On the Brink

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about my grandfather.

Michal Romanowicz embarked with his brother Freidrich from Hamburg Germany aboard the SS Pretoria. The ship’s manifest list the brothers, 24 and 21 respectively, as being of Polish nationality and their last place of residence as Krechn, Austria. They arrived at Ellis Island on Aug. 15, 1913.

That was less than a year before the start of World War I. And Vienna that year had the dubious distinction of hosting Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler, along with Marshall Tito and Sigmund Freud.

My grandfather worked as a coal miner in Ohio and West Virginia. The youngest grandchild in the family, I spent time with him during his late retirement years.

One of my more vivid memories is of him reading from four newspapers while watching the evening news. One was a four-page daily from the small Ohio River town in which he lived, one a larger daily from the city 12 miles upriver, a Polish language newspaper and the New York Times.

“They can take everything away from you,” he would say, possibly reflecting on family and material possessions he’d left behind in Eastern Europe or upon the worldview having lived through the Great Depression and both World Wars formed. “But they can never take away what you know.”

I have always credited my grandfather with partially sparking the passion I have for newspaper journalism. But today, as our new president’s administration puts forth “alternative facts” and orders federal agencies to restrict the information they release to the public, I hearken to my grandfather’s words in a new way. And I fear what lies ahead for our country.