Both of my parents were the grandchildren of immigrants who fled An Gorta Mor, The Great Hunger of mid-19th century Ireland. My father, the son of a widowed telegrapher for a stock exchange, spent the depression moving from rooming-house to rooming-house, sleeping on unheated back porches and watching his father go off every day in search of work, only to come back painfully discouraged each night. My mother's family was a bit more fortunate. Her father was a railroad engineer for the C&NW, and had probably the highest seniority in the Chicago yards, so not only did he keep working until benched by the Railroad Retirement Act, he was able to select a nearby switching assignment rather than traveling a long haul. Because Pop had a job, my grandparents soon found themselves providing temporary housing to any number of less fortunate relations, and when their "tenants" couldn't pay, the cost of the food, tobacco and coal to keep the apartments warm placed yet another burden on their shoulders.
When my parents met and married after the war, my father had gotten a job as an electrician with the City. As soon as children came, my mother was able to stay home. They rode the postwar economic tide, and in 1956, when they were finally able to buy the solid brick Chicago Bungalow on a tree-lined street in Peterson Woods (the realtor's concerns about selling to blue-collar Irish Catholics notwithstanding) they knew they had their toehold on the American Dream. Neither of them, however, ever forgot where they came from, and both ot them had a visceral understanding of the plight of the homeless.
Flash forward to the winter of 1959-60. It was a typically rough Chicago winter, and on one particular morning, following a late night blizzard, the streets were buried in snow. Dad had left the house before 6AM as was his habit, and had not had time to dig us out. This did not stop a pre-arranged kaffeeklatsch, and two of my mother's high school friends arrived for a visit, along with one of their daughters, who was about my age. Stuck inside, I was pleased for a playmate, and paid little heed to what the grownups were up to, until the front doorbell rang. I ran to the door, and there stood a man, wet and shivering, with no hat or gloves, his face lined from hard living and red from the cold. I shouted for my mother, not knowing what would happen next.
Now our dining room adjoined the living room, and the ladies were able to look up as Mama, wearing a housedress and full apron, arose and calmly greeted the stranger at the door. He asked if he could possibly shovel out our sidewalk for fifty cents. Solemnly, Mama nodded, and told him where he could find the snow shovel in the back. Done for the moment, she slowly closed the heavy door and returned to her guests. One of them immediately chided her. "Mary, you know" she scolded "what he's going to do with that money." "I know," said Mama, nodding again, and then excused herself and went into the kitchen briefly.
Thereafter, the topic changed, the kaffeeklatsching continued, as did the play, and nothing much happened, until, perhaps half an hour later, there was another ring of the doorbell, and the stranger announced that he was finished. From my toasty perch atop the window seat created by the warm radiator cover, I watched as Mama stepped up from the dining room and out into the icy winds, surveyed his work and concluded that the walk was indeed cleared of the wet, heavy snow. She went back behind the swinging door to the kitchen to get the man's pay, which she handed him, along with a brown paper sack containing sandwiches, fruit and cookies so that, even though he might squander his meager wages on drink, he would not go hungry, at least for that day.
And if she never gave another example in her life, well, dayenu.