born in 1920, leroy fretz has one of the first more gruesome poems in the second year of the labors of our fingertips: poems from manufacturing history in berks county, but these aspects are tied to his time in the military, not his manufacturing work. he lives in providence house in the city of reading and loves to do coloring of beautiful prints and designs, and some are even taped up onto the door of his apartment.
below is an excerpt of his poem from this project.
*
the business started in 1890 and is still going, glen-gery.
a neighbor of my aunt told me to try to get a job there after i
came back from world war ii. i’d grown up in longswamp
township, and our family moved to fleetwood by the time
i turned four. a few guys and i walked into the national
guard office together, in town, joining
a veterinary company. we waited for tanks,
pulled horse-drawn artillery. after the vet
showed us what grows quiet under skin
and marrow when a horse dies, one crazy fellow leaned down,
began chewing its still open wounds, blood all over his mouth,
in his teeth. once we finally had equipment, we were chasing
the germans out of north africa, all the way to italy. they knew
they were under-supplied and surrendered. my life calculated
in bricks is the other bigger story. at one
point, glen-gery had 21 beehive kilns. it
might have taken 10 days to heat and cool
the bricks, i’d guess, once they were made.
we’d stack bricks high on piles, lifting them from filled
wheelbarrows below us. we’d even plant our feet down
on the handles of those wheelbarrows until the piles didn’t
keep the weight even enough. so our hands wouldn’t swell
of a light burn from the rough feel of bricks, we cut slits
into the inner tubes of old tires, crafted
them as mitts, and used them to grip
what we carried. once they tore down
those old beehive kilns, a new continuous
kiln took the reins. it stretched longer than the hallway
outside of my apartment. forklifts helped by then, too...
*
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