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Waln Brown interviewing Clifford Falatko -1- 8/30/72
Tape 5-1
WB: You used to live by the church up here, the Catholic Church?
CF: Yes, the second house, second door, second block, in the first house there were but three boys and four or five girls, in the second there were 2 girlsand 2 boys in the third house there were 3 boys, they had no girls, in our house there were 14 of us.
WB: 14? this is when you were a kid now?
CF: Yeh, when we were kids, in the third house in every house there were 12, 13 kids
WB: There were a lot of kids around.
CF: The boys were grown up the girls were grown up everybody had big families here
WB: What did you do when you were a kid, do you remember some of the stuff that you used to do? Games you used to play? Social activities that all the kids would do together?
CF: Oh the only thing we used to shoot crap or something like that, nothing like
WB: But with all those kids around you must have had a real good time with all those kids around there was a lot of kids to play with?
CF: Lots of kids to play with but some of them they weren't allowed to play in those days there was Slavish, Polish, Greek, Irish or Dutch some of them
weren't allowed to play with each other, you had to play with your own, maybe you were Slavish or Irish their people wouldn't like it, it's not like now everything is the same, what would the church say, he's going to his church, he's not going to our church that was the Catholic Church, the Slavish people weren't allowed to go there.
WB: That was mostly Irish up in that church wasn't it?
CF: The Irish couldn't get to our church, I don't remember but my Daddy, may his soul rest, you couldn't get close to the church Sunday morning. On the back street there was nothing but Irish people.
WB: On Back Street?
CF: On Back Street in them homes, you couldn't get close to that church on Sunday morning- goats! they'd be chasing you like hell.
WB: The Irish would?
CF: Goats, nanny goats, they had so much thats what they lived on, but today everything's the same.
WB: Didn't the Irish, Slavish, Polish and the Greeks, I guess the Irish sort of stayed to themselevs and did the Polish and the Slavish and the Greeks sort of stay to themselves, or did the Greek people stay with the Greeks and the Dutch stay with the Dutch?
CF: What do you mean?
WB: Well when you were a kid you said the Slavish couldn't play with the Irish.
CF: They used to play, but their parents didn't like it much but the children used play together, yes.
WB: The kids were too young to know the difference, the parents were the only ones that were nasty about it.
CF: But if you wanted to get married you'd say, I'm Slavish, I want to get married to a Polish, their people would say, "Please don't marry a Slovak," and maybe our parents would say, "Don't marry a Polander," again it they had trouble themselves but today
WB: Everybody marries everybody.
CF: And we wasn't allowed to go to their church and they wasn't allowed to come to our church like Protestants that new church there, it was Reformed, St. John's Church, Luthern; St James, Episcopal, that was a big church.
WB: Those were mostly attended by German people weren't they?