The Family Business
M y father’s primary business was a mill about a mile from our house that performed a variety of functions. It was a large establishment in our town, with two huge steam generators, similar to the steam engines you see on trains in old cowboy movies. The engines powered upper wheels that had huge belts going to a series of smaller transmission wheels. By attaching equipment to those wheels, all sorts of work could be done. When I was a small child, the generators burned wood to pro- duce steam; coal was not available. A few years before the war, my father bought a more modern unit that was half the size of the old one and consumed much less wood. There was great excitement the day it came off the railway, and it was brought in on a special platform. A dozen horses pulled it, and the whole town came out to see. It was a big improvement for the business. The major part of my father’s business was grinding different grains. The mill had a sophisticated setup. Sifters removed the husks from the grains, and we were able to produce all types of cereals, grits, kasha — I do not even know some of their names in English — as well as a variety of flours, such as pumpernickel and white flour for challah and white bread. The farmers usually paid for the grinding of their grain into flour with a standard-sized scoop of grain. The scoop would be dipped out of each fifty-kilogram bag. Because of this, we had large silos full of grain for ourselves, and when the season was over, we ground some of it into flour to sell. We also had contracts to supply grain to the Polish army, which took pride in its elegant cavalry and had thousands of beautiful horses, which needed to be maintained on feed grain.
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