CROSS-COUNTRY
ON THE second night of the Pressed Steel Car strike we
'¥ere holding a rally in the Ukrainian hall, the biggest meet-
ing place in town. Mike Peters was in the chair getting
ready to call the crowd to order. Johnny Turek, the pres-
ident of the Union, was talking to me on the platform. The
hall was packed. The whole town turns out for the "speak-
in' " in steel centers.
Al Lake, our local organizer on duty in McKees Rocks,
walked over to me and Turek and said:
"The chief of police is standing in back of the hall. Do
we want him here-or
do we run our strike meetings with-
out a flatfoot taking it -all in?"
I looked toward the bade of the hall and finally recog-
nized the chief through the pipe and stogie smoke. I don't
think I've ever seen an uglier man. About five years ago he
started out to arrest a couple of Italian Black Hands who
had sent a fellow countryman a letter saying they were
coming to his house to shoot hell out of him on a certain day
and hour. The chief went to the threatened Italian's house
and sat with him in his kitchen to wait and catch the Black
Hands.
When the smoke cleared away, the chief was lying in a
heaIr--half his face blown away by shot gun slugs and the
pisano was very much dead. They are still looking for the
Black Hands. The wound left a horrible sneer on the chief's
face that never changes.
So, turning to AI, I answered, "Go down and tell the chief
that we don't need him here-we can take care of our
meetings without the cops."
Al jumped down from the platform and pushed his way
through the crowd to the back of the hall where the chief
was standing. But I couldn't see what took place because
right then Mike Peters called the meeting to order. When
I got up to speak to the crowd, I glanced to the rear of
the hall and saw the chief wasn't there. Al was sitting up
on a windowsill,
and he waved a pudgy hand at me to
let me know that the cop had left. I started speaking and
forgot all about the matter.
That was yesterday.
This morning, as soon as I walked into strike headquarters,
there was a message waiting for me from AI. He had written
a short note on a piece of brown wrapping paper. It said:
"Com down to ware I am. Am in troble." Then he had a
P. S. down in one corner-"Don't
tell nobody ware I am."
That part of his note was easy for me to comply with, simply
because he didn't say where he was, in the note. I asked a
few of the strikers who had just come in from night duty on
the picket line, who had brought the message. They said a
kid had left it a few minutes before I came in. I inquired
as to who the kid was and found out that his dad ran a
little grocery store down in the section of town called the
Bottoms.
Just then, Johnny Turek came in all excited and says:
"Jees, fellahs. there's somethin'
up outside. 'the cops and
the firemen are -riding up one street an' down the other,
jumpin'
out and lookin' in the poolrooms and stores. They're
sure as hell after somebody I"
Al and the Chief
22
"Didn't you find out who they're after?" I asked, knowing
right well by this time that it must be AI.
"They ain't sayin' nothin'. They're just lookin'," he says.
I could see that whatever it was, the trouble Al spoke
about in his note must be pretty bad. I decided to start out
and hunt for him. There were several of the strikers'
cars
sitting out front of headquarters,
and I got one of the boys
to drive me down to the Bottoms. On the way we passed a
police car touring slowly along the street, looking at every
passerby. I sat hunched low in the seat so that they wouldn't
recognize me, and we passed them.
We came to the grocery store in the Bottoms. I got out of
the car and went in. The proprietor,
a little weazened
Polack with a broomstraw mustache that reached his chin
and hid his mouth completely, recognized me and motioned
me to wait until he finished waiting on a fat woman cus-
tomer, who couldn't seem to make up her mind between
garlic sausage or blood pudding. He finally got rid of her,
and we walked into his dingy living room behind the store.
Although no one was around: to hear us, he leaned up
into my ear and whispered hoarsely, "AI, he vant see you.
He say you hurry oop. He have bad fight with chief while
'go. Chief say if he catch, he blow head off from AI."
"He had a fight with the chief?" I asked, worried.
"AI, he coom run here lilly time 'go. Run like hell. Write
piece paper and run like hell away. He tell me where you
find him." He wrinkled his forehead and looked mysterious.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"He someplace cops no find, for sure."
"Well,
where?" I demanded impatiently.
And then, a
sly smile spread over his pale flat face, and once again he
leaned over and whispered: "AI; he be
inchoorchl"
That was certainly an amazing bit of information.
If you
knew AI, you would be as surprised as I was. The last place
in the world you would look for that hard-headed,
two-
fisted lad would be in a church. I'd heard him boast once
that he'd been to church many times when he was a kid, but
only around Christmas when they gave candy away to the
kids.
I asked our Polack friend just which of the numerous
churches in McKees Rocks Al had selected. He scratched
his head, stumped for a moment on remembering the name,
and then proudly announced that Al was over on Fourth
Street in the "Immacklehar." From that, I gathered that
Al was in the Immaculate Heart, the big Catholic church.
I went out and got in the car and told the lad driving
me to stop at the church. He looked at me as though I'd
suddenly become light headed, but he drove me over. I told
him to park down the street and wait. Several police cars
full of firemen dashed by us without slowing up. I went
over to the church entrance. I took my hat off and went in.
It was cool and dark inside, the early morning sun was
filtering through the stained-glass windows and showering
down on the aisles in quiet pools of color. Snowy white
statues, gold-gilded, with china blue eyes, stared down on
the pews from little niches in the walls. Their eyes looked
very sad, but they didn't look hungry and tired like real
humans do when they g~t sad about something. A few people
were over on one side of the church, some kneeling, others
just ~itting. A steady drone of muffled voices echoed from
over that direction. I sat down and waited. Al was nowhere
in sight. In a little while I found him. He came out of a
little box-like affair and tiptoed over to where I was sitting.
He squeezed his big two hundred pounds of bone and gristle
MAY,
