The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
same time that it reinforced American values and helped them to become accepted into the larger society. The pastor of Sacred Heart, Reverend Joseph Kaminski, a second-generation Polish American addressing his ethnic parishioners in 1923, stated, “True Americanism or patriotism manifests itself in industriousness, in religious and moral conduct, in the family circle, and in ownership of a home.”48 Framed this way, praying the Ojcze Nasz helped define them as “true Americans”; as such, the ethnic institution became a springboard for their assimilation into the larger society.49
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Helen never worked outside the home, but she did take in family members as boarders.50 Women’s work during that period was physical and time-consuming. Helen swept the carpets, rolled them up, and took them outside to beat them; she boiled the clothes on a wood-burning stove in the kitchen, scrubbed them on a washboard, wrung them out by hand or through a hand-operated machine, hung them out to dry, and then ironed them. She washed the curtains seasonally and cooked daily. She cleaned the wooden floors every Saturday, and the girls polished them by skating around with rags on their feet. She sewed her own and her children’s clothing by hand, using meticulous, tiny French stitches. In addition, she took care of their growing family. While living on Valley Avenue, Helen and Joe had their fifth child, Patricia Marie, in 1932.
At that time, Joe worked at Jarecki’s, a factory that made machine parts. He was soon laid off from that job and found a part-time position at Hayes Body Corporation. When Hayes Body Corporation began to feel the effects of the Depression, Joe was laid off again. Without a job, they could no longer make the mortgage payment, and on October 4, 1933 the house was turned over to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company for the sum of twenty-five dollars. As a condition to the indenture, the family was allowed to live in the house for another ten months, paying rent at market rates.
Home ownership was important for Polish families, providing respectability and helping immigrants reconstruct themselves as Americans rather than foreigners. In the 1920s, 50 percent of the homes in Grand Rapids were owner-occupied, and the Poles and the Dutch had the highest rates of ownership of all ethnic groups.51 In one study, one-half of the Polish furniture workers in Grand Rapids owned their own homes in 1910, many of them small and modest, yet burdened with mortgages at high interest rates.52 Because of heavy mortgages, foreclosure proceedings started sooner than among those with lower debt-to-value ratios. The failure of the Polish American Bank also had a ripple effect through the Polish community.53
The loss of these homes was not just a material loss but a loss to dignity. Leaving the home on Valley Avenue is something the older sisters vividly remember. Caroline said, “I remember the day we had to leave that house. I still can hear it. Mom had Joe in the green stroller and Fran sitting down on the bottom and Gene on one side, me on the other, and I still can hear the wheels on that stroller going.”
While Sercowo remained stable during the first part of the Depression (between 1930 and 1932, only five of forty-seven residents on Valley Avenue moved), 43 percent of the residents left between 1932 and 1935. Sacred Heart Parish also went through difficult times. The church, which was completed in 1924 at a cost of $250,000, was built on borrowed money. The parishioners banked on the continuation of immigration and general prosperity, but when the quota laws closed the door to immigration in the 1920s and the Depression hit, Father Kaminski had to “go door-to-door begging for funds to meet the mortgage.” Unfortunately, at that time, the church could barely raise $30 in its Sunday collection.54
The Depression hit Grand Rapids hard: at its bleakest point, one in four Grand Rapids workers was unemployed.55 The furniture factories, machine shops, and the embryonic automobile industry laid off men. Grand Rapids City Manager George Welsh, a progressive Republican, created public works projects for men, believing that “a man had a right to save his honor by working for his keep.”56 Most jobs were aimed at developing the city’s infrastructure and required manual labor; men with families were given hiring preference. Joe Grasinski, who now had six children, was given a WPA job digging ditches and laying pipes. His daughter Fran recalls, “I can remember when we were going to St. James, when I was in the first or second grade, my father worked for the WPA. He worked digging some kind of tiles or water pipes, right in front of St. James school. I can remember I’d run out on my lunch hour and he’d be there, sweated up and everything. He’d be diggin’ that hole, and I’s so proud of him, so proud, that was my dad.” He eventually found work in an automobile factory in Flint, where he commuted weekly. In 1936 he relocated to the newly opened Fisher Body Plant, a subsidiary of General Motors, just south of Grand Rapids. He started as a tool-and-die maker and worked his way up to foreman before he retired in 1958.
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After they lost their house on Valley Avenue, the Grasinskis moved from house to house on the West Side, “but we never lived in crummy, crummy areas,” Fran says. “We lived on rent, but it was still always, you know, it was still nice areas.” Helen was a “meticulous” housekeeper and, even though they were poor, they dressed with style. Fran said, “We always got a dress with a pocket, and then this hanky had to be hanging out of the pocket. And our hair, there was no money for ribbons, so we had to tie it with bias tape.57 But she’d iron it out, and she’d put knots on the end.”
In 1936, during this period of bi-yearly moving, Angela Helen, their sixth child, was born. Eventually, Helen and Joe gave up on city life and moved back to Hilliards. In 1939, they bought the eighty-acre Walnut Hill Farm, the farm adjacent to her parents.58 Joe continued to work in the city, on the third shift. During the day he would help his father-in-law in the fields. They also raised chickens and had a large garden but their income came primarily from his job in the factory. The thirty-mile round trip he made daily is something all of his daughters have mentioned—every night, in the snow and in the rain, they recall, he kissed the girls goodnight and drove into town to work. He is framed in their narratives as a good father, someone into whose lap they climbed, someone who cried for them when they left home, someone who loved to sing, and drink, and enjoy a good laugh.
Fig. 10. Helen and Joe, c. 1946
Helen did not want to move back to the country. Despite the openness of the farmland, the country represented an enclosed traditional society more conservative in dress, gender roles, and lifestyles than the urban community.59 Helen and many of her sisters had an elegant manner of dressing that perhaps they inherited from their own mother, Frances, the descendant of landowners in Poland. Helen would wear wide-brimmed black hats decorated with opulent silk flowers and high-quality wool coats. Yet she was also frugal; she bought her clothes on sale, put her own roses and ribbons on her hats, wore the same coat and hat for years, and made her own soles. Her daughters remember her clothes. Caroline fondly recalls, “She had this soft wool coat and it had white fur going around the collar and going all the way down. She made a two-piece from white crepe that had big, big flowers appliquéd on it. And then she had a hat, pink crocheted silk on top of the brim, and then the under-side was all pale pink crepe and then on top were flowers, a whole bouquet all made out of ribbons.” Helen’s style was noticeable when she showed up for Sunday mass or the Saturday night chicken dinners at St. Stan’s. Joe also came to church nattily dressed, with his six daughters in high heels and silk stockings preceding him down the aisle of the small country church. The old village did not always embrace them warmly. Caroline recalls:
Coming from there [the city], it wasn’t very easy comin’ out here. We would go to church, there was no pews. They used to pay twenty-five cents for a pew and then you got your pew. And I remember comin’ into church, nobody was sittin’ but one person in that pew, and I would come into church, and kneel down, and they wouldn’t move and let me in. [laughs] Then, finally, they found one pew for us, and that was the first pew, way up in front. And all seven of us would pile in there. Then they started tellin’ us we were showing off and ooh, dear! It wasn’t very easy. I mean, well, when you come with six young girls like that, and everybody all dressed up, it wasn’t a very easy thing.
But they went, every Sunday they went.