,
they only got five cents an hour, and they had to work ten hours a day. I
don't know, was it seven o'clock, until five o'clock at night. At five
o'clock the whistle would blow, then they would come home already, and I said
now if your daddy and mother give you fifty cents allowance, you think it isn't
enough. I said, these poor boys had to work ten hours a day for it. It was
hard work.

AV: I can't believe you went over to Freeland over a mountain path with just
rubbers. And the snow must have been about three feet deep.

AT: Maybe even more. Well, see, they would be going back and forth, it was
tampened back already. But if you were the first one going through it, well,
you had a tough time to get through it! Usually they'd get some men, you
now, to go first, because they had big feet, so they'd tamp it down. So
you'd always wait for someone else to go through, to break it through! And
not only that, but many times when there was ice, and we used to go the back
way, there was paths that way, shortcuts through the woods over the mountain,
it would be that icy that you couldn't stand on that ice. Your feet would
just be running away under you. And you went to church just the same, no
matter how bad the weather was.

AV: That's amazing! Oh, boy, you people were built tough. What did you have on
your heads?