My grandmother on my mother’s side was from a large and prominent family in the small town of Punxsutawney, PA. One of her uncles was a Catholic priest, a monsignor. He was the founding president of Gannon University, a small Catholic college in Erie, PA. Other members of her family owned a farm and different businesses, including the town bank, and many of these are still in the family to this day.
My mother’s uncle Justin owned Fleck’s Beverage Company, one of the last family-owned soda pop companies in the US. He had a beautiful house in the mountains, and we would have family reunions there with all the pop we could drink. How excellent was that?
My maternal grandfather, meanwhile, was born on a farm in the north of England, in the town of Esh Wnning, which is outside Durham. The family owned the land for generations and still does, which is still a big deal in England. However, they were Roman Catholics. Had they jumped ship during the Reformation they might have even ended up with a title.
I visited Durham in the 1980s. During the winter, European airlines often run ridiculously cheap airfare deals out of Chicago, and my friend found one on British Air that more or less required us to leave in the next week. There wasn’t enough time for my mother to write to the relatives, so I didn’t meet them. We stayed at a B&B, and the owner was curious as to why Americans would go to Durham in February. I said that my grandfather was born there, and she said he must have been a coal miner. “Oh, no,” I said, “The family owned a farm.”
She became visibly deferential toward me, the first time I had ever noticed that.
I am told that my great-grandfather got into a fight with his father, said that he would move to America and make more money than he father ever could. and ended up in a coal-mining town in Western Pennsylvania. He knew how to butcher meat because he grew up on a farm, and that’s what he did.
Are you shocked to find that I have relatives who did rash things out of stubbornness? Oh, you don’t know the half of it.
In Pennsylvania, my grandfather got into a fight with a teacher at school and was told that he could not return to class until he apologized. He refused. His father told him that if he did not go back to school, he had to get a job.
And so, at the age of 14, my grandfather went to work in the coal mines.
Most of the miners were from Eastern Europe. The United Mineworkers were organizing the mines, and because my grandfather could read and write English, he became heavily involved. The older organizers encouraged him to go back to school and then get involved at a higher level, and he did just that. He finished high school and went to Temple University, but it was the Depression and he was bored. He dropped out and took a job with the United Auto Workers in Detroit, then with the Steelworkers Organizing Committee in Youngstown.
He met my grandmother in high school. They both had read a lot of Dorothy Day and were influenced by the Catholic Worker movement, and what better way for my grandmother to reject her bank-owner father and his crummy values than running off with a union organizer?
So yes, my grandfather worked in the steel mills, the blooming mills of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube’s Campbell Works. He knew the heat of the blast furnace. But most of his work was with the union. He knew Gus Hall. He ran for presidency of the local and lost, then was promoted into management. It was sales, though, not crushing the backs of the workers. He found markets for steel that had been produced with errors or otherwise failed to meet customer specifications.
In a place like Youngstown, my grandfather was a member of the elite. You wouldn’t know from the way he dressed, as he was notoriously cheap, but being involved in the union at the levels that he was put him in a different place than the rank and file. He was also wicked smart, loved to read, and kept his ties to England. He listened to the BBC on a world-band radio and subscribed to some English magazines, which would arrive in bundles wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.
In college, I would often find myself in classes serving as the Voice of the Working Class because I knew about the labor movement. But my father handled labor relations for management, and my grandfather was part of an elite group.
All of which is to say, I was not raised rich, but I was raised with privilege. It’s something I try to recognize when I work with others.
