David Aird-- Fresh Off the Boat to Employed: 52 Ancestors 2021 Prompt “Working”

Working from Day Three In America
David Aird: 1897-1975

 

I was delighted to discover a news clipping about David Aird, my husband’s granduncle, that provided some background on how he came to get a job at the Detroit Free Press. The story was a perfect illustration of how David and his brothers came to America ready to work hard and build a new life, and how they arrived at just the right time to make that dream come true.

David Aird was born September 12, 1897 in Dundee, Scotland to parents James Aird and Jane Ann Robertson Aird. James worked as a cabinetmaker; David was the youngest of seven children. The family lived at 14 Peddie Street in Dundee, just down the street from Jane’s brother Thomas, whose family had lived at 10 Peddie in 1891, and at 12 Peddie after 1901.

Peddie Street in Dundee, early 1900s

According to John Aird’s memoirs, his grandfather James Aird was “evidently quite skilled at his trade, but he became an alcoholic, drank up much of his wages, and the family lived in poverty. They seldom entertained friends at home because [Jane] could not be sure in what condition her husband would come home from work. Sometimes the children had to be sent to retrieve him from the tavern. Eventually his drinking led to cirrhosis of the liver, and he then stopped drinking, but the damage was already done, and in two years he was dead. My grandmother later said those final two years (of sobriety) were the happiest of her life.”

To help support the family while her husband’s earnings were erratic, Jane arranged for the oldest boys to be apprenticed in a trade—James and William as electrician apprentices, and Harry first with a greengrocer and then with a hardware store owner.  William, the oldest son, married in 1904, and soon had a son of his own to support. Looking for new and better opportunities, he left Scotland for America in 1907. He, his wife and little son arrived in New York on May 12, 1907, a year before his father James died back in Scotland.

David was only ten when his father died in 1908. The family was left impoverished. Jane took in washing to support her children, and soon her children began emigrating one by one to America, following in William’s footsteps. John Aird said that each of them would arrive in America with “a handful of gold coins, required proof that they were not indigent. Once established in the new country, the coins were sent home so that the next brother cold use them to gain entry.” Harry was the first to leave, arriving in New York on November 13, 1910 at age 24. The eldest child, Isabella, followed, arriving July 17, 1911 at age 31, already an old maid. James followed May 2, 1913.

By 1914, the four oldest children were gainfully employed in the Detroit area, and were able to afford to send for their mother and the remaining siblings. Fortuitously, Jane and her children arrived in New York aboard the ship Campania on June 1, 1914, just barely a month before World War I erupted and made sea travel perilous. Sister Jean Aird was 22 years old, Andrew Aird was 19, and young David was 16.

RMS Campania

David described his arrival in the news article, remembering that they arrived on a Monday, and

“Friends met them and took them to Jersey City for Supper. Then they were put aboard a Detroit-bound train.

‘We arrived here (Detroit) Tuesday morning,’ Aird said. ‘That night there was an ad in the paper for a boy to work in the Free Press composing room. William told me how to get to the Free Press. I went down the next day and was hired. I had a job on my second day in Detroit and only my third in the United States.”

David worked for six years as an apprentice in the composing room, learning the linotype machine and other newspaper composition skills. He left the newspaper for a year but returned in 1921 and worked there until he retired. What an amazing story! His siblings had similar experiences, quickly finding gainful employment that provided opportunities for advancement into a middle-class life.

Detroit News Composing Room, painting by James Scripps Booth. Where David Aird worked.

David married Laura Streng on October 17, 1923. He was 26 and she was 24. They had two children, Kenneth, born June 13, 1925, and Marjorie Laura, born February 16, 1934. John remembers that David loved his children.

However, David’s life in America was not perfect. John Aird recalls that David got a reputation in the family as a bit of a mooch, never contributing to summer camping trip supplies or helping with fruit canning, but expecting to share in the products of his siblings’ efforts.

John also wrote:

“Uncle Dave seems to have been basically a weak person. In his middle years, he became addicted to slot machine gambling and loved to tell us how he walked up to a certain machine and put a nickel in it and pulled the lever and at first crack got back so many dollars’ worth of coins.”

John’s mother pulled John aside to explain that Dave’s attempts to repeat that little miracle led to dollars and dollars of losses thereafter. David’s poor wife, Laura, came to talk to John’s parents “about the fact that Uncle Dave was losing so much money at the slot machines that they hardly had enough to live on. She could not even get an accounting of his losses…she would have left him if she could, but had no way of supporting herself and the children without him. She asked my father to have a talk with Uncle Dave and try to straighten him out. Of course it did no good.”

After that point, David and his family pulled away from the other Airds, rarely joining family celebrations or visiting his mother. John and his side of the family knew very little about David, Laura and the children. Presumably David got his gambling problem under control at some point, as he continued to hold his position at the newspaper, and was admired in the community and in the St. Andrews Society enough to receive the award of merit and appreciation from the mayor of Detroit.

David retired from the Detroit Free Press in 1964 after thirty years with the company. He moved to Livonia, Michigan in 1973, and died there on March 12, 1975. Laura preceded him in death.

David’s story of how he got a job three days after arriving in a new country shows that he and his siblings arrived at a very welcoming time for American immigrants. David had no papers, no experience, and no references other than immediate family, yet even so, a large, respectable company like the Detroit Free Press immediately hired him. They trained him in a trade that would support him and his family for his entire life. 

I don’t believe that could ever happen in present-day America. Even the most menial jobs now require some sort of credentials. Companies would never hire a new immigrant today until the immigrant obtained a green card that would permit them to work in the United States. The only businesses that would hire someone fresh off the boat in this day and age would be businesses operating illegally, paying in cash under the table. Those jobs are only the most menial and most dangerous types of labor. And of course now immigrants are looked upon with disdain and anger by a large segment of the American public which makes their lives even more difficult. The “Build the Wall” people speak so disdainfully of how today’s immigrants expect a handout, ignoring the fact that our country now refuses to allow them to legally work. These people forget how just a century ago their own immigrant ancestors had opportunities that our country has now closed off to today’s immigrants. How quickly we forget.

Sources: 

Detroit Free Press, accessed through Newspapers.com

John Aird Memoir