I found this in a folder near Larry's printer, on his desk at the beach house in San Diego in August 2009. I'm sure Doug and his sons and Gayle and John's children have copies of this. I am posting this for the rest of us who may have not seen it. Walter Fedyk's words, as he wrote it,
MEMORIES
My cousin, John Kaminski, was born on November 19,1919 and I was born on October 23, 1920 making him 11 months older than I. We were both born in Cleveland, Ohio. He lived on East 172nd and I on East 173rd from the age of about 7 until we went into the military in 1942. We literally grew up together and shared many enjoyable times because we lived so close to each other. I've been looking back on those days so decided to share a few of our experiences with our children by putting a few of them onto paper.
John's family was Roman Catholic and my family and the Szmasgala's were Greek Catholic so we celebrated Christmas and Easter twice, according to the Julian and the Gregorian calenders. This meant we went to the Kaminski house on December 25th and on Easter then to either the Fedyk or Szmagala houses for a repeaat of the two tolidays, Christmas on January 7th and Easter, with 6 adults and 9 cousins. As with all family gatherings on holidays, we had a great time. John and I liked walking around the rim of the old style bath tubs. This was a real challenge to our sense of balance and we sure had it because we had to take our shoes off not to scratch the tub, but did not get hurt.
Us nine cousins were in four age groups, Walter Kaminski & Helen Kaminski Mooney, Mary Szmagala (Bobeczko) and Steve Fedak were the "older guys", John, Stella Szmagala (Woloshyn) and I were the younger "punks", my sister Elsie, four years my junior, almost fit in with my group and Taras szmagala was much younger, 9 years younger then Elsie, so was the "kid." The one thing I remember which, fortunately was a short lived custom, was the oldest in each family had to learn how to play the violin. They hated practicing almost as much as we younger kids hated to hear them practice. There were times when the older guys hated us, like whey they had to take us to the show, black and white movies. We often stayed to see the same movie twice. I even remember silent films and prayed the sound movies would be permanent because I couldn't read the captions fast enough when watching the silent ,movies.
John's father and mine did not own automobiles so our only transportation was via streetcars. Weekly passes for unlimited use was $1.25 and there was a Sunday pass for $.25 which permitted one adult and two children or three children to use all day of all lines. John and I and a friend, Al Klivington who was only 5 days younger than I spent all day Sunday after church and dinner "streetcar riding." One of the things we did was walk along the curb in the street looking for Wrigley gum wrappers to send away for Chief Woldpaw prizes. We also looked for any kind of aluminum foil which we removed to form a ball. We spent weeks collecting the foil to form a ball about 4" in diameter, only to find we could only get 25 cents for it at the "paparecks" (paper and rags man). Al and I couldn't understand why several women we saw on these excursions tell John "how cute he looked with the dimple on his chin."
We looked forward to winter because the city did not plow snow off the streets. As soon as it packed down we "belly slammed" on our sleds. All the houses had coal furnaces which required coal being dumped into the coal bin in the basement and hosing down the entire basement after deliveries. Our parents had to constantly check to make sure there was enough coal burning to keep the fire from going out (no thermostats). And the water heaters also had no automatic pilot so we had to light the gas under the tank with a match and make sure we turned it off so the tank wouldn't burst. We did not have refrigerators either. This meant taking the wagon to the ice house two blocks away to buy a 50# block of ice and not forgetting to empty the pan under the ice box so the water wouldn't overflow.
John and I listened to our first radio broadcast in 1925 on a crystal set which a neighbor's son built. All I remember hearing was a lot of static. My parents bought our first radio in 1928 and I remember a crowd on our front porch listening to the Friday night fights. Some of the things John and I talked about when we "grew up" was having to crank the wringer, put up the clothes line from a hook on the house to the telephone pole and back to another corner of the house and carry the wash from the basement to the back yard for our mothers to hang the clothes on the line on wash day. We had to help carry the bed mattresses and rugs to the back yard and beat them with a carpet beater every year during "spring cleaning." Remember our houses got dirtier with coal furnaces.
Halloween was a very stressful time for the adults because there was always some degree of damage done by the kids. For example, every house had a wooden front porch and we "pounded porches" which involved getting a stick, like a baseball bat, and hit the porch until the owners chased us away. We had to be especially careful to not pound any porches where the older guys lived lest we get pounded, but good, ourselves. Another prank was to wax windows. Some of the waxes were very hard to remove from the house and car windows. There was no such thing as "trick or treat" because people did not have the money to buy candy. Cabbage Night was the day before Halloween and it meant garbage cans were dumped and often on peoples porches.
I think the older guys in our neighborhood invented jogging. An airplane testing runway belonging to the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company was at the end of our streets. When the company moved to the Baltimore area, the plant was unused for several years and the runway became part of our vast playground. When John and I were about 10 or so, we started to run back and forth for the full length of the runway in imitation of the older guys who were exercising in preparation for school sports. the older guys, about 4 or 5 years our senior, got hold of an old Model T Ford and worked on it until it was in mint condition. Since none of the guys were old enough to get a driver's license, they drove up and down the runway for hours at a time. On rare occasions, they let us "kids" ride. This too was a lot of fun for us.
There were some hidden dangers of the Martin plant property. For example, one of the kids in the neighborhood was curious to see what was inside a 55 gallon drum at the abandoned plant so he lit a match and the highly explosive material in the drum exploded. Eddie Fitzpatrick, about 10 was seriously burned over his upper body and especially his face.
A small swamp was located across the railroad tracks which ran alongside the runway. At best, the water in the swamp was never deeper than 18 to 20 inches. We found an "abandoned" plaster mixing box (about 4' x 6' and about 12" deep) which we used as a boat. We spent hours paddling and also getting out pf the "boat" because it got stuck in one of the many shallow spots. This was a real thrill for us kids because we never had any access to ride on a real boat of any kind.
Another thing which we did was go to the Blue Stone quarry to swim. The quarry was no longer being used and was about three miles from home up the single railroad track. The water was 30' or more deep and this was where most of us learned how to swim. The older guys were always there and several times saved kids from drowning. Our biggest worry was making sure our hair was dry before we got home so our mothers wouldn't know where we had been.
My mother used the steamer trunk which she brought from Poland to store photographs in. One summer afternoon when I was about 8 and no one was home, John and I went to the attic to see what was in the trunk. After a few minutes of looking at old family photos, we saw one which scared the living hell out of us. It was of a lady in her coffin which was evidently was a custom for some people to do. This brings up the subject of funerals, etc. It was the custom to have wakes in the home which lasted three days and to let the neighborhood know that someone in that home died, they pout a wreath on the door: purple for an older person, white for a child and pink and blue for others. We heard many stories of men who stayed up all night with the corpse getting "stoned." It also was the custom to have the coffin open in church and I also remember, as just a kid, seeing the coffin opened at the cemetery.
Our parents could not afford to buy us many toys so we learned how to make some ourselves, one was scooters. John and I made ours together. We got wooden orange crates to use as the scooter upright to which we nailed a piece of 2" x 4" for the base to which we then nailed the wheels from a pair of roller skates. we then nailed the two small pieces of wood on either side of the top of the box to use as handles. They were a pretty good imitation of store bought scooters and gave us many hours of fun.
Shopping for groceries was absolutely nothing like it is today. We took a wagon to one of two grocery stores about three blocks from home. One was a small A & P and the other was Joe's delicatessen. Both stores generally had only one person waiting on the customers. You told him what you wanted and he brought it to the counter because you did not handle any of the products. He then added up the cost of the groceries you selected by writing the amount on a brown bag and then put the groceries in the bag. We had about 1/10 of one percent of the items we now have in grocery stores to choose from and the cash registers did nothing but hold the money. Many items were not prepackaged, like beans and ice. No precooked foods, no cake mixes, no margarine, etc. etc. All meat, however was bought in the butcher shop, like all medicines were bought in the drug store. Our mothers bought chickens from a poultry store about four miles from home, requiring going via streetcar. They often bought live chickens requiring killing and cleaning them at home.
And clothes; boys wore knickers until about 12 and had to put rubber bands on their knee high stockings to keep them up. Since John was older, I remember how I envied him because he got long pants before I did. And the clothes were not made of wrinkle free materials and required pressing. All the guys had to learn how to press their pants when they went out with girls. Boys wore white dress shirts to school so their mothers spent many hours each week boiling them in the washing process to make sure they were a clean white, then ironing them. These were the real "Good old days."
John and I were both scheduled to go into the service in November 1942. John to Chicago to the Air Corps and I to the army at Camp Perry, Ohio. John suggested we take a vacation in October before leaving. We decided to go to the Jack & Jill Dude Ranch in Montague, Michigan. It took us a day and night to get there, all night to cross lake Erie by boat, several hours by train to central Michigan then by bus to the ranch. We had a wonderful week there. This vacation was memorable for several reasons: one of which was John & I took our first plane ride by flying home across Lake Erie in a six passenger single engine prop plane. What took eight hours by boat going was 20 minutes by plane coming home. Another memorable occasion was John meeting Marcella Batz from Chicago, who was there with her sister, Pearl. Shortly after arriving in Chicago for meteorology training, John called Marcella and they started dating. They were married on June 12, 1943.
The following is almost a "believe it or not" story. I was in Calcutta, India in 1943, waiting to be shipped to the 14th Air Force's 315th Air Service Command in China and had nothing to do for about three weeks but wait for my shipping orders. One of the letters that I received from home from my sister Elsie said that John was possibly going to be shipped to the Pacific area. All service personnel were prohibited from telling anyone when they were being moved and almost never knew where they were being shipped overseas, but could let their family know, in general terms, where they were when they got there. For some absolutely no explainable reason, I decided to see if John was possibly somewhere on the very large base I was on in Calcutta. I walked from one outfit to another all day long for two days, asking almost every GI I met if he knew a John Kaminski. I finally met a guy who knew John and he told me where I could find him. At about 9 PM in the dark of a moonless night, I approached a candlelit table where a bunch of guys were shooting craps and John was at the head of the table running the game. Needless to say, John was absolutely speechless when he realized it was me. We then spent two days together before he was shipped out. Both of us wrote home about this so I have document evidence that this is the truth.
John and Marcella settled in Lombard, Il, close to Chicago, after he was discharged from service. Until they moved to California, we were able to visit each other with our growing families. Until John's tragic death caused by Pancreatitous on December 7, 1979 at age 60, we maintained contact with each other via mail and the phone.
Walter Fedyk
January 2001
MEMORIES
My cousin, John Kaminski, was born on November 19,1919 and I was born on October 23, 1920 making him 11 months older than I. We were both born in Cleveland, Ohio. He lived on East 172nd and I on East 173rd from the age of about 7 until we went into the military in 1942. We literally grew up together and shared many enjoyable times because we lived so close to each other. I've been looking back on those days so decided to share a few of our experiences with our children by putting a few of them onto paper.
John's family was Roman Catholic and my family and the Szmasgala's were Greek Catholic so we celebrated Christmas and Easter twice, according to the Julian and the Gregorian calenders. This meant we went to the Kaminski house on December 25th and on Easter then to either the Fedyk or Szmagala houses for a repeaat of the two tolidays, Christmas on January 7th and Easter, with 6 adults and 9 cousins. As with all family gatherings on holidays, we had a great time. John and I liked walking around the rim of the old style bath tubs. This was a real challenge to our sense of balance and we sure had it because we had to take our shoes off not to scratch the tub, but did not get hurt.
Us nine cousins were in four age groups, Walter Kaminski & Helen Kaminski Mooney, Mary Szmagala (Bobeczko) and Steve Fedak were the "older guys", John, Stella Szmagala (Woloshyn) and I were the younger "punks", my sister Elsie, four years my junior, almost fit in with my group and Taras szmagala was much younger, 9 years younger then Elsie, so was the "kid." The one thing I remember which, fortunately was a short lived custom, was the oldest in each family had to learn how to play the violin. They hated practicing almost as much as we younger kids hated to hear them practice. There were times when the older guys hated us, like whey they had to take us to the show, black and white movies. We often stayed to see the same movie twice. I even remember silent films and prayed the sound movies would be permanent because I couldn't read the captions fast enough when watching the silent ,movies.
John's father and mine did not own automobiles so our only transportation was via streetcars. Weekly passes for unlimited use was $1.25 and there was a Sunday pass for $.25 which permitted one adult and two children or three children to use all day of all lines. John and I and a friend, Al Klivington who was only 5 days younger than I spent all day Sunday after church and dinner "streetcar riding." One of the things we did was walk along the curb in the street looking for Wrigley gum wrappers to send away for Chief Woldpaw prizes. We also looked for any kind of aluminum foil which we removed to form a ball. We spent weeks collecting the foil to form a ball about 4" in diameter, only to find we could only get 25 cents for it at the "paparecks" (paper and rags man). Al and I couldn't understand why several women we saw on these excursions tell John "how cute he looked with the dimple on his chin."
We looked forward to winter because the city did not plow snow off the streets. As soon as it packed down we "belly slammed" on our sleds. All the houses had coal furnaces which required coal being dumped into the coal bin in the basement and hosing down the entire basement after deliveries. Our parents had to constantly check to make sure there was enough coal burning to keep the fire from going out (no thermostats). And the water heaters also had no automatic pilot so we had to light the gas under the tank with a match and make sure we turned it off so the tank wouldn't burst. We did not have refrigerators either. This meant taking the wagon to the ice house two blocks away to buy a 50# block of ice and not forgetting to empty the pan under the ice box so the water wouldn't overflow.
John and I listened to our first radio broadcast in 1925 on a crystal set which a neighbor's son built. All I remember hearing was a lot of static. My parents bought our first radio in 1928 and I remember a crowd on our front porch listening to the Friday night fights. Some of the things John and I talked about when we "grew up" was having to crank the wringer, put up the clothes line from a hook on the house to the telephone pole and back to another corner of the house and carry the wash from the basement to the back yard for our mothers to hang the clothes on the line on wash day. We had to help carry the bed mattresses and rugs to the back yard and beat them with a carpet beater every year during "spring cleaning." Remember our houses got dirtier with coal furnaces.
Halloween was a very stressful time for the adults because there was always some degree of damage done by the kids. For example, every house had a wooden front porch and we "pounded porches" which involved getting a stick, like a baseball bat, and hit the porch until the owners chased us away. We had to be especially careful to not pound any porches where the older guys lived lest we get pounded, but good, ourselves. Another prank was to wax windows. Some of the waxes were very hard to remove from the house and car windows. There was no such thing as "trick or treat" because people did not have the money to buy candy. Cabbage Night was the day before Halloween and it meant garbage cans were dumped and often on peoples porches.
I think the older guys in our neighborhood invented jogging. An airplane testing runway belonging to the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company was at the end of our streets. When the company moved to the Baltimore area, the plant was unused for several years and the runway became part of our vast playground. When John and I were about 10 or so, we started to run back and forth for the full length of the runway in imitation of the older guys who were exercising in preparation for school sports. the older guys, about 4 or 5 years our senior, got hold of an old Model T Ford and worked on it until it was in mint condition. Since none of the guys were old enough to get a driver's license, they drove up and down the runway for hours at a time. On rare occasions, they let us "kids" ride. This too was a lot of fun for us.
There were some hidden dangers of the Martin plant property. For example, one of the kids in the neighborhood was curious to see what was inside a 55 gallon drum at the abandoned plant so he lit a match and the highly explosive material in the drum exploded. Eddie Fitzpatrick, about 10 was seriously burned over his upper body and especially his face.
A small swamp was located across the railroad tracks which ran alongside the runway. At best, the water in the swamp was never deeper than 18 to 20 inches. We found an "abandoned" plaster mixing box (about 4' x 6' and about 12" deep) which we used as a boat. We spent hours paddling and also getting out pf the "boat" because it got stuck in one of the many shallow spots. This was a real thrill for us kids because we never had any access to ride on a real boat of any kind.
Another thing which we did was go to the Blue Stone quarry to swim. The quarry was no longer being used and was about three miles from home up the single railroad track. The water was 30' or more deep and this was where most of us learned how to swim. The older guys were always there and several times saved kids from drowning. Our biggest worry was making sure our hair was dry before we got home so our mothers wouldn't know where we had been.
My mother used the steamer trunk which she brought from Poland to store photographs in. One summer afternoon when I was about 8 and no one was home, John and I went to the attic to see what was in the trunk. After a few minutes of looking at old family photos, we saw one which scared the living hell out of us. It was of a lady in her coffin which was evidently was a custom for some people to do. This brings up the subject of funerals, etc. It was the custom to have wakes in the home which lasted three days and to let the neighborhood know that someone in that home died, they pout a wreath on the door: purple for an older person, white for a child and pink and blue for others. We heard many stories of men who stayed up all night with the corpse getting "stoned." It also was the custom to have the coffin open in church and I also remember, as just a kid, seeing the coffin opened at the cemetery.
Our parents could not afford to buy us many toys so we learned how to make some ourselves, one was scooters. John and I made ours together. We got wooden orange crates to use as the scooter upright to which we nailed a piece of 2" x 4" for the base to which we then nailed the wheels from a pair of roller skates. we then nailed the two small pieces of wood on either side of the top of the box to use as handles. They were a pretty good imitation of store bought scooters and gave us many hours of fun.
Shopping for groceries was absolutely nothing like it is today. We took a wagon to one of two grocery stores about three blocks from home. One was a small A & P and the other was Joe's delicatessen. Both stores generally had only one person waiting on the customers. You told him what you wanted and he brought it to the counter because you did not handle any of the products. He then added up the cost of the groceries you selected by writing the amount on a brown bag and then put the groceries in the bag. We had about 1/10 of one percent of the items we now have in grocery stores to choose from and the cash registers did nothing but hold the money. Many items were not prepackaged, like beans and ice. No precooked foods, no cake mixes, no margarine, etc. etc. All meat, however was bought in the butcher shop, like all medicines were bought in the drug store. Our mothers bought chickens from a poultry store about four miles from home, requiring going via streetcar. They often bought live chickens requiring killing and cleaning them at home.
And clothes; boys wore knickers until about 12 and had to put rubber bands on their knee high stockings to keep them up. Since John was older, I remember how I envied him because he got long pants before I did. And the clothes were not made of wrinkle free materials and required pressing. All the guys had to learn how to press their pants when they went out with girls. Boys wore white dress shirts to school so their mothers spent many hours each week boiling them in the washing process to make sure they were a clean white, then ironing them. These were the real "Good old days."
John and I were both scheduled to go into the service in November 1942. John to Chicago to the Air Corps and I to the army at Camp Perry, Ohio. John suggested we take a vacation in October before leaving. We decided to go to the Jack & Jill Dude Ranch in Montague, Michigan. It took us a day and night to get there, all night to cross lake Erie by boat, several hours by train to central Michigan then by bus to the ranch. We had a wonderful week there. This vacation was memorable for several reasons: one of which was John & I took our first plane ride by flying home across Lake Erie in a six passenger single engine prop plane. What took eight hours by boat going was 20 minutes by plane coming home. Another memorable occasion was John meeting Marcella Batz from Chicago, who was there with her sister, Pearl. Shortly after arriving in Chicago for meteorology training, John called Marcella and they started dating. They were married on June 12, 1943.
The following is almost a "believe it or not" story. I was in Calcutta, India in 1943, waiting to be shipped to the 14th Air Force's 315th Air Service Command in China and had nothing to do for about three weeks but wait for my shipping orders. One of the letters that I received from home from my sister Elsie said that John was possibly going to be shipped to the Pacific area. All service personnel were prohibited from telling anyone when they were being moved and almost never knew where they were being shipped overseas, but could let their family know, in general terms, where they were when they got there. For some absolutely no explainable reason, I decided to see if John was possibly somewhere on the very large base I was on in Calcutta. I walked from one outfit to another all day long for two days, asking almost every GI I met if he knew a John Kaminski. I finally met a guy who knew John and he told me where I could find him. At about 9 PM in the dark of a moonless night, I approached a candlelit table where a bunch of guys were shooting craps and John was at the head of the table running the game. Needless to say, John was absolutely speechless when he realized it was me. We then spent two days together before he was shipped out. Both of us wrote home about this so I have document evidence that this is the truth.
John and Marcella settled in Lombard, Il, close to Chicago, after he was discharged from service. Until they moved to California, we were able to visit each other with our growing families. Until John's tragic death caused by Pancreatitous on December 7, 1979 at age 60, we maintained contact with each other via mail and the phone.
Walter Fedyk
January 2001
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