The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
who had seven sons. Their holdings, however, were never large enough to divide among many sons, so one son inherited the farm and the others bought their own land or found work in factories.12
By midcentury, the main source of family income was no longer the farm but the factory. No sharp line, however, demarcates factory work from farm work. The farms were initially bought with wages earned in the industrial sector, and early farmers also supplemented their farm earnings with wage labor.13 Ladislaus worked in a furniture factory in Chicago before he became a dairy farmer in Hilliards; when his sons were old enough to manage the farm, he once again found work loading freight in Grand Rapids. His seven sons also straddled the shop floor and the barnyard. Some worked full-time in factories and lived in the country, others moved from factory to farm to factory, and still others worked in factories only long enough to raise the money to buy their own farms.14 Most of the farm boys in the second generation started working in nearby cities during World War I. Only one of Ladislaus’s seven sons remained a farmer, and Ladislaus’s own farmland was sold by his youngest son in 1947.15
Map 1. Development of the Polish corridor in Hilliards, Michigan, 1873–1935
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A year and a day from their marriage, Frances delivered her first child, a nine-pound boy, born to this slight seventeen-year-old girl who months before the delivery still naively believed that St. Joseph delivered babies. Ladislaus informed her that the baby would come out the same way it went in.16 Over the next twenty-five years they kept going in and coming out. The second child was born the following May, the third the next year; she had all but one of their thirteen children two years apart.17 She either was pregnant or nursing a newborn for twenty-six years. (Actually, she was too weak to nurse her first child, but she did nurse the next twelve.) All of them were big babies—the smallest was nine pounds, and her last child, delivered when she was forty, was twelve pounds.
Fig. 8. Frances and Ladislaus, c. 1938
Frances had a reputation for being a “tough bird.” She cultivated a large garden, sewed and cooked for her large family, and cared for and cleaned a large house. She worked—even if she received no wages, she worked, and this fact is noted in the public and private memory banks. On the 1910 census—where the occupational category for most women was left blank or listed as “keeping house”—Frances’s occupation read “farm labor” and the census recorded that she worked fifty-two weeks of the year. But she never did “men’s” work, her son Walter defends. “She was short and kind of heavy. She was a tough old gal, I’ll tell you that. But she never worked on a farm. She never worked the barn. Never! She was a hard worker, but she never worked out in the field. Maybe like when they had to pick pickles or something like that, but outside that, to go out and pull corn or work horses, no, never. And same way with doing chores in the barn. I can never remember her ever going into the barn.” Women’s work, though strenuous and significant, was separate from the routines of men.
Frances was small, but there was nothing weak about the grandmother of the Grasinski Girls.18 Her strength was located in a set of traditional gender routines that included tending to flowers and family. Her namesake and granddaughter Frances remembers “her peony gardens all the way from the front of the house down to the road and, you know, as heavy as she was she did all the work and everything herself. Always walking up the hill, pushing the wheelbarrows, and planting her flowers, all her rose bushes and, well, that was what she was kind of known for. Besides having thirteen children.” Pictures show her standing in a faded blue print dress, full apron, and white sandals in front of her fiery red cannas. My aunt Caroline remembers that her grandmother “instilled in me my love of flowers and planting. And she used to say, ‘We don’t get in trouble. We don’t talk about anyone. We talk about trees and flowers.’ [laughs]” Her granddaughters still have offshoots of her peonies. And they all remember her laughing. Fran said, “Oh, my, she laughed a lot and so did the aunts. That’s where we get that from—Aunt Sophie, everybody laughed at the drop of a hat, Aunt Clarice, Aunt Agnes—oh, they laughed all the time. I mean, they laughed and kidded no matter what age they were. That’s where I think we get it from.”
Thin ankles, thick waists, peonies, pickled cucumbers, laughter, strength, piety, and an air of aristocracy because one time, long, long ago, someone owned some land in Poland. This is what Frances passed on to her granddaughters, the Grasinski Girls.
Helen on the West Side
Helen, the mother of the Grasinski Girls, was born in 1903 in Hilliards. She was the fourth child of Ladislaus and Frances. She married the boy down the road, Joseph Grasinski (the son of Józef Grusczynski), at St. Stanislaus Church on August 22, 1922. Joseph had the air of a landowner, and when forced to work the fields he rode the tractor wearing a fedora. Helen shared his desire to move up and away from the farm. Given the restrictions placed upon her choices (“Frances and Ladislaus would not allow them to date other than Polish Catholic, and they had to know the family”), she thought that Joe was a pretty good catch.19 Helen had more freedom than her mother (whose marriage had been arranged), but less than her daughters, who would be constrained only by religion.
Fig. 9. Helen and Joe on their wedding day, 1922
When they married, Joe Grasinski was already living in Grand Rapids, a city about twenty miles north of Hilliards. In 1920, there were over 4,200 foreign-born Poles living in Grand Rapids and almost three times as many Dutch immigrants.20 Poles and Polish Americans moved to the city because it held more promise than the farms, especially in terms of work.21 They moved into Polish neighborhoods situated near the local industries: the brickyards, the gypsum mines, and the furniture factories. Immigrants were more likely to work in these industries, especially in the lower-skilled positions that required heavy manual labor.22 The second generation of men, however, including Joe Grasinski and his brothers-in-law, more often worked as skilled laborers, in particular as machinists and toolmakers in the nascent automobile industry. Throughout the early years of their marriage Joe worked at several factories. Between 1923 and 1936 he is listed in the city directories with the following positions: machinist, filer, die maker, auto worker (which he begins in 1929), and toolmaker (from 1933).23
By 1930, the census takers counted 4,690 foreign-born Poles in the city, and twice as many in the second generation, together representing about 8 percent of the total population in Grand Rapids.24 The Polish community was dwarfed, however, by the Dutch community, which was twice as large.25 Grand Rapids was the center of Dutch life in America and of the Dutch Reformed Church (also known as the Christian Reformed Church; its adherents are called Calvinists). Calvinists followed a strict moral code that prohibited drinking, dancing, gossiping, working on Sunday, and union and Masonic membership. Their presence cast a conservative pall over Grand Rapids. Prohibition came to Grand Rapids in November 1916, six months before the rest of the nation went dry. More than 160 saloons were closed in Grand Rapids (mostly on the Polish-populated west side of town). While the Polish Catholics voted against Prohibition, against regulations on theaters and other places of entertainment, and in favor of the eight-hour workday for city employees, the Dutch Calvinists voted just the opposite.26
Though not the largest ethnic group, the Poles’ densely populated neighborhoods and Roman Catholic faith in a largely Protestant town made them a visible minority. The Dutch conservatism in Grand Rapids exaggerated the behavior of the “fun-loving” Poles, who enjoyed robust dancing and a strong drink. Sometimes their drunkenness spilled over into violence. One headline in the local newspaper in April 30, 1913, read, “Stab Six Men at Wedding, Polish Gangs Attack Guests Leaving St. Isador’s [sic] Hall, One Fatally Stabbed.”27 While both groups were known for hard work, frugality, and home ownership, the Dutch