Ultrarunner. It is an ancient Polish coat of arms. It originally appeared about 1000 AD.
My dad was born in Poland in 1900. Came to this country in 1907, probably without papers as that was totally acceptable then. He became naturalized in the 30’s.
He survived the depression by working at a number of jobs that most people were not interested in.
He worked in the Circus cleaning up after the elephants. Him and his brother worked in the coal mines where they didn’t pay you but gave you “credit” at the company store. You never had enough credit to sustain your self and you couldn’t quit until you paid off your debt. Legalized slavery I guess. One night he and his brother put on all the clothes they had, stuck a spare pair of shoes in their back pockets (shoes were a very hard to come by item) and slipped out down the railroad tracks at night.
He did steeple jack work cleaning the tops of smoke stacks 300’ up in the air by just pulling your self up in a bosons chair. Occasionally the pulley at the top would jamb and his brother who was a semi professional boxer and built like a fire hydrant would climb hand over hand up the ropes, stopping just once to rest. 300 feet!
He worked as a roofer, painter and other menial jobs. The roofing job was his downfall, no pun intended, as he fell off a 3 story roof I am told, but that seems questionable, when he stepped on a patch of ice that was shaded behind a chimney. It did not kill him, but he never worked again. The good news is that he lived 34 more years and died of old age.
Lots of people lived colorful lives back then.
