During the initial stages of research, my mother found a newspaper article from 1915 about a court case that mentioned my great-grandfather. He bought a house, which is still in the family to this day. 316 Bowman Street. He bought it for $5,000 from a widow. Then, the widow refused to give him the deed, claiming he never paid the $5,000. He took her to court, only to have the jury locked by indecision. After another trial, he won his case and got his family’s home. That was a story she never heard before.

 

Before Paul was a miner, and while he was a miner, he was a father, husband, and horticulturist. He came to the United States in steerage on a ship called the Lusitania, which would later become famous for sinking, but not as famous as The Titanic, obviously. No James Cameron movies. This is what my mother knew.

 

My mother found a newspaper article from 1935, where he brought a plant he created from grafting a potato plant and tomato plant, to a local news station to report. This newspaper clip told us more about his personality than we were ever able to understand before. He claimed only one other person in the US had done the same, a professor at The University of Wisconsin, and he was able to do it over a decade before him. He had studied at horticulture and agriculture schools in Europe and was especially good at grafting plants.

 

“I can graft anything… except money.” His words!

 

I don’t know what prompted my great grandfather to suddenly barge into a local newsroom and showcase his potato/tomato plant. Maybe he read something about the professor in Wisconsin; maybe he wanted to convince his family that working with plants was a worthwhile endeavor, especially while the country was still in the throes of The Depression. He said, to the reporter, that he would like to return to farming if his family would go along with it. Maybe this explains why he stuck with coal.