Vox Populi:

In the summer of my junior year in high school, I got a job in the hog-cut department at Cudahy Packing Company. I was a checker, which involved recording the number and weights of pork loins before they were packed for shipping. Yes, dreary sounding, but it paid more than mowing lawns. I lived among other privileged kids in suburban west Omaha, and the job was in South Omaha’s packing house district, which composed most of that underprivileged part of town. As a partial result of the migration of workers from the Chicago packing plants after WWII (Chicago’s Polish population was then second only to Warsaw’s) and displaced persons from the war, the population was mostly Slavic, though Slavs had been coming there for work since the 1860s. Going to that part of town was like visiting eastern Europe. Business signs contained lots of consonants. Prominent were Sokol Hall, The Polish Home, The Bohemian Cafe, St. Stanislaus Church—and, of course, the four major packing houses and their surrounding stockyards. The biggest events, the merriest anyway, were Polish weddings, which featured bright colors, a block-long line of food-laden picnic tables, a sea of Schnapps, Slivovitz, and Pilsner, and a parade of painted and paper-mached cars, horns and yawps blaring non-stop through the neighborhoods—as far a cry as possible from the daily grind.

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