This photograph depicts my grandfather Joseph Louis Baron (November 6, 1918 - June 4, 2012) on the left, my great-aunt Caroline, who is still alive and living in Verona, PA and in her late 90s, and my great-uncle John, on the right. The three siblings played music together growing up in Braddock, PA, in the Baron family's Croatian tamburitza band, which was led by my great-grandfather John. By age 12, the three Baron kids were proficient on traditional tamburitza instruments such as the prim, tambura and bas-prim, and were put to work playing at weddings, apartments or wherever my great-grandfather could hire them out (places where shots of whiskey apparently flowed during breaks). A tamburitza musician, US Steel employee, guard for the first official West Virginia All-State Basketball Team, and a member of the Army, my grandpa was born in 1918 to John and Helena Baron, immigrants from Zagreb, Croatia, who carved out a life in Braddock, in a rented flat near Pittsburgh's burgeoning steel mills. I often try to recount the many stories my "gramps" told us over his 94 years on this planet. Such as tales about my great-grandfather, an extremely strict disciplinarian who ruled their house with an iron hand. The family scratched out a living by renting out a room to boarders who worked shift work at the local mills--and the beds in that room were always filled with a rotating cast of laborers.
