Not even so brief a sketch as this would be complete without an instance or two of the men who have been handicapped by industrial accident. Such men are met everywhere in Pittsburgh,—they are so common as to excite no comment. In proportion to their numbers, the Slavs are the greatest sufferers from accident in the Pittsburgh region, for to their lot falls the heaviest and most dangerous work. The report for 1905-1906 of the National Croatian Society, to give a general example of what industrial accident means to the Slav, shows that out of its membership which averaged about 17,000 for that period ninety-five men were killed by accident [almost a third of the deaths from all causes] and that ninety-seven died from consumption, the inception of which is often traceable to the character of their work. In addition, eighty-five other men were permanently disabled.
Andrew Jurik's job was to run a "skull-cracker" in the Homestead mill. This is a contrivance to break up scrap so that it can be easier melted, and its main feature is a heavy steel ball which is hoisted into the air and then allowed to drop upon the scrap which has been heaped beneath it. This crash of the ball throws pieces of the scrap in all directions. The work is very dangerous, especially at night when it is hard to see and dodge the flying scrap. One Monday night [the day before he had worked on a twenty-four hour shift] Jurik failed to see and dodge. A chunk of scrap weighing four or five hundred pounds struck his leg and so crushed it that it had to be amputated.
Almost a year after the accident I went to visit Jurik, and found a mild-faced, kindly-looking, not very intelligent man of forty, sitting in his landlady's kitchen rocking his landlady's baby. That was Jurik's job now, to take care of his landlady's children in part payment for his board; and that was all he was good for yet, for he had only a leg and a stump. He had been paid $150 by the Carnegie Relief Fund; of this he had sent fifty dollars to his wife in Hungary and had used the balance to pay his board. The company had promised him an artificial leg and light work as soon as he was able to get around, but as his stump was not yet entirely healed, as he had not a cent, as his wife was writing him letters begging for money for the children, Jurik seemed worried.
Jurik looks at the future blankly, helplessly. He had at first planned to bring his family here, but now he can never get the money for that. Nor can he go back to them. He would be more useless, more helpless, on a farm than here. The only solution Jurik can see to the lifelong problem suddenly thrust upon him by that flying piece of scrap, is for him and his family to remain indefinitely apart: he working at whatever poor job and at whatever low wage he can get, and sending a little to Hungary to help out,—his wife to continue working as a laborer on a farm at twelve or fifteen cents a day.
Often the handicapped man's problem is thrust directly upon the wife for solution, as it has been upon the wife of John Hyrka. Hyrka is a Ruthenian of thirty; his wife is twenty-eight. He was making fair wages in the Duquesne mills; they were both healthy and strong, and they had high hopes for the future as is natural with the young. But May 26, 1907, John, who was working on a platform directly over a limestone mill, stepped on a rotten plank and both his legs shot down into the mill. Before he could be extricated the flesh had been torn from the soles of both his feet.
Since then (or at least up to the time of my last report) Hyrka had been in the McKeesport hospital, where attempts were made to graft flesh upon his soles. When I last heard about him his feet were still not healed, and it was practically certain that the grafting would be a failure and that he would be a cripple for life.
When this tragedy descended upon Mrs. Hyrka she was within a month of confinement. Into this grim situation entered the baby, adding its cares. Until months after the accident she was in no condition to work, and when she did regain her strength the demands of the infant would not permit her to take up regular employment. For six months she lived upon thirty dollars a month the company paid her, then the company cut off this allowance, and after she had felt the pinch of want for a time, she demanded a final settlement. They offered her $600, she to pay all further hospital bills, which up to then had been paid by the company. She talked the matter over with John, and between them they decided that to have the flesh scraped from your feet and to be a lifelong cripple ought to be worth as much as $1,000. But this seemed an exorbitant estimate to the company, and as Mrs. Hyrka held firm to her own figures, the matter was still unsettled when I left Pittsburgh. She was then living on what she could borrow; the high hopes of twenty-eight were all blasted; she knew she had a cripple on her hands for all his life, thirty or forty years perhaps, and she was wondering, desperately wondering, how she was going to be able to support him.