BLACK SHEEP SUNDAY

I do not have anything to post about concerning black sheep relatives.   I am not saying they were perfect, I am saying I haven’t found them yet.

I did hear, but not documented, from my father that my great father Patrick O’Rourke had participated in the HOMESTEAD STEEL STRIKE  When my father talked about it he only said that Patrick never worked for the steel industry again, and he spent his days as a street sweeper for the local borough.  He would have been forty at the time.   Dad also said that his grandfather was “miserable” and “mean”   and he had quote him by saying “It is better to be a dead lion than a live jackass.”   There was a lot of bitterness in the man, and probably rightly so.   Patrick lived to the ripe old age of seventy seven.

Now, is this a kids perspective?  But my grandmother Gertrude O’Rourke said he father was mean and angry at everyone at the time.  It would be demoralizing to lose your job in the prime of life and have a eight  children to feed.   At that time big business did not care about their employees and whether they lived or died.   Looking at the conditions today I do not think anything has changed, just the bonuses have gotten ridiculously out of proportion to the rest of the salaries.  I seriously doubt if then, as well as now, the CEO’s have any idea of the lives of their employees and the suffering they caused, on the other hand they do not care.