NEW CLOTHES

Steve told me that he remembered the day he arrived in Iowa. He recalled his father crying when he met him at the train station.  And  he remembered that he himself was wearing Slovakian-style clothing.

As he described it he wore shorts similar to lederhosen with colorfully embroidered suspenders (like the ones in his school photo – posted on March 23 and April 13). If you look closely at a blowup of his passport photo you can see a corduroy jacket with decorative ties rather than a zipper or buttons. While traveling through New York and Chicago and riding on the train he must have noticed that his clothes did not fit in.  Although he did not mention it, I suspect his father bought him “American” clothing shortly after he arrived.

He turned 17 about a month after his arrival. He was transitioning from a boy to a young man so it would have been a good time for a new set of clothing. If you look at his passport photo you will notice he still had a little baby fat in his cheeks.  I will post a photo in few days that was taken when he was about  20 years old.  You will see how he had  matured and slimmed down.

In addition to clothing he probably also noticed a difference in architecture and farming between Iowa and Slovakia.  Almost all of the buildings in Slovakia were made of brick and covered in stucco.  The houses were built close together or even connected to their neighbors.  The farmers lived in the village rather than in individual farmhouses out in the countryside.

In Iowa there were one or two farmsteads every mile and the important buildings, like the train station, banks, the stores along Central Avenue and the churches where made of brick and stone, but almost all of the houses were made of wood.

His father’s house was just outside of Fort Dodge amongst a group of houses built by the U. S. Gypsum Company to house their workers.  It was a wooden foursquare. There was a lot of open space between houses.  There was space for a large garden and a barn for dairy cows (not attached to the house as in Drahovce).

He would have also noticed that there were a lot more cars in Iowa. He told me that there were very few cars in Drahovce. You had to be very rich to own one. In Iowa even his father could afford a car.