Chock Full O' Whatever

My grandfather did not keep in touch with his family. He wanted to forget that life existed before he moved to Los Angeles, I suspect. However, my grandmother kept in touch with his sisters, which is how it came to pass that C. my long deceased grandfather’s niece, came for a visit a couple of weeks ago. She spent her vacation with my grandmother in Willmar, a smallish city about two hours west of the Cities. Not my idea of a holiday, especially given that she lives in rather a similar small town a thousand miles or so away, but to each his or her own I guess. My role in all of this? I drove C. to the airport this morning.

C. lives not far from the coal mining town where my grandfather was born to Russian immigrants. He was the baby of the family and C.’s mother was the oldest. Grandpa left as a teenager and returned only once in his life. I distinctly remember him calling the area an, um, “sh*thole.” When not insulting the place, he gave almost maudlin accounts of life in a company town in the early 20th century. His father, an immigrant from Russia, died of the flu when he was only a baby. (C. says he was the first in the area to die of the 1918 flu. Not exactly the American dream come true.)

Needless to say, I’ve wondered about the place. What of this hell on earth? So I asked C. about her town. Proximity to the Poconos was established (less than an hour due east!). As we talked about family history, the topic wound round to a recent influx of immigrants and there apparent hostile takeover of her town. “They came with the meat processing plant and now they’ve taken over the Wal-Mart,” says C.

As the conversation flowed back into the past, C. waxed poetic about the old days when the mob ruled the place. There were Italian immigrants, and you know what that means. But, you see, that was different than these openly crime-committing Latinos. There were no murders or (strongly implied) crime of any kind before they came. The mob, though, they were okay. “They left the regular people alone,” she explains.

Back in the day, if a black person or a Latino came to town, she recalls, a mobster would just let them know that they could leave one of two ways, if ya know what I mean. I wanted to give C. the benefit of the doubt. Really, she’s funny, chatty, engaging.

I really might have given C. the benefit of the doubt – even after the mob comment – until I asked about lunch. What would she be up for, I wondered. Her reply: “Anything but Mexican. It’ll kill me.”