1. A New Home

Mrs. Delores Redwood

“I was born in 1915 in Lynchburg, VA. They were trying to get black men especially up in the North, especially the steel mills. And Homestead Steel Works of US Steel, was bringing black families as a way to get the labor to supply the war effort. So in 1919 our family, seven girls and one brother, we moved to Homestead, PA. That was very gainful employment. My father and my brother made big money. We were very well respected as a black family. We had seven girls and one boy in our family. And families then, your mother and your father, they played close attn. to their children. All that I am and ever hope to be I owe to my mother and father. And they raised us, and taught us how to live. I didn’t live to be 102 by being a dummy. (Laughs)”

Mrs. Welzetta Hardeman

“Delores (Redwood)”…when we lived in Homestead, she worked in a little shop across from where we lived I just was so impressed with her. In 1941, they began to tear down where the Waterfront is in Homestead, that’s where I lived. And we had to find a place to go.

I remember coming in this house, I never saw so many beds. So many rooms, in all my life. When we moved up here, of course it was 1941. There was white people every other house. And you were told, you’re in a white neighborhood now, don’t come here acting up. And people began to buy homes, although everybody worked. I felt we were poor, poor. I did (laughs). Because, well number one, my mother had bought the house but my mother wasn’t but 21. She bought the house off the man and, he owned a bar down the hill. Seventeen dollars a month. She used to go down the Hill and used to take us down with her. Jews had many little shops in the Hill, and she’d go down in the little store, and she’d pay the mortgage there. And it’d be about four or five old men sitting in a little room in the store, sitting by a fire. And umm, yeah she had the house but it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t as fashionable as it is now, but it was home. It was home.”

Mrs. Edith Oresick

“My father was from Romania, my mother was from Poland…They met here. I think they all came as teenagers. When they married, they lived on Milwaukee St. I lived very close to Schenley Field, so in summertime everyone used to go there. Everybody. And we’d play together. That I remember. When I was younger we lived in that block where I think all the parents were immigrants, spoke Yiddish. I understood Yiddish because my mother spoke it. She didn’t speak English when she came, and she wanted to get her citizenship papers because she had family in NY that she wanted to bring over, this was during the 30s.

I used to go to school with her at night, at Herron Hill, for immigrants to learn English so they could get their citizenship. That was quite a diverse crowd there! (Laughs) From all over. From Italy, from Greece, from all over. Most of the immigrants did not talk much about Europe. And now I regret not asking about that. You know my grandmother and her two sons died in the Holocaust. My mother’s mother. My father’s family from Romania, they didn’t suffer that much. Most of them left to go to Israel. My father ran away, like people ran away from the south, the Jewish boys ran away from the army because they were really not treated well.”