My father, Bruno Vincent Zapor, was born May 20, 1918 in the coal mining town of Iselin, PA, located a distant 18 miles from Pittsburgh in the hills of western Pennsylvania.

Bruno was the second-youngest child of Valentine Zapor and Anna Krajewski Zapor. He had an older brother and sister, John and Mary, and a younger brother Stanley. The names of the two older siblings were shown in the 1930 census as Fudgie and Advie, although I always heard them called Thadeus (John) and Mary.

Like Iselin’s other immigrant families, my grandparents emigrated from Krakow, Poland in the early 1900s. The coal town’s population in the 1920s consisted of immigrants from all over Eastern and Cemtral Europe. The 1930 US census showed families fron Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Russia just in the houses neighboring my dad’s home.

In the mid 1930s, at the depth of the great depression, my father began working in the coal mine that was the center of every aspect of day-to-day life in Iselin. After just over a year, dad realized would not make a good miner (his words) as he could not stand the long hours in the dark clostraphobic mines. Later in his life, dad recalled he was the only one of the miners who would run when he heard the rumbling of the rocks along the miles of tunnel in the mine.

Although dad was not the type to talk endlessly in heroic terms about the hard times he had lived through, the few times he did talk about his life in the coal mine and desperately searching for work to help support his family during the depression vividly illustrated the contrasts between his generaton and ours.

After leaving the mine, dad along with several other men from Iselin would travel across the country by train desperate for work during the depression. Late is his life he often recalled sleeping in railroad stations and even funeral homes during this time. Dad also recalled lines of unemployed workers desperate for such menial labor jobs as dishwashers and janitors.

In July 1940, dad was among 46 men from his home county of Indiana, PA to take the exam to join the CCC or Civilian Conservation Corps on July 9, 1940. The local newspaper, The Indiana (PA) Evening Gazette, listed Bruno Zapor among the men completing physical exams. The same article noted that the 46 men were competing for only 34 slots available for Indiana County men in the Corps.

During his 6-month term in the CCC, dad was stationed at one of the 25 work camps in the New Mexico where he would labor on public works and development projects modernizing and taming the still wild West. Later in his life dad often recalled travelling to the mexican border towns of El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.