KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
Electricity was generated in our plant; it was the only establish- ment in town with electricity. The mill and the lumberyard were lit brightly with electric bulbs burning all over the place. Eventually, when the Russians came to our town, they installed electric power lines and used my father’s facility to electrify the whole town. Telephones and radios used a type of low-voltage battery called an accumulator, and we recharged these batteries for everyone in the area. The accumulator was made of glass — you could see the liquid inside — and was mounted inside a wooden case with a rub- ber strap. The factory charging area was impressive, maybe thirty feet long, with benches and shelves. People would exchange their empty batteries for charged ones. The charging of batteries was a big business in and of itself, even by American standards. Lumber was also cut at the mill. The region had tremendous for- ests and numerous merchants shipped lumber by river to the major port cities of Poland. During the summer, people would lease por- tions of the forest for logging, and would cut the trees and pile the logs up on the other side of the river. They would wait until winter before bringing them across the river. When the river froze, farmers, who could not farm in the win- ter, would be hired to transport the logs across the river on sleds to our mill, where they would be stored in huge stacks for cutting. The lumber merchant would specify how the logs should be cut. Usually the widest center part of the trunk would be cut into beams about four inches thick. Then the rest of the log would be sawed into boards approximately one inch thick. The bark was removed by a circular saw to square off the boards. They would be stacked to dry, with strips between them to let air pass through. There were two or three acres full of stacks of cut lumber in our lumberyard. Then, when the weather warmed up, the lumber merchants would ship the boards to their destinations by river. My father also bought logs during the winter and when he had idle time left on the machinery between contract work, he cut stan- dard boards to sell. Nothing went to waste — he used the bark and other scrap wood trimmed from the logs to fire the mill’s fur -
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