One of the men who worked in the slaughterhouse was a socialist, a thin, burning-eyed man in his thirties. Dick Nikowsski was twenty years old. This socialist worked beside Dick, and became his friend. He talked endlessly, obsessively about “the bosses” and “the working stiffs.” Half the time Dick couldn’t follow the socialist, didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, thought only that he was going to get them all in trouble. But he liked the socialist because behind the rage he sensed something wild and wounded in the man, and besides, whenever there was a dispute between the foreman and a worker, the socialist was the only one who stuck his neck out for the worker.

Then, one day in summer when it was so blistering hot in the slaughterhouse the sweat was pouring down into the men’s eyes, blinding them, the socialist suddenly turned to Dick and said to him: “Do you know where the owners are now? Right now while you and I are here sweating like pigs?” “No,” Dick replied, “where?” The socialist took a folded page of newspaper from his pocket. “There!” he thundered. “At the coast!” Dick stared blindly at the picture of a group of men and women lying languidly by the sea. The blue eyes of the seventy-year-old Nikowsski stare at me, fifty years disappearing in their wide gaze. “I didn’t even know what the coast was,” he says in wonder as fresh as that of the twenty-year-old still alive inside him.