The front page of the Erie Times-News on Christmas Day a century ago featured a kind of public Christmas card from a widowed immigrant and her family.
Mary Stankiewicz, 39, and her eight children were enjoying food and other gifts brought by a steady stream of neighbors and strangers.
The best present of all was the home that had been built and furnished for the family from “materials galore” donated by the community in response to an Erie Times-News appeal.
“Merry Christmas to you all,” Mary Stankiewicz told her benefactors in a greeting beneath the Dec. 25, 1924, newspaper photograph of her family, “from Mary, Mike, John, Joseph, Sophie, George, Stella, Little Petie and myself.”
‘No words can possibly describe the place’
Brunislaw (also spelled Bromislev) Stankiewicz, had been killed in late 1923 or early 1924, by differing accounts. He was hit by a wagon when the horses pulling it spooked and ran.
His widow and children were living in a single 9-by-16-foot room at East 33rd and Brandes streets when the Erie Board of Health condemned the dwelling in spring 1924.