Then follows a personal description filled out by the employment officer:

• ”Height:  5 ft. 8 inches
• Weight:  164 lbs.
• Color of hair:  Dark Brown
• Color of eyes:  Blue”

Finally, a most revealing portion of the application tells of Paul’s restless nature, his dissatisfaction with ”ordinary” boring jobs, his driving urge to find something more fulfilling and satisfying.  It is a record of his "occupations" over the ten years from 1900 through 1909.  He attended public school at St. Cloud from May 21, 1900 to June 1, 1903.  He quit school to become a section hand for the Great Northern Railway, at St. Cloud, June 1, 1903 to September 28, 1905.  He quit that job and hired out as a fireman for the Great Northern at Melrose, Minnesota, from September 28, 1905 to June 22, 1908.  Again he quit and made a very brief sampling of car repair work at the Great Northern shops at Waite Park, Minnesota, from June 22, 1908 to September 15, 1908.

At that point he decided no aspect of railroading seemed right for him.  In the light of having years later come to know him as his eldest son, I have no doubt that my father would not, could not, work at anything he didn't enjoy doing.  Now, apparently disenchanted with taking orders from the inevitable foremen who ran the railroad, Paul struck out in a new direction.  He tried farming.  He went to work as a farm hand for his cousin Adam Sakry (son of Andrew Sakry) who ran a farm near Barnesville, Minnesota ... and he lasted through one cold, bitter, lonely prairie winter, from September 15, 1908 to April 2, 1909.  By spring, he was back in St. Cloud.

 Perhaps in sheer desperation, he took a job as a stone laborer at a St. Cloud Granite Finishing Shed (possibly the United Granite Company which conveniently operated a Stone Shed only a half block from the original Sakry address at 1624 Breckenridge Avenue North).  His foreman was a Swede, Charley Johnson.  I can readily suspect that my father, unlike many of the other Polish men of the ”West End” neighborhood, could have been just a bit reluctant to take orders from a Swede. (My Uncle Joe Sakry had once told me that, ”Paul couldn't take orders from anybody,” much less a non-Polander!)  Be that as it may, Paul put himself under the supervision of granite foreman Charley on April 2, 1909, only to sever the short-lived relationship on December 1, 1909.

All those jobs.  And each time, Paul quit.  Or so he wrote on that Great Northern application form of May, 1910 in Minneapolis.  However, considering Paul's short fuse and independent spirit, it is not entirely unlikely that he may have been fired from at least a few of those jobs simply for insubordination or loss of temper when a boss got abusive or ”over-bossy.”

 And so, after three years of schooling and five jobs over a six-year span, Paul found himself at age 27 trying once again to get back on the railroad.  He apparently moved to Minneapolis early in 1910, and, from his Great Northern application of May 21st, it can be assumed he went to work as a railroad switchman in that city soon after.  A post card to Paul Sakry dated May 3, 1911 contains a rather cryptic message: ”Hellow Pallie ... be sure and come on down Sunday.  You know about what ... and be nice about it ‘cause I been told she always pays everybody.”  The card is postmarked at St. Paul, Minnesota.  It is unsigned, but is apparently from one of Paul's pals.  One can only surmise the meaning of this message (and surely a bit of playful ”wildoatsing” is not without some likelihood), but the card does establish that Paul had an address at 704 Third Avenue Southeast, in Minneapolis, no doubt at a rooming house.  He probably lived there from mid-1910 to late the following year.  And by then, another change was in the offing.  But this time it came in the form of a promotion, from switchman to brakeman.  A Great Northern Railway Seniority List of freight brakemen in service, dated January 1, 1912, for the St. Cloud and Fergus Falls Division, has the name of Paul Edward Sakry as No.114 (near the bottom of the list as a recently employed brakeman).  His seniority date, which is probably the date when he quit switching in Minneapolis and began as a brakeman back in St. Cloud, is December 4, 1911.

 After studying all the information in my father's 1910 job application for work on the Great Northern Railroad, I have had to conclude that I know of no other document relating to him which helps so clearly to understand a fundamental side to his nature which puzzled and perturbed so many of his friends and family.  He was a maverick of a sort, a free spirit who would ”take crap from nobody.”  If he didn't like the driver, he jumped off the wagon and sometimes (according to his younger brother John who was not unlike him) not before he had punched the driver in the nose.  Paul seems to have been deeply aware of what his parents had left in Poland ... the futility, the oppression, the dull stagnancy of European vassalage with its futureless dependency, subjection and servitude.  But unlike most of his family and Polish peers who found it difficult in America at first to shake off the old ancestral habits and hang-ups of subservience, this American-born, Polish-American Paul Sakry grabbed onto his birthright of freedom as soon as he learned about it in school.  At any rate, he certainly recognized and caught its spark more quickly than most.

 Even in the most difficult of his boyhood hardships and struggles he seemed to sense that in America one didn’t have to settle for what others decided or were willing to allow.  Such a radical departure from old European traditions, of course, had its own price and its own related problems.  Here he was, a free spirit in a free land ... but the freedom had come too quickly to be wisely handled or fully understood.  Such boundless independence as these uninitiated American newcomers now possessed could be troublesome, even dangerous, without some proper conditioning.  The conditioning would have to come gradually through learning, experience, trial and error.  Paul could handle the trial and error all right, but he had not acquired much learning ... and, as subsequent events were to prove, it was going to take most of these "European transplants” at least a generation or two to garner the experience to cope with American Freedom wisely and successfully.

 Formal education, of course, is not a litmus test of good character or motivation in any person.  Paul was seen by relatives and family friends as a funny, fun loving and good natured fellow.  Paul’s sister Francis would tell of one of Paul’s favorite ”cut ups.”  He could play one simple tune on a piano (mostly simple chords) and when asked to play any song, he would always play the same song but simply give it whatever title had been requested!  Francis remembered Paul as happy-go-lucky and always fun to have around.

 So Paul Sakry, with little or no schooling beyond the barest rudimentary eight grades of ”readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic”, but with a strong driving sense of this strange new blessing of liberty for which his father and mother had given up their homeland, expressed his independence in the only way he knew: to hell with tyrants, even if they are merely the section foremen on a labor crew; one must work hard if need be, but never as a slave, never as a subservient inferior; if the job doesn't suit, if it doesn't somehow satisfy, if it makes you swallow too much guff, if it doesn't fit ... quit!