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quarter employed. They had one day of work a week sometimes in the mines. So he was setting up little plots of land for them and showing them how to raise food. They were actually raising wheat. He insisted on everybody's raising wheat and grinding it for their own bread. As an Italian he knew how to do it. He had grown up on one of those farms. He was having them do that. He was getting a cow not for every family, but for the best families - the families who could take care of a cow. He was getting a hog for almost everyone.

He invented an idea which has now become a considerable idea - the Catholio Rural Life Project. He's the head of it now and it was based upon his experiment at this place in Iowa.

I started into this discussion to say that these degraded coal miners were very religious. I use the word “degraded” not as anything that they had done to degrade themselves, but they were living and working in a degraded situation which must have been degraded for many years before the depression. They were the only miners I ever saw who were not sort of lit up by the idea that they were superior to all others. I think they probably were just persons who had not been miners in the old country, although some of the Bohemians were. The others had sort of been corralled out of the big cities to come and work in these mines, or had drifted into