Delousing The Children

In the daytime, we noticed there was a … usually if you went by the street, there’d be a pig in the house and it’d be tethered. They tethered a pig. A pig apparently is fairly docile when they have a string on their foot. So they’d have a string on this pig’s foot. So once we got to know the Italians a little more, and find out somebody had been in New York. There’s always one or two that had been lived in New York or Philadelphia, and he’s gonna tell you all about it, see. So we said to him, “What about this pig? ” “Well,” he said, “the vermin in the beds and that will go on the pig quicker than it will on a human. So you bring the pig in all day and any vermin that’s there, the bed bugs and lice and that, will go on the pig. Then you take the pig out at night and you get rid of them.” What the pig didn’t take out, on a sunny December day of '43 … the ladies would be sitting with a baby in their arms, or small children on her hand, fine tooth combs and a small saucer of olive oil. And they were delousing the kids and putting the lice in the olive oil to kill them.