Goodbye, Walter Malinski

1
Fireside Chat
We were sitting around the radio, listening to President Roosevelt's Fireside Chat. The President was talking about something called the CCC. The Civilian Conservation Corps. It was for young people who couldn't find jobs. Pa got real excited.
"You! You! You're going!" Pa pointed his finger at my brother, Walter. "You'll give us your pay, and we can all eat a little better. You're going!"
Walter stared down at the floor. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. Even if he liked the idea, I couldn't tell. Walter hardly ever let on how he felt about anything.
"CCC? What's that? What?" Ma asked. She wasn't good with English.
"It's jobs! It's government jobs for boys," Pa said in Polish. "They teach you how to build houses. You plant trees, help fight fires, all kinds of jobs. You live at a camp. They give you food and money."
"At a camp?" Ma said. "I don't like that idea. Sounds like the army to me."
"But, Pa, Walter's not old enough," my sister Victoria said. "You have to be eighteen years old. Walter is only fifteen."
"They'll never know," Pa said. "They give you food and money. Walter's going!"
"Sounds like the army to me!" Ma said.
"Aah! You! What do you know!" Pa said.
Well, we all knew we were poor. It hadn't always been like this. In the good days, Pa used to work in the dye house. He made dye for the cloth at Harrington's Cotton Mill, and he used to work long hours. We had enough money for shoes and clothes. We had meat for supper almost every day, and sometimes there was money left over for ice-creamcones. We'd all take a walk down to the drugstore, and Pa would tell us jokes he heard at work. He'd make us all laugh.
"Knock, knock," Pa would say.
"Who's there?"
"Olive."
"Olive who?"
"Olive you!"
The drugstore had one of those new pinball machines. Sometimes Pa would let Walter and me each have a turn. A turn cost a whole nickel. Those were the days when we had nickels to spare. Pa used to be fun.
But times were bad now. The cotton mill and the dye house laid off a lot of workers, and Pa was one of the unlucky ones. He tried to get a job at one of the other mills in town, but no one was hiring. Many mills had gone out of business. Pa could talk some English, and he was a hard worker. It didn't matter. There were no jobs. There were no more jokes and no more ice-cream cones.
Now Pa took walks by himself past all the closed mills. Ma always had tea waiting for him at home,and they'd talk together. "What's going to happen to us?" he'd say, sighing.
Sometimes Pa's cousin Chester, who lived in Greenville, would hire Pa to help out on his farm. It wasn't a big farm, and Chester didn't really need much help. It was far, too--about eight miles away. Pa walked there and back, but he didn't complain. He took the work when he could get it.
"We're still luckier than others," Victoria told me. "Some people in other parts of the country are standing in lines for bread, and they eat at soup kitchens. Some people are homeless. At least we have a place to live."
I got scared when Victoria said that. We were living in one of the row houses owned by the cotton mill.
"What if the Harringtons made us find another place to live? Would we have to beg on the street?" I asked.
Victoria tried to cheer me up. "Listen to me, Wanda Malinski! Things will get better for us. You'll see. Any day now, Pa will get a job."
"What's going to happen to us?" I sighed.
As the weeks went by that fall of 1934, Pa talked more and more about the Civilian Conservation Corps. Chester knew some people downtown who worked for the city. Pa and Chester were going to fix things so Walter could go.
Sometimes Walter seemed to get a little interested. "CCC sounds good to me. They'll give me good shoes, and I'll eat three meals a day. Big meals, too! Ham, roast beef, even lamb."
"But, Walter, you don't like lamb," I reminded him.
"I'll like it. I'll build houses and make roads. That's real men's work!"
"But, Walter!"
"What? What?" he asked me.
"Never mind," I said.
I didn't want Walter to go away to build houses and make roads. I wanted him to stay right here with me.
Text copyright © 1999 by Helen RecorvitsPictures copyright © 1999 by Lloyd Bloom