The Bethlen Home Messenger, 2002 (1-4. szám)
2002-09-01 / 3. szám
actüntp ï|igï)ligï)tô LOOK BACK WITH LOVE "Look Back with Love" is an essay written by Ligonier Gardens resident Julianna DeTilla. In this essay, Julianna recounts some of her experiences and observations as she lived in the Hungarian community of Pittsburgh. Chapters of this essay will appear in this and successive issues of "The Messenger". "Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to be free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, the tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door"...Emma Lazarus They came from Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia and other ethnic pockets of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They embarked into the steerage of ships at Fiume, Trieste Palermo and Naples. On many of the ships, they shared the lower decks with cattle. Some men left their wives at home, and came dreaming of earning enough money to go back and buy a piece of land and make a better life for himself. The titled aristocrats and landed gentry owned most of the acreage in their beautiful homelands. Some of the immigrants were young men looking for new adventures, and there were brave young women, without the customary dowries required by the groom's families in the European countries. A great many of these immigrants were swallowed up by steel mills, the railroads, and coal mines of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. We will be writing here about the ones we knew so well. The ones who settled in the back alleys in the back of Second Avenue, which started in downtown Pittsburgh and ran all the way to the Glenwood Bridge, which crossed the Monongahela River into Hays, which was not yet a part of the great city. During the Civil War between the states, Pittsburgh earned the title "The Arsenal Of Democracy". The skies of the city were filled with smoke from the industries that were going full blast twenty four hours a day. There was a great industrial revolution happening, and strong backs and willing hands were very much needed. These were provided by the poor immigrants, who, since birth, were imbued with strong work ethics. It was a matter of pride to earn your daily bread with the work of your two hands. The immigrants lived in wooden row houses, usually two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs, with a stoop out front. They lived on three sections of Herbert Alley, on Dyke Street, which ran along the iron fence that closed in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks. The American born children of the immigrants were taught the strong work ethnic of their parents, and had certain jobs to do, also. Each had a burlap bag, and, when a freight train passed, they picked up the pieces of coal that fell off the coal cars, and took them home to feed the coal stove on which their mothers cooked and heated the house in the winter. The firemen on the locomotives got to know the children and threw a shovel of coal down to them as their train whizzed past. These remembrances are not in chronological order. The children of the immigrants didn't know what year it was until they were enrolled in school. Many of them didn't know English until they went to school. Outside, they played with the children of Ukrainian, Italian, Polish and Jewish immigrants and picked up a smattering of each other's languages. We knew it was Sunday, because we were sent to Sunday School and Church. We knew it was Monday, because our mothers did the washing. We helped, if we were tall enough, by turning the handle of the wringer, while our mother fed a myriad of sheets, union suits and pantywaists between the rubber rollers. Our mothers washed our clothes on a contraption called a washboard. It was a piece of corrugated tin and a wooden frame that stood in a large metal tub, which stood on a wooden bench. The clothes were soaked in the tub in hot water. Our mothers worked so very hard. They bent over the wash tubs for hours, from very early in the morning, soaping the clothes on the washboard with Fels Naptha Soap, and rubbing them up and down, to get them clean. The white clothes were then put into a copper boiler on the stove, bleached, and then lifted out with an old broomstick, into the rinse water, and run through the wringer again. In between times, the mothers had to stop and wipe a little nose, change a diaper, or chase a toddler. All the immigrant mothers had to do this, no matter what country they came from. It is safe to say that during their childbearing years, most of them were always pregnant and gave birth to many children. The children played out in the alleys and passed the measles,, chicken pox, whooping cough, and the dreaded diptheria and scarlet fever on to each other. Many a family stood around an open grave and wept while a little white coffin was lowered into the ground. The City Department of Health could only nail a white sign on the door and quarantine the house where the contagious child lived. We children, as we passed that house, would automatically hold our breath, thinking that would save us from catching whatever bug was emanating from that house. The very first word of the Hungarian National anthem is "Isten”, God, which shows that the Magyars, or Hungarians as they are known to the world, are a devout people with a strong faith. In this anthem, they beg God to bless them with strong spirit and prosperity. They beg Him to extend to them His strong arm, when they are struggling with their enemies. They exhort Him to remember that they have paid for their past sins and, already, for the future sins. This anthem is a prayer and, when it is sung continued on next page...
