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I mentioned earlier Paul Edward Sakry's difficulties with the unrestricted American style of Freedom. He really had his
problems with this freedom siren. He never did completely or even moderately understand it. A brisk Polish temper, pride and obstinacy got in the way often enough. But, to some extent, in somewhat the
same manner as did his younger brother Doc (John), he did occasionally confuse license with liberty. He was among those many Americans who sincerely believed that the Eighteenth Amendment was an aberration, an
insult to the Constitution of the United States and itself a denial of the very freedom the Constitution was intended to uphold. He could (and did) with impunity engage in the bootlegging trade of the roaring
twenties, probably realizing some of his greatest prosperity out of supplying (of all people!) the aristocracy of our town ... the mayor, the sheriff, certain attorneys, physicians and other ”respectable” business and
professional leaders of the St. Cloud community, with the finest ”Stearns County Thirteen” available.He could, in the light of general public acquiescence, rationalize and readily reconcile his ”moonshine”
business even with his very deep and unswerving patriotic and religious beliefs. He was a typically devout Polish Catholic ... absolutely and undeviatingly faithful, with full and frequent attendance at the
numerous services; monthly confession, weekly mass and communion, vespers, rosary devotions, benedictions, stations of the cross, May devotions, Lent, Advent, etceteras. And there was no chance that I or my
brothers and sisters, though we were a second generation removed from the Old World, might even dare to attempt explaining to our father that somehow his notion of freedom made a contradiction with the dogmatic,
over-imposed, tyrannical religious suppression he accepted without question and also imposed on us. Let us enjoy our great heritage of freedom, he seemed to say, but
don't let me catch you kids missing any church service. That's different. In religion we're dealing with the Kingdom of Heaven, and we have no choice but to obey the word of the Lord ... to the letter! No tyranny here. No human servitude. Just the Heavenly Father disciplining his children! And, of course, our earthly father disciplining
us! Other than that, Paul loved, practiced, upheld and permitted personal independence with a passion. If our father had had in his youth an opportunity to attend high school and college, I am certain he
would have become an outstanding attorney and ultimately a great politician. Throughout my boyhood, especially after I was old enough to know and understand him, I noted that he always had a fascination for
politicians and members of the legal profession. There were always a few attorneys among his closest friends, and an occasional public official who was aware that Paul could get him votes among the Polish
community. Dad was a gregarious type, frequently surrounded by a company of cronies, and these companions and friends were from all walks of life, from stone cutters and railroad section hands to the attorneys,
politicians and business people I've mentioned. I especially marveled at the way my father could attract the lawyers into his circle, though I always suspected that such attorneys as did come around were,
like himself, active resistors of the Eighteenth Amendment and so had a deeply binding and mutual affinity for the illegal moonshine whiskey to which he had easy access through his many contacts in our city and the
surrounding farm country. He always managed to have a ready supply on hand which, ”for a small stipend to cover costs and services,” he shared with his cronies in clandestine comradeship in the
privacy of our home basement. Many of his friends were the railroad men who resided in our neighborhood and worked for the nearby Great Northern Railway as brakemen, firemen, conductors, engineers, yardmen,
switchmen, and so on. He considered himself a needed ”supplier” for the trainmen who, with few exceptions, did historically and with a deep patriotic conviction disavow the constitutionality of the Volstead
prohibition law and defiantly continued to enjoy their booze as they always had ”between runs” on their trains. Dad also had quite a following from among the hard working stone cutters in the granite finishing
sheds along the railroad just south of our neighborhood. But the attorneys were something else. Several of them really liked him, enjoyed his company, his lively wit and great sense of humor, his
open, naive bluntness, and his genuinely warm and friendly attitude. For Dad it was a very providential connection, for the lawyers did come in handy at critical times when ”the law” made occasional raids upon the
suppliers around town. If he got into difficulty with local or federal authorities, he always had plenty of free legal assistance to smooth things over. Not that the local
authorities bothered much ... for even when they did, it was a sort of ”look busy” routine which was required of them but always executed reluctantly and not before ”tipping him off” ahead of time so he could
make sure ”the coast was clear.” After all, several judges and even the county sheriff were regular patrons of his business. Thus he enjoyed the protection of some fairly influential friends ... although the
observation did not escape me that at least some of these were his friends by a kind of alcoholic necessity.
But of all of them, the attorneys particularly intrigued me. When any of them arrived at the house for refreshment and a bit of relaxation, they were not, like the railroad men, escorted to the
basement. They were royalty of a sort, so they rated the living room where they could enjoy their drinks in the homey comfort of stuffed chairs and sofa. Dad always gave an enthralled
ear to their endless accounts of their courtroom exploits and legal experiences ... betraying an almost worshipful interest which they took advantage of with a relish, for in him they always had a willing audience full
of praise and appreciation. And he picked up on their mannerisms, one in particular, which became a familiar part of his own repertory. When he had something important to say to the family, or to
visiting company, he would strut about the room with his thumbs hooked into the arm-holes of his vest, the very picture of some pompous prosecutor addressing a jury. When, as sometimes happened, the thing
he had to say was quite ordinary or of little consequence, the big pose which accompanied it became ludicrously, unbefittingly comical, and we children had to struggle to suppress our giggles. If we were
under reprimand for some misconduct, the occasion took on the somber air of a courtroom trial ... though even in this I suspected Dad was mainly indulging his fantasies about being a great attorney. He loved to
use the thumbs-in-vest pose (see pic G5-17) whenever we had company and he wanted to tell a story or a joke. Or he would take the center of the floor and expound blissfully on
some favorite political topic for ten solid minutes. Of course, though his vocabulary was extremely limited if not atrocious, he stretched it to its limits. While his speech did not too noticeably
reflect the dialectal influences of our Polish neighborhood and background (for there still remained much use of the Polish language all about us), his command of English remained simple and limited.
Nevertheless, his mannerisms suggested strongly that he longed to be a courtroom orator. Actually, in a simple way, and with what plain simple English he did have at his command, he really was
an orator of sorts. For when excited and worked up, whether in anger or enthusiasm, he made up in intensity of emotion and gesture what he lacked in English diction. His heroes were
people like the famous political leader William Jenninge Bryan and the noted barrister Clarence Darrow. In my later school years when I had come to understand more clearly this frustration of my father's,
for truly he was a frustrated attorney-orator-politician, I could sense a kind of ironic humor in all this. His efforts to be what he could never be were sometimes hilariously comical, yet, they were also
grandiose, sad and pathetic. But mostly he was funny, sometimes boyishly braggy, sometimes even absurd. He wanted to be a ”somebody,” a Mr. Big ... and he was for this reason a
real patsy to praise and flattery... and many a ”friend” of his pried an easy cash loan or grant out of him with a mere compliment.
He favored me probably for the very reason that, once he realized my own advancement in the language, he saw in me some possible potential of becoming the linguist he himself had always, wanted to
be. Whenever I happened to use some word he didn't know, such a "big" word would please and excite him, and he wanted then and there to learn it, to understand what it meant. He would ask me to
explain it and to show him how he could use it in ordinary conversation. He learned many words just that way, through my passing on to him as my own learning and education progressed, especially during my high
school years. There were times when we kids nearly broke up laughing as Pa sprang one of his new words on a visiting crony and then, at the request of the surprised and admiring listener, attempted to explain what
it meant. Some of his explanations were utterly devastating. Obviously, with his limited knowledge of English grammar, pronunciation and sentence structure, he could do some unbelievable things with his
enlarged vocabulary, often coming up with some of the most outrageous, grotesque word definitions and usages imaginable. One of his "big" words would pop proudly into his conversation at some point where
it absolutely did not fit, yet, even as I winced I noted how pleased and important it made him feel. He wanted so much to create a big impression among his cronies that he took real pains to memorize such words,
whether he was really sure what they meant or not. All of this was such a charming and distinctive facet of Paul E. Sakry’s character that I had always wanted to memorialize it, and so made some effort to
include it among my memoirs. In a strictly biographical sense, there is no question about Dad's great interest in words and language ... the American
language. For many years I never quite understood why he and Mother reared me entirely in the Polish language so that when they enrolled me in the first grade at St. John Cantius Catholic School, at six years of age, I spoke only Polish and no English whatsoever. When I asked him about it years
later, his explanation only confirmed further his almost obsessive determination to shed the old "Polock ways" and Americanize his family as quickly as possible. He told me they never tried to
teach me English because they were afraid I would pick up all the bad dialectic habits of speech that still marked the West End sector of the city as "Polock West End." "We wanted you to learn how to talk
'American' ... right from the start ... to talk it right, and not full of all the Polish brogue of the way we and all our friends and neighbors talk. We figured if we didn't teach you all our bad speech habits,
you would find it easier to learn the true American language. We didn't want our
family to grow up sounding like a bunch of ‘dumb old Polocks’.” Not a very dumb idea, Dad and Mom, for it gave me a wonderful head start on my mastery of the English language. I learned it right,
right from the very start ... and by the time I graduated from the eighth grade, I knew grammar frontward and backwards. The nun teachers had fulfilled my father's wish. Afterward, as a freshman at St. Cloud
Tech High School, I was quickly transferred from the freshman English and grammar classes and put directly Into Sophomore English … which gave me a year’s head start on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and
Midsummer Night's Dream as well as American contemporary literature. Yes, Dad's unusual interest in a language he understood only in its most limited and rudimentary form was certainly a kind of blessing for which
I have always been thankful. For indeed, the encouragement he always gave me through his own great interest had a significant bearing upon my own development. My father was, in his own unique way, a very
interesting but also quite a remarkable person. It is really tragic that he never had an opportunity to attain more of his potential. Along with his personal longings, Paul wanted so much for his
family that he was constantly frustrated by both his educational limitations and the very real social and ethnic impediments of his time. He was like a wild free-ranging bison of the prairies trapped in a
quagmire of local ignorance, ethnic tradition, class pressures and economic struggle. He was a proud, stubborn, liberty-loving entrepreneur who had been born most assuredly before his time and simply
unequipped for the task of breaking out as he wanted to from the overwhelming odds against him. As I've mentioned, he so wanted to be a "somebody" that he admired and did, at such times as
he could, associate with men who were. His friends included such central Minnesota (St. Cloud) notables as Sam Pandolfo, founder of the ill-fated Pan Motor Company; U.S. Congressman Harold Knutson of the then
Sixth Minnesota Congressional District; Harry Burns, Jim Quigley and other prominent area attorneys; city Mayor Colignon; Stearns County Sheriff Ben Shoener and his successor Art McIntee; Arnold Daniel of the well-known
Daniel Furniture Store family; and any number of other local business and professional personages of the 1920’s and 30’s. By the standards of his day and by the dominant position he held within his own ethnic
peer group and Polish neighborhood, during a decade of prosperity prior to the Great Depression, Paul Sakry can be said to have been at least a sort of ”little” big shot, for he did carry not a little clout within the
limited scope of the ”Polish West End” sector of the city. Neither of his brothers had the wide personal contacts he had, or acquired as much in-city property and other holdings as he did … or lost as much. At his peak he owned three city lots, two houses and a restaurant, along with stock in the Pan Motor Company, a Montana oil well, and several downtown bars ... all of which (except the houses and
restaurant building) evaporated with the crash of 1929. He built the restaurant around the close of World War I (about 1919) and, with the help of my mother Monica, ran it for the Great Northern railroad
trade nearby for several years before renting it out to a man named Cash Jardine. Meantime our growing family was rapidly outgrowing the little house at 1624 Breckenridge Avenue, and in 1923-24 Paul built our
second house next door to the first, at 522 - 17th Avenue North (just around the corner). Thereafter, the small house was rented out. Typically, if Dad was going to build a
house, it would be the biggest house in the West End. It was a large, two-story frame structure with full poured concrete basement containing a cistern, toilet, furnace room, wood storage
area, coal compartment, large fruit cellar for storing foods, laundry and broad play area; first floor with big kitchen, dining room, living room, sun room (for Mother's beloved plants), fireplace, enclosed porch,
bedroom and closet, central hall and stairway; and second floor with full bathroom, central hall, and three big bedrooms, each with a large walk-in closet. Even a big attic for storage.
Dad was very proud of this house ... ”big enough for a small hotel” ... and he chuckled with satisfaction when the envious ones would accuse him of being ”uppity” and trying to ”show off.” ”It's a
free country,” he would say, ”and there ain't nothin’ stoppin’ you people from goin’ out, and doin’ the same damn thing!” The restaurant which he built and operated for a time, faced the busy Great Northern
Passenger and Express depot directly across the way and quickly became a favorite eating place for railroad workers from the station and the railroad yards nearby. Dad did much of his own cooking and, judging from
the popularity of the place, his culinary talents must have been considerable. As was typical of him, of course, he soon tired of the routine and rented the business out. By then he was discovering too, that
he could make a lot more money a lot more easily by going into the bootlegging business. He had learned about the possibilities while running the restaurant, when some of the railroaders who were good friends and
customers of his asked him if he could supply them with whiskey when they wanted it. One other result of the restaurant venture was that Paul became such a good cook that he would often thereafter cook up his
specialties for the family and relieve our mother of the task. One of his specialties I remember which was a family favorite was baked bullhead with pepper sauce. It was one of the tastiest fish meals I have
ever experienced. Our three large lots took up 'nearly a quarter of the block, and allowed space for an enormous garden which our mother (Minnie) maintained every summer to stock our great
fruit cellar full of canned fruits and vegetables for the winter months ... and which often cut into our playing time when Dad ordered us to ”help Ma” with the weeding, or hoeing, or watering, or picking the potato bugs.
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