A new country, a new start

Henry Lowenstein: My mother and sister were working in a factory there, making clothes; my father was working as a chemist in a … testing water in a plant where somehow that was important. And, you know, I didn’t have a job, I had of course no education, my education had basically stopped at the age of 14 or 15, the only thing I had learned was English, but no real education. And my sister managed to arrange for me to go to the local high school. But I was 23 years old at this point. And so the first job I got was digging graves. I dug graves in the morning from 9 until about 2, and then classes would start and I went with the students who were studying under the GI Bill. And I went from 3 until into the evening. And I started at the rock bottom of high school. The folks there were wonderful and allowed me to work at my own speed—the whole program was designed so that students could work at their own speed because, I mean a lot of people had returned from the war and these were veterans from the war, who had come back. And I actually had to do every piece of work that a high school student was expected to do, write every paper, pass every test. And I must tell you that I found it pretty much of a breeze. I went through it and I did the four years of high school in four months. One year per month! And this was in addition to working every day as a gravedigger. Except for algebra! Algebra defeated me, and it took me another three months to get through algebra. And so it took all together seven months before I qualified for high school graduation. But people were wonderful.

And so when I got that, I then went to work in an iron foundry. And I worked there and then I went to an art school in the morning. They had an art school in Williamsport, the Technical Institute, and there was a wonderful woman there in Williamsport who managed to get me admitted. And it was a Jewish lady, and, just at every step in my life, somebody had helped. And it has always been a source of gratitude on my part. Anyway she got me into the school, I would work on art in the morning from 9 till 2, then start… go to the foundry and work from 3 until 11:30 at night. And that was hard work, and very miserable, actually, but I was grateful, it was a job. It was relatively dangerous, because I had to climb above the hot metal and work on the machinery above the red hot iron down below. And that lasted me about a year, ‘til one day I slipped and almost fell off the roof into all of this, and at that time I quit and got another job in a paper factory, making paper plates, paper cups, and napkins. And I worked there for a year. Again, all the while going to art school.