ABSTRACT
Gary's third winter held few comforts for the thousands of foreign construction and mill workers crowded together in the makeshift boarding houses on the town's southside. Work days were long, and frigid temperatures and blowing sand made life difficult. The thirty single men who called the boarding house at Massachusetts Street and Eighteenth Avenue home welcomed the services of fourteen-year-old Katie Kordich, who did their cooking and housework for four months. Her two dollars a week also came in handy for her family while her father was temporarily too sick to work. The police, however, had other ideas. Following state law, they ordered the father to enroll the girl in school; but, when he entered the boarding house, the boarders refused to let her leave and shot at him. She was finally rescued by the police and placed in the local school on June 1, 1909. "She is well along in the grades and is exceptionally bright considering her training in a foreign home," the local paper commented. 1
