The Eighth Tribe, 1979 (6. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1979-05-01 / 5. szám
Page 6 THE EIGHTH TRIBE May, 1979 infractor was a womai who had found a hole in the fence. “Well, one day she went out,” Mrs. Dely said, “and she got the groceries from Troy Street. She was coming home and pushed the fence in — and there stands Mr. Moskowitz. And she had to move. He (the woman’s husband) lost his job. She was the first one that went out. She was braver than the rest.” There was plenty of activity in the colony. The second floor of the office-store building was a muchused dance hall. “And in the evening, after the dishes and everything was done,” Mrs. Dely said, “you’d go and sit out on the front porch and someone would start singing. You should have heard them — singing all over.” The wooden fence is gone now, hut the houses and part of the store building remain. The houses, on Mack and Notre Dame avenues and Baltimore Street, were nominated last summer to the National Register of Historic Places, and Montgomery County Historical Society officials believe approval is almost certain. The houses cost $800 apiece to build, according to news stories of the day, while the store building cost $35,000. The average wage in the colony was $9 a week, and the houses rented for $12 a month. “The wages were very low,” Mrs. Dely said. “Of course, you could buy a lot for that money, too.” The settlement included 30 two-story double houses and 10 cottages. Each side of each double house had five rooms, three downstairs and two upstairs. At night, the dining room, the center room downstairs, became a bedroom for the head of the household, while his family slept in the front room. Boarders lived in the upstairs rooms. “You had to keep boarders,” Mrs. Dely said. Usually, the boarders were single men or married men whose families were still in Europe. “They’d come to work and then they’d send for their families, or some of them went back to Europe after they saved their money.” Shortly after it was built, the colony sparked a heated public debate which was reflected in the newspapers. The Dayton Journal and Dayton Daily News considered it a wrong to be righted. In its first Sunday edition, May 19, 1907, the Journal, in a long feature story, called the colony “one of the great institutions of the city of Dayton,” and said it was the best of that kind of ethnic settlement in the United States. The News published a story about life in the colony on Saturday, July 21, 1906. The reporter had visited the colony on a payday and described the Hungarian men lining up at the colony office to receve their paychecks, which were cashed in American money. The money then was exchanged for “Moscowitz brass,” coins which were good only in the colony store. The use of scrip was one of Moscowitz’ ways of discouraging colonists from making purchases outside the colony. The writer also had visited the colony’s butcher shop, where soup meat sold for 6 cents a pound, rib roast and round steak for 10 cents a pound and Porterhouse for 12 cents. On Monday, July 23, however, the News abandoned its passive description of the colony, claiming its initial story had sparked a public outcry. The paper pledged to seek “reforms,” and told of a “dangerous Hungarian” who had been arrested for carrying concealed weapons — a “slungshot” and a heavy, metal hall. The next day, the News revealed that Moscowitz allowed slot machines — the “worst form of gambling” — in the colony, and hinted that several local officials were reaping profits from the machines. The slot machines were removed the following day, according to the paper, which carried a story headlined, “Daily News Already Has Done the Hungarian Colonists a Good Turn.” That day’s paper carried a strong attack on Moscowitz, whom it called the “Czar of Little Hungary.” It criticized Moscowitz, who often arranged immigrants' passage from Hungary to America, for taking a percentage for himself. The Neivs said it did not want the “stockade” — which the Herald and Journal had called a “necessary evil” — to become “a stench in the nostrils of the city.” Paul Kelemen, a Washington Twp. resident whose family arrived in America from Hungary in 1921, saw the self-contained community as a response to language and cultural barriers. The wall, with its guarded gate, kept intruders from taking advantage of the colonists, he said. Andrew Nagy, the son of Hungarian immigrants and a former chairman of the Hungarian Festival Committee which coordinates Hungarian participation in Dayton's annual international festival, had a different interpretation. “If I were in a country, and I didn't speak the language, lie said, “they would say to me, ‘You work here. To get there, you go down two blocks and over two blocks. To get home, retrace vour steps."
