Labor Day 2018
I liked this nostalgic chapter on Labor Day. It involves a parade, a picnic, and a sandlot baseball game. The novel is in the 30s- 40s when workers and their families actually took time off work to relax and be together. There weren’t malls with Labor Day sales that kept the merchants at their jobs. Whatever you are doing today, I hope you remember what the day is for and relax with your families.
Chapter Six
Seemed like everyone in town was talking about Labor Day: Labor Day picnic, Labor Day parade, mayor’s Labor Day speech. Willy didn’t care. He wasn’t interested in Labor Day. He was interested in the Wednesday-after-Labor-Day-day; the day school would start. But, Labor Day had to come first.
“What’s so special about that day anyway?” he mumbled to Drum while they made sandwiches in the kitchen.
“Well, it’s a day to honor all the working folks. The miners and the factory workers, the mill workers, folks like that, you know. Even the mailman!”
“Why?”
“Well, all the stuff we use every day, it comes from their labor. The money that keeps our town’s businesses from closing down? It’s all from the workers’ wages. I reckon we need to have a day to let them know we ‘preciate that they work and make money, then spend it. How many sandwiches you got made? I got four here, how many you got?”
“I got you beat, Drum. I made six sandwiches.”
Willy thought about the folks he saw around town. Mill workers and factory workers, walking home down Harmony Street at the end of the day with their dinner buckets swinging in their hands. They were dirty and too tired to laugh or joke around with each other. Too tired to light the bent cigarettes dangling from their lips. He’d seen the factory smoke in the sky and heard the shift whistle three times a day, but he didn’t know what they did in the factory. And the trains; they came through the town on schedule several times a day. The sweaty engineer waved to everyone and the conductor checked his pocket watch against the big town clock at the depot. Labor Day’s for them?