 You were born where? I was born in Voriceville on Prospect Street, with my grandmother as midwife and a doctor. That was in your father's house? Yes. How did he get that house to you, do you know? Well he bought it. And you got a loan from? He got a loan from the Voriceville savings and all, $600 loan. I didn't know much about it. I had to learn about it from you. What kind of work did your father do, Mike? Well he started before he came to Voriceville. He was in Rosetta, Pennsylvania. He was on the mines. He run ten boilers for steam, for power for the mines. He was a very good boiler man. He made steam and then he came here and he went to work at Voriceville Casting Company and he had a night watchman and he took care of the boilers. He was very good at it. He knew his business. Although he couldn't read or write, he could manage the things he had to do. Now didn't he work for the railroad at one time? Well for a while. Yeah, what did he do on the railroad? Well just the labor. Lay the ties, weed, fixed broken rails, whatever they had them. Now I noticed from the picture in the book that most of the people in that picture were Italians who worked for the railroad. Yeah, there were others who came on later on, like Gifford and, well I forget the other guy's name. There were others that came in after we did, some Irish people, Shuffet was on and some of them guys, some of the farmers used to work part time. The street you lived on, nominally referred to, I've heard you say Macaroni Alley, Spaghetti Alley. What does that mean, Spaghetti Alley? Well we had three or four families. Four families of Italians out of about six houses. And what made it special, was it especially the Italian neighborhood? Well not really, but you could say that because we were mostly alone up there, just on that street was just outside of the village, you might as well say, but it was close enough that we were in the village. Now you and I have talked a couple of times about your mother making bread and pizza, making all from the wall. Scribe that a little bit, what did she do to make bread and stuff, what was the process? Well we made bread, we used to have boarders, more people, we had family, we had eight, my grandmother lived with us, and we'd take in a boarder, come from the old country to give them a place to stay, and she'd bake, bake bread, cook. We had chickens that we used for barter, sell the eggs, and get meat. We didn't have very much money, but we never saw a day without something to eat as poor as we were. I can remember we always had something to eat, no matter whether my father was working or not, we managed, they had a way of, in their way of living, to know what to do. And what do you remember about your mother making bread? What was the process? Well she had this big pan, wash basin that used to use them for washing clothes, but she bought one special for that. And that was her to keep. She used to clean it like a real trooper. She had linens to put on, after we made the bread dough, she made the dough and then put it in there to rise. Then she'd put it by the heater, by the radiator, or by the stove when we had the stove on, and it would rise overnight. And then she'd get up early five o'clock and make her bread, get her pans filled, and then she'd light the oven. And then she'd go from in between. We'd help her bring the pans out. She had a spatula that would put them in the oven. She'd clean it all out, hose it down, bop it out. She was very fussy, boy. Well, Mike, describe the oven. See, people who were seeing this would know what that oven was. Well the oven was set up high, even with your chest. And you'd put the fire right in there. They had what they call a fire break. My uncle Sam made this, that was his business. He took the blocks and put it up there. And then they got fire break. She used to wait until it got white with the heat. Then she knew that she had to take the, she'd break the flames out, the coals out, put them in a pail, take them out in the garden. And then she'd throw a little flour down to see how it would brown. That was her system of thermometer instead of she didn't have no thermometer, she used her own system about how hot it was. She'd know by the burning of the flour whether it was too hot or whether it was just right if it would tan, just the flour would turn tan, then she'd put her bread in. And she had a time, she was busy, we were around, she'd say go take the bread out. She knew just exactly what she was doing. Well how many loaves would she make on a given day? Oh on a given day, twenty loaves. Some pizzas. We'd come home from school and we'd eat a pizza before meal. We ate pizza before it was ever known in the country. If I'd known that, well millions of dollars are being made with pizza today. We used to sell them for fifty cents or she'd give them away, but mostly to people. She got to be well known around there. People would come up when she was baking, the day she was baking they'd happen to go by and grab a loaf of bread. Yeah you said Bill Hoteling was this? George, Bill's father. George Hoteling. He would stop speaking. He would stop speaking to her, say hello ma, how are you? Shoot the breeze, then he'd go home with a loaf of bread or two. And you said to me at one point that you used to get together with relatives from Green Islands? Oh yeah, we used to have. How did you arrange that sort of thing? Well there was no arrangement. They came out, we fed them. Especially during this time of the year when the harvest, the garden was being harvested. My mother had a green thumb that was out of this world. My father and I used to spade it about it pretty near an acre and she planted it. She was in charge of planting it and watering it. And we'd help her weed. Boy she could grow anything. I've seen a pile of peppers four feet high in the lawn. Green peppers and tomatoes and we'd can. She'd can make a lot of her own tomato paste. Now you buy it. She made her own. She had boards that she'd put legs under. My father'd put legs under it and she'd dry her tomato, put her tomatoes out there and dry it. Take the seeds out. She'd put them through a colander and put the paste out there until it dried and she'd can it. And we had all our ingredients. We didn't have to go to the store for anything. We had tomatoes, cans of, three hundred cans of tomatoes. Quartz. She used to put peppers down in vinegar, you know, and have Andibasto. They had it. I tell you, Dennis, they knew what they were doing. They couldn't read nor write. But boy, they could manage. They had things. Well, God gifted them with knowledge that they didn't pick out of a book. They were very religious people. They knew the Bible frontwards and backwards. My grandmother, God, loved her. She was a grand woman. She brought half of boy's will into the world. Dr. Jocelyn wouldn't go to deliver a baby without her. He'd call her right away. He'd go pick her up. She was a midwife. Oh, she was a grand person. She could be a saint today. Well, how did that work, Mike? He had a baby to deliver. Why would he call her? Because she did it over in the old country. They didn't have no doctors there. A baby was born and the woman, my aunt, would have a baby and she'd be down in the, Mike Ricky's grandmother would be down in the store a couple hours afterwards, working. They had their own. I can't understand it today. It cost so much to bring a child into the world. And they did it just as easy as pie. You didn't hear of any unnecessary accidents or anything like that, like you do today. Yeah. Grandmother used to make rag rugs in the wintertime when she couldn't grow out. I still got one of them inside. Yeah, I saved it. We'd give her the people to bring rags and she'd make rugs, big ones, little ones. She was out of this world. On a Sunday afternoon, Mike, how many people would you have for dinner sometime? Well, it's hard to say. We could have from one, from our family up to fifteen more, twenty more. Is that right? Sure. She fed everybody. Well, it was a custom of ours. If you came to the house, the first thing they'd do is get a bottle of wine and they'd put some food in front of you, whether you just got up from the table or not. They were awful strict about that. If you didn't eat, you didn't sell them. You had to take a bite no matter who came. They stayed there fifteen minutes. They had something to eat and drink. We used to make five barrels of wine a year, sure, fifty gallon barrels, two hundred fifty gallons of wine. My father had five rows of grapes, the blue grapes. That was his pet. He used to take care of them. Then we'd pick them and run them through the grinder and let them make the wine, stay five days ferment and boil over, you know, and then we'd put it in the press. I'd have to go down and wind the press up for them. We had everything. We used to make root beer, three cases of root beer for the kids. Oh yeah, we used to make soda. How did you make the soda, do you recall? Well, you could buy the ingredients and I wish I could stop shaking. Then we'd get the root beer and the yeast and we had a hand corker that we'd buy the corks and the cork bottles, we'd squeeze it down and the cork would close and we'd put it down cellar to have three cases of soda. We had everything. We had the life. Now Mike Greenlee says sometimes people would come over to cut wood. Oh yeah, his father got a crosscut saw. He had a bottle of tea ford. We'd put a belt on it and you know, one of them bent saws that would rock, had a chain on it. You put a tie on it and then shove it up and that would cut off the block and we'd make a pile of that and then we'd split it and pile it up in the shed. Then during the winter I used to have to take it. One of my chores was to bring the wood and throw it down the cellar window so that the boiler could, we could have it for the boiler and we had wood, ties, biochemical, it was forming. We'd tell him we wanted to load and he'd dump it in front of the house by the railroad track. We'd have to go get it, bring it over to the road, take it in the backyard, pile it up until we got time to cut it. You ought to see me on the back end of a crosscut saw. I was about nine, ten years old. My father'd say, pull. I'd say, well I can't pull anymore. He used to sharpen them saws, crosscut saws. He was talented. He had a tooth setter that you set them, you know, you had to set them just right. He had a tool that he would use. Then he'd get files, sharpen them up and we'd go through the ties until we hit a stone or hit a spike or something. Then we'd have to stop and point them up again. Yeah, we had an interesting life. Now Mike, you're talking about burning wood. It was coal around then, people burning coal. Oh yeah, we used to get up on the train and coal would go by, chestnut coal, and kick it off along the track and then we'd go and pick it up in pales. Yeah, we had coal. We had soft coal. I remember my dad would buy chestnut and then peak coal. He'd put the chestnut to get the big flames and put the peak coal to bank it overnight. He was an ace with a boiler, which stayed warm as kittens. He used to work from six until six, six at night until six in the morning. He used to be home. My mother would have a big pan of fried potatoes and meat for him to not get up and go to school. He'd say to me, eat. I'd have to have some potatoes with him. That's where I got to eat fried potatoes and toast in the morning. At that time, from six to six, he was working where? At the Albany casting. What sort of work did he do there? He was night watchman. He had a clock. He had to go around for fire protection. You'd have to go to these different keys and you'd have to punch the clock and it had a dial on it, a paper register dial that you would put in there. The boss would put it in there so that he went around and seeing that nobody was there. We used to find hobos in days, sleeping in the sand that they used to make molds out of sometimes I'd go over and help him and he wasn't feeling good when he had too much to drink. I'd stay over there until twelve o'clock and go around and punch the time clock for him while he took a nap. Yeah. How old were you at that time? Oh, I was young, twelve, fourteen. When I was fourteen I worked on a section gang during the summer with my uncle, Mike's grandfather. He had the section on a DNH. I worked on it both years, fourteen and fifteen. Made thirty-four cents an hour. And most of the Italians on that crew at that time too, right? Well, no. We had a few. We had Gifford, J. Gifford's father and Shufell. There was one other guy, I can't think of his name, and me. There was five of us on the crew. When you were younger, when you were talking about this time of life, obviously there was no television. No. We had a radio. We got a water can. I finally got him to get it. And we used to listen to that. We didn't have TV or anything them days. Hell, we didn't have TV. I was old. I was married before we got TV. I got an Emerson table model up at Aldermen. I remember my first one. Well, what did you do for recreation at that time? Oh, we used to get together when the kids were on the street, play baseball. With a ball if we could get one. If not, we'd roll some old stockings up and go across the field and roll us across the track. Then we had parties at home. We'd get together and play cards. We played pinocchio when we were young. Played all kinds of cards. And we were baseball fans. We'd listen to the games. And we had entertainment, such as the movies it was. Then we'd go to the church suppers, work for the church, help put on suppers and spaghetti suppers. And we'd get together at card games. The church would sponsor a card game, make some money. We'd go there. Our eye would go down the street where the park was. Remember where the park? And we'd sit around there until late nine o'clock. We had our orders to get home. So we'd go up the road, up the track and get home. So we were there by nine o'clock. So we wouldn't get into trouble. But we, yeah, I finally worked enough to get a second hand bicycle to move around. Pedaled papers. I pedaled papers for eight cents a night. Forty-eight cents a week. And I saved every bit of it. When I was eighteen, nineteen, I had a thousand dollars. Now you mentioned the down street, Mike. What's the term down street, up street? What does that mean? Well, we lived about five city blocks from the park. From where we lived. You know where you go to the library. That street was all ours. We lived on the first house on the hill. There was one on the bottom. And another one on, the next one was our house. And we had people that come over. Local neighbors used to come in. And when they knew we had spaghetti, they'd come over and my mother'd say, come on in. Have a digit of spaghetti. She had enough for everybody. She had a say. And she'd always have enough for supper in cases. The Lord stopped in to have a meal. She meant some individual, some hobo. She had enough for him to come in. And that was her way of saying, I'm paying the Lord back for the abundance that we had. She was a great person. So you recall hobos before you fell? Oh yeah. They had a smart. Remember you hear them people say, when they go by on the trains they'd have a symbol that they would put by the house. She wouldn't let them in the house. She'd let them sit on the front porch. She'd give them a half loaf of Italian bread and fifty cents to go down and buy bologna and make her own sandwiches. Yeah, we had a guy, my father was in the winter time. We gave him the shoes. He had an all overcoat that was good. We gave it to him. We felt sorry for him. They stuck around the foundry. He had him there by the, where it was warm in the boiler room. And when he went home he brought, we found the coat and the shoes on the porch. He said he couldn't take them because people would think he had too much money. And he wouldn't get fed. You imagine that? There were some pretty decent people, some well educated people who came by them days. Now Mike, where did you go to school? I went to Voriceville. I walked from there all the way up to where the elementary school is now. It used to be a three room school house there when I got, until I graduated in twenty-eight where I got out and went to Delmar. I went to Delmar for four years. Then I went to work at Duffy Mott, Duffy Mott Commandance with its prune juice and apple cider. What did you do at Duffy Mott? Maybe you could tell us what. Well, I did a little of everything. Like why freezing up? I coopered barrels. Now see people, younger people today won't know what that is. What does that mean? Well, we used to buy whiskey barrels. Off the company would buy the barrels that they used to put whiskey in and ride them around in the ocean to make them stronger. Then we'd buy the empties. Some of them had two, three gallons of liquor in it. Some of the guys there used to look for them. I wasn't the regular cooper. Cooper helped. They had hoops on. You see in a barrel with hoops, both sides were parallel. So you'd take a hammer and a hoop, iron and drive them home and put steam in them, wash them out, steam hose in them, put water in them and steam them and get them nice and clean and roll them down. Then they'd put vinegar or they'd send vinegar in barrels to the stores. In them days they used to sell it by the gallon in the stores. They'd drink by a barrel. Now then afterwards it came to put the bottles. Later on we used to bottle them and send them in case goods. Some of them still liked the inter-countries. They still liked the barrels. So we used to ship the barrels to them and then they would sell it to you go in with a gallon or a half a gallon or whatever you wanted to do and made your purchase. You'd tap it. Yeah, you wouldn't tap. It was long like that. It had a little thing in the end. We'd turn it, it would open the hole up and it would run. Alright, so you'd coop it at the site in the well, would you though? Oh, I worked. I did maintenance work. Well, I got to be shop-stored. And I was the top man on the totem pole. Wherever they had it, if my job wasn't to work and that day I'd have to go fulfill another job that I got. I got to know just about everything. I got to be a handyman. If a guy was missing from a labeling machine or the shipping room where we used to load trucks, I'd go over and help load trucks, check them on, unload freight cars of empty glass, barrels, everything. It's just a handyman. It got me to be pretty valuable to him. I enjoyed doing it. I didn't do the same thing. I wouldn't bid a job unless it was. And then I'd have a different job every day, maybe. And it broke up the time. You talked to me one time about the Italians in the village at that time, not being the favorite people. Well, we weren't, you know, the attitude. Well, the spaghetti benders would tell you, not all people, I could say. You know, we were discriminated against by a certain few. Like they, it took my cousin, Charlie, Mike Rickies' father, the first one accepted into the fire department. They didn't accept Italians or Catholics. He broke the barrier. And then we went in. I served 42 years. You see that plaque I got out there? We broke in pretty good. We made a name for ourselves. We behaved ourselves. We didn't go around getting into fights or anything like that. My father was a be-by-yourself. He didn't go very much. He had his wine. He'd stay home and work in a garden and take care of his grapes. We used to hire a guy they used to call, clubfooted Jimmy. He was clubfooted. Do you ever see a guy clubfooted? He used to drive. He was a mechanic and he'd drive like a bee. And he had a Ford, Model T Ford C Dan. If we were invited to a wedding, we'd hire him to take us. And we'd take him in and he'd be fed just like us. When we'd go to Green Island or Troy or wherever, we had to go to the cemetery. If we had to go to a funeral, our people believed that you should be represented. They were very clannish about that. If one of our relatives died, we had to be sure and pay our respects. So we would hire, until I got a car when I was 19 years old, I got a helpmobile, 1931 helpmobile with some car, mechanical brakes. Yeah, there's a lot to tell Dennis, but as I say at my age, you've got to prompt me. What are you doing great so far? Now what about the Odd Fellows Hall? Did you ever go to that? Oh yeah, we went to, when we could get the money, ten, fifteen cents. On Saturday night we'd go to movies. What do you mean you could get the money? Well, there wasn't much money around. But my mother, my father would give her his paycheck. And he'd say pay the taxes first and then we'd eat next. He was a true, in fact, when I came home from the Army, I wanted to take my mother with the money I had saved and take her over to see her sister because I had seen her when I was over there in Italy. And she says, no, I'm not leaving this soil to go over there for no money. She says, this is my home, America, right here. And I'm glad we got their citizenship papers. They couldn't talk, but we taught them enough to, we made them practice enough to sign their name. So when they went up there, they could sign their name on the certificate. We taught them that. And my father and her, my father could talk good. Mother was fair, but she was busy all the while. But she could make you understand. She'd go and do the grocery shopping. You didn't dare jip her in money. Now where would she grocery shop? Well, we went to Albany Carpet Bag down on Madison Avenue to the Italian stores. We'd buy a twenty pound box of spaghetti, four gallons of oil, olive oil. We bought alcohol, ninety proof or a hundred and eighty proof alcohol to make our own liquor. We were handy people. How'd you get there, Mike? Local train. We had the Alderman local. We'd run two or three trains in the morning, one at noon. Come home at one o'clock. They would turn around at Alderman. That's what they call the Alderman local. Hell, we had sleepers going from Albany to Binghamton. Big trains with sleepers. Then they'd go over into Pennsylvania. From Binghamton they'd go into Pennsylvania. The railroad was busy. DNH was one of the best railroads going. They had freight trains coming from Pennsylvania with coal, as I say. We'd hop on. We'd see one with chestnut heaped up. We'd kick it off with our feet. Then go pick it up. Two or three pails kept us warm. We used every trick in the book. A lot of people don't know how important the railroad was at that time to go from Borisville into Albany and back. Oh, gee. My mother-in-law, my father-in-law, worked in the roundhouse in Oniana. They lived in Oniana. That's where I got married. She had a pass. They were still running locals when she was there. She'd go in instead of hanging around the house, she'd grab her pass and go into Albany and pass away the time. Then when my son was born, she used to take him on the train when he got to be old enough so she wouldn't be afraid to lose him. Oh, the train. I went to school first two years to Delmar on the local. We'd buy a monthly ticket. We'd get the train at eight o'clock or a little after seven. We'd get down there and walk over Borthwick Avenue to school. Then I'd walk home when I played basketball. There was no train, no bus after twelve o'clock, so I'd walk home in the wintertime just to play basketball. From Delmar? Yeah. I used to get picked up sometime because the driver of the last bus that went in used to, at twelve o'clock, if I was out there, he'd pick me up and drive me up to the corner in Warrisville and then I'd walk home. Now, Don Lentley said, he asked me about having money. He said in Warrisville there were only two kinds of people. He said there were poor people, basically, or just ordinary people. And then there was the business people. Yeah. Does that make sense to you? Well, that's just about all there was. We didn't have very many. We haven't gotten today people with what I call political pull or rich people who could do something for the community. Like this new superintendent of the school, he got a billion dollars. He was smart enough to get a billion dollars for the asbestos relief. The other guy didn't think about it, but he found a billion dollars that's going to come into our district. And that's what I mean. We didn't have, we had O. B. Vaughn at the mill, Bloomingdale's, that you mentioned in the book, that he was a bootlegger, he was wealthy. But they weren't, they didn't do things. Well, I've been in correspondence with Fred Bloomingdale. Have you? Well, not him, but his son. That's his son, yeah. So I said to Frank, I said, gee, people have been talking about your father being a bootlegger. So he says, I'm not going to tell any stories to somebody who writes books for living. Well, did he say that? Well, Frank, Frank is a funny guy. Is he? Oh yeah, he had a brother that was a little bit better, Bud. I don't know where Bud is, he's around here somewhere. But Frank is retired now, and he's up in Syracuse. Yeah, yeah. When you say funny, you mean why? Well, he was strict. He was on the up and up. He didn't want his father to know that he was a bootlegger. He didn't want anybody to know his father was a bootlegger. Although he used to have Lincoln cars, go to Canada and come down with a load. Then he'd get picked up, and he'd pay so much to get out. Everybody knew it. Hell, they were selling it up until way late. So who, I mean, people knew about it then? Oh, sure, we all know about it. You know, you can't keep them things quiet. Fred himself was a happy-go-lucky guy. He'd go to the grill and live it up. Yeah, we didn't have very many influential people. Churchgoers and the Presbyterian Church, that kind of stuff. We had a mission church for a long time. My mother would go every day if she could. She had a way. She'd walk, although she had a milk leg that slowed her down. But they believed in God and the church, like nobody's business. Well, you told me once, Mike, that the Catholics weren't well accepted at first either. No, we weren't. We weren't in school. It was hard. I can't tell you the feeling that you get, because I believe I had an inferiority complex. I didn't think I was as good as him. I had that belief. But I got along. I did my job. I played ball. I wasn't good, but I tried everything. I tried to do what the rest of the people were doing. In high school I played baseball a little bit, basketball. I tried to run, but I was too big. A hundred yard dash almost did me in. No, we didn't have the means that some of the people had. But we were all alike. We were all on the same level. It was a community that only a few. Like I used to go to Dr. Jocelyn, fifty cents a call. I used to get these pains in the stomach, gas pains. I thought it was appendicitis all along. I'd go in and he'd say, come on, what's the matter with you now? He'd feel my stomach. He'd say, go home and take some Alka cells or something. I'd get a call. Gee, I remember I had a real flu or something. I came home to school with a temperature. Gee, Dennis, he gave me three little pills. He'd say, go home, get him bed, take one of these now. One when you wake up. Gee, I took them pills. I didn't have no flu or no cold or nothing. I was amazed at the fastness that I had. He had, like Mary Tork's father had in business, Mike Rickey's grandfather bought that store where he is now and they got to be in Italian. They're big shots. They're dumb. When they get a little more money than you and then you've got to take your hat off to them. Well, my uncle, you talk about that. When I was over in the old country, my uncle walked with me and his wife had to walk behind them. You heard that. That was the law. She had to walk behind them all the time. She couldn't walk alongside them. That was tradition. Oh, they are tough. They had their own code. If you, younger generation, got a girl in trouble, they went right over and took care of it, boy, right away, quick. You got married. You miss yours, though. A woman got her pregnant. You better believe you were going to make it right whether or their families would find out why. There was no yes, if or when, and about it. They were strict in their own way. They governed themselves on that stuff. We didn't have the trouble you got now, although there was some of that going on. You couldn't stop it. You never will stop it. Human nature is human nature and you never stop it. Now, Mike, you said earlier, sometimes you didn't feel up to stuff that some people in the village, like in Furiority, was that because of being Italian or Catholic or both? Both. How did that come about? Was there a feeling? Well, you get a feeling. You figure, well, they leave you out of something. Like, for instance, in high school, I could have been captain of the team, but they had a fraternity down there. I was a senior. I played four years. It was my turn to be captain. They gave it to a sophomore who was in the fraternity. They wouldn't let me in the fraternity. Things like that. I could tell you dozens of little things like that. You were used to it. You let it fall off your back like the water on the dock. But we managed to. We had some pretty dumb, bluntly. He was no dummy. His brother was a smart Italian. We had some colleagues. Mike Rickey's father, Charles, he went to Albany High. He was smart. And we finally made the grade. We broke the barrier and we've been going ever since. Now Mike, you worked on a wagon. Petling ones, did you tell me? Well, no. My uncle had that. My father had a Larby truck. They used to go out in the country. He had a meat box, put ice in it, and he'd sell meat, vegetables. And when I was young, I used to ride with him. We'd go down to Selkirk and get ice. He'd deliver ice to people, buy ice, big slabs of it. Take a poker, ice pick and make a twenty-five-cent size, or fifty-cent size. Oh yeah, we did everything. Didn't you tell me you had a meat market once in an hour? Oh, I had a meat market now. I bought my, that was Charlie Rickey, Mike's father. How did you wind up over there doing that? Well, as I say, I saved up a thousand dollars when I was nineteen years old. I worked at Duffy Mott, and then they used to lay you off when come Christmas time, because the Apple season was over, and they'd run until Christmas time, and then they'd lay you off and call you back, maybe in February, when they got some orders, we'd stockpile the stuff. If they needed somebody to load the trucks, they'd call us back for a day or two. Well, my people wanted the best for me. My mother says, why don't you go up with your cousin and see, maybe you can buy that meat market? Well, I tried to do it. I stayed into three years, I paid a thousand dollars, all I had was money. I gave it to him, and then I didn't have any money to do business with. I didn't know enough to go to the bank and borrow. In the first three months I was six hundred dollars on the books, so I had to borrow some money from my folks to pay for the meat. But I made it. Well, I was twenty-four when I sold out, and I had a nineteen-thirty-seven brand new Dodge, eight hundred seventy dollars. I paid for it in the three years that I was there, and then I went to work at Toblin Packing Company. Curing hams, making smoked hams, bacons. I had the experience, and they hired me. So I stayed there until I was twenty-seven years old. And on Christmas morning that year, Uncle Sam sent me a notice, and he said, we want to see you in a couple of weeks. So by January 1943 I was on the train down the camp up to five below zero. Now, Michael, let me ask you a question about that. He had come from Warrisville, which was probably 350 people at that time. And all of a sudden you cast into this big world. What kind of change was that? It was a big change. I'd never been away from home. Well, yeah, I got pretty lucky. I joined the Boy Scouts, and I went to Scout Camp once for two weeks. My father saw to that. My mother agreed, and they hired this crooked Jimmy to come down and see me on a Sunday. I got involved pretty good with Boy Scouts and church. But when I got in the Army, well, I can say one thing, I had a lot of friends. I made friends. I made a lot of friends. And when I got out of the Army, I went to see them. We were, my company was, our battalion was all made from Long Island on the eastern coast of New York State. We were all New Yorkers, except the Cadres, to Platsburg. We were all local people in each little community. There was three from Forestville. I went in my house at Outer Scouts, Benny Thomas and me. We stuck together. And then nearby Lens Falls, we had a bunch of guys, five or six, seven or eight. In Saratoga there was two or three more. In Platsburg there was three or four more. We had 150 guys from the Long Island. And I still keep in touch with a good majority of them. We still had a reunion, September the end of September. We had 40th reunion. I didn't go, of course, but I've been to a good many of them. You're back to earlier worries though, Mike. What stores were on Main Street when you were younger? What grocery stores, for example? Well, there were several grocery stores there. Up there, right across some stores, there was a Vera Lasher's father had the, oh, what kind of a store? Schaefer's store. And then my uncle's down the street where the block, you know what the block, I'm talking about the block. They had two stores in there, Barbershop, a hardware store, Jocelyn, and then Homer Corbin had a hardware store. He bought the hardware store. And then Ricky's across the street. And the tobacco factory, the cigar factory next door to them. And on the corner there were Billy next to, going up my street, the first house. There was an ice cream parlor, Mr. White, who I paddled papers for. He had ice cream parlor and candies for the kids. He had a room in the back where you could go in and get a sundae and stuff like that. Now you walk into that room, what was in that room? You could get a sundae? Yeah, he had ice cream dips. You could get a cone, whatever you had. You could take your family in and get dishes. It was a mom-pa affair, Mr. and Mrs. White. Their son, John White, had the store later on opposite the schoolhouse in that house there. We used to go from school over there and buy penny candy and all that stuff. Yeah, we had businesses. And there was a feed mill, Javunk's feed mill, the coal pocket, Dave Wayne's coal pocket. And back there was a coal chute, a big building that the coal came in. It had a conveyor belt. Opened the coal pocket and the coal would go down and go up into the chutes. And they'd run their truck under it and pull a handle. You wanted a ton of peat coal? They got you a ton of peat coal? You wanted chestnut? Or you wanted the bigger two-inch coal? Yeah, we had all that stuff. What took place in the Grove Hotel when you were young? Oh, that was... What was still going on there? Well, they used to have barters. They used to serve dinner and they had people who roamed and bartered there for a year around. And they had to feed them. They had the bar, which was a nice bar. And then they have gambling tables, a pool table. We used to go in at 17 or 18 years of age and go in and play pool, watch the guys play. They had some good guys. One old fella who had retired used to go buy down the track. He lived up there where Hamples live now. He used to come down with his stick. He had a cue stick that he had bought. He'd put on a show for him. He'd show us how to play, make different shots. Yeah, we got around. You had to go to any of the dances in the back? Were the dances or picnics in the back at that time? In the back of the Grove? Do you remember any of those? No, we had picnics. Baseball. We had baseball. We had a good baseball team. Then they used to have dances in the pavilion. It's down now. There used to be an open pavilion like this. It had no windows in it. All the way around and a band would come on the weekend. And we'd have a ball game and then they'd have dances and beer parties. I didn't do too much dancing myself, but that was because we were young. But the people who had dates like that, when I was seventeen years old, I tended to borrow from Michael's father and they would have parties, strip tees, bowling teams would come out and he'd feed them and then they'd have a couple of dancing girls come in and strip. I've seen that when I was seventeen years old. Mike, talk a minute about the three room schoolhouse. There was three rooms when you first started, right? Three rooms and you had an outhouse. One side was for the women and one side was for the men. And you'd start, one teacher would have two or three grades. You'd stay there, then you move in. You graduate from the third grade, go into the fourth, fifth, into the next room and then the principal, Bolton, would have the seniors and maybe some seventh graders. And we learned everything in one room. We had our classes and they gave us arithmetic, geography and English and mathematics. We had it all there. Three teachers, three, four teachers. That's all we had. Some younger people don't know, when you say an outhouse, exactly what that is. Well, it's just a plain three, four, three, four hole over the urinal. You'd get permission to go there and if you stayed too long somebody would be coming after you. So it didn't fall in. Even in the winter. Oh yeah. Yeah, we had a pail for water. And if you were bad, they'd send me downstairs. If I kicked the traces a little bit, going shovel coal on the boiler in the wintertime, take care of that. Oh yeah, we had it rough and ready. Well, Mike, other than your family, when you look around the village, there are people who had an influence on you when you were younger. What people come to mind is maybe having an influence. Does anybody come to mind? Not in my younger life. But in my older life I made friends. We had friends we used to go out with. They had a car, Clyde Laws, Dom Tork, Mary's brother, and several others that we'd get together when we were 17, 18. We'd go to the city and have our beer, pick up girls. We traveled the best way we could. Did you have a telephone when we were younger? Oh no, no telephone. No toilet. We had a two-seater outside in the barn there that was not old enough. When I got busy, I talked my father into putting a bathroom in. $325 a day. Shower, sink, and a telephone. Yeah, I helped them along. When I matured, I was the first boy in the family. They had four girls, two of them died. My sister was a twin. When I was born, we had two sisters ahead of me and one behind me and then my brother who was still alive. I was looked upon to do the business. Take care of the bank. When I got 16, I would have to go and do the official business of the house. My sister went to Albany Business College. She worked for $7 a week. $1 a day. She used to take the train in. She worked for an old radio guy. I can't remember his name. He got to be very popular. And he died. He used to run the radio station. She worked for him. I can't remember his name. Then she went to work for old B. Vunk as his secretary. She run that mill for 20 years. He looked upon hers. She couldn't get to work. He sent one of his men up the railroad track in the snow with a typewriter and papers. And she used to work home. We'd get out with shovels and shovel the path so the cars could come up on the hill. We didn't have snow plows. We'd shovel our way back. Let the cars and the horse and buggies with the sleigh delivered milk. They bought milk from a Polish milkman. He had a 20-gallon or a 40-gallon can. And he knew my mother would make cheese out of it. So he'd come over and say, in his broken Polish and my mother's, in her broken Italian, they'd bargain back and forth. He wanted a nickel at court. She'd say, I'll give you three cents. She finally won out. She'd take 40 gallons of milk. She'd make cheese, cottage cheese. She'd make cheese in it. And she had a basket that put it in that would drain and we'd have the best cheese. All my mother, Dennis, my mother, could have worked for a king. She was the best damn cook that ever lived. You'd give her a piece of meat and she'd make a delicate meal out of it. She was something else. She got well-known for her spaghetti and her bread in the village. That's where we had got a lot of friends. Used to come up. She was a bird. Now what about when the guys would come over to get back to, when some people would get together at night, like Mike Riggie says sometimes people would come and play cards. And I know you used to play at Riggie's store all the time. Well, we played with our uncles. We'd get together and we'd play with them. We'd play for wine. We have a boss and an under-boss. In other words, a bunch of us were playing and I won. I'd have to be boss and you'd have to be under-boss. Well there was, whoever was playing, there was a glass for each party who was at the game. I'd say, well we'll let Mike have a drink. You were the under-boss. You'd say, no, you have to drink it. And sometimes they would drink it between them. They'd drink it all and let the rest go skunk. And then sometimes we'd give them all the drink. That's one of the highlights of there. We used to play Sundays. We'd play for drinks wherever we were. And we played the Italian game. Preschool, you heard Mike say it a good many times. What is that game? Well it's with a straight deck. And it's like Trump. Preschool. And that would be the trump card. Well I can't explain, I haven't played it in so long. The aces were one thing and the doos and the trays were another. They had different meanings. If you had them cards, you used to give your partner a hint on what he had to play. Oh it got to be real hectic. My uncle told me, he used to bite his finger if he lost or he made a misplay or we made a misplay. They got really down and deeply involved in the games. They were World Series. We really had some hot games. When did those games take place Mike? In the house. One Sunday we'd go to your house. Next Sunday you'd come to my house and we'd go to another house. We'd play and then we'd stay there in the evening and have a bite to eat. We would put out a bite with some coffee or wine or whatever they wanted and then they'd go home. What did the women do? Well they sat around, crocheted, shot the bologna, took care of the men and the babies. Some of them played cards. Eventually when they got 18, 19, the girls played with us. We'd let them play. They'd just start games. So that everybody who wanted to play could play and enjoy themselves. Mike, you know from your own life and you saw some of the things that I put in the book. At one point, Borgersville changed and the old way of life went. Does that ring true to you? The changes came along and the old Borgersville was not here anymore. What do you think, what happened when such a debt went away? Well we had different people. We eventually got people coming in. Houses were being built. Back in them days you could build a beautiful house for five thousand dollars. Doris Hodges, a run days father bought a Montgomery ward or a Sears robot. It's still there by the post office. Johnny Holmbach's son lives in it. And it's still there. It paid about four thousand dollars for it. They'd come in and bring the side to handling and they had a guy who set it up like they did. Well Borgersville grew. We helped it to grow. Then when we went in the army and came back we had ideas. I got to be assistant fire chief. They allowed us to move around and go easy. It wasn't so hard then. They knew we bent well. So they accepted us. I think that's a pretty good amount. What do you think? Well I might have left something out. Do you think it's any less out? Well not much. From growing up. The railroad, we mentioned the railroad. The trains that used to go by. I used to get to know the conductors. I'd ride. They used to have what they call a way freight. They used to deliver cars to the different that spend a couple hours here in the morning. And I'd jump up in the engine if I was home. I'd jump in and I'd run the engine. Push the lever. We'd put it out of wreck one time too. We used to switch into the mill. Into the sider mill. They used to leave cars for the west shore. They would transfer. They'd had a loop there where they could drop cars. Then the west shore used to leave cars for them to pick up and go on the DNH where they were rerouted different places. We were a busy town. They had over a two million dollar business in that railroad station here when the Army Depot came in. They had, oh, Voresville was busy. They got to be well known. They had the Army Depot, it was called Voresville, although it was in Gilliland. They were named at Voresville Army Depot. It was one of the biggest in the world. You realize that? Then they moved it. When John Kennedy run, he promised to people in Pennsylvania he'd send them business and he'd send them Voresville. Because we were a Republican town. Politics kids. He cleaned us out. He moved it right away. There was no reason for them to move it. There was 46 miles of railroad in that place. But it's busy now. People who own it got different Woolworth company in there. It's got a warehouse. A lot of businesses have warehouses there. I didn't know about the, about the, that was rule of the ethic candidate. Oh yeah, he promised. Easton PA took Voresville, took a good many of our people with him. Some of them had good jobs. They went with it. Easton also, didn't Shuman, who founded it? Shuman, he went there too. He had a place in Easton, didn't he? Yeah, he took some of them there. I guess the Army Depot didn't go to Easton. I forget where the hell it is. Shuman went to Easton. Yeah, but where did the Army people, but the Army people got moved by Kennedy though. Yeah, it's in Pennsylvania. I can't think of the name right this minute. It'll come to me eventually. No, I guess we covered as good as I can. Yeah, I think, I don't know, did we run out of tape? Yeah, okay. I think we, Mike, that was great. Thanks a lot. You think it's all right? Yeah, you know, usually, if somebody has to ask 50 questions, you would just go into it. Well, I just told you about my life. Yeah, that's exactly what I want. It's all too easy. I knew you could, wow. So when we put the whole tape together, we might want to use a couple of minutes. I didn't tell you about my older life when I was 25 years the assessor for the town of New Scotland. Town assessor? Yeah, 25 years, 1951, until it started from two million to twelve million dollars this town. A lot of people don't know the work that I did. Now I do. Boy, I really done some work, some work that's not too well known in the village. I'm just a husband, but I had a job to do. I did it. I didn't discriminate between Democrats or Republicans. I was a Republican from the word go. And just because you were a Democrat, I didn't raise your assessment. I wouldn't allow it. They tried to get me to do it, and I said, you don't want me. If I can't treat this man the same as I've treated, I don't want the job. They finally got the message. But if you were a Democrat and you had a problem, you come to me and I took care of it. I would go through John Jones or the committeemen. And I told all the committeemen, you got a problem with the guy, send him to me. I'll take care of him. I'm not going to let you run me around it. Well, you can imagine what it would be, twelve committeemen in the town. They get one gripe. You have twelve gripes to take care of, and then it got bigger. So I had to put the kibosh on that. I used to go to Kent Tice when he was chairman. He used to come to me, Mike, I need a favor. What is it, Kent? He'd tell me. I'd tell him if I could do it, I'd do it. And if I couldn't, I'd tell him. And I'd say, you have to tell him. We can't do it. You had poor people who couldn't, who had sick children, they didn't have the insurance. Of course, it wasn't much. You could knock a couple hundred dollars off their assessment to help them out for a little bit. But you did the best you could. Now they're fighting over reassessment. It'll never work. It never works. I was twenty-five years. I went to school. I got certificates. I went to all the conventions where they had the best guys from around New York State with the New York State Assessors Association. New York, Buffalo, I went to Buffalo. And I used to argue with them. I'd say, you guys, you have a problem. You call the state board of equalization an assessment up and you'd say, listen, I've got a problem here. I don't know exactly what to do. The last word they'd say, well, I would do it this way, you're the last one who has to rule on it. You're the assessor. We won't take any responsibility. You've got to make the decision, not us. We're not taking it. So I'd have to make the final decision. Even though I had a problem. So I didn't call them. I'd make the decision the way I thought it was right. If it was right, it was right. If it was wrong, it was wrong. I'd hire a lawyer. Telephone company took me to court. Did they really? Sure. When I was an assessor, we settled outside the hearing room. The guy, the lawyer came to my lawyer. He says, can't we settle this before we go into the hearing judge? I says, well, make me an offer. I wouldn't give in to him. They thought I was just I wasn't smart. I haven't got the education. A lot of these people have forgotten. I've only got a high school education. So they settled with you outside life? Sure. We settled. And you got what you wanted? Yeah, I got what I wanted. He got what he wanted. Sure, I was taken to court two or three times. I didn't know that. But you know, I had forgotten. I did know you were an assessor. I had forgotten that. Until you just mentioned it again.