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Forms to be Filled out for Each Interview FOLKLORE
CHICAGO FOLKSIutF
FORMA.
Circumstances of Interview
STATE Illinois
NAME OF WORKER Betty Burke
ADDRESS 1339 South Troy Street
DATE May 4 1939
SUBJECT Packinghouse worker
1. Date and time of interview May 1, May 3, evenings
2. Place of interview 3658 South Boyne Avenue
3. Name and address of informant
Estelle Zabrittfici"-
3658 South Moyne Street
4. Name and address of person, if any, who put you in
touch with informant.
None
•Ei.. Name and address of person, if any, accompanying you
None
04,i CHICAGO
oldpije,
6, Description of room, house, surroundings, etc.
Four Roam house, 2nd floor back, stove heat, very neat and homey. Being
married about two years and both working steady, they have all new and good
furniture. They live in a cleaner, fairly well-to-do workers! residentidt
section. By !well-to-do! workers is meant the kind who have skilled jobs
in the yards, foremen, small time office executives (from the yards).
Three large Catholic churches dominate the social and community life of this
small section. Plenty of saloons but all situated on the business streets,
not, as in the real yards slums, eight blocks south, scattered thickly on
every street, business or 'residential!.
(Use as many additional sheets as necessary, for any of the forms, each
bearing the proper heading and the number tb which the material refers.)
W3613
FORM B
Personal History of Informant
mum Fousiukk
STATE Illinois
NAME OF WORKER Betty Burke
ADDRESS 1339 South Troy Street
DATE May 4, 1939
SUBJECT Packinghouse worker
NAME OF INFORMANT Estelle ZabritaKi
1. Ancestry Lithuanian, American born
2. Place and date of birth Chicago, 23 years old
3. Family Married, Husband Lithuanian, American born
6 months old baby girl
4. Places lived in, with dates
South side of Chicago and back of yards
5. Education, with dates
Grammar school, two years of High at Englewood High
6. Occupations and accomplishments, with dates
Never did anything but work in the yards
FOLKLORE
CHICAGO
7. Special skills and interests
Her baby and her husband and her home are the most important things in her
life. Union work comes next, but since the baby came she hasn't done much
except attend its social affairs.
8. Community and religious activities
Attends a YWCA center recently established in the yards area. Lauds it
for its progressive ideas and stimulus to stockyard women workers. Raised a
Catholic but not very religious. Seldom goes to church.
9. Description of informant
A beauty, mild, smiling ways. Says she gets along very well at the yards
because they think she's beautiful and dudb. The foremen would come and cry on
her shoulders all the time about the union and she would have to be so solicitous
10. Other Points gained in interview and sympathetic and indignant about it all, sti
with a CIO button stowed away in her purse sinoe
the first day the union came to the plant
FQLKLORE
FORM C
Text of Interview (Unedited)
CHICAGO FOLKSUYV
STATE Illinois
NAME OF WORKER Betty Burks
ADDRESS 1339 South Troy Street
DATE May 4, 1939
SUBJECT Packinghouse worker
NAME OF INFORMANT Estelle Zabrits
CHICAGO
I'll tell you how I got to working in the yards. I wanted to
finish high school but we had a lot of sickness and irouble in my
family just then; my father got t.b. and they couldn't afford to send
me any more. Oh, I guess if I had begged and coaxed for moony to go
they would have managed but I was too proud to do that. I thought Ltd
get q job downtown in an office or department store and then maybe make
enough to go back to school. Me and my girl friend used to look for
work downtown every day. We lived right near the yards but we wouldn't
thiik of working in that smelly place for anything. But we never got
anring in office work and a year went by that way so one time we took
a walk and just for fun we walked into Armour's where they hire the girls,
you know. We were laughing and hoping they wouldn't give us applications,
lots of times they send new girls away because there's so many laid off
girls waiting to get back, and we really thought working in the yards was
awful. Lots of girls do even now, and even some of them will have the
nerve to tell people they don't work in the yards. They'll meet other
girls who work there, at a dance or some wedding and they'll say they don't.
FOLKLORE
FORM D
Extra Comment
CHICAGO FOLKSTUtT
STATE Illinois
NAME OF WORKER Betty Burke
ADDRESS 1339 South Troy Street
DATE May 4, 1939
SUBJECT Packinghouse worker
NAME OF INFORMANT Estelle Zabrits
CHI CAGO
But you can always know they're lying, because mostly their finger nails
are cracked and broken from always being in that pickle water; it has some
kind of acid in it and it eats away the nails.
Well, in walks Miss MoCamn and she looks over everybody and what did
she do but point at me and call me over to her desk. I guess she just
liked my looks or something. She put no to work in Dry Casings, you might
think it's dry there but it isn't, they just call it that to distinguish it
from Wet Casings dept., which is where they do the first cleaning out of
pig guts. The workers callit the 'Gut Shanty' and the smell of that place
could knock you off your feet. Dry Casings isn't that bad but they don't take
visitors through, unless it's some real important person who makes a point
of it and wants to see. Lots of those ritzy Lilies can't take it, they tighten
up their faces at the entrance and think they're ready for anything, but before
they're halfway through the place they're green as grass and vfmiting like they
A
never did before. The pickle water on the floors gets them all slopped up,
just ruins their shoes and silk hose. And are they glad to get outi They
bump into each other and fall all over themselves, just like cockroaches,
FORM C page 3
CHICAGO FOLKSTUFF
they're so anxious to get away and get °leaned up. We feel sorry for
them, they look so uncomfortable.
I operated a power machine in Dry Casings. It's bitter where I
am because the casings are clean and almost dry by the time they oome
to the machine and I sew them at one end. Mine is a semi -skilled job
and get good pay, piece work, of course. On an average of from $23
to $27/a week In my dept. there aren't so many layoffs like in the
other places. 114 work about eight months a year, but I was lucky, I
only got it three times in the five years I was there. I think they
sort of like me, Miss McCann and some of them.
But the first meek I was there, you should have seen my hands,
all puffed and swollen. I wasn't on sewing then, I was on a stretching
machine. That's to see if the casing isn't damaged after the cleaning
processes it goes through.
You know that pickle water causes salt ulcers and they're very hard
to cure, nearly impossible if you have to keep working in the wet. The
acids and salt just rot away a person's skin and bone if he just gets the
smallest scratch or cut at work. Most of the girls in casings have to
wear wooden shoes and rubber aprons. The company doesn't furnish them.
They pay three dollars for the shoes and about one fifty for the aprons.
My husband got the hog's itch from working there. He can't go near
the yards now but what he gets it back again. He used to have his hands
and arms wrapped up in bandages clear up to his elbows, it was so bad.
The company paid his doctor bills for a while till it got a little better
but they broke up his seniority. They transferred him to another dept.
FORM C page 4
CHICAGO FOLKSTUFF
after he had worked 3irywars in one plaoe, and then after a couple
months they laid him off because they said he was 'newt in that
department. They just wanted to get rid of him now that he was
sick and they had to keep paying doctors to ours him. Finally
he got a job outside the yards to he Said Ito hell with them'.