[question] We got our jobs at the Triangle on the same day, because my sister and I make a promise to each other always we stay together and we work together, because we are all we got, each other, so we always stick together and take care of each other.

[question] My sister was a wonderful girl. She always looked out for me.

[question] I was the older. So I looked out for her also, like I said. We looked out for each other.

[question] We started at the Triangle almost a year before the fire, in April 1910, with the jobs we had the whole time there, we were sleeve setters, a tricky job you got to do it just right and you can’t hide the mistakes the way you can hide some other kinds of mistakes you make, working so fast. You set the sleeve crooked, you ruin the piece. You can’t make mistakes and you got to work fast. My sister Pauline, she did the right sleeves and I did the left sleeves and between us we could finish a lot of shirtwaists. Sometimes if everything went perfectly we could do twenty-four shirtwaists in an hour, three hundred shirtwaists on a good day, but that was only if the machines didn’t break down and if the thread didn’t break. You had to be careful you didn’t put a needle through your finger. You know why that was bad? Nobody cares if it hurts or gets infected. It was bad because then you would bleed on the goods, and the bosses would make you pay for anything you ruined with your blood, even just a little dot of blood and the piece was ruined. So if you were bleeding you would tie a piece of scrap around your finger tight to keep working. You always got to keep your blood to yourself, which girls know anyway if you know what I mean, but it was hard because you got to work with your hands and they can get caught and you can have a sore place that keeps bleeding, especially in the winter if you get chilblains, that’s what we used to call them, and that would hurt very much in your fingers and make them split and bleed too easy.

[question] I worked a little slower than my sister, so sometimes she would have more finished work in her pile. The way we did it, because she worked faster she would do her sleeve first and then I would take from her pile to do the left sleeve.

[question] Did I say my seams were better? When did I say that, I never met you before. [Remark quoted from oral history in Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire Fifty Years Later, commemorative booklet published by the ILGWU] Okay, so forty years ago I made a comment maybe I shouldn’t say about my sewing being just a little better than my sister’s. If you know so much, why do you come here with poppy-seed cake—maybe we can get some tea to dip it and it won’t be so dry—to pester an old lady asking questions you already got all the answers for? You ask me questions just to hear me say the same things, for some kind of test? I am very old. Do you know what it is to be so old? You learn you don’t care so much about a lot of things you used to think were important.