[question] Jacobs? He was a thief. He would change the time to get extra minutes of work from all the girls.

[question] He would set the hands of the clock back. Or just stop the hands until someone would make a complaint and then he would just shrug. He did it very often, yes, but he wasn’t the only one to think of that kind of stealing. He was a man without a conscience who would take from anyone what he could get. I told you already when we were having tea, before you turned on your machine so you catch my voice, about how he would act like he couldn’t do sums to give us the right money for adding up all the slips—we had these slips, they showed how much work we did in a week. Believe me, you don’t want to waste time thinking about this little man, this nobody. I heard he died in a fire in his apartment a long time ago now.

[question] You could say there was some irony about it. That doesn’t interest me so much. It was when I was working for the union, you know I was in the office of the Women’s Trade Union League for those years after I closed my store when the neighborhood changed, we talked about that already on the telephone when you called that first time, you think I don’t remember? Maybe I remember better than you. Williamsburg was a decent place to be for all those years on Stagg Street and then it was not so nice after that, and all my customers were gone and anyway it was too much work, with such long hours, and the stealing, it was bad, and I was robbed two times, so that was how I got the news, in the union office, there was a commotion about the irony of course, that he should live from one fire and then die in another, and then there was some little newspaper article with some wrong facts, these articles, they always make mistakes. [note: See Long Island Express, late edition, February 3, 1956, “Triangle Fire Survivor Succumbs to Blaze”]

[question] Oh, nothing important. I don’t remember what was wrong, just that there were mistakes, like in every newspaper article. [humorous aside by interviewer, not relevant for transcription] He was living by himself in Long Beach, near the boardwalk somebody told me. Or I knew that from somewhere. Something caught fire from his stove, I think that was it. But about this, you already know. You know more than I do. I am not interested but you, you are interested.

[question] He had no family? If you say so. I don’t care about that. A lot of the people I knew from that time at the Triangle, they retired there and Lido Beach, too, which was right next to Long Beach, but all little houses, not the nice big apartment buildings, these buildings were just like in the city, they had them at Long Beach, so it was like being in the city plus you got the ocean to look at. But he didn’t have so many friends from those people. Not anyone I knew. I heard he got sick and wasn’t right in the head, but I don’t know about that. Why do we speak of him so much?