WRITING HISTORIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

My great-grandfather, who we called Grandpa Joe, immigrated to the United States from Italy when he was four. He was from a small town called Ceraso ("cherry," in the native dialect of Italian) about an hours' drive from Naples, and born to a family of poor farmers who had become even more frustrated in the decades following the unification of Italy after seeing none of their political goals met. Eventually, the family decided to try their luck in a new country, where they had heard immigrants were welcomed and had opportunities for free schooling and even to open their own business or restaurants. In short, they had the classic "American Dream," and left centuries of work on the same acres of farmland behind to pursue it.

Joe arrived with his family at Ellis Island on November 18, 1930 in a boat from Sicily, where he was born. After a stressful two weeks of in-processing at the immigration center, Joe's mom, already pregnant with his younger brother (who would eventually become the fourth of nine kids), gathered Joe and his older siblings and brought them to the New York train station. They took a train to Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and from there made their way to a small mining town nearby called Freelance (then called Freeland), to join Joe's dad, who had come to the US several months earlier and already had a job in the mines. Freeland saw a lot of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe through the mid-twentieth century, as immigrants spread the word to their communities back home that jobs in the mines were plentiful. Italians made up the biggest group, with Poles, Slavs (broadly), and Irish making up other major demographics.

Living on a miner's salary was really difficult, and as more and more of Joe's siblings were born, it became harder for his parents to put food on the table. The family started raising chickens and goats to sell the eggs and milk for extra money. They also had a large garden, and sourced a lot of their meals from the vegetables they grew. Two of Joe's uncles, who had arrived in the US earlier and were lucky enough to be hired by an American shoe-maker, made more money and also helped support the family. It was also relatively common these days for people to find coal in the river beds, which they could collect and sell to the mine companies or use in their own homes. Joe and his brothers and sisters did this often after school. Joe went to Freeland Elementary and Middle School, where he learned English (and subsequently helped to teach his parents at home, who didn't want to speak the "Old Country" language anymore). His parents encouraged Joe and his siblings to do well in school and study hard. They had always imagined that an American free education would change the fortune of their family. They had left Italy because after being denied for generations an education or any other form of upward social mobility. He started at Freeland High School in 1942, but only attended for about a year and a half.

In 1944, Joe's father was hurt in a mining accident that immediately killed a few of his fellow laborers. After a month in the hospital, he died as well. Though the family was compensated for his death, the money only covered a few month's worth of salary. Before too long, Joe's mom was struggling to put food on the table, purchase staples like soap to send the children to school in clean clothes, and take care of their livestock. In the wake of his father's death, Joe joined his older brother who was already working in the mines. He was only 16 years old. In 1956, as the coal industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania was starting to dry up, Joe moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I was born in the same city just under 50 years later. Natural gas and crude oil were growing in popularity, and coal became too expensive and dangerous to continue being the top option.

Unfortunately, over the years, we have lost the name of the specific mine where my family worked. As the accident in which Joe's father was killed may have indicated, however, most of them had pretty poor conditions, without adequate protection for the men and boys who were employed in them. All offered low pay and subpar conditions which, at best, toed the line of federal safety regulations and at worst, blatantly disregarded them under the assumption that their largely immigrant worker demographic wouldn't report. Even though my grandpa could technically work legally in the mines at the age of 16, he spoke of friends much younger than him picking right next to him. Child labor was outlawed in 1938, so children younger than 16 should have been barred from the shafts. Today, of course, the dangers of mining warrant a legal requirement in the United States that workers be 18 years old. It seems that there were about four possibilities for which mine Grandpa Joe actually worked in. One was the site of the Knox Mine Disaster in 1959, just three years after Joe left Freeland, where miners were illegally ordered to dig under a river, resulting in the collapse and flooding of the tunnel and the death of 12 workers. Many local historians consider this incident to be the end of the coal industry in the region, as people found other energy sources easier to stomach. It is also very near the site of the 1897 Lattimer Massacre, where about twenty miners were gunned down (and an additional 40 were wounded) by law enforcement on their way to a protest advocating for safer working conditions and better pay. Regardless of which mine Joe worked in, we know he was overworked, underpaid, and subjected to health risks ranging from the Black Lung that almost every miner suffered as a result of inhaling coal dust and the ever-present risk of being involved in an explosion, just like his father was.

Grandpa Joe worked really hard his entire life to give his family the "American Dream" that had compelled his parents to leave Italy. He was a miner for over ten years, constantly under danger of being crushed in the tunnels like his own father, in order to allow my grandma and her two brothers to finish their schooling, an opportunity he didn't have himself. Hard physical labor was not what he had envisioned for his life in America. The mines killed Joe's father, ending his aspirations of an education, and paid him so little that his dreams of entrepreneurship were also killed. Over the three generations since our immigration to the US, my family has accomplished many of the things they imagined when they chose to come here. Joe's daughter, my grandmother, worked relatively comfortable jobs as a secretary in a law clinic, and later as a substitute teacher. My mom was the first person in her family to go to college, and now works as a nurse with new mothers in a NICU (neonatal ICU). I am now a student at Harvard University. It is lamentable, however, to imagine how this prosperity may have come sooner and with so much less pain if my family hadn't first been sucked into the mining industry when they arrived.

Sources

https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ct0u/frldschools.html
https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/feature-articles/martyred-miners-lattimer
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census.html

Additionally, much of the information for this narrative came directly from my grandma, who was told some of the information by Joe, her father, or remembers it herself from her childhood.