"Psia krew!" (dog's blood)--How I almost didn't come to be...

Towards the end of the "Great Depression," (will this term now be applied to the present?--anyway, around 1936-37) my dad had luckily found a job stoking the blast furnaces of Republic Steel in the Flats area of Cleveland. At this time, he was courting my mother, the youngest in a Polish immigrant family of twelve children who spoke Polish at home. 

Being an enterprising "interculturalist" in the big city "melting pot" of the time, my dad asked his co-workers to teach him some Polish romantic talk to plead his cause with his girlfriend. They did. 

When Saturday night rolled around my father tried his new found Slavic eloquence on his date. My mother had not heard these words before, so the next day she asked her dad what they meant. "Psia krew!" (SOB in English) exclaimed my grandfather, "I kill him!"