…….I grew up in the “melting pot of America” where immigrants came to find their fortune in the dusty, dirty steel mill where they would perform backbreaking labor to secure their families’ future. It’s where a scarfer could make more than a bank president, live in a nicer house, but was destined to die an early death from the day-to- day exposure of asbestosis in his lungs, I maintain that is why there is no “class” system. I’ve also lamented that is why higher education was not high on the list of the baby boomer high school graduate. You could graduate high school one day and if your Dad or Mom worked in the mill, there was a job waiting at a pretty high wage. It was the best and worst of America.
…..But, this isn’t a Weirton Steel story. It’s a New Cumberland story, particularly “upper town” and distinctly Polish. I’m making cabbage rolls today for my family and the memories have kind of flooded back and smacked me in the face.
……..It all started with cabbage rolls. I’m making them today because it’s Sept. and I think it feels like fall and because the kids and grand and great grandkids are coming for dinner. Everyone loves them but no-one in our family is Polish. My family could claim not a shred of any ethnic strain to cling to for a tradition or dishes that define us. Not Polish, not Italian, not Serb, not even Greek….nope we were bereft of any of the fun stuff that anchored you to your roots.
My Dad was Scotch-English from family who migrated from Missouri to New Cumberland Heights to farm with dairy cows. My mom, well she knew her grandparents immigrated from Ireland on her Mom’s side with a surname of Carroll but beyond that didn’t really know who we were were. So we did what a lot of humans do when they don’t have a strong family identity…..we morphed into what we loved and what surrounded us.
……Is it any wonder then that we became a wannabe Polish family? I mean it was America and you can be anything you want as long as no one checks your birth certificate. From our apartment above the office at Pearl and Chester, my Mom found good friends in the Simons, Spileckis, Zukowski and Chetocks.
……The Polish people had initially worked in the brickyard and lived on Rockyside. When the Catholic Church moved south into upper town, they followed the church living in the neighborhood which surrounded it and moving into houses which clung to the hill above the holler. Thus “Catholic Hill.”
…..My sister, Marsha, was seven years older than me, but an old soul when she was born. We just lived across the street from Immaculate Conception and she took to Catholicism like a duck to water. That wasn’t easy because we were bi-monthly Catholic and Presbyterian. Dad was Presbyterian and Mom was Catholic. That meant that we alternated Sundays at each church. I was five and that arrangement was cool with me until the Presbyterians made Marsha mad. No one can hold a grudge like an eighth- grade girl and the girls in the Presbyterian choir made a joke about “let’s be quiet and pretend we’re Catholics.” That was the moment Marsha had been waiting for. As we departed church that day she grabbed onto my chubby hand and declared, “We are Catholics now.”
……..We all believed she was in charge so no-one in out little family argued with her. She informed my Dad who didn’t protest and then my Mom who wondered if that meant she had to go to first mass after a night out.
…….Marsha embraced the church and the culture and wouldn’t you know it, by sophomore year she had found a nice polish boy, Bill Webster, whose mother was a Drelick.
…….Before you know it we were expanding our menu. Marsha was going to sodality and was on May Court. I on the other hand was going to my first confession and trying to figure out why I had to confess that I had violated church rules by wearing pedal pushers to tell my sins to a priest who wasn’t supposed to be able to see me behind the black cloth let alone my bare legs. I also hand on sandals which made sense. Everyone knows you have to wear sandals with pedal pushers. Didn’t those nuns have any style sense? To top it off, I had also violated the head covering rule by taking a bobby pin and attaching a Kleenex. The nuns were aghast, but it made sense to me. You could take a lacy cloth handkerchief and to cover your hair. In our house, we didn’t have handkerchieves. We blew our nose with Kleenex so it made perfect sense to substitute the Kleenex on my head.
When the nun in charge saw me she clasped her hands to her breast and took me aside lest I pollute the properly attired, pious girls seated in the front row ready to unload the sins of a seven-year-old.
………She asked about my Mom’s whereabouts, I had no idea. It was Sat. morning so the odds were in favor of shopping or getting her hair done. Where was my Dad. He dropped me off and is having coffee at my sister, but even I as a seven year old I knew she didn’t want to take him on. So when the nun told me my whole outfit was against the rules……like murder…..I responded, “That’s just silly”! I was then told I had to confess my smart mouth as well. (as years would progress I would have no problem finding sins to confess)
……When Marsha married it was a Polish wedding right down to estinisha (you dance with the bride you put money in the basket and take a shot) By that time, you’re drunk so you don’t care how much money you put in the basket. No caterers for us, the neighborhood women pulled out their roasters and made cabbage rolls and all the fixings and we went to the upstairs of the VFW where Franki Yankovich played. They ate and then pushed aside the tables and danced. I remember Grandmas danced with grandmas and little kids danced with little kids. It was a Polish wedding with the Herrons masquerading as Polish.
…..I of course went the non-traditional route like the Heinz 57 mutt that I was. My parents moved out not far from the dairy farm and I can’t say I identified strongly with any nationality. I used to wonder who my grandfather was and would conjecture someone from far, far away.
……But, along the way I craved cabbage rolls especially in the Fall. I didn’t go the route of watching those who knew best make them, I just got a cookbook and started experimenting only to one day discover that mine were better than not only Mom’s, but Marsha’s. I will never forget the look on her face when Bill Webster, our close as we could to Polish family member, said “I like Tamara’s cabbage rolls better than yours.”
…….And so, the breeze picks up and I gather my small family around me to eat cabbage rolls and marvel at how good they are. And, I reflect that maybe, just maybe that missing piece of the my puzzle was Polish.
