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MAN WHO COULD RECITE          NORRICK

him to do it for us-all the men around listening."

(Shubert Sebree of Terre Haute, Indiana, another "old" glassblower, tell me it was not unusual for men to "recite" for one an-other at lunch time, or as part of the Temple program; that is, at union meetings at the Labor Temple.  "There was a lot of real talent around," he remembers.)

"Do you know," my father goes on about the fellow who could recite the Second Inaugural, "he was one of the finest men I ever knew, and one of the best educated.  He was straight out of Mississippi, brought north at the time because, by God, they had to have men to work in their God-damned factories.  And a dirty shame it was, what happened to them."

He paused.  "I was there, right there in the midst of that riot, and to this day I don't like to think about it, that men and women could do the things I saw done that day, in East St. Louis, Illinois."

My father, who had learned his father's trade, was working in the glass factory there then, one of the last glasshouse jobs we were ever to have, for machines were taking over.  We were living in Terre Haute at the time; my mother, my younger brother and sister and I.  My older brother, just turned 18, was in the army, in the First Division, training in Texas to go overseas.  We had our worries-Bill in the war; Papa away from home, living in a boarding house, sending home what little money he could.  When school was out we went to Belleville, which is near East St. Louis, an interurban ride away then.  We were staying at my Grandfather Hassall's house.

the east St. Louis riots

That is how it happened that I, too, remember the East St. Louis race riots, and the worry and fear that went with them.  "Ed's over there," my mother would say as the nights wore one, and he didn't come home to us.  If only he would come!  But he couldn't, we knew, unless he walked, for the interurbans were not running.  Nothing was.  There were no radios then, and I haven't the slightest idea how we knew what was going on in East St. Louis, but we did.  We waited, fearfully, wondering what was happening to Papa.

Now, after all these years, as he sat in the chair after reciting the Gettysburg Address, I was to know.

"It was bound to happen," he took up the story.  "Feeling was running high in both races.  Negroes had first been brought in as strike-breakers in the aluminum plant, but what did they know about strike-breaking!  They'd been promised jobs-that's all, by the agents

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 11:32:05