Interview with Elsie Puputti of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Topics include: Elsie Puputti was born in Finland, June 26, 1932. He father died when she was very young and her mother struggled to raise her and her siblings on their small farm. Memories of how poor the conditions were in Finland and what it was like during the war. Mrs Puputti's mother had been born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts and eventually was able to return with three of her daughters January 6, 1949. Arriving in New York harbor and her first memories of the U.S., how things compared to Finland. The help her aunt was to her family when they first arrived. She worked as a maid until she was married in 1951. She went to night school to learn more English. Going to church, social activities, and how she met her husband. Customs she missed from Finland and traditions she kept. How Mrs. Puputti started her store. Her children and their interests. How her life in the U.S. compares to what it would have been like in ; 1 INTERVIEWER: Mrs. Puputti, where were you born? MRS. PUPUTTI: I was born in Finland. INTERVIEWER: In what? MRS. PUPUTTI: [Unintelligible - 00:00:06]. INTERVIEWER: And when was that? MRS. PUPUTTI: 1932. INTERVIEWER: What month? MRS. PUPUTTI: June 26. INTERVIEWER: Okay. Could you briefly describe what your earlier years were like there, like what was your family like? MRS. PUPUTTI: Uh, well, we had a very small home. We were -- my father died when I was very young. I was only three years old. My mother took care of us, six of us. And everything was quite poor, I think. Very much, we didn't have very much of anything, you know? My mother was born here in Fitchburg. And after my father had died, she tried to struggle on. We had a little piece of land. And, and she wanted to -- she figured when we get a little bit older she wants to come back to Fitchburg, try to see if she can make a little better life for us here. INTERVIEWER: Did she, did you live on a farm, like? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Yeah? So she had to the farm work and all of you helped? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Small farm? MRS. PUPUTTI: Very small, yeah. INTERVIEWER: Uh, what kind of uh education did you or your brothers and sisters have? MRS. PUPUTTI: Well, we all went to like a grammar school or like [unintelligible - 00:01:22] that type of a school. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. MRS. PUPUTTI: Then two years after that, that's how extensive my education.2 INTERVIEWER: Because after that you usually have to pay for your education, and a lot of people couldn't go then. So you can remember times were sort of poor or anything like that? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. We had sometimes very rough times. Most of the time we always had food, except right after my father died. That was the hardest time. But then after that we always managed to have food. And then we had relatives here. My aunts, they used to send us packages. In the wartime we could get clothes and things like that. To me, a lot of times we were almost better off than some of the other families [unintelligible - 00:02:12] they had bigger houses and more land. INTERVIEWER: You were happy as a child, I think? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes. I can't remember being really miserable. INTERVIEWER: Do you remember any important events that happened? Like you said you were there during the war. Can you remember anything about the occupation and the revolutions? MRS. PUPUTTI: Well, where we lived, we weren't really touched that much, except that I remember when we did receive lot of… what do you call [unintelligible - 00:02:43] other people that move to our…? INTERVIEWER: Refugees? MRS. PUPUTTI: Refugees. Yeah. We took care of some of them and tried to get them housing and helping like that. I was… I can't remember. I must have been about -- I don't even know how old I was, maybe 12 years old. Could be that I'm wrong with my… INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Do you remember any bombings or anything like that? MRS. PUPUTTI: No, we didn't have bombings in where we lived. Not even close. We saw the planes go over, but that's all. INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide to come to this country? Or your mother made the decision, right? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes. I was young. I was 16, 15, 16 years old. She just wanted to come here. We were young. Three girls, my oldest sister and my 3 younger sister. And she just decided to take us with her because we weren't married or anything. She wanted to, you know, keep us together. INTERVIEWER: So she left some of the children in Finland? MRS. PUPUTTI: She left two of the older girls. My brother died in the war. That was the one of the hardest part for me. He was my only brother. He died. But there was five girls, and two of them were married, so they stayed. INTERVIEWER: So this was something that your mother had planned for quite a while, right? She had always hoped that when she figured you were older to come over here? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: How did the others feel about the choice to come over here? Did your relatives say they thought it was a good idea, or did they tell you not to? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. Those days it was very hard to get here. That was 1949. Very few people got in. And I remember my mother got in the US because she was born here and she got her citizen papers back. And that was the only reason we were able to make it here. And like I said, we had waited for I think it was about two years for our papers to come through. So it is something that she -- remember, see, she was 13 years old when she left, so she remembers what it was like here. Because we were very, very excited. I was. My older sister wasn't. She had boyfriends, so I guess she wanted to stay. But I was very excited, and my younger sister was very excited. INTERVIEWER: When did you leave? Do you know what date it was? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. We came here January 6, 1949. So it took us about 11 days to… INTERVIEWER: Eleven days to -- and did you come over by boat? MRS. PUPUTTI: By boat, yeah. 4 INTERVIEWER: What was that like? MRS. PUPUTTI: Well, I was very sick. INTERVIEWER: Were most of the family sick? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. MRS. PUPUTTI: Very sick. But it was very exciting because I had never been in a huge ship. INTERVIEWER: Was it a nice boat? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Were you all crowded, or…? MRS. PUPUTTI: No, we had a nice room. We had… the name of the boat was Stockholm. That's a Swedish line. It's one of those big ocean liners. There isn't too many left like that. INTERVIEWER: So aside from being sick, it was a comfortable, pleasant ride. MRS. PUPUTTI: Oh, yes. It was very nice. INTERVIEWER: Do you remember if it cost very much? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah, I think my ticket was $120, because I remember my aunt had paid for it and, you know, here. And after I started working, that was the first thing I did was to pay my ticket. INTERVIEWER: So your relatives here in Fitchburg helped pay for all of you to come over [unintelligible - 00:06:26] because that would be difficult for your mother to raise that much money for all of you. Once you were on the way, did you have any second thoughts about coming, or were you just -- like you said, you were excited, really? MRS. PUPUTTI: No, we were very apprehensive. Very, very -- you know, looking forward and thinking about what it's gonna be like. INTERVIEWER: What place did you enter this country? Do you remember? MRS. PUPUTTI: New York. INTERVIEWER: Was it Ellis Island, or… MRS. PUPUTTI: No, not anymore.5 INTERVIEWER: Just New York harbor? MRS. PUPUTTI: Just like any other tourist. INTERVIEWER: Do you remember what the first thing was that you saw in this country? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. To me, the most striking thing was when I saw the Black people the first time. Then I see some nuns, and I had never seen that. That to me was -- you know, I keep my eye on them quite a while. Then I had picture of the city much different. I had thought it was so beautiful, but there's nothing that can describe. But then it was quite dirty, and I was disappointed, actually. But then… INTERVIEWER: The buildings were tall though. MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. That was something exciting, but… INTERVIEWER: And the Statue of Liberty, things like that. MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. But still, it was so different that it always stays in my mind. INTERVIEWER: So you felt a little disappointed but still happy? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah, still very excited. INTERVIEWER: Was there any type of welcome for you? MRS. PUPUTTI: Nothing big. My aunt came to pick us up. We came from New York to Fitchburg in a bus. INTERVIEWER: Was that the first time you've ever been in a bus? MRS. PUPUTTI: No. INTERVIEWER: No. MRS. PUPUTTI: We had buses in Finland. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Was there any kind of confusion, like did you have a communication problem finding your aunt? MRS. PUPUTTI: No. INTERVIEWER: No, she was right there. MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes. INTERVIEWER: Okay. Did you speak any English at all? MRS. PUPUTTI: No.6 INTERVIEWER: Or any of your family? MRS. PUPUTTI: No. My mother did, few words. She had… INTERVIEWER: She had spoken… MRS. PUPUTTI: But she had forgotten. INTERVIEWER: Forgotten? Yeah. Did you have to go through any formalities here, or were they in Finland that you had to…? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. Only that they'd check your papers. INTERVIEWER: No physicals? MRS. PUPUTTI: No. INTERVIEWER: At least in Finland you probably had to. MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah, we had to go through all the -- we had to get the shots and everything. It was very, very strict. You had to get all kinds of papers. But here they just checked them and… INTERVIEWER: Did you notice any differences when you were traveling from New York to Fitchburg? Did you notice any differences compared to Finland? Like was the land flatter? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. Actually, the roads first, that was something that I had never seen, huge roads. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. MRS. PUPUTTI: Highways. And then the scenery, everything was so much cleaner. The woods are so thick with the underbrush. Things like that. We had clean woods. I mean, you can see. INTERVIEWER: Oh yeah, clear. MRS. PUPUTTI: And then the hills, we had no flat. INTERVIEWER: How about the climate? Did you notice any difference in the temperature? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah, it's… INTERVIEWER: Well, you came in January, so it was pretty… MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah, it was about the same. It was cold here as well. INTERVIEWER: Did you find any differences between like the winters in Finland and how it is around here? Some people say they're more 7 unpredictable. Like in Finland, you get constant snow, whereas here you can get a blizzard. MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah, in Finland you never get two feet at one time. No. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. MRS. PUPUTTI: So that is different, and the air is dryer. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Did you meet any American people along the way, or mostly you were just traveling with your aunt? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. I can't remember. No. INTERVIEWER: Were you pretty much excited still, or were you disappointed at the changes in scenery? Was it still exciting? MRS. PUPUTTI: When we got here, it was very nice. Houses were so big, but not to me, because we're used to it now. But going along the Mechanic Street, and all that Elm Street, High Street apartments, there were these [unintelligible - 00:10:37] and things that look so, so different. I had never pictured nothing like that. INTERVIEWER: Were you disappointed, or you liked it? MRS. PUPUTTI: No, I think it was very unusual. Something about it, I can't put it into words, but it was exciting, somehow so different. INTERVIEWER: Did you and your mother and the other girls, did they stay with your aunt then? MRS. PUPUTTI: No, she had gotten us apartment already. We were our own family right away. INTERVIEWER: And did she get a job somewhere? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. We got jobs, all of us. My youngest sister, Lisa, went to school, but the others, we had to go to work. INTERVIEWER: What did your mother get for a job? MRS. PUPUTTI: We mostly did the housework [unintelligible - 00:11:18] but you have to do [unintelligible - 00:11:21] so did I. INTERVIEWER: Did you do housework for other people? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes. INTERVIEWER: And your other sister too?8 MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. I was like a maid for [unintelligible - 00:11:30] different things until I got married and I quit. INTERVIEWER: When did you get married? MRS. PUPUTTI: Two years later, '51. I met my husband here. He had come from Finland too. INTERVIEWER: Did you ever get a chance to go back to school or to learn English in school? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah, I did go to night school. That's how we [unintelligible - 00:11:50] learn to speak clearly. INTERVIEWER: Otherwise you picked it up? MRS. PUPUTTI: But then you just picked it up on the way. INTERVIEWER: I'm surprised how well the people do that I interviewed when they say they just had like a short time in night school and they just picked it up. It's hard to believe you can do so well. Did you look for a neighborhood that had mostly people of your own nationality, like Finnish people? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. That's not so much that we looked for it, just that… INTERVIEWER: They were all there. MRS. PUPUTTI: … they were right there. INTERVIEWER: Were they friendly? Were the neighbors friendly? MRS. PUPUTTI: Oh, yes. We never had any problems with them. INTERVIEWER: Did it take much time for you to become involved in the church or social activities in this area? MRS. PUPUTTI: Not in the church. We were not immediately, because my mother is very religious and we all are. So we naturally started with the church that -- it was right in the neighborhood, too, the Messiah Lutheran Church. It's just been with us ever since. INTERVIEWER: So you got into church activities and events like that? How about social activities, like dances or picnics?9 MRS. PUPUTTI: A little bit. They used to have like a [unintelligible - 00:12:58] society. They used to have dances those days, but they don't have that much anymore, like [unintelligible - 00:13:02]. INTERVIEWER: Right. Did you use to go? MRS. PUPUTTI: It used to be a little bit [unintelligible - 00:13:08] like they had shows, we used to act and things like that. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. You took part in it? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah, a little bit, but nothing too much. That was one thing that I was -- we were very, very lonesome Christian girls. Very lonesome. We missed our old friends and… INTERVIEWER: Boyfriends and things? Is that how you met your husband, through one of these? MRS. PUPUTTI: No. It was quite interesting. I had met one older gentleman here in evening classes in high school, and he used to tell me about this very interesting boy he used to know and he used to live with in Sweden. And he says if he ever gets here, I would very much like you two to meet. So when my husband came here, first time this gentleman introduced us. And actually, he brought him to my home. That's where I met him very first time, in my own home. So somehow I just end up right away. He was so different, so refreshing coming from [unintelligible - 00:14:12]. INTERVIEWER: Must have been nice he could tell you about [unintelligible - 00:14:15]. What were some of the things that you missed most about Finland, like food or any customs? Did your mother still cook Finnish food? MRS. PUPUTTI: Oh, yeah. Yes. It's not so much that I -- I don't know if I missed anything like that so much, any of the foods or customs or anything like that, just that there's a certain kind of atmosphere, a certain kind of feeling for everybody where they have been or something long years, but not any particular thing.10 INTERVIEWER: Just miss the whole thing. Yeah. Did you keep up any customs? Did your mother practice customs? MRS. PUPUTTI: I suppose so, if you really start to think about it. Like Christmastime, we always had the kinkkus. INTERVIEWER: What's that? MRS. PUPUTTI: That's pork. Fresh pork we cook, [unintelligible - 00:15:14] fish and things like that. INTERVIEWER: You still kept that? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah, we still keep that up. Easter time we used to have special foods we're used to making. Not so much anymore. INTERVIEWER: How about holidays? Did you still have any? [Unintelligible - 00:15:26] maybe all the Finnish people practiced holidays? Could you ever get hold of anything like Finnish books, things like that? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes, we did. Let's see. Oh, I suppose [unintelligible - 00:15:43] well, I have to think of it. I can't remember. INTERVIEWER: You could still read Finnish books? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes. But I can't remember how we got them, but I know there was some. INTERVIEWER: Okay. What were some of things you enjoyed most about your new life? Anything special? Any more conveniences or better pay? MRS. PUPUTTI: Well, yeah. The food was so nice. That was one thing that was very good. And then the cars, you know, started coming out that we had never had a chance to drive like we did here. Well, everything was faster and a bigger scale than what I was used to. INTERVIEWER: Did you like that? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes. Yes, it's something that we'd pursue. Let me think. What would be some other things that would be nice? INTERVIEWER: Would you have had a chance to have your own shop? How did you get involved in this?11 MRS. PUPUTTI: Oh, I know I wouldn't have had the chance to have this own shop like this that I have here. Well, see, one thing though Finland's been always very up to date on fashion, and the quality is superb. My brother-in-law in Finland has a big clothing store, and we used to get these for Christmas and we used to visit them. Like in 1969, the whole family, we went over, and just to see that store. It just inspired me to think that, "Why couldn't we have something like that in Fitchburg with all the Finnish people here?" So it would really be something special for them. So I had dreamed about it, but I didn't really think that I'll ever do it. But then one time a couple years ago, after I was talking with my sister, she got so excited that, "Go ahead, do it," that I go to my brother-in-law and see what he thinks if he could give me the factories and people to send me some things, you know. It's hard for you to get started and then you still have some factories send you some things and they don't know anything about you. But he was good help with me that way that he got them to send me some things, and then that's how it started. It's two years now and they keep sending us. And it's so nice because it's so different. Everything is so well-made. People seem to like -- like I said, steady customers. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. MRS. PUPUTTI: Continual. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. I meant to ask you, did you ever have any children after you got married? MRS. PUPUTTI: Oh, yeah. I have a daughter and a son. Daughter is 20 and my son is 18. INTERVIEWER: What do they do? MRS. PUPUTTI: She sells right here. She is going to Graham Junior College for this retailing and merchandising, and the boy is going to Worcester Tech. My husband has a small machine shop, so we have two small businesses in Fitchburg.12 INTERVIEWER: Cool. MRS. PUPUTTI: Our son is interested in that life. He wants to be engineer. INTERVIEWER: Keep in the family. MRS. PUPUTTI: It's not that we push him, but it's what he enjoys. INTERVIEWER: No, it's his choice. Were you able to understand the local newspapers and magazines and radio and things like that? MRS. PUPUTTI: First, right away when we came, there was a Finnish program on the air that time. And actually, we were interviewed. INTERVIEWER: Oh, yeah? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. Because it was so unusual for new people to come, immigrants to come from Finland at that time. And there was [unintelligible - 00:19:48] the Finnish newspaper we used to read… INTERVIEWER: So you could keep up with the news? MRS. PUPUTTI: [Unintelligible - 00:19:52] anymore after you get used to the English one. And things like that. And we used to -- like in the church we could hear Finnish language all these years. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. MRS. PUPUTTI: We still have Finnish services. INTERVIEWER: So do you speak at home? MRS. PUPUTTI: Not anymore. INTERVIEWER: Do you speak it with your husband, possibly? MRS. PUPUTTI: No. INTERVIEWER: No. MRS. PUPUTTI: Very seldom anymore. It's not that we don't want to. It's just INTERVIEWER: It's that you're so used to… MRS. PUPUTTI: … that we're so used to. And I remember first we wanted to learn English, so we purposely said that we're not going to speak in Finnish so we could learn it, and then it became a habit. INTERVIEWER: So the children never picked up Finnish? MRS. PUPUTTI: Oh, they did.13 INTERVIEWER: Oh, they did? MRS. PUPUTTI: They did. And they still understand almost all of it. And they can even speak quite a bit. INTERVIEWER: That's good. I think it's good to keep it in the family if you can. How about political preference? Do you have any, and how'd you choose? MRS. PUPUTTI: I'm strictly independent. I used to vote when I feel the man deserves it. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Okay. Did you ever take any active parts? Did you ever campaign for anybody? MRS. PUPUTTI: No, not really. INTERVIEWER: After you had lived here for a while, do you ever write back to people in Finland and tell them to come over, encourage them? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes. As a matter of fact, I did. Nine years ago I got my sister's family here. I was responsible for it. It was eight people. That was one of the biggest families that had come from all time. And they were interviewed on the boat, and they was taking pictures and everything because it was unusual. Large families like that doesn't usually get up all and just leave. INTERVIEWER: Did they stay in Fitchburg? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes, they're still here. INTERVIEWER: They enjoyed it? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yeah. The oldest boy went through air course, and he's living in Alaska now. INTERVIEWER: Oh. So they're happy that you gave them that advice? Would you ever consider going back to Finland to live? MRS. PUPUTTI: No, I don't think so. I love to go there, you know, and stay for a while. Unless when I'm really old, I don't know. INTERVIEWER: After you retire or something?14 MRS. PUPUTTI: See, we feel it's home here in Fitchburg. We have a home in Rindge Road, and we've been there for 15 years. The children were born there. It would be too hard now to… INTERVIEWER: This is where your roots are now. Yeah. MRS. PUPUTTI: … cut everything and… INTERVIEWER: You have gone back to Finland though? MRS. PUPUTTI: We have, yes. INTERVIEWER: How many times? MRS. PUPUTTI: Quite a few times. First time we went 1969, then I've gone twice after that. INTERVIEWER: Did you notice the changes that are happening over there? MRS. PUPUTTI: Oh, yes. And we do have to say that Finland goes much faster than we do here in Fitchburg, much faster. INTERVIEWER: They caught up to United States standards and all. MRS. PUPUTTI: Oh yes. And the housing and everything is -- they are building much more than we are here, much more. INTERVIEWER: Do you feel that generally life has worked out better for you here than it would have in Finland? MRS. PUPUTTI: Yes, I really think so. I feel maybe -- like I said, my husband and I, we took the chances on business here. I feel a lot American people, they probably wouldn't have dared to try to do what we do. But because we came here, we didn't have anything… INTERVIEWER: You couldn't lose anything. MRS. PUPUTTI: So we feel that even if we have something little bit now, we came with nothing. That's what my husband says, he came with $20, and if he leaves with $20 that's fine. INTERVIEWER: Wow. Do you feel your children have a better chance in this country than they would've in Finland? Or do you think now it's different, maybe?15 MRS. PUPUTTI: Well, they probably do. But right now over there if you're ambitious you can go almost as far over there as you can here. I feel that in our case it was better here. INTERVIEWER: Of any plans that you made when you came here, is there any you haven't achieved yet that you regret? Or have you really accomplished more than you probably ever expected? MRS. PUPUTTI: Well, see, I never thought of going into business while I was at home and taking care of the children when they were smaller. So to me, this is something that I didn't even think of doing until the last minute. I think I've done better than I've really expected. INTERVIEWER: That's good. What is the most important advantage you feel that you have as a citizen of this country? MRS. PUPUTTI: Well, even things are much rougher now here than they were when I first came. I remember how we used to keep the doors open, now we have to lock everything up. All that was much nicer then, but I still think that Americans have more freedom than any other country in the whole world. Even if Finland is free, but there's still some certain logical things about -- well, I suppose from Russia because they're so close. I feel that people don't appreciate that feeling; they abuse it. That makes me awful upset sometimes, you know. They should go someplace to live where, really, you can't speak that clear. Yeah, you cannot blast the president in any place. You can't really do that. INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that's true. Many times you hear people say they long for the good old days. When you think back at what the good old days was supposed to be for you, which would you rather have, the good old days or now? MRS. PUPUTTI: I think I'd rather have now. I think it's a saying, "the good old days." I can't say that I have anything in -- my life was anything so terrible that I want to take back. But I still like the present. I still feel that we're going ahead. It doesn't mean that I value the 16 money or want to be something rich or something like that so much. It's just that unless you can pay your bills and be comfortable and happy in your everyday life, that's the [unintelligible - 00:26:02]. INTERVIEWER: So you feel you've lived a good life? MRS. PUPUTTI: I think so. INTERVIEWER: Okay. Thank you./AT/jf/ah/es
Voices of Virginia pulls together stories from oral history collections from across decades and archives to create an all-audio source companion for Virginias high school and college students. The "album" is only two hours long, but contains dozens of short oral histories from eyewitnesses to key moments in American history, from the end of the Civil War to the 1980s. The excerpts are downloadable, accessible by smartphone, and accompanied by a transcript. Audio clips are also available on Soundcloud . Youll also find a brief introduction to each narrator, historical context adapted from experts at Encyclopedia Virginia , American Yawp , and Public Domain sources, and helpful classroom tools like discussion questions, activities, and lesson plans that fit into both the Virginia high school and college U.S. History curriculum. By following the larger national story with narratives from across the Commonwealth, Voices of Virginia grounds students in how history guides and is guided by everyday people and their experiences. Voices of Virginia is a winner of the 2020 Mason Multi-Media Award from the Oral History Association. Over twenty archives across Virginia and beyond have generously donated segments, and granted permission for their oral histories to be reproduced and publicly shared under a CC BY NC SA 4.0 license, which ensures that the content remains free to use and re-purpose for all listeners. These archives include: African American Historical Society of Portsmouth Amherst Glebe Arts Response Archives of Appalachia (Eastern Tennessee State University) Cape Charles Rosenwald Initiative Center for Documentary Studies and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Duke University) Charles City County Richard M. Bowman Center for Local History Chuck Mauro, private collection (Herndon, VA) Clarence Dunnaville (American Civil War Museum) Desegregation of Virginia Education Project (Old Dominion University) Digital Library of Appalachia (Appalachian College Association) Eastern Shore of Virginia Barrier Islands Center Friends of the Rappahannock George Mason University Grayson County Historical Society Greene County Historical Society Mountain Home Center (Bland County Public Schools) Old Dominion University Libraries Special Collections and University Archives Oral History Archives at Columbia (Columbia University) Roanoke Public Library (Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project) Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (University of Florida) Southern Foodways Alliance (University of Mississippi) This material is aligned to the History and Social Science Standards for Virginia Public Schools - March 2015 . The collection was curated by Jessica Taylor, Ph.D. with Emily Stewart. Feedback regarding this collection is welcome at https://bit.ly/VoicesOfVirginia This work was made possible in part by a grant from University Libraries at Virginia Techs Open Education Initiative . About the editors: Jessica Taylor is the Director of Public History and an Assistant Professor of Early American and Oral History in the History Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) where she has been a faculty member since 2018. Jessica completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Florida and her undergraduate and master's studies at the College of William and Mary. Her research and work focuses on the history of social change in Virginia and the American South, from the colonial period to the present day. Dr. Taylor collaborates with preservation and historical groups across the South to collect and share oral histories, teaches Public History and Native History classes, and is the author of multiple journal articles about historical memory in the South. Her manuscript, Certaine Boundes: Borders and Movement in the Native Chesapeake , explores the lives of Indians and non-elites in seventeenth-century Virginia. Beyond writing, she works to provide opportunities for and be a better teacher to every kind of student. She is always looking for hands-on experiences and conversations about activism, history, archaeology, preservation, museums, and liberal arts education. Emily Stewart is a student in Virginia Tech's History MA program. She will earn her Master's degree in May, 2020. Emily completed her undergraduate studies at Virginia Tech where she majored in History. Her current research focuses on Virginia educational history in the twentieth century. Her master's thesis focuses on the relationship between standardization and segregation of Virginia public education in the early twentieth century. Throughout her studies at Virginia Tech, Emily has always been interested in oral histories. The Voices of Virginia project presented her with an ideal opportunity to further cultivate her interest in the field of oral and public history. ; Virginia Tech Open Education Initiative Faculty Grant https://guides.lib.vt.edu/oer/grants
As President Obama's popularity numbers continue to drop, Republicans are still struggling to find the right candidate that can deliver the final blow to the incumbent and sweep the GOP back into the White House. Rick Perry was to be this man just three weeks ago, but after less than stellar performances in the last debates, and once his record had been scrutinized by his challengers and the press, he has fallen out of grace. The Texan governor was perceived as the man that could attract Tea Partiers and base primary voters, while at the same time satisfy deep-pocketed Republican donors with his solid conservative views on the economy and the role of government. However, the GOP establishment and its largest donors are uncomfortable with some of his public statements (for example, referring to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, voicing his creationist and anti-science views, and his reactionary pro-gun position) which would make him less electable in the national race. Many of these rich donors and Wall Street executives are economic conservatives but quite liberal on social issues. Paradoxically, Mitt Romney, who is still first in all the polls, has the right mix for Wall Street, but his religious affiliation (Mormon), his lack of charisma and his "plastic" "salesman-like" persona raise questions about whether he can connect with the base and win the primary election.In this theater of the absurd that have been the candidate debates, Perry did well at first, but then stumbled last week in Florida, when confronted with his own record as governor of Texas. He has been severely criticized by Michelle Bachman for issuing an executive order to vaccinate middle school girls against HPPV in Texas, and in his second debate he was mobbed by his fellow candidates for allowing the children of undocumented immigrants to attend state universities paying the lower "in-state" tuition rate, just like any other Texan legal resident. Even though 70% of the national electorate supports Immigration Reform and the Dream Act (which includes a provision exactly like the one Perry took), and even though the Latino vote will be fundamental in the next election, he was pilloried over it. This is the kind of wedge issue that candidates on the Right can use successfully during the primary but will work against them in the national election.Perry's confidence seemed shaken for the rest of the debate: he dodged several questions, mumbled responses and looked down at his notes several times. In contrast, Romney, smooth, fresh- faced and articulate, seemed to be having a great time delivering sharp retorts that threw the Texan off balance. From Perry's demeanor one could tell he was unpleasantly surprised by the aggressive questioning of his policies and the mocking tone of his opponent. Clearly, he is a man of authority who is not used to having his decisions and beliefs openly criticized by others. He defended himself as best as he could, but the damage had been done. Consequently, Rick Perry, the GOP's "knight in shining armor" who was urged to run by the GOP establishment and was supposed to deliver the ultimate blow to Obama, lost his appeal overnight and is now struggling to keep his campaign alive. Aware of this great opportunity to win the White House, the GOP establishment continues second-guessing its own field, looking for perfect contender that can lead them into a new era. Romney, still the de facto front-runner, has become a much better candidate in the last four years, but his inner restraint, his lack of emotion, his failure to connect makes Republicans uneasy. He is a technocrat, the type of candidate the voters can't "fall in love with", and while he can take on Obama as an equal, it is not clear whether he can beat him. So the GOP moved ahead in its inexorable quest for the unbeatable candidate, all but destroying former favorites on its way. The new favorite last week was for a while Chris Christie, the first-term governor of New Jersey and a former state prosecutor. In deep contrast with Mitt Romney the "salesman", Chris Christie, the "Jersey big guy" had a certain quality of authenticity that heightened GOP expectations and made them dream of winning again. Some hefty figures in the party establishment (former statesman Henry Kissinger and conservative intellectual William Kristol among them) were putting enormous pressure on Christie to run. He quickly has become a favorite among conservatives because of his stunning achievements: a Republican governor in a "blue" state who managed to pass budget reform, take on the teachers' unions and reform the state pension system during his first two years in office. He is a big man who speaks bluntly, a terrific governor, a leader at a time when leadership is hard to find. But after ten days of high drama and speculation, Christie announced in a one-hour press conference last Friday that he was not running.There were three main reasons for his refusal to become a candidate for the highest office in the nation: First and foremost, his decision would have come too late. At the time, there were only ninety days until the first caucus in Iowa; Florida has set an earlier-than-expected date for its primary and with that, it has pushed back all other dates in the calendar so that voting may start even earlier than expected. The order of primaries is traditionally set and the privileged states (Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina) would be loath to change it. Governor Christie's campaign would have had to scramble to get his name on the ballot of all 50 states (each state has different procedures, from the very simple to the very complex). Most agreed that he would have been a very strong candidate, but such a late entry may have harmed future prospects for him. Second, Christie is still an unknown to most of the electorate, and probably would not have had the support of rural and Southern voters. Would the wealthy New Yorkers and party pundits who were promising him huge donations ultimately have delivered and stayed with Christie for the long-term if he lost some of the early caucuses and primaries? And finally, there was the question of whether he would ignite the primary base once some of his views became known. His record is clear on management of state finances and on standing up to public unions. But there has been scarcely any scrutiny about his views on immigration. Speaking to a Latino group in 2008, he said for example that undocumented immigrants should not be classified as "illegal" since: being in this country without proper documentation was not a crime." He is a moderate on abortion, he has banned drilling for oil off the coast of New Jersey, and his energy plan resembles Obama. These are all core concerns of the base which has been driven by mainly primordial instincts in the last four years. Would Christie's blunt leadership style and reform zeal, his sincerity about the depth of the challenges and the difficulties of the solutions have carried the day? Now, it seem we will never know, but it is the phenomenon itself that is worth pondering: the establishment is unhappy at the prospects of Perry in the national election, and worried about Romney's chances in the primary. In their quasi-irrational frenzy to find the perfect candidate they may be undermining their own chance to win.Republicans seem to be looking for the anti-Obama, and Chris Christie fitted the bill: he is a heavy, no nonsense guy (a lot has been said about his overweight condition, with one NBC journalist going as far as asking the question: "Should there be a weight limit for presidential candidates?") who speaks in a very direct way, does not shirk away from difficult decisions, is ready to take on opponents and do whatever is required to get the country's economy back on track. There is nothing Hamlet-like about him, except perhaps in his hesitancy about running for president. He is also a very bright policy wonk who completely "gets" New Jersey problems and knows what needs to be done to "fix" them. On the other hand, although flattered by all the attention and support for his candidacy, his decision was due to a sincere self-appraisal: he is not ready to be President of the United States in 2012, and prefers to wait until 2016 if his aura has not worn out by then.In the meantime, Obama is trying to persuade Congress to pass his jobs bill and to show that in spite of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles he has faced at every turn of the road, he has the strength to solve at least one problem, unemployment, and the courage to tax those that make over a million a year. His jobs bill includes many Republican ideas. It proposes a combination of shot-term tax cuts, investment incentives and job creation through infrastructure projects, with long-term strategy of tax reform including ending tax loopholes for corporations which would reduce the deficit by raising the government's revenue levels. He still strikes an optimistic note, but he has already recognized that, if the economy doesn't pick up by early next year, he will be running as the underdog. In other words, he has admitted that the solution is really out of his control and in the hands of what John M. Keynes called "animal spirits". Only by restoring confidence will investors start spending the 2 trillion dollars they are allegedly stashing away in wait of better times. But Obama has now a new challenge: the Occupy Wall Street protest movement that is expanding its base and spreading to other cities. It is the unemployed youth counterpart of the populist Tea Party on the right. Both are angry at Washington, but the reactionary Tea Party blames the government for everything gone wrong, while the radical OWS blames big banks and corporations, or said otherwise, it blames the 1% that have gotten richer even during the Recession, while the 99% got poorer. With its protest movement, the Young Left has declared its independence from the establishment Democratic Party. It is Obama's base delivering Obama himself an ultimatum to either take the side of the 99% or lose their support forever. Since Obama's dreams of bipartisanship are close to over, one hopes his campaign advisors will interpret the OWS movement as an opportunity to harness their energy towards support for real reform. But it is unclear whether OWS, a diverse, amorphous, leaderless movement, will allow itself to be organized by Washington insiders with clear policy goals.The GOP frustration must be disheartening. Its establishment saw the enormous potential of Governor Christie to win the center-right of the political spectrum and with it, the national election. His remarkable success at striking bipartisan deal to reform New Jersey's finances proves his bona fide credentials as a problem solver and a leader. His irreverent, unscripted yet incisive responses to the press and the public, his indubitable charisma and his authenticity all worked in his favor. However, his refusal to run is now a fact, and as the deadline looms nearer, the GOP will have to reconsider whether to anoint as its candidate Mitt Romney, the Mormon, affable yet one-dimensional former governor of Massachusetts, the most progressive state in the nation, or Rick Perry, the less articulate yet pragmatic and successful governor of Texas, the biggest and most conservative state. Of course, unexpected outcomes are always a possibility, as shown by Herman Cain's case. The African American candidate and former Godfather's Pizza executive who has never held public office, won the "straw" primary poll in Florida last week and saw his popularity soar in national polls after a very well-received debate performance in which he repeated over and over again his simplistic 9-9-9 tax reform program, his plan to privatize pension funds, and his anti-Washington mantra. "Salesmanship", then, is not a bad asset in politics, after all, unless you are also a Mormon millionaire.Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
Part two of an interview with Julia Casey. Topics include: Food that was purchased and prepared when Julia was growing up. Formalities between the Italians in her neighborhood. How the children would play. The Roxbury neighborhood house that started a girls club and the types of activities they participated in. The nurses and doctors who would visit the neighborhood. Home remedies for sickness. How Julia and her husband met. How their marriage was received by their families. What it means to be Italian. Julia did not grow up in a religious community. What it was like to move to Fitchburg from Boston. The different expectations of boys and girls in Julia's family. Julia's children and their jobs. How speaking proper Italian has benefited Julia. ; 1 JULIA: In, in these little -- I mean, they still have the same candleholders. I've got them on my dining room table, but, but they didn't have -- I don't remember the candles. I remember these little wicks. I'm gonna ask my friend about that. And they would float on top, and you would think it would be kind of dangerous, wouldn't you? But I still remember these little candles they would keep bringing. Now, that was one of the customs, but they have special foods on the 19th of March. It was I think the Feast of St. Joseph, if I'm not mistaken. INTERVIEWER: Yeah, it is. Mm-hmm. JULIA: And the lady across the street would make that little Italian pasta they called orzo, and I think it was a type of barley. They would make the actual grain itself and the orzo pasta, O-R-Z-O—you can buy it in any market today—it was shaped like that. But they would make a dish from, I think, I think it might've been barley, and they made that on the Feast of St. Joseph. That was the custom where they came from. INTERVIEWER: Did they also make -- I don't remember what it's called -- but fried dough, little pizzas? JULIA: No, that was not, not common. I didn't know any -- no, and we didn't eat pizza, not like they do today. I know that my father, there was a barroom about a mile away from us, an Italian barroom in another Italian section, and that then made pizzas. And very, very seldom did I ever know of anyone who made pizza. You know, one of the ways that they did was they used to dip bread in tomato sauce, which is all pizza is, but I never actually knew families who made pizza. That didn't come into fashion until long after the war. INTERVIEWER: So living with all of these different people, no one really made pizzas? JULIA: No, no one made pizza that I knew of, you know.2 INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. JULIA: And nobody made lasagna. And raviolis, very seldom did anybody make raviolis. Why, I remember that in the [Piedmontese] family they would make these very fine Italian sausages with white wine, you know. Some of them made bread, but it was a problem because the bread man from the Italian, the big Italian bakeries in Boston, would come through the street. We -- they went out shopping but they went out mostly to buy different kinds of meat and specialties. But we had food then, clocks with fresh food, fish. The chicken man came, vegetable man came through the streets, and the women would just buy what they needed right on the street. On Saturdays they'd go shop; everybody went out with bags. They'd go into downtown Boston and buy special things that they, you know, couldn't get, but for the most part they went shopping once a week. They would go to their special stores to buy, you know, different kinds of spaghetti and pasta. They used to buy them in big boxes, some of the families, 10, 20-pound boxes of fine -- long, long spaghetti. And they didn't have the varieties that they have now, you know, but I mean, if they wanted salamis they'd have to go to the Italian delicatessens where they sold the different kinds of salami and everybody ate different kinds, you know. My father would go in and bring home these packages. The markets -- we went to the -- in the north, and with Petrini and Baldini, and they would slice the salami paper-thin and they'd weigh it out on gorgeous pieces of wax paper in beautiful, even rolls, every kind all rolled up. You know, he'd bring them home and we'd go crazy. Italian bread and salami, those are our idea of living, prosciutto, you know, salame crudo, salame cotto, [unintelligible - 00:05:11]. And they used to make -- my mother made lintels with a special, big liver sausage and other kinds of, 3 you know, pork sausage, and that was a dish that they had once in a while. So the food was very -- it was, whatever house you went into there was a different tradition. Every region had different… INTERVIEWER: Was there a lot of sharing? JULIA: No. I wouldn't say that, no. There was -- they maintained, really, a great deal of respect and formality. You know my mother lived with these families, 13, 18, 20 years, she would never think of going downstairs without, you know, knocking on the door and saying permesso when someone answered. You always said permesso before you entered. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. JULIA: She -- and they referred to each other as signora. They didn't call each other by their first names for many, many, many years, you know. INTERVIEWER: Even with the… JULIA: Unless they were said, unless you were told, you know, "Call me Angelina," "Call me Celestina." They knew the first names, but they really observed quite a formality. INTERVIEWER: Is that among people even in the same region, from…? JULIA: No, if they were from the same region, you know, then they would call each other that, that way. But from another area, until they got to really know each other, quite a while, you know. They -- some of the southern Italians worked in stitching shops. We had a family who had a pants -- he was in manufactured pants, and various of his women relatives and men relatives were in downtown Boston, you know. Most of them did well; they were frugal people. Their children bought automobiles, very few of the originals, you know, immigrants, bought any. So we had a kind of a clear street for playing. That's why we were able to play jump rope and hoist the 4 green sail and red rover and hide and seek. We played all these games on the street. The girls who were a little bit older than we were, they'd come out of the laundries, and if we'd be playing double-dutch jump rope, they'd come and swing -- we're talking long clotheslines -- swinging long clotheslines in the street, double-dutch, you know. Now, I think only the black girls do it, very complicated. INTERVIEWER: Yeah, the cities. I think it's popular in the cities still. JULIA: Yeah. Well, now you have too many cars. You don't have any clear spaces to play things like that. The boys made -- what do they call them, I don't know, scooters out of roller skates of two by fours on orange crates [laughter] and go whizzing along the street with these homemade things, you know. INTERVIEWER: Did the girls ever do that? Do they ever borrow these scooters? JULIA: No, we were, we were not tomboys. As I said, our mothers kept an eye on us, and they would play stickball, the boys. We would play catch, among the girls. But -- and we belonged to a settlement house, a bunch of us did, and they took us to camp… INTERVIEWER: Was there any…? JULIA: In fact, I still have a picture of a group of us. INTERVIEWER: The settlement house, was there any…? JULIA: The Roxbury neighborhood house on Albany Street, which was there for, maybe, 50, 75 years. Its special work was to help the immigrants integrate into American ways of society, and they provided clubs. Somebody came to our street and started up a library, a girls' club, and as a result of that group -- and it was one of the Boston's Brahm-, a woman from the Boston Brahmin family who, you know, belonged to -- this was their way of doing social work, women that were brought up very well-educated in the Back Bay or Beacon Hill area of Boston, belonged to these old families 5 whose, many of whose ancestors had made their money on merchant ships, you know. And that was one of the works that they did. And they take to our street, and the street next to ours, and they started a girls' club. They would bring books, and we learned to do a little crafts, knitting, and then eventually, we joined the neighborhood house and they had a camp in Bennington, New Hampshire, to which we went, and they would take us to wealthy homes for once a year, say, for picnics out in the country. And then at the neighborhood house, we put on plays. I remember one time we went to Simmons College, and a group of us put on a play, Little Lord Fauntleroy. One of us had a green velvet costume, put it on for the students, and then we danced, and we talked about different things. And as I said, we did some crafts and they encouraged whatever they saw, for instance, they -- I liked classical music. I don't know why because, you know, I mean, in that generation very few people had pianos—but they did have phonographs, you know. We didn't. But somehow I was attracted to classical music and I was able to get tickets to the youth concerts at Symphony Hall through the neighborhood house. And it was wonderful, you know. In fact, the girls that grew up after us did the same thing. They belonged to the neighborhood house and had their own little group. INTERVIEWER: Now, is this a place that really catered to the Italians? JULIA: No, it catered to -- Roxbury was sort of in the area, there were a lot of Italians there, but it didn't cater to them especially. There were people, you know, from other groups and this -- the odd part was that our neighborhood was not connected to any other neighborhood. It was isolated; that's what made it so close. Many of the young people that grew up there married each other. That's one of the reasons that the families maintained contacts, you know. 6 A number of people that I knew married other people from the neighborhood, and so from one, you would hear the news of what's going on with others even though they lived in faraway suburbs through those family connections. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. JULIA: But we didn't interact with other Italian neighborhoods at all. We had this industrial area that we had a big playground that the kids on my street didn't use very well, and it was right next to our elementary school. But our families would never let us go to these industrial areas in the afternoon or night; that's why we were confined to our streets. INTERVIEWER: And that's where you'd play. JULIA: Right. INTERVIEWER: So when you were part of the Roxbury neighborhood house, was that your first exposure, really, to other ethnic groups? JULIA: But we stayed together; the girls from my street stayed together in their own group, and we did not interact unless we were -- and we put on our own little plays. Oh, we put on a supper one night for the staff of the neighborhood house, the head of it. Dear God, what was her name? Her brother was a very, a world-famous Shakespearean actor. I can still see him now—tall and thin, with great refinement. These women were all college graduates. Some of them had gone to the Simmons School of Social Work. At that time that was a very important area of study. You know, at the house in Chicago, these women became -- well, it was called social workers but not the same way as they do in the Welfare Department. This was real social work. And the house was an offshoot of the settlement house movement that started with our house in Chicago. They had them all over the east, eastern part of the country, you know, so they'd seen all 7 different kinds of ethnic groups. But they were very refined women. They taught piano, they taught music, and they had a library. They got college girls to come in and help tutor students who wanted to be tutored. They provided many services. They went out into the neighborhoods. And they, along with our elementary school nurse, provided wonderful medical services for those neighborhoods. My sister, who was born two years after I was—I said she was my brother's twin—was very seriously brain-damaged, and the result of that was that, you know, my mother's life was pretty terrible for the -- until she died, she was a serious epileptic, at ten. INTERVIEWER: She was epileptic until she was ten? Is that it? JULIA: She died when she was eleven. INTERVIEWER: Old enough. JULIA: At the age of ten, when she was about ten or eleven, my mother found herself pregnant with my youngest sister. And the visiting nurses used to come to the street, whom I think, it might've been through the Metropolitan Insurance Company. They would come in their blue uniforms, and they would visit all these Italian women who had any need for any kind of medical service. If one of them was pregnant, she came and spoke to you and advised you how to take care of yourself. She did the prenatal work. You didn't go to the hospital or a doctor if she advised you, but she did notify the hospital of when the birth was expected. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. JULIA: But she gave you, you know, information on good health and hygiene and what you needed to eat. Because the Italian women, they were naturals at this, except my mother, who had grown up in a family that was extremely reserved and she knew absolutely nothing when she came. You know, they didn't -- you grew up in Italian families in rural areas, then you, knew because they taught. 8 And, in fact, my mother even had a midwife, one of them had midwives who were… they were trained in folk medicine, you know. They weren't like the [unintelligible - 00:18:09]. That was why some of the births were pretty bad. INTERVIEWER: Oh. JULIA: But anyway, they would help each other by, you know, in that way, but they -- the visiting nurses and the school nurse. The school nurse, if she detected a problem with any student in the school, either from information by the teachers or -- we also had physical examinations, and doctors would come in once a year, and physically examine every child. She detected vision problems. If they detected anything, like they would catch phases of diabetes, they would catch all kinds of problems. The visiting nurse would immediately visit that child's family, and she would make the arrangements to have the child sent for examinations at Boston City Mass General, wherever there was specialists for whatever they saw, you went. Once a year you brought five cents, a bus would pull up to the school in relays, and everybody went to the dentist in Forsyth Clinic. For five cents, they did pulling and filling, and this is where the dentists were trained, so the student dentists would take care of you. INTERVIEWER: Do you feel that the settlement house then had changed your life in any way? JULIA: Oh, definitely. You know what? It performed wonderful services. In the first place it taught us, it taught -- besides the playing that we did on the street, it brought us into a little bit more of the American way, you know. It brought a little more cohesion, and we learned to do things that we couldn't have learned on our own. Although, on our street they used to put on, like, shows, so we'd dance in -- strictly amateur, and one of the mothers made crepe 9 paper costumes. She could run them up so rapidly, I could still remember this purple crepe dress that was [laughter] with ruffles and a [unintelligible - 00:20:43] here, a ruffles on the skirt, and I still keep in touch with her daughter. INTERVIEWER: Wow. JULIA: They were clever. This lady would go into the stores and see something in the window, a dress. And she'd fix it in her mind and come home and cut out a pattern out of newspapers from what she remembered, and she would produce dresses for her daughters. INTERVIEWER: So it exposed you more to an American way of life? JULIA: Yeah, it did. And you know, besides our old school teachers, they spoke beautiful English. INTERVIEWER: Were you going to school with mostly Italians? JULIA: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Only Italians, or…? JULIA: Well, I would say a lot. The Irish had more or less moved away from that section of Roxbury, even though our parish church was St. Patrick, and the Irish had moved well up beyond Dudley Street because they were by that time much more affluent. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. But it sounds like the neighborhood that you grew up in was so harmonious. JULIA: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Did you ever feel any sense of conflict when you went to school or outside the confines of the neighborhood? JULIA: We did. We felt that, so there must've been a lot of what we used to refer to as American kids, who are probably mostly Irish descent. But we didn't have very -- we had hardly anything to do with them at all. There was one Irish family, the Kellys, and they went to parochial school, but actually they married into the Italian community. And that was the only Irish family I knew. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm.10 JULIA: My father had a few Irish tenants who we didn't think too much of. Going to the Depression they would never pay their rents, you know, but then… INTERVIEWER: In that six-family house that your father owned, were there other relatives living in the house? JULIA: No. INTERVIEWER: No? JULIA: No. There were, you know, strange people who came. And during the Depression men sold wine, you know. In fact, even during Prohibition some of them did. We would find taxis coming into the street, and I don't know how people got, you know, the names of people who would sell the wine but if you had no money, or very little money, you made money any way you could, you know. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. JULIA: So. INTERVIEWER: So what about the other families from different regions? Would you call them by regions? JULIA: They were very -- they were, yeah. INTERVIEWER: I heard… JULIA: Calabrese, Baresi, Sicilian, yeah. INTERVIEWER: But when you referred to them I heard you just mentioned a little while ago that… JULIA: Yeah, Piedmontese. We had about four or five Piedmontese family. And of course, their dialect was even different. And that's next to Lombardi, but see, their dialect takes from the [unintelligible - 00:23:56]. INTERVIEWER: Oh, I see. JULIA: Right. INTERVIEWER: And where does yours? JULIA: More, you know, we -- down to the east of Lombardi is the Venetian province, and then you go up into the Tyrol, which today 11 is bordered by Austria. So the northern Italians, they don't put final vowels on their words. They chop it off, you know. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. So I was -- I've been noticing your pretty green eyes. Where did you get those? JULIA: All Italians have their, you know, you'll -- there's a brown-eyed type, but you can find green-eyed Italians in Sicily. INTERVIEWER: Really? JULIA: Oh, yes. Hazel, you know. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. JULIA: Grey from my mother and father. They didn't have brown eyes. Nobody in my family had brown eyes. INTERVIEWER: Hmm. Wandering in your neighborhood, was there a woman that people would go to for advice, or…? JULIA: On the next street there was a lady who apparently had been, you know -- there were many ways to educate people, have always have been. And some people were very wise. She was in America a lot longer than the other women. She had a big family with grown, with grown-up sons, so she was -- and she came from a family where she was told a great many things and learned many things. So yes, there were some women who knew about things, but since they all came from different regions they all knew their own customs, and they had different ways of treating, you know, headaches, or -- I remember my grandmother used to slice potatoes and put them inside wrapped, fold them into a cloth, and when somebody had a headache, my aunt did that, too. They would put these sacks of potatoes in this cloth; they would just tie the cloth and bath with them. I don't know why. They used to string garlic if they thought a child had worms, and a child would wear this string of garlic around his neck. And if you had a boil, my mother would cook linseed flower. They'd buy them in the drugstore, only in the Italian drugstore, and you would 12 make poultice—that was very common. Some people used bread and water, and you would have this thing on whatever bump you had that you wanted to [unintelligible - 00:26:47]. They were really strep infections, but they didn't know strep infections, you know. There were boils, and if you have a little infection in your finger or thumb, you'd wrap it up in bread and water with a bandage or poultice of some kind. Even the American doctors would recommend them. They'd tell you, you got -- check moisture and heat would cause these things to mature. INTERVIEWER: Did you notice that different regions…? JULIA: They would bring chamomile -- yes, Mrs. Mucci downstairs kept herbs, dried herbs, chamomile and what they referred to in America as mallow [unintelligible - 00:27:41] and I -- if that [unintelligible - 00:27:44] grew here, I had a plant one time. And they would buy these dried herbs at the Italian drugstores, and they would make teas out of them. You would drink them. If you had indigestion, the northern Italians would buy it in liquor stores. It was called Fernet, F-e-r-n-e-t. It's actually an [unintelligible - 00:28:10] in medicine containing a great deal of -- bitter, bitter! But many times you'd go visiting in, after you wake, sometimes before, you would get a tiny glass of Fernet. Branca – that was the trademark. It came in a green bottle. And it was co-, it was a digestive. It was -- because it was so bitter, it was considered to be good for your stomach. INTERVIEWER: So no matter what your age, you would get that? JULIA: Then we -- everybody had Belowski. INTERVIEWER: What's that? JULIA: May I give you either some hot tea or coffee? You must be exhausted. INTERVIEWER: No, I'm fine. I'm fine. It's not much longer. Thank you. JULIA: And get you as hot as broth, or as a broth.13 INTERVIEWER: No, I'm fine. Do you need something? JULIA: I get like this once in a while. But yes, I don't wanna move this thing. INTERVIEWER: I can take it off if you'd like. JULIA: I find the only thing is -- part of the [unintelligible - 00:29:15]. Five months ago he's a co-host by the senior -- high-styled program on FA-TV, so we call him the Mike Wallace… INTERVIEWER: And you've been married [unintelligible - 00:29:32] years? JULIA: [Unintelligible - 00:29:32], Linda. Linda! [Unintelligible - 00:29:35] HUSBAND: Oh, pardon my cold hand. JULIA: That's my husband, Phil. INTERVIEWER: Nice to meet you. HUSBAND: My pleasure. JULIA: In his museum of … in New… museum about neckties that I paid a fortune for. HUSBAND: Well, I sure got TV exposure today. JULIA: Yeah. He get to… who did you interview today? HUSBAND: I interviewed a very interesting 91-year old woodcarver. JULIA: Oh, my heavens. HUSBAND: Louis [Charpentier]. And then that was followed up by a group of Irish step dancers. And I didn't do anything on that, so they just dragged me from dancing, so all I could do was say, hello and goodbye. INTERVIEWER: Oh. HUSBAND: It was frustrating. JULIA: You know, Edcel Johnson wants you to let him know when that program is on now. HUSBAND: Oh, I'd bet they… JULIA: Teddy, too.14 HUSBAND: I bet -- all right. I bet they did that thing so I -- in my notebook there. INTERVIEWER: Was it a cable TV show? JULIA: Yes. It's at ATV. You know, the informational video… HUSBAND: It started innocently enough. I'm on the board for an organization called The Resources for the Elderly, and their primary function is to sponsor the Meals, Meals on Wheels and the Elderly Nutrition Program. Like they some -- it goes back about three, four years ago. It's been quite a while. They started this program—these are all volunteers and all seniors—it's called Senior Lifestyles. And as a TV show material that is supposedly of interest to the seniors, and it, it's partly information and partly entertainment. And so, as I say, I'm on the board for the Resources, and we were having a board meeting, and it just so happened that the woman who was then serving as host for the program for some time decided that that was enough for her, so they're looking for somebody to fill in as a host for the TV show. And one of the board members [woke] up and said, "Mr. Casey would be a good replacement." And somebody else said, "Yes, indeed. He would be great." JULIA: Oh, he loves women. HUSBAND: And I couldn't think of any reason why I couldn't or wouldn't do it, so before I knew it I had been drafted and I was serving as host to it. Then that's what I do. It's on once a month, and they have two half-hour segments. Usually last -- monthly only has one half-hour, but today we have two half-hour segments, and the first one was this Louis Charpentier. And my god, he was -- you know that guy we saw in the coffee shop? JULIA: I thought he was gonna be easy… HUSBAND: No, no, no. This is… JULIA: … interviewing famous carpenter. Oh, Louis Charpentier.15 HUSBAND: … this Louis, he is -- he claims to be 91 years old. JULIA: Oh, my heavens. INTERVIEWER: He looks wonderful. He does. JULIA: Did you see any of his work? INTERVIEWER: No. HUSBAND: I used to… JULIA: I think they have it at the library? HUSBAND: He used to be head of the plastics industry. And the plastics industry was an organization, apparently, that did work for all of the plastic shops in and around… JULIA: When you came with your ham sandwich a little mustardy. INTERVIEWER: I thought… JULIA: I thought you'd have sandwich. You've got to listen to me talk for four hours and have nothing. HUSBAND: Yeah. I'll have a ham sandwich. INTERVIEWER: Well, you have to get those though, because you said you had to wait… HUSBAND: Oh, that's all right. JULIA: I'm gonna call the lady and tell them you're gonna be a little late. HUSBAND: But anywho, this Louis is something else, and he was -- he started his woodcarving when he was only about two years old, apparently, while he had a carving that sold his home up to the farm up in -- well, back and around or back there, and there was the oxen that was plowing, there was his father, there was the house he lived in and his school, the whole bit. INTERVIEWER: So do you interview these people? HUSBAND: I interview them. I try to make intelligent conversation with them. JULIA: I have made intelligent conversations with them. HUSBAND: The thing that makes this fascinating is that I usually don't know until I arrived at the studio who is going to be the guest for the day. INTERVIEWER: Oh, that's difficult.16 HUSBAND: I have to -- I know it was… INTERVIEWER: Oh, Julia was just telling me about the tapes that you found in the [unintelligible - 00:34:30]. HUSBAND: Yes. INTERVIEWER: That's remarkable, especially because here I am two days later. JULIA: I know. INTERVIEWER: All about Italian dinner. JULIA: And on the other tape, what I said -- think it's a, seems to be a little illogical, I was wanting to say the least. In the other tape, you would have to guess who the family Christmas but then I'd read, since I wrote it all out, it's more logical, you know. It's more -- or less of a timely sequence. But I do give you the information I've given you about the broth. INTERVIEWER: Okay. JULIA: And… INTERVIEWER: It'll be interesting to make a… JULIA: Oh, yeah. I'm gonna make myself a sandwich if I can figure out how to open this slice of cheese. INTERVIEWER: Do you want some help? JULIA: Oh, I -- oh, here it is. Heavens! I thought. What's the matter with this? INTERVIEWER: How does your husband feel marrying an Italian? JULIA: It was an adjustment; let us put it that way. INTERVIEWER: Was it? JULIA: I met him… thank you for this. INTERVIEWER: Yes. HUSBAND: Tried one this morning. INTERVIEWER: Oh. So who made these? HUSBAND: The man I interviewed, Louis Charpentier. INTERVIEWER: Oh.17 JULIA: Oh, he gives you -- oh, I've seen him do that at the Historical Society where he teaches you how he got started. HUSBAND: Right. JULIA: And he tries to teach everybody that they can do the same thing. INTERVIEWER: Oh, so he was -- his work is just so good. Oh, he's so… HUSBAND: No, he used to work in plastic. And as I say, he works for -- he works in an organization that designed methods for making just about anything you wanted, buttons or, how do you say, [unintelligible - 00:36:18] or whatever it was called for… JULIA: I know he's just working now. He's in the library and… HUSBAND: No, no. He's retired. JULIA: Yeah. But where is his work? I know he started, he started on display somewhere. HUSBAND: Yes. It's in a home. He has it at home, because I asked him if it was all insured and he said that it was. JULIA: I don't know how… INTERVIEWER: So Phil, let me ask you, how did you feel marrying an Italian? HUSBAND: Oh, wow, it… JULIA: You should ask his mother. HUSBAND: No, we -- and now seriously, we had a problem. It's not because I married an Italian, no. It's just that my mother didn't particularly like Julia, unfortunately. I'm not sure what the root of her prejudice was. It might have been because of her heritage, or it might have been just because my mother didn't want me to get married at that point, although I was not exactly a teenager. I had come home from the war, and I was a book. But whatever reason or reasons my mother had she didn't actually… didn't actually -- she didn't oppose the marriage, but she didn't support it, and she didn't even show up for it. My father and my sister came. JULIA: Though she was my [unintelligible - 00:37:48], she cooked. She was great to the children.18 HUSBAND: Oh, yeah. That's right. She loved the, she loved her grandchildren. She was very -- and they had a great time. JULIA: She was very generous to me in many ways. HUSBAND: My son approved of Grandma's cooking, and they had a good time visiting her. And we all, every holiday, we make sure that there was a delegation that went to Grandma, though we tried and made a compromise. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. Now, did you -- where did you grow up? HUSBAND: I grew up in Roxbury prior to the days when Roxbury had the… with the ethnic… JULIA: Now it is. HUSBAND: It is now. When I was -- I was there prior to that. INTERVIEWER: Thank you. JULIA: Lemon juice? INTERVIEWER: Thank you. HUSBAND: And by one of those strange coincidences, Julia lived the one part of Roxbury, I was in another. We had never laid eyes on each other before the war. Did she tell you about how…? INTERVIEWER: No. I don't know how you met. No. HUSBAND: Well, we met -- it was like something out of one of those [unintelligible - 00:39:12] that tells -- she had that series of how people tell how they -- I was in the Navy during World War II in an organization called the [CVs], and I was stationed overseas in New Guinea. I met her brother, who was in the combat engineers, and there was this [unintelligible - 00:39:37]. So I got to know him, and his platoon was involved in the invasion of the Philippines. They were moving out agents. So he said to me, he said, "Phil," he said, "we're going to be cut off from correspondence for a while. Would you do me a big favor and write to my mother and tell her that if you don't hear from me, not to worry, I'm all right?" So I said, "Sure, all right." And I did 19 that, I wrote to his mother, and his mother who was living in Roxbury, I sent a letter to Washington where my girlfriend was thankfully employed as a government girl. And I -- with instructions for her to answer this letter. So she answered the letter, and Julia and I started corresponding, and that's how we get to know each… JULIA: Fifteen months. HUSBAND: And then after the war, when I came home, I… JULIA: It was all over. HUSBAND: And then there… INTERVIEWER: What? What was all over? JULIA: It was all over. He was hooked. INTERVIEWER: Oh, he was flirting as soon as he saw you. HUSBAND: Then there was some kind of a breakdown in the romance, and we had separated. [Unintelligible - 00:41:00] and we get back together again and we could get married in 19… INTERVIEWER: How did her parents feel about her marrying an Irishman? HUSBAND: Oh, as far as I know… JULIA: Horrible. HUSBAND: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Oh, with him? JULIA: My father… HUSBAND: There was a point in time when her father didn't care who she marries and who would take her off his hands. INTERVIEWER: Oh. JULIA: I was going to [unintelligible - 00:41:24]. HUSBAND: Yeah. I was even supposed to get a bicycle, a motorcycle for marrying her. JULIA: "Philly, I give you motorcycle [unintelligible - 00:41:34]." HUSBAND: No, but she… JULIA: You better [unintelligible - 00:41:38]20 HUSBAND: Neither one of those gifts materialized so, anyhow. No, I liked her father and mother. And of course, I had -- I was very friendly with her brother and sister. And so, we had the wedding, and that was a [unintelligible - 00:41:57] together. INTERVIEWER: How was she different from the, let's say, Irish girls that you went to school with? HUSBAND: Oh, she was a different. -- I didn't actually – I didn't know that many girls when I was going to school because you have to remember that when I was going to school, this was in the days when the boys went to one school and the girls went to another. Boy's school was an English high school. JULIA: But in elementary school… HUSBAND: Elementary was all boys because of… JULIA: Oh, you did? HUSBAND: Yeah. That's -- I went to the all… JULIA: Oh, I didn't know that. HUSBAND: With the nuns [unintelligible - 00:42:34]. JULIA: Well, I was actually the first female person you ever met. HUSBAND: No, not exactly. I met… JULIA: You may have seen New Guinea. HUSBAND: You have to define, there, the word "met." Kind of -- you were the first female that I was—let's put it this way—that I little became involved with. JULIA: Well. No. That's enough. INTERVIEWER: Well, we're in all kinds of things today. JULIA: Are you gonna have a ham sandwich? HUSBAND: Yes. I'll have a ham sandwich. So what is this project here? INTERVIEWER: This is a project that's recording the experiences of -- by Italian-American family in the Fitchburg and Leominster area. HUSBAND: Oh, yes.21 INTERVIEWER: But we had seen Julia at a -- one of the Italian night, the films that Fitchburg State College had put on, and Julia started talking extensively after the movie, Big Night, I think it was called Big Night. HUSBAND: Yes. INTERVIEWER: And we realized it was someone that maybe we'd like to talk to because she seems to know so much about the culture. HUSBAND: Yeah. And she is the one member of her family that has -- that is interested in the [unintelligible - 00:43:57] of the family extensively. JULIA: I was also the first one born in this country of my family. INTERVIEWER: Your family. HUSBAND: She was born in this country, which makes her an Italian-American, but she maintained contact, through her mother, maintained contact with Italy. She knows how to speak Italian, including the dialects of northern Italy. And now she is in the process of learning how to speak… INTERVIEWER: Right. HUSBAND: She's starting again. Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Now, were there any surprises though when you married…? JULIA: Yeah. Seven. INTERVIEWER: That's -- wow. Seven children, right. But the Italian culture, I'm wondering… HUSBAND: No, I didn't have any problem with that. I was very fond of her family. Wherever her family gathered then there was a party. And her family had always been most cordial to me. INTERVIEWER: What do your children consider themselves? HUSBAND: They consider -- when they think about it, they… you probably have to ask them how much they consider themselves to be Italian. JULIA: More than half. HUSBAND: Well, I don't know whether they really think about it.22 JULIA: They went to the parochial school in Dorchester, and their last name was Casey. So they fit right in. Even though there were a lot of Italians. And by this time, Dad is gone. You know, we're not immigrants anymore. Your father was a professional man who's a graduate of Boston College, and so that they didn't have to go through that. They… HUSBAND: I came up here; this is the first place I've ever been to where they couldn't spell Casey. They would actually went, "Case-, how do you spell that?' And I thought at first they were kidding me, because down in the Boston area there was a very large population of Irish-Americans. There's still a lot of Irish down there, some of them from Ireland itself, and some of them are there illegally. INTERVIEWER: And what traditions do you try to carry on in your family? JULIA: Well, the traditions are that they know that I'm intensely interested in the Italian part of the family. I have furniture, for instance. I have, you know, [unintelligible - 00:46:38] for years and other pieces that my mother gave me when she was… HUSBAND: They have -- girls have a lot of respect for Italian culture, and one of them had been over to Italy. Take your time. JULIA: This was an -- how did you get involved with this? INTERVIEWER: I'll call you all out when it's all right because… JULIA: Are we going to meet again? INTERVIEWER: I don't think so, unless you… when I leave, feel the need to talk about something else. JULIA: Are you -- do you need -- I would like to, if possible, because I had -- now, I have four appointments this afternoon, and I would like -- I was trying to figure out how I could get copies of these tapes. INTERVIEWER: I could have that done for you at Fitchburg State College. So I'll call you… JULIA: And you have more than one? INTERVIEWER: Probably. I'll call you next week…23 JULIA: All right. INTERVIEWER: Okay? Okay. So what does it mean to be Italian to you? JULIA: It doesn't, it doesn't mean that I have been all my life aware of the great contributions that the Italians have made. But I became more aware of them as I grew older, and it made a strong attachment to family. And as I said, I still have -- my close friends are still the kids that grew up, that I grew up with, they're still the people that I grew up with, even though we all live in different places. It means certain types of food. It means, especially to me, it means this age of almost 80, I am determined foreigner, and I have -- it means that whenever I meet anybody that is Italian, that speaks Italian -- to me there's quite a big difference between the northern and southern Italian. I've always been made of… INTERVIEWER: Tell me what you just said, always been aware of… JULIA: I've always been aware of the vast differences among the people from this one peninsula that juts out into the Mediterranean, that there is such a difference in everything about them—the food and the way they speak—and it's made me very, very aware of the differences that a language can develop into, almost different languages within a cohesive place, you know. We have this boot that goes down into the ocean split down the middle by this range of mountains, and yet every section you go to, because it was at one time a collection of city states—and somebody brought that up the other day in class, it was a collection of city states—and yet my mother's experiences and the way she spoke and lived was so different from everyone else's on my street. So being an Italian, to me, meant that I had to adjust to -- when I went to school I felt very out of it, because I started school in Lexington. My father bought a house in Lexington for a few years, and I had -- I just felt a complete foreigner because I spoke hardly any English myself since we were isolated in Lexington.24 But I -- after I came back to Boston, then I had to adjust and get used to all of the different -- the girls who came from different Italian families, all of them, were. They spoke differently, their parents spoke differently; they had all these different ways of doing things. And that adjustment was a wonderful experience for me. And it means -- now, I don't think so much of modern Italy. I feel that in some ways they've grown excessively. I've heard other people made this comment, too. I've read a couple of books that said the same thing, that they've become excessively materialistic. Certainly, you know, religion -- we were not, I will say another thing, we were not a religious community. The women -- the praying that was done, the observation of religion was private. Everybody didn't lead the street and go to church on Sunday. The young kids that were making their first communion, they had to go to church. We went to church in a group, but mothers and fathers for the most part didn't go near the church. The church was run by Irish priests; nobody understood the Italians, and we hardly ever saw a priest. And so it's very different from this situation here in Fitchburg where the Italians set up their own church on top of an Irish community that moved out, you know, the Irish community and church was St. Bernard's. The Italians, back 75 years ago, decided that long ago, that they wanted their own church, and they set it up, they found an Italian priest. And we were not -- women prayed on Sunday morning, sometimes you could look up at certain windows and a woman would be sitting there with an open book which was, obviously, a [unintelligible - 00:52:54] in Italian, and she would be reading her prayers. This is [unintelligible - 00:52:59]. They observed some of the saints' days, but it was not a community that went to church. Ever. INTERVIEWER: Now, what about making first communion and confirmation? Would you go into the north end?25 JULIA: No. Some of them did. INTERVIEWER: Mm-hmm. JULIA: A couple of the families sent their daughters into the north end to make -- but most of us that were the same age, there were, you know, about two or three or four at that time, then they would go to the parish church, you know, in a group, and that was also beyond the industrial area. So it was maybe a 15-minute, 20-minute walk, and we went because the nuns, where they have were training the kids in the catechism, we went to Sunday school. Then, because they didn't want us walking to that neighborhood, as we grew older, we started going to the Jesuit church, the Immaculate Concepcion in the south end, which was an enormous church but not a parish church. But then I belonged to the choir there; some of us joined the choir. And that was an all-American experience; there was no Italians. INTERVIEWER: So Fitchburg in 1968? JULIA: I cried all the time. I didn't -- I never wanted to leave Boston. You know, I did spend a very good experience, first, the college community… INTERVIEWER: Say that again? The college community? JULIA: The college community is a wonderful place. I've always been a reader. In that respect, the kind of reading that I did was quite different from what other girls on my street did, and I am unable to explain that. I am unable to explain the direction in which my own, which you might call intellectual growth. Well, I went to an all-girls high school, and I don't know why I was attracted to classical music and literature. And I mean, I practically lived at the public library. As a matter of fact it was his branch, too. His branch of the public library, he lived on the other side of it, but you know, until my brother met him in New Guinea and he wrote to my mother, I had never a clue that he was around.26 INTERVIEWER: So when you came to Fitchburg did you make any connections with Italian people? JULIA: Not at first. Not at first, because I was still taking care of the family. Later, then, as my children grew up and they met -- because we went to St. Camillus, and that is not an ethnic church, you know. So later -- actually, in the last 10 years, I would say, I… I've met 10, 20 youths through my children. My daughter married into a Fitchburg Italian. For a little while we joined the Sons of Italy. I joined the Virginia Eleanor Lodge, and I didn't keep it up, but you know, I've met a lot… INTERVIEWER: [Unintelligible - 00:56:16] speaking, what did your parents and the parents down street, what did they want for their children? JULIA: All they wanted was for them to grow up and to go to work. The girls were not encouraged to go to school. My sister, who, as I said, who came along 13 years after I did, was first college graduate on the street. She went to, she got… INTERVIEWER: Pick it up. You said… JULIA: My sister, Mary Louise, was the first girl to go to college in our entire neighborhood. INTERVIEWER: Now, how did that happen? JULIA: She was fairly smart in school, and she was in the class of 1952 at the same high school I had gone to in a girls' high school in Boston, and she got a teacher's scholarship. And she decided she wanted to be a nurse, and how she was scared, oh, instead of going into a hospital program… INTERVIEWER: This was in… JULIA: Back… out! Instead of going in to a three-year hospital program, somebody put it into her mind to go to Boston College, a four-year degree course. Actually she went. INTERVIEWER: Wow.27 JULIA: She went out of her work at Boston City, quite a bit of it, so she could live at home and the hospital was five minutes away. She took part of her affiliation there. INTERVIEWER: Now, what did your parents think of that since they really wanted you to go to work? JULIA: Well, they felt that we should go to work. They didn't, you know -- but when Louise came along they had been sufficiently Americanized, but nobody, nobody encouraged. They expected the girls would grow up, get jobs in factories, or if they went to high school, find a job in an office and then get married. INTERVIEWER: What about the boys? JULIA: The boys, none of them went to college either, although some of them were quite smart. And one family, the boys went to college on their own. They were a little bit older than the rest. And then they -- some of them got jobs in technical areas, like different labs and in MIT, and they would stop taking courses along the job training. But almost -- one young man, which is a surprise to everyone, we knew one boy from that street that went to college; he became an officer in the Navy. No one else in his family did. There were five or six children in the family, neither girls nor boys went to college, and he was a little older than I was, and he actually went on to law school. Why? I have no idea, because his parents never spoke a word of English. And he was Sicilian, you know, and yet he went. So when I said "yet he went," it sounds like a put-down, it really isn't. It's just that none of us were encouraged to go to college, nobody. My mother couldn't understand why I was constantly reading, but it was because, you know, I worked. I mean, I helped my father in the house, peeling just because they would whitewash them. I haven't done anything like that since I got married. I refuse to do it, because that six-family house took it out of all our hides. People would move out, 28 you'd have a terrible mess, you know, you not only have the problem of trying to collect miserable rents, but every time a new family moved in, me and my father be washing and cleaning and my mother and I went after, cleaned up after all of them, and it was a -- it was really the -- it wasn't until many years afterwards, and it wasn't too long before they died, that some of the older families that had owned houses themselves sold them, and some of them came to live in my father's house. And that was a good experience. They paid their rent and very respectful, which was a surprise, because in the beginning they have a… INTERVIEWER: Is it important for the Italians to have a clean house? JULIA: Some of them. Some of them wasn't, you know. INTERVIEWER: Anything else that you'd like to add? I've been here a long time now. [Laughter] JULIA: No, I think that I -- they all -- I wanna add this: that the older that I have gotten, the more I appreciate where I grew up, dirt street and all, the more I realized the goodness and the cleverness, the ability of people from other regions of Italy, the more I appreciate the beauty of that language and what, what is world's known about the Italian culture in general. And I think that my mother and father provided me with, if nothing else, an openness about accepting people from everywhere, you know. That I got from them. Well, we're very gregarious. I appreciated all the different types of humor they had, different cooking. So then since I've left my neighborhood, I feel like I fit in everywhere. The college community? No problem. The Italian community? No problem. Where am I? I feel that I fit in, and it definitely came from this upbringing. INTERVIEWER: Okay. Could your children say the same thing? They've been brought up some way different?29 JULIA: There is one, a teacher, Maria is a schoolteacher. Kath has always done office work, she's the only one that [unintelligible - 01:02:38] go to college, but there wasn't because she couldn't -- you know, he's in the fire department, he's an electrical engineer in Boston working on the big date. [Unintelligible - 01:02:51] American, an Irish girl from Fitchburg. My son, Steven, was working for the Waste Water Treatment Plant in Burke and was attending Fitchburg State. He had gone three years to Texas -- I remember my Louis, feeling that we cooked very differently from anybody he knew, and he thought it was strange, you know, that -- I thought it was strange that other people didn't cook all this stuff then [laughter]. But my Julian, who's the youngest, is a technical writer for Lotus for Boston College. Julian went to UMass, Cathy went -- enjoyed our lives here, we've gotten used to the Georgia life here, the ones I have done. INTERVIEWER: Okay. JULIA: I learned Spanish on the job. That was the other thing that the Italian did for me. I was assigned to the Department of Public Welfare after I took that six-month refresher course. And gradually, by taking in-service examinations, I went from clerk stenographer to sort of an administrative job, and I was in the Child Support Enforcement Unit. We had a great many women coming in from Puerto Rico, all of whom spoke Spanish, and many of them brought in interpreters. Well, after I listened for a while, I suddenly realized I understood what they were saying and, if I had enough courage, I could begin to speak the Spanish language. And as a result I did. And I used to be able to conduct the interviews in Spanish. I didn't need the interpreter, you know. So that was another thing that I got out of learning Italian. Now, the proper Italian is a great surprise to me. I don't know how I started that. I'm sure I'm the only one that grew up where I grew 30 up that speaks it, and it's -- I compare it to people learning to play the piano by ear. I was so accustomed to all these different dialects that gradually the proper Italian, especially when I went to Italy, even for short periods of time, and I began to listen—and my aunt used to listen to the radio, Italian programs on the radio—and somehow the language has come. I'm fluent, but I'm not grammatical perfectly. I have to feel my way through the grammar. But I'm fluent, I can say most things that I want to say in ordinary -- and I don't know why. I feel now that I know things about myself like everyone as you grow older, that I have a gift for languages, although the grammar was difficult for me. We were only allowed to take French. In junior high school, French was the only language that was offered, and I had a bad time with the grammar. But as I've grown older, I find I can -- I've been able to master the language. I can speak, and everybody understands me. Why? I don't know. INTERVIEWER: It's a gift? JULIA: You know, even my -- when I meet the occasional person that came into the office, all the workers that came in, the Spanish-speaking workers, they all used to laugh because [laughter] there I was, I could say what I wanted to say in Spanish, and they'd all make, you know, little conversation, and I'd always talk to them. Well it isn't everyone that gets to have an audience like that. [Laughter] INTERVIEWER: [Laughter] I enjoyed it. Thank you. JULIA: I'm gonna call my friends and tell them that I will be there. I'm working…/AT/jf/jc/es
This study reviews: (1) how levels of donor financing of the health sector in Somalia varied over the decade 2000-09, (2) which health interventions were prioritized by donors, and (3) how evenly health sector aid was distributed to the different zones of Somalia. The overall aim of the study was to create evidence for donors, implementers, and health specialists involved in allocation of financial resources to the Somalia health sector. The results of the study are based on quantitative data collected from 38 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors and implementing agencies active in Somalia. Quantitative data were collected between March and May 2007 and in March 2010, with response rates of 96 and 95 percent, respectively. The report is organized in five chapters. Chapter one provides the background to the study, along with its aims and objectives, and contextualizes the study area, Somalia. Chapter two provides the conceptual framework for the research by looking at aid financing trends in developing countries, in the health sector, in fragile states, and in Somalia. Chapter three describes the methodology, the data collection process, types of data collected, and methodological limitations. Chapter four presents the quantitative findings in terms of total health sector aid financing, and expenditure by disease and by zone. Chapter five offers conclusions linked to the four primary study objectives and provides recommendations for future funding.
Part one of an interview with Joseph Addante. Topics include: Joseph's family history. His parents were separated during WWI and reunited in Fitchburg, MA. The birth of Joseph's siblings and Joseph (he was the youngest). Catholic education. Americanization classes taught by Margaret Kelty. Speaking English and Italian. His father's experience trying to bring his mother (Joseph's grandmother) to the United States. Visiting relatives in Italy. How his father came to the United States. Family political differences in Italy. The villages in Italy where his parents grew up. The work his father did as a shoemaker in Italy and in Fitchburg. ; 1 SPEAKER 1: The Center for Italian Culture at Fitchburg State College, the [unintelligible - 00:00:06] project. It's Tuesday September 4th 9:30, 9:45 am. Our first interviewee is Joe Addante at his home at 535 South Street Number 22-2. Thanks Joe for taking time again to talk with me. I was hoping that you could give me some biographical information, specifically when you were born. What your birth name is. I was wondering is it Joseph or is it Giuseppe? JOE ADDANTE: I was born on the 25th of August in 1926 at 2:00 a.m. in the morning, by my father's little log that I found. They named me Joseph Bartholomew Addante; Bartholomew because the 24th of August is the big feast day in my father's village. There's a church that was built in 1100 or 1200 and it's a historical site in that area. And that's how I got the name: Joseph from my father, and Bartholomew from the feast day. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. JOE ADDANTE: Uh, I was born in Fitchburg. I was the fourth child that my parents had. They had one in Italy that my father never saw again, that died when he was three or four years old. My mother and father were separated for 10 years because of World War I. My mother rejoined my father in 1920 in Fitchburg, and in 1922 my sister Mary was born, '23 my sister Rose was born. And three years later a son was born, which was a source of joy to my dad. And we grew up together. Uh, also living with us were my two uncles for a number of years, because they had come also from Italy. And I jokingly say I grew up with three fathers, my uncle Rocco and my uncle Dominic. Rocco has a son Rocco Jr., and Uncle Dominic remained a bachelor and was never married. Um, from there we lived on the Water Street lane, which was part of what was called "The Patch" in those days. I attended St. Bernard Grammar school, which was a Catholic parochial school for St. Bernard Parish. However, since my father's brother was a Franciscan priest, he was anxious for us to have a Roman 2 Catholic education. And being acquainted with Monsignor Donnelly, who was pastor of St. Bernard at that time, we were given the privilege of attending the quote unquote Irish parochial school. I graduated grammar school there, then I attended St. Bernard, which then became the Central Catholic High School, graduating in 1944. SPEAKER 1: Okay. I was hoping that you could go back a little bit. Last week when I was here… JOE ADDANTE: Yes. SPEAKER 1: You mentioned something about your mom and dad; your father had to wait nearly 10 years to bring your mother over. Is… did I hear that correctly? JOE ADDANTE: Yes, well, when my mother arrived of course the family started. And as I said, my sisters were born and so was I. My recollection of my early childhood goes back to about 1931 or '30 when I was probably five or six years old. My recollection is going to Americanization classes with my mother. Uh, these were held at what was the Registry of Motor Vehicles building, and the upstairs was sort of a classroom hall kind of arrangement where classes were given in English for immigrants, and also Americanization, which in today's terminology would be called Instructions for Assimilation. Very interesting, because the woman that taught this was Margaret [Kelty]. Margaret [Kelty] was a legend in her own time. Probably one of the most foremost people in adult education in the United States by the time she died. I remember fondly her talking about the 500 Basic English words – which I wonder why they can't be used today – done by some professor from England that came over here. She adopted that technique, and with the use of these 500 words apparently one could communicate and get along. 3 But above and beyond that, Margaret was a genuinely helpful person. She was the daughter of a pharmacist who had a drugstore in the area and in his time had learned to speak Italian to better serve his Italian-American clientele. Margaret has sort of been a legend in the memory of most of us in that particular period of history. She and her sister were always a helpful part of the community and probably helped bridge the differences between the Italian community, if you will, and the Irish community at a time when some saw the Italian movement as a quote unquote Latin invasion. Also at that time there were other people who were quite helpful to the Italian community. Miss [Courtney] and her sister, they were schoolteachers, and of course in those days they were unmarried. And also there was a Mary [Bartley] who was the principal of the Nolan School. These people all had a meaningful role and a large role in helping the Italo-Americans, or the newly arrived Italian immigrants, to get adjusted to the American way of life, learning the language and the expressions, and also sort of acted as a bridge in many cases between them and their Irish neighbors. SPEAKER 1: So how old were you when you remember going to these Americanization classes? JOE ADDANTE: Probably between five years old, six years old. Just prior to the first grade, and then also sometimes even after the first grade because some of them were conducted in the evening. SPEAKER 1: Was that your introduction to English, or did you hear it from friends? JOE ADDANTE: Well, we grew up speaking both languages without actually recognizing there was a difference. We spoke Italian at home; spoke English with our friends without even giving it a thought, frankly. Some of our friends who were attending the Immaculate Conception School had to learn French because the classes were conducted in French in those days. And some of 4 them grew up speaking English, Italian from home, and French from school, which became an advantage to them. SPEAKER 1: But prior to school you were probably living in an Italian neighborhood where there was… JOE ADDANTE: There was English spoken. My father, bear in mind my father had been 10 years before my mother had arrived. He had already become, I believe, a citizen. And he ran a checkbook, ran a business and spoke English in a very passable way, so that he did speak quite a bit of English at home in addition to Italian, hopefully encouraging my mother in her English, which she picked up very readily and read almost all the novels of those days, the classics. I remember her reading to me from Les Misérables in English, which I had forgotten until I saw the play in London and it all came back to me. Yeah. So my father was a very – and mother both, they were very literate people and they loved…they had read many of the classics in Italian and were sort of rediscovering them in English. SPEAKER 1: So tell me more. I tried to ask you this just a few minutes ago but your father, how he tried to get your mother to America and he had some sort of resistance or some… JOE ADDANTE: No. No. That was his mother. My father had no problem in those days getting his wife over here. But at the end of World War II my father had a love for bringing back his mother to this country, because he and both my uncles could have taken care of her very easily. But in going through the immigration papers it became complicated, and it dragged out. And my grandmother died in Italy without ever having seen her son again, and I never got to know her. And my father lost interest and decided never to return to Italy. It was a sad thing, because I had kind of hoped to go with him. In fact the first thing I did, meaningful thing, after his death was to go to Italy and to find out where his sister was, and my uncles, and the village and the home where he, the house where 5 he was born. And I have visited several times since. And I managed to bring my Franciscan uncle to this country for two visits, and so I began to bridge the communications between the cousins and uncles and aunts and that sort of thing. SPEAKER 1: So did Dominic or Rocco ever go back to Italy? JOE ADDANTE: Yes, my uncle Rocco went back in 1937, was married, and he had the same sad experience my father had. He was separated from his wife for 10 years until the end of World War II. When she came here then his son was born, Rocco. My uncle Dominic managed to go back a couple of times because he wanted to visit his sister, who was alive then, and his brother, which he did; then that was his last visit. SPEAKER 1: Okay. Now your father, how may siblings did he have? He had three brothers and… JOE ADDANTE: My father was from a family of 10 children. I think there were seven survivors: my father and his sister and three brothers that I knew, and another sister that I never knew but I met her children, and another sister that I never knew that survived to adulthood, if you will, you know. SPEAKER 1: And their names? JOE ADDANTE: Oh. SPEAKER 1 Do you remember them? JOE ADDANTE: My father's name was Joseph, his sister's name was Agatha, who was an extremely lucky woman in the very early days survived a double mastectomy and lived to be 85 or 86 years of age. SPEAKER 1: In the old country? JOE ADDANTE: In the old country, so it was done back in the days when surgery was primitive by today's standards. Then there was my uncle Rocco, was next. And I think there are a couple of sisters in between. One was [Anina]. To go down the list there was my father, Agatha, I think [Anina], Rocco, and then there was another sister whose name I don't remember, then my uncle 6 Dominic, and then my uncle Francesco who became the Franciscan. That I recall in the names and a couple others. SPEAKER 1: So I read somewhere that in the old days that a lot of marriages were arranged, but your father wished to choose his own wife? JOE ADDANTE: My father was a very independent person. He chose his own wife in a very romantic way and courted her with poetry. My father had a poetic flair. And I think he passed it on to his children, because we all love poetry. But the one problem was that they were of opposite political parties in their families. And my father's main reason for leaving Italy was not so much the opportunity, because he was a craftsman. He made handmade shoes and there was always a lot of work for him. So rather than stay home and get involved in squabbles, he left. He wrote to a friend of his who was in Maine. And the friend never answered but just sent him a ticket. I think it was a $35 steerage ticket in those days. My dad arrived in this country in 1910 and never went back. He landed in Boston, not Ellis Island. And then from there he went to Connecticut and got work with the railroad, because there were some Italian men that would take care of him as far as the language was concerned, while he was trying to learn English. And he stayed there for about three months. And they had an Italian daily newspaper in those days published in Italian for the immigrants. There were many such newspapers just like the Finnish [Raivaaja Press] here. There was an ad in the paper by a shoemaker in Fitchburg by the name of [Sisino], who was looking for a shoemaker. So my dad came to Fitchburg and he was here till he died. He worked for about four months with this man and because he could not arrange to have his evenings off to go to night school to learn English, he quit the job because his primary interest was in learning English. He got another job working at one of the 7 mills; I think the [Beuline] Mill was the name of it. And he worked there for a short period of time, finally saved enough to get a little shop started. And by 1912 he was able to send for his brother to help him in the business. And by 1915 he had bought a building of his own. Tried to send for my mother, World War I broke out and that became an impossibility until the 1920s when my mother and my other Uncle Dominic came together from Italy. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. Now, what about the political party? Can you tell me more about – he didn't want to become involved in any squabbles in Italy and that his wife… JOE ADDANTE: Yeah, my father was not much of a political animal. He saw politics for what it was, in many ways, but not a very… in his mind a very constructive thing anyway. More than that I never heard. I guess he did like my uncle. My mother's brother was a very political person and very active. And I think the… if there was any antagonism it was between my mother's brother and my father's family, if you will, being opposing political persuasions. Whether it was conservative or liberal in those days I don't know. I never really got a handle on it. But my uncle Luigi, my mother's brother, was mayor of three villages at the same time. Because, you know, you had to be a property owner in order to run for political office and you had to be a property owner before you could vote. It was a democracy, but it was a selective democracy in those days. But he was very active, and his wife had died with only one surviving child after having gone through many pregnancies. So it was he and his daughter who actually grew up with my mother as a sister, although she was a niece, because my uncle was the oldest and my mother was the youngest of a large family; but they were the only two survivors. In those day that was not uncommon. And Giovannina, who was my mother's cousin, was almost like her sister and they grew up together 8 and they used to communicate a lot. But then my mother joined my dad here in 1920. But the political thing was not something that my father was interested in and he just got away from it. I think that is the best thing he did because he thoroughly enjoyed this country. SPEAKER 1: Now his wife, your mother, was from the same small village? JOE ADDANTE: Oh yes, they were practically across-the-street neighbors. I mean, the village today has only a population of about 1000. And in those days it was probably a little bigger because they had larger families, and it was mainly an agricultural village to begin with. It is now still slightly agricultural but more on a hobby basis and it has become the weekend place for those that grew up in the village and sought work in the cities nearby. And they go back there on weekends and they fixed up the maternal and paternal homes into the weekend places to rest and enjoy. It's very interesting what they've done with the village, because it has become a very pretty, enjoyable place, because there is very little work being done there except a few tomato plants here and there, and olive trees and that sort of thing. SPEAKER 1: Tell us the name of the village. JOE ADDANTE: The name of the village is [Carpineto Sulla Nora] because it's on the [Nora] River and it's in the province of [Piscada], which is on the Adriatic side of Italy and it is basically central Italy; almost directly East of Rome. SPEAKER 1: Okay. And what region would that be? JOE ADDANTE: That would be [Abruzzi], is the province. The [regione] is province. It is [Piscada]. They refer to their states as regions and then what we call counties they call provinces. SPEAKER 1: Right, so the region is… JOE ADDANTE: And what we call counties they call parishes. [La Paroche de]… SPEAKER 1: Okay.9 JOE ADDANTE: Yeah. SPEAKER 1: So your father, he learned the craft from his father? JOE ADDANTE: From his father, who had learned it from his father. No, but my father was actually apprenticed out, and he had to serve a three-year apprentice in order to be a master craftsman in those days. And he had to live and became almost like an indentured servant when you were an apprentice. You lived away from home, you lived with the master, and after the three years you came back home and you were considered a guild member kind of thing. SPEAKER 1: Where was he sent? Do you know? JOE ADDANTE: Probably 20 miles away. And I never got the name of the town. The only thing I ever heard was he did not enjoy the meals because they weren't like his mothers. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: They never are. Now, why would your father not have learned from his father? JOE ADDANTE: It just wasn't done. It wasn't done in terms of you wouldn't be recognized as a true craftsman if you learned from your father. Although my father did teach his brothers, but that's the way it was done, and it cost money. He had to pay for it, and it was sort of a tuition, if you will. And that was done mainly for shoemakers, tailors, cabinetmakers, bearing in mind in those days you could not go out and buy finished furniture that easily, or even caskets for the dead. You know, these people had the cabinetmakers. My mother would tell me that they would have coffins half finished and they would just finish them for the day of the funeral. SPEAKER 1: Okay. JOE ADDANTE: Shoes had to be made, my father would actually go out to these large estates where they had tenant farmers and that sort of thing and they would make shoes for everybody there. They would stay probably a week. They would make 10 or 15 pairs of shoes and repair their saddles and all leatherwork. It was a whole kind of activity. And they would do that for 50 or 60 10 miles around. Very interesting kind of… they would go, they'd pack their tools, pack a mule, go off and get this work done and come back. SPEAKER 1: Did they work on the leather itself? JOE ADDANTE: Oh yes. They didn't tan it; they bought tanned leather. But then they would start from scratch. They made their own patterns, their own lasts, they did their own measurements. It was incredible. My father could look at a foot and with a piece of tape he would make a last to make a shoe. But that's the way they were trained, you know. SPEAKER 1: Now, did he continue doing that when he came here? Did it change much? JOE ADDANTE: When he came here the polio was a very prevalent problem, and he made a lot of shoes for polio victims, or he modified a lot of shoes. Then he got into the actual shoe repairing. In fact I, much of that influence rubbed off of me and I got interested in being a podiatrist because of that. I could see him put lifts on shoes. I remember I made my first pair of shoes with my dad when I was about nine or 10 years old, helping him out and learning how to do it. I sort of grew up with it. And my uncles worked with him and then we had three shoe repair shops going at one time. My dad also wholesaled leather and heels, and nails, and stitching material for the shoes. He became a finder. So he covered the whole gamut of the shoe thing. SPEAKER 1: Just so we can record this, tell me what the process was that you remember. For example, when someone wanted a pair of shoes they would come and see your father or his brothers and…? JOE ADDANTE: The first thing they would do is have them stand up on a piece of paper and they would outline the foot. And then – and my dad did this without half the education I had in terms of this. But he says, "You know, when you put the weight on the foot that is the real size." And he would measure this out. Then he would measure the girth of the foot, just like the waist of a11 body, around the foot. Then he'd also measure around the ankle and he got these measurements. Then if he had a ready-made last, he could use that. If he didn't he'd have to make one or modify one, because he had certain basic ones that had been pre-made, because manufactured lasts began to come out. They were made in [Lynn], Mass. In fact [Lynn] was apparently the foundation of the shoe trade in the United States. Then he would modify that. Then he would proceed to make a pattern of the leather and the lining. Now this was done in our living room, if you called it that. My father had this sewing machine, and this is where we could cut the patterns out and then assemble the upper of the shoe, and then he'd put it on the last. Now, putting that on the last, you cut off an insole that you put on the bottom of the last which would be the sole, the bottom of the foot. Then the leather was drawn over that. Then it was stitched and a welt was put on, called a Goodyear welt because that was an American process. And it was stitched by hand, and then to that was fastened the sole. And that was the intriguing part, because when you had a polio victim one foot usually was, or one leg would be shorter than the other, or sometimes you had to put a weight because as a shriveled-up limb, as a result of the polio, would not grow unless it was pulled on. So by adding weight to the shoe, as the youngsters would try to run it would pull on that leg and encourage a little extra growth. And I remember weighing those things and they were half a pound, or a pound or three pounds, whatever it was, to try to bring that leg to its fullest capacity, even though it had been affected by the polio.12 So there were a lot of interesting little details involved, but that is basically it. And then though we put the eyelets on, there was a machine that put the eyelets and laces and sometimes we had to cut laces and cut a special tip on, because on some of these patients they had a higher type of shoe: sort of a semi-boot like a trucker boot effect to hold it on a shriveled limb. SPEAKER 1: Were there different styles that people could choose from? JOE ADDANTE: Not as it is today. Far from it. Far from it. In fact, I remember the transitional period when shoes went from being nailed to being stitched. Because they would use little tacks, the old tacking shoemaker. When the machines came in, I think my dad was one of the first ones to have an electric stitching machine in New England. And other people who did shoes in the area would bring them to him. They'd do everything else but stitch them, and he would stitch them on the machine and he got a fee for stitching these shoes for them. SPEAKER 1: Where did he buy that machine? JOE ADDANTE: He couldn't buy it. SPEAKER 1: Oh, he had to… JOE ADDANTE: He couldn't buy it. He had to get it from the Goodyear stitching company and there was a royalty, there was actually a stitch meter. And you paid by the stitch. They would come and read the meter. And in fact his company, the Goodyear stitching company, not the rubber company, they actually were sued after World War II. It went that long before people were allowed to buy them because it was considered a monopoly and they were cracked. But the insidious part of it all, which was very unfair, following World War I they started making these machines. They were on royalty in this country, but they were being sold overseas, so that the overseas shoemakers began to compete with ours in a very unfair way, because the foreign laws did not protect the copyright, the patent laws that we have here. That was an interesting… SPEAKER 1: Must be. So how was it that your father was given this? 13 JOE ADDANTE: Well, he read about it and decided he needed one. He was sort of an avant-garde kind of person anyway. He got it. He had to pay for it. He couldn't own it outright. You had to buy it but then you have to pay the royalty on it, so it was a two-way hook-up, you know [laughter]. SPEAKER 1: So was he…did he follow…did he do each step of the shoe or did he do some of it and then handed it over to his brothers, or…? JOE ADDANTE: Well, they all did. They worked together. SPEAKER 1: They worked together? JOE ADDANTE: They worked independently, and they worked together. And sometimes it would be like a little mass production line on a small scale. One would do one and one would do the other, depending what they were doing that day. And of course to run these machines, you had to heat them up. They were gas fired because rosin was in there and rosin had to be… you had to melt the rosin till it was soft, because when the thread went through there to give it strength, it was dipped in and out of the rosin. So they didn't run that stitcher every day. They would run it like three times a week. So the other days would be in preparation for that. Much like the old tailors did when they had the steam presses. They would get all their work done, and they would press on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I used to see that in the neighboring tailor's shop. That was an interesting experience, too./AT/ca/sg
Part two of an interview with Antoinette Carchidi of Leominster, Massachusetts. Topics include: She never felt discriminated against. Her and her husband made wine during prohibition. Social activities and what she did for fun. How her husband developed his tailor business. How she became a U.S. citizen. Her feelings about the U.S. How American food compares with Italian. ; 1 GREG CARCHIDI: And as our tape ran out the last time, she was just finishing, uh, when she was, uh, uh going to night school and it got to be kind of tough to travel from Charlestown to the North End. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. Right. GREG CARCHIDI: Okay. And you just remembered a story about -- you also, you remembered a story about, uh, the boat when you were coming over. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. When the people took over… GREG CARCHIDI: There was a strike, right? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: It was strike. When the people -- working people, I mean the passengers that was on the boat took over, they found a bomb. GREG CARCHIDI: A bomb on the boat? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: On the boat. And good thing they took, took over and found that, otherwise we would all be gone. GREG CARCHIDI: A bomb, right? SPEAKER 1: Disaster, disaster. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Disaster. That's right. GREG CARCHIDI: Wow. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: That's right. GREG CARCHIDI: So, what, what did they do when they found the bomb? They just got rid of it? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: They get rod of it, I don't know… GREG CARCHIDI: You don't know. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: … how they did it, but the rumors that's where [unintelligible – 00:01:15]. So we was all saved. But they probably got them on this history. They, they probably have it in… GREG CARCHIDI: In the books? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: In books. 2 GREG CARCHIDI: Yes, it must be on record. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Record. GREG CARCHIDI: Somewhere. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Somewhere. GREG CARCHIDI: Probably on record somewhere. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: That's right. GREG CARCHIDI: Yes. SPEAKER 1: And the news media must have said something about it. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. Sure, sure. GREG CARCHIDI: Okay. After you were in Leominster for a while, or just looking back now on, you know, being an immigrant, do you remember anything? Like did people discriminate against you, do you think? Did they call you [guinea]? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: No. GREG CARCHIDI: No? They didn't find that at all? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: We lived with Irish people. GREG CARCHIDI: Really? Where? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: In Charlestown. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: And they all liked us the first day they see us. GREG CARCHIDI: So they liked you. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: We could say yes, and they took us and make a tea, sit at the table for us to drink a cup of tea with them. How nice they were. And the people living upstairs with us, they [send] their husband, which -- she was Irish, and then her husband was Italian and said, "You go upstairs," because we were young anyway. "You go upstairs, see my wife and even if you don't know how to talk English," he says, "she, by [unintelligible - 00:02:59] her, you learn." And so, we said: "We're ashamed to go upstairs. We don't even know how to say yes, you know?"3 GREG CARCHIDI: You didn't even know how to say yes? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: No. "And so, we can't go upstairs. Make your wife come downstairs," we'd say to him. And so, we have a little baby, and so she don't like to, you know, come down with the baby. That's it. GREG CARCHIDI: They treated you nice? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: They treated -- all the Irish people treated us wonderful, believe me. GREG CARCHIDI: All your experiences were nice. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. And I now I'm going to tell you, near the window, an Irish lady called her cat, "Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty!" I went to the kitchen to my mother, [laughter] and my sister says, "I learned a word. I know how to say, call the cat in English. It says, 'Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty.'" [Laughter] I was so happy. GREG CARCHIDI: Because you learned how to say a word. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: To say one word. [Laughter] Yes, I did. And that's it. I guess… GREG CARCHIDI: That's funny. Outside of work and everything, I know you worked at the tailor shop… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: With grandpa… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: You kept the house and raised the kids. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: Cooked and sew, whatever. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: You know, you did a lot of work. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. 4 GREG CARCHIDI: Did you belong to any clubs, like what did you do for excitement? Like I know prohibition was on. You used to do the wine, right? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Oh, yes. GREG CARCHIDI: You made the wine? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes, we make the wine. But then we didn't -- just for house. GREG CARCHIDI: You didn't sell it? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: No. No. GREG CARCHIDI: But you made… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: We made wine. We give wine to doctors, lawyers… GREG CARCHIDI: But you didn't sell it [laughter]. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: But never did take a penny. GREG CARCHIDI: Police chief, fire chief [laughter]. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah, we did, because I remember – GREG CARCHIDI: Nobody could buy it. Somebody had to make it. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. Well, anyway, we used to make just for family… GREG CARCHIDI: Friends. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Friends. But doctor come in our house, of course your grandpa sew for the doctors. GREG CARCHIDI: Oh, he used to sew. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: So he made suits for doctors and for the judge. You know, the… judge from the bank. We used to make suits for him, and they'd drink the best booze they had, and they liked our wine. GREG CARCHIDI: They liked your wine? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Mm-hmm. Sure, they liked our wine. And they asked, they said, "Can we buy?" "We don't sell it," we'd say. We never did sell one glass of wine. We give. Give it away, yes. But not sell the wine. GREG CARCHIDI: That's was the way to do it. That's good.5 ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: I lived in [unintelligible – 00:06:35] we make our living sewing. GREG CARCHIDI: So everything else was fun? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Fun. GREG CARCHIDI: Right. And I know you must have had a lot of fun, because I… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. We had… GREG CARCHIDI: I remember… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: … good times at home. And for the club, like, [unintelligible - 00:06:51] they had a Christmas party, New Year's parties. We enjoyed with them. GREG CARCHIDI: You used to go? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: And they danced. They had a dance downtown first, and we used to go dance on the street. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: They used to have a dance on the street, and your grandfather used to be band leader. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: And we used to go on the band concert, take my children on the carriage and go down and hear the music. That's it, that's a good time. It was before, you know? They didn't have like they have it over here now. Everything is changed. GREG CARCHIDI: Oh, yeah. Did you ever own a car when you were living… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: No, no. GREG CARCHIDI: Yes. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: A car, we never owned it, but with a nickel you took a bus. You don't really need a car then. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: You'd take a bus and you joined in. The summer, your grandfather hired a cab to go…6 GREG CARCHIDI: He hired a cab? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: To go on the beach and to have a good time for his children. All the time, we used to -- two or three times a year we used to go out, [unintelligible - 00:08:35] the cab, or with a friend. We paid gas and go, two families, and we had good times. But that's it. GREG CARCHIDI: I remember you used to tell me a story that he used to say something about the cars; he used to walk faster than the car could go. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: He used to say, "Why should I buy a car?" ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. He… GREG CARCHIDI: "Who needs a goddamned car? I can walk faster than that." SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] I don't remember that. GREG CARCHIDI: You used to tell me about it. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. GREG CARCHIDI: He used to walk fast to work down the street. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: He would love to walk because we live near town anyway, used to live near town. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: And walk, you enjoyed to… we never took a lunch because he liked to sit down on the table and eat. He says, "That's my pleasure, to go home and eat." Until he couldn't do it anymore, when he was sick he couldn't do no more, and I had to make lunches then. Until then, we could go, we walk. And we've taken busses to, that's it. GREG CARCHIDI: Did… okay. Were there any real problems because of… did you think because you were immigrants? Did you have any problems like getting work? Like how did you establish? You must have already been established as a good tailor.7 ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: Were there ever any problems about people getting enough work? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: When he come in, in this country, it was different than when I come in. GREG CARCHIDI: Oh, he came a lot earlier. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: He came earlier. But he had a little complication because he come -- see, over here there were all English people, and he didn't know how to talk English and he had to go in the shop. He went and worked in a shop until one friend that came from [Broughton] and see him, and he says, "What do you do with your trade? You left your trade?" "No," he says, "I'm going to take you with me in Broughton," he says, "because this trade is worth money to you in years to come." So, then he left Leominster for a couple of years until he learned how to talk English, and he went to work as a tailor again in Broughton. For a couple of years he stayed in Broughton, your grandfather. But he was not married then. He was only a little kid himself, you know, young fellow. I don't know the story before, but that's what he told me. He says, "If it wasn't for this friend, I will never have this tailor business again. That's it. Because I come, I didn't know how to talk English." He went with a Jewish fellow to help him, but then if he need a thread, he didn't know how to say it. If he needed line, he didn't know how to say it. So that's why he had to leave. That's it. GREG CARCHIDI: But then he proved to be successful. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. Yes, he was very, very successful. It was a good business. Yeah. We made a very good living then.8 GREG CARCHIDI: All right. What else have I got? Oh, Boston. When did he get sick? I know he died the year I was born. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah, right. GREG CARCHIDI: But I never saw him or anything, I never got to know him. But when did he get sick? Did he get sick right… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Ten years before he died. He was 10 years sick. Then, on 25th anniversary, they give us a party in Boston, a party in Broughton. And so, when we went and visited Broughton, that's when he got sick, the 25th anniversary. GREG CARCHIDI: Did he have a heart attack? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: He had a shock or a stroke. Then after five years, he had the second shock. And so, in 10 years, he died. That's it. GREG CARCHIDI: I remember -- did you mention while he was sitting down or something and he just…? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. Well, the first shock, we was visiting Broughton. You know, we had -- she was in first year training. GREG CARCHIDI: Nursing? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Nursing training. And your father came back from… SPEAKER 1: Graduated. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Graduated? Yes. SPEAKER 1: When he graduated, he must have come back to Broughton. I was on duty. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah… You're sure? SPEAKER 1: Yes, I'm sure. It was about 1950. [Pause for 10 seconds.] GREG CARCHIDI: It must have been around … ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: I don't remember, because I think you're still were sick in school. Because Joe probably can – yes. SPEAKER 1: No, I working in [unintelligible - 00:15:24]. GREG CARCHIDI: So anyway, what happened? When he went away, he was at the party?9 ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Party, yeah. And that's when we had to call the doctor there, and we stayed there about five, six days, and Joe come get him with his car. And he was not married yet to Kaye. And so… GREG CARCHIDI: So it must have been in the '40s. That was in the late '40s. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Late '40s. Well, sure, because '57 -- it was probably '49. GREG CARCHIDI: '49, '50. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: '50, yeah. He probably was [unintelligible - 00:16:15], right. Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: So he had a shock then, and… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. And that's it. GREG CARCHIDI: Did he still work? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah, five years. He didn't work -- at the second shock he couldn't do it too much. He couldn't do too much. GREG CARCHIDI: But he lives to be -- how old was he when he died? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Sixty-seven. GREG CARCHIDI: Sixty-seven? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Sixty-seven years old. So, that's it. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah. Okay. Do you have any opinions about America in general, you know? Coming here, did you really like living here, you know? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Oh, yes. GREG CARCHIDI: You spent a lot of your life here. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. I lived here more than I lived in the country I belong. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: I enjoyed living… GREG CARCHIDI: You're glad you came here, right? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. Yes, very. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah. Have you ever been back to Italy? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: No.10 GREG CARCHIDI: No? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: No. GREG CARCHIDI: What do you think about it? Do you wish you went back? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah, I wish I visited, yeah, but not to stay. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: I like this country. I'm a citizen in this country for many years now. GREG CARCHIDI: What did they ask you when you went to become a citizen? Do you remember? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: [Laughter] Yeah, I remember few things. They asked me if a colored guy can be president. GREG CARCHIDI: A colored guy? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. They asked you that? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes, they asked me that. GREG CARCHIDI: What did you say? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: I said yes, all depend on the votes. And he say, "Good." [Laughter] GREG CARCHIDI: All depends on the votes [laughter]. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. All depend on the people, and that's it. Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: You're right. All depends on the people, whatever the people want. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: They told me -- he says, "How old the president should be before he…" GREG CARCHIDI: He could become president? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Become president. Well, I said, "35." GREG CARCHIDI: All right! ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: He said: "You're right [laughter]." They were surprised of me [laughter]. GREG CARCHIDI: Did you study it? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: No [laughter]. GREG CARCHIDI: You guessed?11 ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Guessed [laughter]. I says, "Well, you know, at the 35, this is -- before, how could you be, you know, a president? You can't be a president before because you're too young." And… I mean the senators, they were in the state house. GREG CARCHIDI: You mean the White House? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: The White House. GREG CARCHIDI: You mean the… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: White House, yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: The federal government. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. And I told them 96. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah, now there's a hundred. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes, well, at that time 96. GREG CARCHIDI: Forty-eight states. When did you do this, get your citizenship? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Nineteen… GREG CARCHIDI: Was it… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: It was the 1940… GREG CARCHIDI: Oh, 1940. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: '42 or something like that. GREG CARCHIDI: Yes. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: It was in the fall, anyway. I still got it, you know, by this time. And that's it. I became citizen. I didn't have any trouble. They made me read, they explained me how to -- if I knew what I read, and then I had to explain. Everything was okay. GREG CARCHIDI: It was good? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. They say, "Oh, no trouble with you." They pulled the book they gave me to read and says, "You're all right [laughter]." And that time, it was hard to become a citizen, too. GREG CARCHIDI: Yes. So you became a…12 ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. You had no… GREG CARCHIDI: And then you were proud, right? Proud to be an American? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. Oh, yes, yes. GREG CARCHIDI: Good. Have you got any development in favorite hobbies when you came? I know sewing was your business. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: Let's say cooking. How about cooking? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Cooking, yes. I cook quite a bit, but I cook -- we had little parties in the house, and I cooked for them. I had company all the time from out of town. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: I'd cook for them. And it was -- that's okay. That's okay. GREG CARCHIDI: I want to ask you another question about food, because I've interviewed -- I've already interviewed about four other people. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: And every one of them has said, mentioned things about American food. What do you think about the American food? Do you think it's… would you rather eat the Italian food or the American food? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: I like some American food too. All depends, you know? I don't like all Italian cooking either. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: You know? And the same way, the American cooking, the same thing. I like something that, I like it more than the Italian cooking, you know? And I like the Italian cooking too. GREG CARCHIDI: But do you basically think that the American food is not as tasty as the Italian food? It's not like… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Some are not. GREG CARCHIDI: Oh, yes. Some.13 ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Some are not tasty. GREG CARCHIDI: Yeah. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: That's right. The way they eat is different, right? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah, well… GREG CARCHIDI: They don't eat… they rush. [Speaking in Italian], you know? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. They have to have dessert all the time, which Italian people, we eat substantial food and then you can eat dessert if you wanted to. GREG CARCHIDI: Yes. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: I like dessert. But if you eat Italian food, it won't fit to you [laughter]. That's it. GREG CARCHIDI: I always find that. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: If you eat about a half a dozen sausages, and then… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes, right. GREG CARCHIDI: Macaroni, where are you going to fit pie? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Pie [laughter]. That's right. GREG CARCHIDI: Where are you going to put the pie? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: That's right. American people eat dainty. You know, they -- a little of this, a little of that, and they have dessert, which I think is nice. GREG CARCHIDI: Have you ever -- this is the all-time American question. Have you ever been to McDonalds? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. GREG CARCHIDI: A hamburger place. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. [Laughter] GREG CARCHIDI: You're not American until you go to McDonalds. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: [Laughter] I enjoy McDonalds [laughter] better than Papa John's.14 GREG CARCHIDI: Papa John's is a rip off. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: Too expensive. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. It's… if you get the hamburger, which I do -- sometimes we like a hamburger, and it's quick and it's tasty. I enjoy it. GREG CARCHIDI: Oh, yes. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: What's wrong? I don't find anything wrong. It's cheap. The price is right [laughter]. GREG CARCHIDI: See, you can tell you're American. The price is right. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: [Laughter] Right. GREG CARCHIDI: Okay. Let me see. I think -- yeah, that's good. We've done about over an hour or so. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: I think that's plenty. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: It's a good one. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: You've given me a lot. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Pretty good, yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: Thank you very much. You know, a lot of people, especially a lot of teachers, they don't… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: You know, they're smacked, they're all doctors, they know their field very well, but a lot of times it's good to have… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. GREG CARCHIDI: A real first-hand interview with someone that has lived through… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: That's right. GREG CARCHIDI: … what you have. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: That's right, that's right.15 GREG CARCHIDI: Have come to another country, developed here, and got a good job, and… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yes. [Clanking of the dishes] That's okay. That's okay, don't worry about it. This little table is too little. You get – you burn yourself? GREG CARCHIDI: And it's all on tape [laughter]. Okay, we're back now after a slight accident [laughter]. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Well, it was not your fault. It's a bit… GREG CARCHIDI: That's okay. Okay, well… ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah? GREG CARCHIDI: We've got -- I think we have a good example here of immigrant experiences in the United States. ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Yeah. Well, it went… GREG CARCHIDI: Would you like to say something in your native tongue? Wishing the people a merry Christmas or a happy New Year, or…? ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: Of course. With the gladness. I wish everybody merry Christmas and happy new year, and I'm very happy that I'm in the United States [laughter]. GREG CARCHIDI: Okay. Can you say something in Italian? Say, "I wish you a Merry Christmas?" ANTOINETTE CARCHIDI: [Speaking in Italian]. GREG CARCHIDI: Oh, all right. Thank you very much. This was Antoinette Carchidi, an interview with her grandson Greg Carchidi. Thank you very much. And now [laughter], the end./AT/lj/es
Part one of an interview with Julia Casey. Topics include: Julia's service as a clerk stenographer in the Civil Service Commission. Family history. Her parents came from Italy; her father was from Crenna and her mother was from Milan. The arranged marriage between her parents and their immigration to the United States. Her grandfather's work at a gas company in Italy. Her relatives worked in an embroidery business in Massachusetts. What it was like for Julia to grow up in Boston. Speaking proper Italian. What their neighborhood in Boston was like. The social club nearby. The foods people cooked and ate. The Christmas traditions of her family. How to prepare and serve polenta. Celebrations for patron saints. ; 1 LINDA: Okay. JULIA: All right. LINDA: So why don't I just start by saying this is Linda Rosenlund with the Center for Italian Culture at Fitchburg State College. It's Wednesday, November 16th, 2002. We're at the home of Julia Casey at 700 Pearl Street in Fitchburg. And Julia is just filling out the biographical information sheet, but I decided to turn the recorder on because she has some interesting anecdotes while she is writing. So she was just about to fill out the work history portion, and she began telling me that she worked for the War Department Chemical Warfare Services in Washington, DC, and you started 10 days after Pearl Harbor. JULIA: Yes. I had -- after high school, I had gone—and it's not noted here—to the stenotype school in Boston. And in the course of learning, they sent us to take a Civil Service Examination since [stenotypee] is a type, is machine shorthand. And in October, I took the [unintelligible - 00:01:13] Civil Service Examination in Boston, and then when the war broke out, I received a telegram to report to Washington by the 17th of December. And so 10 days after Pearl Harbor, I found myself at the War Department for assignment in the Civil Service Commission and the War Department. They sent me there, and then they assigned me to the Chemical Warfare Service as a clerk stenographer. LINDA: Does that mean it wasn't a choice? JULIA: No. No. There was no choice. They assigned you -- thousands of girls were pouring in from all over the country to, to man the increased offices for the War Department. The war was on, and every department in the government needed extra help, and so they took Civil Service Exams all over the country and the girls that were registered were sent telegrams to come in, and then they sent you wherever they needed you. So I worked there until I think October of 1944, and then I was transferred back to the Boston Procurement Office for the Chemical Warfare Service. LINDA: -kinds of things did you learn? 2 JULIA: It was straight stenographic work—filing, clerical, and stenographic work. I worked for a number of different people who dictated letters, and we typed them up and did general office work. LINDA: Were you ever learning anything interesting? JULIA: No. No, except the names of the various gases that they were using at the time, which was still pretty much what they had from World War I—mustard gas and things like that I haven't thought about it in years—but they had arsenals of gases all over the country. And so the correspondence mainly had to do with shipments and [unintelligible - 00:03:30] get into any of the research part at all. Men from major chemical corporations around the country came in to handle the government's program. Beyond that, we have no way of knowing. Things were either stamped secret or confidential. But the correspondence was so voluminous that things that came in, the regulations from the government had to all be filed and none of us did that and read anything like that. It was secret confidential, general -- you just filed it or you did whatever clerical work was assigned. LINDA: Obviously, war is such an uneasy time anyway. It must have been… JULIA: It was very exciting because we were young, and I eventually lived with four roommates in an apartment, and we worked almost six days a week. And because of the wartime, you didn't have as many things open to you. You couldn't visit the White House. For a long time, I never even got to see the Houses of Congress. We lived a very good life. We took care of our apartment. Each of the girls that I lived with, with whom I'm still closed friends, came from the different parts of the country except one who came from my own neighborhood. She lived with us. I lived with the girl from [unintelligible - 00:05:10], Missouri and a girl from Sunnyvale, California, and a girl that had come from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and we kept house, we shopped, we did laundry and we wanted to work in a 3 different agency and went to work with public transportation. We lived in Washington, and then we lived in Arlington, Virginia in an apartment. And we all came back to Boston together. We all arranged for transfers to various agencies in Boston. LINDA: Were you ever questioned about your Italian background? JULIA: No. I never was questioned. The questioning had to do with various organizations that you might have belonged to where they found your name. I mean, I was 18 years old when I left, so… And then I continued my Federal Civil Service until about seven months after I was married. LINDA: And that was in 1951? JULIA: 1950, yes. In April, I think I left my job, and I didn't work just for Chemical Warfare Service because after the war, they had what they call Reduction in Force, RIF. In other words, all the people that had been hired for the war were then let go, but you could go to other agencies that were getting rid of all of the stuff that the government had bought during the war, and one of the agencies I went to was the War Assets Administration in Boston. I forgot the name of the original name of the agency. They are in charge of reselling all of the machine tools that had been bought for the war plants, and New England was a very heavy industrial area for machine tools and machine and all kinds of things. So I went to work for the War Assets Administration, and then I think I put in sometime with one of the Air Force for terminal agencies here at the army base in Boston. And I was pregnant almost immediately after I was married, so I left in April of 1952. My first child was born in June of '52. LINDA: Are you okay? JULIA: Excuse me. I have a dry cough. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: [Unintelligible - 00:08:17] administration. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: I'll put CWS. That's the Chemical Warfare Service. LINDA: Okay.4 JULIA: And then War Assets Administration… and the Air Force. I still have all my papers, so I can check if we have to. And then I left in April. Our church, Catholic. That's all you want, isn't it? Or do you want… LINDA: Well, why don't you tell me where you go now? JULIA: All right. LINDA: -instead of Boston. JULIA: Okay, St. Camillus. LINDA: Okay. You have lived in Fitchburg since '68? JULIA: Yes. I've lived in Fitchburg since -- we moved here because my husband obtained the position of Director of the Library at Fitchburg State College in 1967, and he commuted about a year, and it was too much for him to commute to Boston. So, we had to sell -- we decided to sell our home, and we've lived here since March of 1968. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: Okay. Social clubs, wow. All right, I was a member, and still am, actually, of the League of Women Voters. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: Boston and Fitchburg. [Unintelligible - 00:10:07] Garden Club, where I was president for about four years. It's 1963, 1993, the June of [unintelligible - 00:10:30] Club. LINDA: I'm not familiar with that. JULIA: It's a Catholic layman's organization. I was actually the first woman admitted in the Fitchburg area. Would you mind opening the door? Letting the dog… LINDA: Oh okay. The dog is going to be [unintelligible - 00:10:48] with me now? JULIA: It's cold. She might just -- come on, sweetheart. Come, darling. Come on, Sasha. What a good [unintelligible - 00:10:59]. What a lovely dog! That would be on the tape. LINDA: That's okay. JULIA: All right. Let me…5 LINDA: What's that? JULIA: It's very cold in here because I turned down the heat, and the stove is not on. Let me just turn the heat up. Okay. Hold on. LINDA: Okay. What's the… JULIA: [Unintelligible - 00:11:24]. Ooh, my kids are [unintelligible - 00:11:29]. LINDA: Say what? JULIA: My [unintelligible - 00:11:33]. LINDA: Oh, who cares about things like that? Thanks for showing me all of the photographs. Julia just showed me the photographs that had been in her family since your mother passed away, I guess. What year was that? JULIA: My mother died in 1989 in Windsor, Vermont, because my sister owns a nursing home there and my mother went to live with her. But my mother lived alone on 11 and 13th Pompeii Street in Roxbury until she was 89 years old. My father had bought a six-family house on Pompeii Street, which originally was Lansdowne Street, and she lived in that house until she was 89 years old. Then she came to live with me for a year, and my sister took her up with her right after my son Steven's funeral in August of 1985. I treasure the artifacts, the furniture, and the pictures that I have. I have a whole collection of photographs from Italy which I'm hoping to organize before I die and so that the descendants will have some idea of who they came from. LINDA: Well, tell me a little bit about your parents. Were they born…? JULIA: My father was born in Crenna, Gallarate, C-R-E-N-N-A. It's a small town or village, and it's right above the city of Gallarate, G-A-L-L-A-R-A-T-E, which is a part of the Malpensa Airport in Milan. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: They are Lombards. My mother was born -- Lombardi is the province. My mother was born in Milan on December 5th, 1893. My father was born in Crenna, Gallarate on January 30th, 1891. And the family had lived there for a number of generations, and there are records in the church in Crenna. 6 LINDA: And their last names? Your father's last name is… JULIA: [Tomasine]. LINDA: Tomasine. JULIA: Yeah. LINDA: Mother's? JULIA: Seminario, and it was an arranged marriage. LINDA: So tell me a little bit about that. Did your mother tell you that was an arranged marriage, or…? JULIA: Most Italian women had to have the approval of their families before they married. It's a little complicated. When my father was an infant, a young girl baby was… I do not know the circumstances. She was assigned, she was asked -- no, that's wrong. She was given to my grandmother in Crenna, who was at the time nursing my papa. In other words, she was a nursing mother. And oftentimes when babies were either abandoned or the mother died or was too ill to take care of them, they were given to a nursing mother, who brought that child up along with the child she was nursing. In other words, she became a wet nurse. And if she had sufficient milk—since there were no formulas or bottles at the time—then she nursed both children. And this little girl, whose name was Carolina, she was brought up with my father until she was 18 years old. And then she was given her freedom, her choice to do whatever she wished, and at that time of course, girls, they went to work or they married. And she went to Milan to work, and she met one of my mother's uncles and married him, and as a result of this marriage, the two families were connected, not by blood, but because this girl had been raised with my father. And they have a child of their own, a little girl. And when the little girl was 9 years old, when [unintelligible - 00:17:15] was 9 years old, Carolina, her mother, died. And at the funeral, 7 which was during World War I, my mother went and my father went, because they were from the two families. My father went because she was called his sister of the milk, [foreign language - 00:17:45] de latte. That means that his mother nursed the two of them together, [unintelligible - 00:17:52] de latte. It was quite common, if there was no other way for these little babies to survive. Many women didn't have enough milk to feed their children, and my mother told me that in Milan, there were professionals wet nurses, and they used to come into the city on trams from the surrounding villages, and they wore special headdresses so they were recognized as women who were going to nurse babies in private homes. And this was their profession as long as they could. They would go to the home of somebody who could afford it and nurse a child whose mother is not able to feed a child, and they were honored. They were very respected women, recognized. They used to come in on the trolley cars into the city. And so I thought that was a very interesting thing. I have never heard of it myself. But I know I had another aunt on my father's side who went to South America and who could not nurse her first child and took her to a wet nurse in the country to nurse, to be fed. So it was not an uncommon situation at all. LINDA: So now your parents got connected at the… JULIA: They're only connected -- it's not a blood relationship. LINDA: Right. JULIA: It was marriage. And… LINDA: So you were telling me that it was arranged. JULIA: Yes. When my father came, my father came to America in 1912 with two brothers, two brothers were here, but America was a very tough place to be if you didn't speak English, and he didn't have any high skills. My father was trained as an embroiderer, because that was his father's cottage 8 industry in my [unintelligible - 00:20:23] in Crenna. But he couldn't get that kind of work in America, and so he did heavy laboring, washed dishes and did anything he could. And being the oldest son, when the family in Italy needed him, he went back, but he went back unfortunately in 1914. I think he told me that he went back in April, and in August the war broke out. And his youngest brothers were taught in the Italian army, and his two brothers in America joined the American army. So there were two brothers in the Italian army in the infantry and two boys who had a wonderful time in the American army and never was sent overseas. So when his sister of the milk died, then he met my mother at that funeral, but right after the war's conditions in Italy were very bad, he came back to America in 1919. And he felt that he was then about 26, 27 years old, and he felt that it was time to settle down, and he wrote to his mother. And his mother arranged with my mother's father and asked my mother if she would like to go to America to marry her son. And my mother agreed even though she didn't know him and had only met him at that one time, and so she came to America. LINDA: Did she come by herself? JULIA: No. Italian women did not come by themselves, unlike the Irish, who did. She came with -- by this time, the two boys, Vincent and Peter Tomasine, who were in the United States, decided that they wanted their mother to come. My grandparents were separated at that time, and so they made arrangements. One son Vincent had a girlfriend in Italy that he had more or less grown up with, and he sent for her. And then my uncle Peter and -- let's see, my grandmother came. They sent for their mother and Maria [unintelligible - 00:23:12], who married Vincent, and then my grandmother brought her youngest daughter, Mary, who was not married, and she brought her son-in-law, Angelo [unintelligible - 00:23:25], who 9 was married to my father's sister and had gone back to Italy from South America during the war. And after the war, he wanted to come to America. But the men always came first. So he came with his mother-in-law, who was my grandmother. LINDA: So your father returned in 1919. How long did he take him to save enough money to send for these? JULIA: Well, he worked very hard and the passage was very cheap, and so he sent money for them and sponsored my mother. And when she came here, they were married. There wasn't any big ceremony or anything like that. They lived with his mother and Maria [unintelligible - 00:24:24], who then married my uncle Vincent, and my father's youngest sister, Mary, Maria, and his brother-in-law until they all got settled. They lived in Roxbury in a flat. And then… LINDA: And what year was this that your mother came over JULIA: It was 1920 and '21, 1921. She arrived on October 12th in New York the same day, because she always said she came the same time as Christopher Columbus, on October 12th, 1921. By the way, I have a tape here that I -- of a family history that I wrote up in 1981, and we played it at Christmastime. And the whole story is on this tape. LINDA: Oh, interesting. JULIA: As far as I can remember—and I don't vouch for extreme accuracy in anything, because by that time, my mother was pretty well along in years in the late '70s. And she was 80. My mother and I, I went to Italy for the first time when I was 50 years old in August -- September of 1973. I went back with my mother, and I was in time to meet her brother, Raymundo Clemente, her brother, Umberto. His name was Umberto Seminario, the father of the boy who was lost in the Second World War, and his wife Osana, and my mother's half sister, Anna. And I say half sister because my mother's mother died at the age of 25 from consumption, when my mother was only four years old and her brother was two. And my grandfather, Raymundo Seminario had to remarry. He married within six 10 months so that he could keep his two children. Then there were two girls born of that marriage. LINDA: Did you mention the name Clemente? JULIA: Clemente was my grandfather, Raymundo Clemente Juliano Seminario. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: Yeah, three names. And sometimes they call him Clemente. Sometimes they call him Raymundo. But I was named for him, and my brother was named for him. LINDA: Well, that brings up an interesting point. I see that your name is spelled J-U-L-I-A, and Italian… JULIA: They Americanized it. LINDA: … didn't have J. JULIA: Yes. They don't have a J. LINDA: So when did that happen? JULIA: Probably when the birth certificate was sent into city hall. I was born at home, and the doctors who came in attendance didn't speak any Italian, and so they just put down what they heard phonetically. My brother and sister, all of us were born at home. So the records at city hall were just deplorable. They're awful. Then, of course, when we were baptized, then the names were different even on those baptismal records, which I have, because then we were baptized in the Italian churches in Boston. LINDA: So let me get back to the birth certificate. It's been my experience where the birth certificate actually has the Italian name, but it's later in school. Not yours? JULIA: No. I'd have to look it up, and you know, I'd have to look it up. But I think that the birth certificate -- it might be. LINDA: Well, it's just interesting that you [unintelligible - 00:28:52] change. JULIA: I also have my mother's, her brother's, and their half sister's report cards from their Italian elementary school in Milan, Italy, all signed by their father, my grandfather. I have it right around the corner. They're in the back.11 LINDA: Very interesting. JULIA: I went to visit the schools that they attended when I went to Milan. LINDA: So now your experience seems very different from many of the Italian Americans that I have, and their family is situated [unintelligible - 00:29:33] north. JULIA: Yes. Yes. Most of the Italian immigrants were from the central and southern part of Italy. From the north, the population there was more educated, and there was more industry, so jobs were plentiful unless, like in my grandfather's case, you had an industry where he was an embroiderer at many areas that have cottage industries. He worked out of his own home, and he was not a particularly good business man. So when the wars came along and he lost a lot of money, building an apartment house, so the boys decided that they would all come to America. LINDA: But they actually left the first time before the war. JULIA: Yes. Three of them came before the war, and my father was the only one that went back because he was the oldest son, and he must received word that things were not going well at home. And so he went back to help out for a time, but then after the -- he had to go into combat. Then when he came back after the war, things were not much better, and he joined his brothers in America again. LINDA: What did your mother's people do for…? JULIA: My grandfather started at the age of eight carrying bricks. He came from a large family in [unintelligible - 00:31:20], which is in Lombardi. It's the same town where Mother Cabrini was born. She was a modern Italian saint. And because child labor was very common, he went to school to learn to read and write, but then he got a job carrying bricks to build the gas company, and I just recently found out that the gas company in Milan was built by a French firm. 12 And so after the building was built, he got a job in the company. I don't know what he was doing, but he probably started out by shoveling coal or whatever. They made gas out of burning coal. And eventually, he worked his way up in the company until at the age of 54, he was in charge of sending out the gas to the entire city of Milan. They had huge gasometers in which they stored the prepared gas, and it's very strange because when my mother and father bought their house in Roxbury right across Massachusetts Avenue, which was the main street outside—their street connected to Massachusetts Avenue—there was a huge gasometer meter that was owned by the Boston Gas Company. And so all of my early life, I saw the same huge gasometer that my grandfather was a part of in Milan. LINDA: Interesting. JULIA: Right. It's gone now, as they put in the southeast expressway. They took it away, and they have different -- now they bring the gas in by pipeline, so they don't store it. LINDA: Did you ever have any discussions with your parents about the fact that it was an arranged marriage, or was it just so common then? JULIA: It was very common. You married people that you were introduced to, or there wasn't any of this thing of going out on dates. The expression in Northern Italy for a couple who were interested in each other was [foreign language - 00:34:04], meaning they speak to each other. That was the expression. They stayed in groups. They're amongst the families, and a gentleman, once a young man was interested in a girl, his only access was through her family. LINDA: Now, what brought your father to Boston? JULIA: Because his brothers were here and he figured he could -- he was very, very nervous. After the war, he came back in a very light post -- what do they call it? LINDA: Post-traumatic syndrome? JULIA: Post-traumatic… LINDA: Syndrome, I think.13 JULIA: They didn't call it that at the time, but he couldn't stay at home. And so, he came here and he did mostly have [unintelligible - 00:35:04] for the rest of his life. LINDA: But initially, when he came in 1912 with his brothers, what brought them to Boston? JULIA: Because they -- the Italians had started coming to America around 1890, 1888-1890, and the word got back that you could earn a living, and his brothers happened to be there. They had an aunt, their father's sister, Luisa Milani, came around 1880 or 1890, and she was married to a man who was a stonecutter, and of course, marble and granite. They have quarries in Massachusetts and Vermont, and her husband was a stonecutter. In fact, he died of silicosis. And these men were skilled laborers, and they worked in -- where they made cemetery monuments and they carved, they quarried stone for buildings. So their aunt was here, and they have to have someone to sponsor them. So my first two uncles came under her sponsorship, and so did my father under her sponsorship. Then a younger brother came around 1928. He had remained in Italy after the war. He was the youngest, and he came later than they did. And he became an automobile mechanic, a very skilled one. So that's right. And then my father, he bought these two houses for $1,700 apiece, and his brother Vincent gave him a down payment to put down so he could get settled. They bought homes almost immediately after they arrived. LINDA: Is this on Lansdowne, which later became Pompeii Street? JULIA: Yes. Well, my father did, and then his two brothers bought homes in other places. And his brother Vincent started up the same family embroidery business that he was -- that was his trade the rest of his life. He had a factory in [unintelligible - 00:37:36] where he did a great deal of 14 [wobbler], the embroidered patches that they used to distinguish outfits and military units and all types of things like that. LINDA: What's the name of that company? Do you know? JULIA: It was Vincent Tomasine Embroideries. And in fact later, after the war, long after the war, he sold it to someone else. LINDA: I'm wondering why your father didn't… JULIA: He couldn't stand it. After the way, he couldn't stand indoor work. He just couldn't. He was too nervous, and the business of course was run very differently from what his father had run in Italy, a one-man shop, whereas my uncle, all of my aunts went to work for my uncle, and they would get contracts. Say, women will embroidered slips and embroidered underwear, and the manufacturers in Boston that were making rayon, nylons, shorts would send -- they would stitch up the fronts of the slips, then they would send them by the box-loads to my uncle, who would put them on frames and do the embroideries on the front, then they went back to the factories to be re-stitched, to be stitched and completed. So he did all the embroidery, work whether it was blouses, whether it was slips, whether it was anything else that had to be done. As I said, during the war, it was military patches. LINDA: Now, about your mantle, you have a beautiful piece of embroidery. Who did that? JULIA: My mother. Because her mother had died so young from consumption, my grandfather refused to allow his daughters to work in large factories, in a factory. He didn't want them to do factory work. And so at that time, clothing was made almost custom. They didn't have huge factories that churned them all by the thousands, and fine clothing for girl who was going to be married, her [foreign language - 00:40:00] was made out of fine cloth and linen. And there were many, many -- again, it's a type of cottage industry, but small shops that were girls that were hired for this skill in stitching and 15 attaching tucking, attaching waist, and my mother worked in a place where they made shirts, and all kinds of skilled work was done by hand on single machines. And then every year for the month, they were allowed to vacation. My grandfather took them to the mountains, and that's still customary today. Every summer, most of the Italians go off to the mountains of the seashore for vacation. They believe in that. Most of them can afford to do that. If they can't, then they go away for a week or two. LINDA: So let's talk more about Boston. What was it like living on Lansdowne Street? JULIA: We loved it. It was a good street, and the same people that lived there when I was a child, the girls that grew up with me, other than one or two who have died, are still my friends. I still maintain contact even though they might have been a year or two younger or older, that contact with those families have never really been broken. There were about 60 families on two streets in a very -- they were part of [war day], but they were off of Massachusetts Avenue near the south end of Boston, although it was officially Roxbury. And all of the landlords on those two streets were Italian, and they came from all parts of Italy from the Piedmont to Lombardi down to Abruzzo down to the southern part all the way to Sicily. LINDA: Yeah. JULIA: So I grew up learning many dialects, hearing many dialects, and my mother kept in touch. She wrote letters to her family and friends in Italy and relatives until she couldn't see anymore 65 years later. So I would see my mother sitting there late at night, midnight, writing to Italy, and then the letters would come back and… LINDA: Did she save those?16 JULIA: No. I did it. She didn't. I saved quite a few. I have quite a lot, and as a matter of fact, one of my mother's girlfriends, [unintelligible - 00:43:10], I think, married a man named [unintelligible - 00:43:18], and her descendants lived in a part of Milan, and our children, which would represent the fourth generation, this lady's grandfather worked with my grandfather at the Milan Gasworks. And my mother kept in touch all those years with his daughter, with her friend, because they were neighbors. LINDA: Let me just slide you hand through here. Okay. JULIA: And my daughters and my sister's daughters had gone to Italy after college and met them and stayed with them. So there were four generations whose friendship has stood the test of time. LINDA: That's remarkable. JULIA: They came to visit two years ago, and I've been there to visit twice with my mother. LINDA: So what was it like when you went back? JULIA: It was like déjà vu. I knew everyone that my mother introduced me to. I'm very fluent in the dialect, which is very seldom spoken now anymore, because after Mussolini came in, one of the ways that he tried to unify the country of Italy was to insist that they all speak proper Italian, whereas everyone who came to America during the '20s and before spoke the dialect of their own region, or their own village. In fact, many people on Pompeii Street could not understand my parents. No one could if they spoke in the Lombard dialect, because it was so different. LINDA: How did they communicate? JULIA: Because they did have a common -- they could speak in proper Italian. Many of them had gone to school. And I mean, they could -- if they went to school in Italy, then they could read Italian, but there was a common thread. It was very difficult though, because they usually never spoke in proper Italian. But the southern Italian spoke closer to the proper language.17 LINDA: The southern? JULIA: Yeah. The southern and central ones, they spoke in a manner that was a little bit closer, closer to proper Italian. And my mother wrote in proper Italian, and most of them have had elementary school educations so that they could communicate with their families in Italy. LINDA: Did your parents learn English? JULIA: Yes, they did. My father could read the American paper. They listened to the news on the radio, and of course, we grew up and went to school in America. And my mother was forced. It was very, very difficult adjustment because she frequently misunderstood what I said in English, and it made for a great deal of friction until enough years went by that my youngest sister came along 13 years after I did. By that time, my sister came to understand the Italian because in the family, my mother and father still spoke in dialect and all of my aunts and uncles, the same dialect. So we got it through hearing it. It wasn't until I went back to Italy the first time in 1973 that we went back for three or four weeks, and it was the first time that I had what you call an immersion, where everybody spoke proper Italian and I suddenly understood. Like a person who plays the piano by ear, I understood the Italian. And then, when I went back in '76 with my mother and sister, again I was exposed to about three weeks or so, or a month, of everyone speaking proper Italian, except in mountain villages, where I visited with my mother—they still spoke dialect. And of course, I was fluent, and I still am. LINDA: So let me see though. Do I understand this correctly? Your mother spoke the dialect, but she came to… JULIA: But she could read and write proper Italian. LINDA: Right. So when she returned, and people were speaking more proper…18 JULIA: Right. But we only did family visiting. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: And so everyone she could understand because she could write and she had learned proper Italian. And my mother remembered the lyrics, the words to the songs she had learned from nursery school. She was sent to nursery school. Remember, my grandfather remarried, and his second wife had two babies. And nursery school, [foreign language - 00:49:00], it was called. [Foreign language - 00:49:04] is the proper Italian word. And they had very fine nursery school for children, and so my mother and her brother and sister were sent to nursery school, and -- my mother told me a very interesting thing. Up until she was 15 years old and went to this private Catholic school that was run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Milan, even then, they had a woman who was referred to as [foreign language - 00:49:43]. And I haven't exactly known how to spell it, but a woman accompanied all these children to all their homes. The school was not far from their homes, but the children were accompanied to their homes by a lady. Even when she was 15 years old, someone accompanied all these students to their homes. LINDA: So when they walked home… JULIA: Right. Unless the parents came to get them; and if they couldn't, then somebody took them home. LINDA: Wow. So getting back to Boston, do you have all of these different regions where they are different Italians… from different regions is what I mean… JULIA: And all we young girls, all of us, we would play together, and then we would compare how our mother said things, how we would, you know, be there laughing, and then we [unintelligible - 00:50:48]. My mother said it like this. My mother said it like that. And all of us learned the different dialects, or they understood them even if they didn't try to speak them. 19 We had an awful lot of fun. We played on the street. We played street games. We learned to dance on the street. Our mothers taught us to crochet and embroider. That was another way that we passed the time. And the mothers, because this was small street, when the housework was done or the middle of the day, they came out, and when they weren't arms akimbo leaning out of their windows, they were down in the doorways, and we were watched all our lives, all of those young years. Somebody was always watching and looking out on the street, so nobody got away with anything. LINDA: Now, do the mothers socialize together? JULIA: Yes, they visited each other's little lots. As I said, I think I counted one time; there might have been 60 flats. It's still in existence, that neighborhood. But it's been bought by a developer. In fact, my brother still owns my father's house. He doesn't live there, but he still owns it. LINDA: So you had all different kinds of generations… JULIA: And all different kinds of cooking and all different generations; and when they died, they were waked in the apartments. They were not waked in funeral homes. Many children were born on the street, so we saw it all. We experienced it all. And young people died. I had two friends who were wonderful, lost a sister. Both of them lost sisters at 21 years old, and the whole street was born. It was complete support from everyone, because these girls had been -- one died in childbirth at 21 years old, and the other one died from apparently a blood clot just after some surgery. And everyone went to Boston City Hospital because we were only five minutes away from it. LINDA: Were the mourning traditions different between different regions? JULIA: They wore black. Some of them never took off that black. Even in the north end, most women who lost their husbands would wear black for the rest of their lives unless they remarried. Some of them did the same thing 20 on my street; if they lost their husbands they wore black housedresses. It was just the custom. But several children died, two of them from spinal meningitis, which at that time was fatal. And I think one was nine and one was 14. And of course, women, they mourned. They wept. They cried. That was a terrible thing. It was a part of life, and they didn't try to gloss over it. They lost a child in childbirth. You could hear them sometimes screaming from the pain even though doctor might come, an intern might come from Boston City Hospital. I remember that one of my friends' mother gave birth, and she lived on the third floor across the street. It must have been an extremely painful experience. My mother was marking the floor gray-faced, remembering her own. LINDA: So there was very little privacy. JULIA: The flat was small, and there was very little privacy. We knew who got along, who didn't get along. And some of them, even though they came from the old country, if things got too bad, they will separate. But for the most -- and the women as they got older, our parents, not my mother -- my mother went to work during the Depression when my father had an accident and broke his leg. He couldn't go to work. My mother went to work at the army base stitching uniforms. But it was only for a short time. As soon as my father was well enough to go back to work, then she had to stay home. LINDA: … in that area generally help each other? JULIA: To some extent. I will say this. When the Depression came, even though we lived in an industrial neighborhood, there were many pieces of vacant land. We have no idea who belonged to them, whether they were city owned land or belong to the neighboring factories. We had two very huge laundries which are still in existence. They were linen services. They 21 serviced hotels, restaurants. They did that kind of thing, places that used a lot of uniforms. So the girls who were brought up just ahead of me, many of them went to work in the laundry. I did too for a short time, while I went to night school after high school, and then as I said, when I passed the civil service exam, then I went to Washington. And after that, I did office work. But as the women grew older and their children were out of high school, many of them went to work either in the laundry or in a box factory. But during the Depression, every family sectioned off some small piece of these vacant lots and grew gardens. That was natural for them; even my father had an enormous garden from a piece of land that was vacant near our home. And according to my sister—this was while I was in Washington—and my mother, he just grew marvelous vegetables. Everybody grew, even in their backyards. No piece of land went to waste. So I never knew anyone who went hungry during the Depression. They would find jobs for each other. You just have to let -- they worked for private contractors, and Italian contractors were making their way up succeeding the Irish. So if my father was out of a job, he would notify the Italian men in the neighborhood and somebody would find him a job. LINDA: Now, did you notice that these people from different regions, did they kind of stick together? JULIA: Yes, they did. They [unintelligible - 00:58:30] somebody bought houses close together and lived in -- and people from the Piedmont occupied apartments kind of close together. But it was a tiny street. It was very small. So you were all -- you just grew up together. And as the women, as the families lived there longer 22 and longer, they got closer to each other, so they learned to respect each other. LINDA: What do you think the unifying factor would be, would have been? JULIA: The fact that they were all immigrants, and that they were locked into these -- they were a part of this small neighborhood. So you have to get -- men played bocce at the end of the street. Then they set up a social club. A few of the men from Abruzzo belonged to the Sons of Italy. And in the summertime, they would have a bus come to the street, and all the Italians who wanted to would bring watermelons and macaroni and meatballs and Italian bread and cheese and salami. If you want to tour, you can get on the bus and they would go to public parks where the Sons of Italy would have a big day. There would be a dance pavilion. They would dance to all this Italian music and have picnics, and the young kids would let them go [unintelligible - 01:00:15]. LINDA: Now, did people growing up here, did they begin their own social clubs depending on regions? JULIA: No. There was just one, and most of them were… I think the ones that belong to it mostly were from the Abruzzo. My father belonged to it a little while, but he wasn't really active. But there were quite a few families from the Abruzzo region of Italy and they belong. And they drank wine; they made wine in the house. The grapes would come into Charlestown, Massachusetts on the trains, and every October they would go to Charlestown and they would order a truckload of grapes. Then they would borrow grinders—my father did too—and grind the grapes. They might make a [unintelligible - 01:01:08] with boxes of grapes and make wine. So whenever you went to visit then [unintelligible - 01:01:16] you were an adult, they always offer you a glass of wine. Everybody's cooking was different because they came from different regions. My mother never learned to make what we refer to at the time as pasta [foreign language -23 01:01:33]. But today it's knows as spaghetti and meatballs. My mother had to learn after she came to America. That was not part of our Italian food culture at all. My mother came -- Milan is near a rice-growing area. So in Northern Italy, you eat cornmeal, polenta, and rice were the staples, soups. But in Southern Italy, they were used to for special occasions, they would -- it was always with tomato sauce that was the standard pasta with tomato sauce. Very seldom, they eat rice. None of us ate much meat. Meat was eaten very sparingly. In the Lombard region, the main dish which is now becoming, and again, has become very, very popular is called risotto. That was one of the staples that I grew up with. And the holidays, we had -- at that time, some of the delicacies that are important today were not important. Things like [foreign language - 01:03:10] was not important, but my mother told us about the Christmas customs in her home. She always mentioned this [foreign language - 01:03:19]. Now you can buy it anywhere. They import it, because the fly it in, and we had special things that we ate on holidays. And my mother told us about the Christmas customs of her family. LINDA: So was that a strong tradition on Christmas Eve celebration? JULIA: Christmas Eve was considered even by the Church as a day of fasting and abstinence. Christmas Eve, when I was growing up, was a non-meat day, and amongst the Italians, who were not accustomed to dairy anyway, they use cheese. But on Christmas Eve, you ate neither milk products nor meat. You ate fish. Now, the southern and central Italians would celebrate. They might cook six or seven, in some families, 12 different kinds of fish dishes. In my family, we observe Christmas Eve very quietly with no kind of celebration at all. The next day on Christmas, then we would have -- we might have polenta, which I made this Christmas, by the way. 24 LINDA: Oh, you did. JULIA: Yes. LINDA: Now, how did you serve it? JULIA: I plugged in? LINDA: You are. Just having system -- hang on. Okay. JULIA: Polenta is made—and I can assure you because I still have a package of flour there. You can buy it today under the Goya brand; it's the only place I find it. But in my father's day, you went to the various Italian markets and they would have barrels of it, and you bought course ground corn flour, cornmeal, and then you just put it into -- I still have my parents' cup of polenta pot. Everybody brought their polenta pot from Italy. It was called, in the dialect, the parieu. LINDA: How do you spell it? Do you know? JULIA: Parieu, P-A-R-I-E-U. It's how you pronounced it. That's in Lombard dialect. LINDA: And that's the polenta pot. JULIA: Right. Let's see, how did they say it in Italy? Paiolo is the proper Italian word, I think, if I can find it in here. Paiolo, P-A-I-O-L-O or P-A-I-U-O-L-O; it's a boiler, a copper, a cauldron, a kettle, that they used for polenta. LINDA: So how did your family used to serve the polenta? JULIA: The polenta was made in this copper pot that had a rounded bottom designed to hang from a crane on a fireplace. Because in Italy, they didn't have stoves, not even my mother's family, who lived in an apartment in the city, had a stove; they had small gas light burners. But if you have -- we have kitchen rangers, black iron ranges, and they would remove the round top on one section of it in the front where the fire was farthest, and boil a certain amount of water when you have much water to boil. And then you very, very slowly added the cornmeal. You added salt, maybe a little piece of garlic, and you slowly add in the cornmeal. 25 Now, one person has to hold the pot so it wouldn't tip over. And my father, that was my father's job, to stir that cornmeal until it was very thick and firm, and used an old piece of broomstick to do this, a [canalla], a piece of stick, like a piece of broomstick. Then when it was very firm, they would put down a cutting board, a piece of board on the table, cover it with a flour sack that had been -- a clean dishcloth. They used to make dishcloths out of flour sacks, the women, unbleached muslin. And my father would take that big kettle of polenta and dump it over on top of this cloth and then cover it. Then they use the string to cut it. You cut it because it would slice down with the string. And I've met many people in Fitchburg who remembered that same system of cooking polenta and cutting it with the string and dumping it over onto something. And we served it with various kinds of stew. Now, the southern and central Italians would most likely serve it with a meat ragout or Italian tomato sauce that they might use for any pasta dish. We served it with a stew that was called cassoeula, very difficult to spell, C-A-S-S-O-E-U-L-A. It was made from savoy cabbage, Italian sausages, spare ribs, and cooked with carrots and onions and garlic into light -- but no tomatoes, celery, into this wonderful stew, and I made it this Christmas. So from now on, as long as I'm alive, that's what we'll have for Christmas, and that's what we ate. Or they would make a rabbit… make a stew out of rabbit or chicken. But that's how we ate it. Then my father would eat it with gorgonzola cheese. And the next day, you sliced it and cut it and fried it with eggs for lunch or supper. I had an uncle, an old uncle, who lived with me after he was widowed, and he used to slice it the next day and layer it with milk and onions and bake it. And you can use polenta like you can use potatoes or rice with anything. It's delicious. My Irish husband loves it. Right, the kids love it. And you can make it out of a Quaker oats cornmeal too, but I don't like it as well as I 26 do the coarse meal. It has become quite popular again in upscale restaurants. LINDA: Now, when your mother would serve it on the board at the table, did… JULIA: Yeah. Put your dish there, and my father would take the string and the slice would fall on to the dish, then she'd serve the stew from the bowl or the pan. LINDA: I've also heard of people in Fitchburg, their mother would lay it out on the board, and then everyone would kind of eat it… JULIA: I have all that. Now, the first one I met since I've been here that tells me that, but I have a very close friend whose parents have 13 children, and the father made a big, long table to accommodate them. They lived in my father's, one of my father's flats, and when they made the polenta and the tomato sauce, he would lay it out on this table, and every child would have, every person would have a section and would eat with his fork or spoon, then they would put the tomato sauce over it. Right. LINDA: That's interesting. JULIA: Right. LINDA: So now, living with all these different regions or people from regions, were there different patron saints or celebrations? JULIA: A lot of them had relatives in the north end, and the north end was really the center of the Italian religious community, and so some of them would visit their relatives on feast days. Some of the Sicilian women who had relatives in the north end, they would go to the north on feast days. But we didn't do that. They would celebrate the feast days now that I think of it by cooking special foods, and a lot of them have like little [plaster] saints, and they would always keep votive candles, which was strange. They were little wicks that floated, little wicks, and you lit the wick, and they'd have like some kind of maybe a little asbestos washer, some little washer. I haven't seen those for 50-60 years. I haven't seen them. But I remembered the women used to keep -- a lot of the Southern Italian 27 women would keep votive lights. They would pray for their families and pray for good health, and they were attached to devotions to these different saints, or St. Joseph or the Virgin Mary, and they would keep little votive lights. I'm trying to think what -- they didn't have racks in them, but I don't know what the liquid was in these -- I mean, they still have the same candleholders. I got them on my dining room table right there, but they didn't have -- I don't remember the candles. I remember these little wicks./AT/jf/lk/es
Part one of an interview with Settimio "Babe" Pellechia. Part of this interview has been redacted as per Mr. Pellechia's wishes. Topics include: Family history. How his parents came to the United States from Italy and settled in Leominster, MA. His father's work at the Leominster Button Company and then as an ash collector. Babe's memories of growing up in Leominster during the Depression. His father's construction work. The work his siblings did. What it was like for Babe working with his father on construction jobs. How his brothers turned the construction business into a concrete block manufacturing business. The different businesses Babe started and worked in. What the Lincoln Terrace neighborhood was like when Babe was growing up. His mother mainly spoke Italian and knew very little English. Speaking Italian in the home. What his mother was like. The types of food his mother would prepare. Babe's work in the motel business. What life was like when Babe was running an ice cream shop and a motel. His children's education. ; 1 BABE: And [DeMazzio]… [Icelano], and then after would actually be Joseph… Enrico. LINDA: Enrico? BABE: Enrico. LINDA: Enrico. BABE: Uh oh, we got caught. Enrico, and then myself, and then Olga. LINDA: Hi, I'm Linda. SPEAKER 3: Hi nice to meet you. BABE: Now there wasn't -- of course Dave passed four years ago. There was another DeMazzio [unintelligible - 00:00:53] Icelano. LINDA: Oh, there were two others that died? BABE: Well, they died at the age of three and one in the same weekend. LINDA: Okay. BABE: Before the others. That's why they renamed the others. LINDA: They renamed -- so. I'll put that in here there were two others. You want that in there? There was another one DeMazzio that died and they named it the next one DeMazzio. And Icelano was one that died, and they named the next one Icelano. SPEAKER 3: I would like that in there. LINDA: Okay. SPEAKER 3: [Unintelligible - 00:01:21] you should have hired her. LINDA: How are you, Tina? TINA: Oh good. I'm… LINDA: Now, your marriage. BABE: Now, there's a bad part. You had to spoil it. October 5, 1945. I'm sorry, October 6, 1945. LINDA: Uh-oh. SPEAKER 3: I was just waiting. I didn't want to say anything. LINDA: October 6, 1945 and you married Augustina, what? SPEAKER 3: Traini. BABE: T-R-A-I-N-I. 2 LINDA: Augustina Traini. BABE: This comes out of that because [unintelligible - 00:02:01] that's part of the book [unintelligible - 00:02:05]. SPEAKER 3: Babe, you're going to have to do this because -- I'm sorry, I have a class. I'm teaching down the college, so… BABE: What was that last one? LINDA: Your children, the names of your children. BABE: Okay, Linda… LINDA: Another Linda. BABE: And Barry David. LINDA: And Barry David. Residential history. Now, you lived on Grove Avenue. BABE: The different places we lived? Well, we started in Lincoln Terrace where I was born, and Miller Street, [Union] Street. After Union Street we went to Sterling, Westminster, to Grove Avenue, and then over here. LINDA: Norfolk, okay. BABE: I missed one, Litchfield Street. LINDA: Where was that at? BABE: That would before Union. LINDA: Litchfield? BABE: Litchfield. Is it recording now? LINDA: Yes. BABE: Then I can't joke as I go on. LINDA: Oh, you can joke. I just wanted to make sure that… BABE: Had I graduated it would've been the class of '40. LINDA: Okay. Work history. What did you do? Your father? BABE: What did I do? I started with contracting with my father. My father was a contractor, so I fit in that very good. And then I was self-employed in the following businesses: Babe's Ice Cream, Dennison Motel, West [unintelligible - 00:04:06] Motel, and Babe's Miniature Golf, subdivision of the real estate [unintelligible - 00:04:07] houses. LINDA: Subdivision of real estate? For housing? 3 BABE: Mm-hmm. That's all I did. LINDA: What about Blocks? BABE: Yes, true. That was another corporation. These were all my own. Blocks was a corporate… LINDA: That was with your father? SPEAKER 3: At least she remembered. LINDA: Contracting with father, Blocks -- was that the name of it? BABE: Well, Blocks was the name of the four brothers. SPEAKER 3: It's a great thing you guys are doing, you know. I'm so glad you got that older woman, that 100 year old lady, 106. Thank God you got her before she went. LINDA: We got a little bit. You didn't get to see her [unintelligible - 00:05:09]. SPEAKER 3: Not me. It was someone who was working before. BABE: To show that we're not always hiding. That first sheet down there, what's that say? SPEAKER 3: This one? BABE: Yeah. SPEAKER 3: The Joy of Growing Up Italian? BABE: No, no, the one above it. SPEAKER 3: American? BABE: No, what's the next one you have there? SPEAKER 3: This one, the Americans? BABE: Oh, that's what you had. [Unintelligible - 00:05:26] LINDA: Babe, my next question here is St. Anne the Church, and that's St. Anna. You always belonged to St. Anna Church? BABE: Off and on. LINDA: Off and on. SPEAKER 3: Yeah. BABE: And now it's off. SPEAKER 3: I'm just going to say bye. And I'll see you. LINDA: Good luck. Nice meeting you. [Unintelligible - 00:05:58] 4 BABE: It was a pleasure. SPEAKER 3: I got pineapples for my still life. LINDA: You're going to paint still life? SPEAKER 3: No, they're drawing. It's a drawing class that I'm taking [unintelligible - 00:06:05]. BABE: Before -- do you want to shut it for just a minute? SPEAKER 3: Not on there, so… LINDA: Thank you, Ann. I would have checked. Okay, we have to start again. I'm Linda Rosenblum with the Center for Italian Culture. It's Tuesday, October 30th at 1:20 p.m. We're with Babe Pellechia, and Rosa Farrell is with me, and we're at his home at 27 North Fourth Drive in Leominster. Hi, Babe. Thanks for letting us come and interview you. I thought that you could tell me a little bit about your parents first. Are they the ones that came to Leominster? BABE: Yes. My father came to Leominster in 1906, and… how far do you want me to expand on that? What he did? LINDA: Sure. Well, first of all, where did he immigrate from? BABE: From Rome. LINDA: Rome? Did he travel with your mother? BABE: No, she came in 1909. LINDA: Okay. Who did he travel with? BABE: He just came on his own, I believe, at that time or whatever, people were coming. He left from Roma and landed in New York then came to Leominster. LINDA: Do you know why he came to Leominster? BABE: You know, that's one of the questions we never asked him, and I'm still trying to find out why he came to Leominster. It must be because of friends; that's where most of them was. You know, there was quite a colony of the Santa Maria Del Combo, and that's from the section of Italy where they came from. So it could have been from other friends where he… 5 LINDA: What do you call that, Santa Maria? ROSA: Del Campo. Santa Maria Del Campo. BABE: It's an Italian organization. ROSA: The particular region in Italy. LINDA: So, close to Rome? BABE: It's south of Rome. It's actually -- El Vita, and [unintelligible - 00:08:00]… which is part of -- give me a minute. My notes over there, please, these little papers here. It's [unintelligible - 00:08:17] Costa Lata. C-O-S-T-A, L-A-T-A, I believe it is. And that's where most of them came from. LINDA: And I had just read in some of the papers over here that he studied industrial agriculture when he was in Rome? Did you know that? BABE: He was a farmer, whatever that may mean. You know, like I say, [unintelligible - 00:08:41]… authority, and that sometimes these things happen like a good friend of ours that was a garbage collector, and he did wonderful things. The city of New York gave him an award, and they said he is a sanitation engineer. And the guy got up and says I am a garbage collector. So I don't think he did much studying at that age because there was -- things were pretty rough there in Italy. LINDA: Did he ever tell you any stories of Italy? BABE: Oh yes. LINDA: Would you like to share some? BABE: Well, he would say the way they used to work and so forth, and their living conditions, which was pretty rough at that time. That was the reason why they came here. Of course, supposedly our roads were paved with gold, and that's out there. But he was always a very hard worker and always wanted to do more, learn more, do more, which he did do in his life. Like the first thing he did when he came in to Leominster was he headed down to Leominster Button Company, which is near, 305 Whitney Street, and they're called [unintelligible - 00:10:01] now. And he was a rubber of buttons and combs. They used ashes, and it's surprising that 6 they [unintelligible - 00:10:11] health in that year one of the filthiest jobs that -- the men worked, and this is outlined -- let's see, this is put out by the Board of Health of Massachusetts. LINDA: So he was called a rubber? BABE: Mm-hmm. LINDA: Did you remember him explaining what he did? BABE: Well, what it is, you take the buttons or the combs or whatever they're working on [unintelligible - 00:10:37] was turtle, made from turtle then [unintelligible - 00:10:39], and what the ashes and what the wheels going at the RPMs that it does go, and the water, that polishes up, really polish it. But of course if you got water and ashes and a wheel going you know what that does to the person, and that's what he did for a few years. Surprisingly though in 1914 he sold that fine ashes -- this was a business for him. LINDA: So he realized that there was a use for that ash. BABE: Mm-hmm, and they got him out of that filthy working conditions. LINDA: I'm wondering what does an ash dealer mean? What would he do with the ashes? BABE: You go around and pick up the ashes from people's home, 10 cents a barrel, bring them down and screen it through a screen that water won't go through, and that's what they used for rubbing. That's the compound that they used for rubbing these plastic -- not plastic but the horns or hooks or whatever they were doing. LINDA: Did he get that idea from someone else, to go and collect the ash? BABE: Well, he got the idea from being in business. He got some wagons to collect the ashes, which were -- and the rubber district was a good business at the time, and then he felt that he had that, why not screen the ashes and sell it to the industries, which he did. Another byproduct of that too that the -- when you screen the ashes you always get the coal that never burnt, and half of Lincoln Terrace was the Italian Colony. He used to go down and pick up the coal, and it kept a lot of people warm up there 7 at that time, so that they would go down -- it was on Middle Street where they did that. So [unintelligible - 00:12:33] he helped out a lot of people by letting them go and they go through these screenings and pick out all the little black diamond gold that heats the house, and that was it. LINDA: So this 75 Lincoln Terrace, was that where you lived, or … BABE: That's where I was born, and that's where we lived at the time. LINDA: So he actually -- I just want to make sure that we get this on tape, so sorry to keep asking you… BABE: That's all right. LINDA: It's an old art, and it's not easily explainable. So he would go around to people's homes, or… BABE: Yes. Because everybody burnt coal in those days. You'd call up and you'd go there and then take the barrels out where -- which as he said was very, very heavy, because you'd either have to go up the stairs if they didn't have an outside door or to the bulkhead or something like that, and he aggravated at some people to get more ashes in the barrel [unintelligible - 00:13:26]. And so that's more weight, and then you couldn't screen it. Other than that he had the horse and wagons, put them on, bring them down -- the screening plant was on Millet Street, which is just off of Lincoln Terrace, and there he would screen what he picked up from the people's homes and separate it and sell the extra fine screened ashes to industry. And he shipped it to a few places all over the United States at the time. LINDA: Where did he get the money to begin this type of a business? BABE: By what most foreigners other than Puerto Ricans, saved their money [unintelligible - 00:14:09] saved their money and do it that way. LINDA: So at this time was he married? BABE: Probably should strike that out. That isn't too nice to say, but it's already on tape. 8 LINDA: Well, it's going to be edited. BABE: Okay. LINDA: What did I ask -- was he married to your mother by this time? BABE: Oh yes, he married my mother in 19… I'll put my glasses on. It would help, wouldn't it? LINDA: Okay, but we can figure out the dates later. BABE: Hmm? LINDA: We can figure out the dates later. BABE: Okay. LINDA: So we'll figure it out. So can you tell me a little bit about growing up on Lincoln Terrace? BABE: It's a good thing that we didn't know better. We enjoyed ourselves. It was a happy life and so forth, but I just wonder what would happen today if children had to go through what we did. Our fun would be getting in a sandbank and digging holes and whatever we could find, cups and make objects out of it. We'd play baseball. Whoever had the baseball and the bat would be the one that would pick the teams and when we'd play and how we'd play. And it was -- on today's standard it was really very, very rough living at the time. We had no entertainment to speak of. We hardly go to movies only it was only a nickel to go to the Gem Theater; we didn't get there too often. And the main highlight, or one of them, was at Christmastime at the -- one thing my father would do, he did everything for Christmas. You know, for food and things like that. And one of the big games as I remember would be getting the table like this and putting sawdust on it, and he'd hide coins in the sawdust, and you each had a shape to pick out a shape where you'd want hoping to get more coins than your brothers and sisters and so forth. So that was one of the fun things that we did. 9 But myself as I grew up I always had a tendency to follow him and get involved with his work. By that time [unintelligible - 00:16:36] he was in the contracting. He was more doing contracting at that time, became a contractor. So I always followed him around on jobs and things like that. So I learned more. I think even for myself I think I grew up real fast as far as a youngster. LINDA: Is that partly because you were the seventh son? BABE: No, because that's what I wanted to do. LINDA: Explain to me though what your name means again. BABE: Settmio is seven in Italian, and that's what it means. It's just that the Sette is seven, and that's where the name comes from. LINDA: So I forgot now. You're the seventh son or seventh child? BABE: Seventh son in rotation. LINDA: And how many sisters? BABE: Out of eleven. There was three girls in the family. LINDA: So by the time you came around your family already had six boys? BABE: Yes. I was the seventh and the last boy in the family. LINDA: So how were your brothers' lives different than yours? Were they harder? Were they… BABE: Oh yes. Well, my oldest brother was quite active in the business and so forth. He did all that. But then my next brother was a -- he worked very, very hard, and entertainment was out as far as that got. No vacations and things like that. It was strictly, as I remember it, when -- don't forget I'm entering about the time, well, 8 years old and that was the beginning of the Great Depression. I remember that quite well. The families were living on $12 a week, quite a few of them, which is what the welfare would give you. LINDA: So during the Depression your father was working? BABE: Whenever [unintelligible - 00:18:44] work. Yeah, he was doing contracting, whatever work he could get. On one job he was a supervisor for doing some work at city hall, and this is choosy but you have to do it 10 by the WPA program at the time. And to do a [unintelligible - 00:19:02] for city hall you did it at the time but they send them 30 men. You know, other people that were on the WPA, and they were on top of one another so my father had to let them be -- he had them closing doors, open doors and sweeping, everything but working because they were all in one another's way. But he was a supervisor at that time. But he did work like that there and then we plowed snow in the wintertime—there was income from plowing the snow, keeping the truck busy. Then he did odd jobs as they came up, but nothing -- it was a tough time. To backtrack, my father was very, very successful up until 1929. He owned 33 houses, and one by one he lost them all because people didn't have money to pay the rent and the banks wanted their money and they would just keep taking the house. You know, the foreclosing, keep doing that. LINDA: So he owned 33 homes and he lost every single one? BABE: All but the one we were living in. LINDA: Oh. BABE: Yeah. LINDA: How did he afford to buy 33 houses? BABE: Because he got to be a good-sized contractor. Like he built – he had the contract for all the concrete work in the Leominster post office, which was quite a job in those days. In 1926 he built the Main Street garage down on -- he did the fence around St. [Lido's] cemetery, which is quite a sizeable job, and he built numerous homes. In those days the first homes he built, regular homes like on Lincoln Terrace, there's probably eight homes up there that he built and was sold for the big sum of $2,800. LINDA: Wow. BABE: That's what they were at that time. In fact, numerous times, her dad would work for my father on his trade. You know, blocks and bricks, plastering 11 so that he and [unintelligible - 00:21:22], whenever they had a job that required brickwork and plaster and so forth, they were the first two that he called to do the work. So you see we would all get things first class with first-class people. But he couldn't -- the Depression was too much for everybody at that time, not only him. LINDA: Before we go on, let's back up a little bit. He came to this country, he started -- he used ash to rub buttons et cetera, then he opened his own business selling ash. BABE: He started that, yeah. LINDA: Right. So what kind of time frame are we talking about? BABE: I beg your pardon? LINDA: What's the time frame that we're talking about? BABE: [Unintelligible - 00:22:05] LINDA: Where was it, 1914? BABE: Yeah. LINDA: So he was selling ash in 1914, and then he went into the construction business? BABE: I can give you year by year. Let me show you. See, this is the -- you know, all the concrete work on this job there's his -- do you see that there on the box [unintelligible - 00:22:27] and Company? LINDA: Mm-hmm. Oh that's interesting. That's in '29, so this was a bad time. BABE: No, that was the good time; the beginning of the bad started right after that. So that the -- well, he worked the button shop, at Leominster Button… then he -- let's see as we go along here. Okay, now in 1913 he put a grocery store in the house. LINDA: He put a grocery store in your house? BABE: Well, [unintelligible - 00:23:14] to sell groceries, yeah. LINDA: So at 75 Lincoln Terrace? BABE: Yeah, that's still 75 Lincoln Terrace. And then of course he got both here the ashes and the grocery that he did. LINDA: So who's running the grocery store? 12 BABE: My mother. LINDA: Oh, was it your mother? BABE: Yeah. It's just on Lincoln Terrace a small street though, there wasn't -- no store, like you think of stores today. And it keeps on changing. Now right now, then in 1916, he added trucking to that too. LINDA: Trucking? So that's when he's an ash dealer though? BABE: No, he started with regular trucking after that. Sand and gravel and so forth at that time. LINDA: So again, he'd buy the sand and gravel, and then… BABE: No, we had our own pit. LINDA: You had your own pit? BABE: Yeah. He owned the land down on Miller Street, which was back in there. LINDA: So at least we understand the chronological. BABE: Hmm? LINDA: At least we understand it a little bit more, I think. I was going from the ash business right to building. BABE: [Unintelligible - 00:24:43]. LINDA: That makes more sense. We get into trucking, gravel and sand, and then construction. And he would build these buildings himself? BABE: He did all kinds of construction work. He even built the 38 -- he had the contract for the bridge on [unintelligible - 00:25:05] Street in Pittsburgh, which was Route 2A at the time. ROSA: He put the sand and the gravel and the ashes. Didn't he make his own blocks, make blocks for construction? BABE: Started making blocks around 1920. That was part of the… LINDA: So he would use the materials that he was gathering or buying and selling? So who would he sell the blocks to? Or would he use the blocks for his own building? BABE: He would use the blocks or sell them to whoever needed them. LINDA: And how would he make the blocks? 13 BABE: From our own pit, with the sand and gravel we had there on North Smith. He would make the blocks at that time. LINDA: Was it a mold, or did people do them… BABE: It's a machine, the machine that the mold would take care of it. LINDA: What was the name of the construction company? BABE: Pellechia and Company. LINDA: Pellechia? Did they have many people working? BABE: At some times he had quite a few people. LINDA: You don't have to worry so much about those dates, because I can look through that after. I'm just trying to understand how someone comes here from nothing and owns 33 homes. BABE: It was 1925. LINDA: Sand and gravel, ashes and store. So he goes from his buggy to his truck. Now, who's Charles? BABE: That's my oldest brother. LINDA: Your oldest brother. Okay, so your brothers went into business with him? BABE: Yep. LINDA: All six of them? BABE: We all worked for him. We all worked for him. We built a lot of gas stations, too. We had quite a team. Because amongst the team there was my father, who strictly did supervisory work, figured the job and things like that. And then we had Charlie, who was [unintelligible - 00:27:09] equipment as well as piping and so forth; Red was a great laborer; Rico was a carpenter first class; I was a mason, but what I picked -- I went to trade school to be a mason, you know. So when we would get on a job we were pretty much able to do quite a bit of it ourselves. LINDA: Now, who's Red and Rico? Are those brothers? Red and Rico? BABE: Brothers. LINDA: So those are nicknames? BABE: Mm-hmm. LINDA: For who? 14 BABE: Well, DeMazzio and Enrico. LINDA: And where did you get your nickname? BABE: Babe? After 11 kids it's time to call somebody Babe. No, my sister Lena gave it to me as she said when I was a baby at that time. LINDA: So how did your brother Red learn how to build pipe for -- what did you say that he did? BABE: When you run a gas station there's a lot of pipings involved. You know, water and gasoline and so forth. That was how he -- my brother Red was a hard worker and the one that never asked for too much and always -- education-wise Red was very, very limited. In fact, one of the side stories on that is he couldn't learn his general orders in the Army, and as a result of it, on his record, they said he would never be anything other than a private, and he couldn't get any Class A pass. So they went overseas, and he had two companies that he was in that were completely all injured or so forth, and he became the top sergeant of the whole group. So he knew what to do when it was important. He had the smarts for that, but as far as the learning he just didn't have the ability to learn. LINDA: So, how did you all learn and know -- was it, were you apprenticed? Did you have any kind of… BABE: No, no you just learned from one another. That's how [unintelligible - 00:29:19] families just keep going, and it was just, you know, you started off -- and our father knew what was what and we picked it up real fast and just kept going on it. LINDA: Can you tell me or share with me an early experience of working with your father? BABE: Well, I just started, just jumped and started doing it. In fact, I was 15 years old and I built the gas station on the corner of Walnut and Main Street in Leominster. I was supervisor and so forth because they had other jobs, but it all came natural. I just enjoyed it and I just did it. In fact, 15 when I was with the trade school, at the end of the school year I was in the brick mason department, and the instructor told me, "Don't come back; you're wasting your time." LINDA: Wow. And is that why you didn't go back? BABE: Well, I had to go to work. LINDA: Well, bring me back though to a day when you're working with your father. What was it like? Did you all kind of disperse and go to different jobs? BABE: Go to different jobs. He never drove, so one of us had to drive him. One thing about him he was very honest, and he was very thorough. In fact whether we were doing a job contractor or day work he would even tell us, you do the same thing whether it's day work or contract, even if you lose money. So you know, with a bringing up like that, you can't go wrong. So of course when I was very young and we were doing a lawn on Berne Avenue, and we had the big roll that you use to roll with, and I was very young and the roll was banking, and I'll never forget I came close to the bank and I couldn't hold the roll, and it went down and right through a flower garden. That was one of the unpleasant days. [Unintelligible - 00:31:33] let me know that I did wrong. He never hit us or anything like that. But I was worried for a while on that score. But then I'd go figure jobs and then he'd take me with him, because I'm the one that probably liked it the most and did it the most. That was good days. I enjoyed it. I never resented -- I think he taught us an awful lot, so we couldn't lose with that combination. And with a mother that would watch us like we're all just a baby -- whether you're six years old or 40 years old, she wouldn't go to sleep until you were in the house. It was good times under the conditions. As I said though, we didn't know better. If I did that like -- I know that many a times on the job when things 16 were that the -- come time to eat and all we had the money for was probably a cheese sandwich or something like, that you know, just limited, which is -- my son now later on was putting in overhead doors, he had a business he did that, and he was developing by the South Shore there and he came home and he said, "Dad, you know I forgot my money today," he says, "I didn't eat." "What do you mean you didn't have no money at all?" He said "Well, I only had a dollar." I said, "You know, you still could have had a cheese sandwich." He said, "Dad, those days are gone." So that's the difference. LINDA: So, when you'd go with your father to figure jobs you said, did someone call him? Not call him probably, but contact him to build something? BABE: Yeah, people would call from his advertisement. He did advertise, and they'd call him too. You know, a lot of people wanted bids; you have to bid it. So I'd go with him a lot of times and do the bidding and help him do the bidding and so forth. As I grew older. LINDA: So would he write a contract out and then have a company sign it, or…? BABE: Most of the time you just did it with the individual, it was all by -- in those days everything was with a good shake hand, which they meant. Very rarely was there a contract drawn up. Unless it was a big job, and then they'd have that. LINDA: And who was his competitor? BABE: A lot of competitors. There was a lot of competitors. Must have been -- Leominster probably had about 15 to 20 contractors at the time when it got to contracting. LINDA: Were there any other Italians? BABE: Oh yeah. There was probably half a dozen or so I think Italians. LINDA: Did your father apprentice anyone? Did anyone begin working with him and then venture out on their own? BABE: Well, we wouldn't call it apprentice. They just did that, which is the American way to do things. You never met anybody better than 17 themselves, so that -- yeah, we had somebody. I mean, that never bothered him. LINDA: How long did your father do this kind of work? BABE: Until he retired at about age -- he stopped working I think at about age 60. LINDA: And did the company survive? Did the sons take it over? BABE: Well, what happened, we kept the thing going quite a while. Even by that time, the brothers, we went into the manufacturing of concrete blocks on a real production method. We used to manufacture quite a few a day, and that became our sole business then. LINDA: So tell me about that then. BABE: Well, we came back from the Army, and with the -- three of us were veterans, and we got a loan from the government on the G.I. Bill, and we bought this production machinery and put up a whole plant and went into manufacturing of concrete blocks all type on full production. We used to make at that time about 4,000 blocks a day and get out -- plus the building supplies that went with it. And my father first saw [unintelligible - 00:36:15] he gave us the land and he also would watch the building of it when we did that. That was in 1945. In 1946 we started selling the blocks from our new plant. LINDA: And what was the name of the company? BABE: Blocks Incorporated. LINDA: Blocks Incorporated. And you and your three brothers started… BABE: And myself yeah. [Unintelligible - 00:36:42] Well, there were three veterans, but then one wasn't there. One didn't go into the Army and he was part of the corporation. LINDA: So four brothers plus yourself? BABE: No, four brothers. LINDA: Oh, four brothers. Three [unintelligible - 00:36:55]. So you would make these blocks and then sell them to… BABE: To whoever wanted to buy them. LINDA: Do you have advertisement for that company too? 18 BABE: Yeah. LINDA: Good. And how long did you do this? BABE: We did it up until 1979. LINDA: Oh, so what happened to the business? BABE: Well, at the age of all of us at that time it was time to liquidate it, and we did. We just sold off the -- we had an auction for the equipment, we sold the real estate, and by that time we were all -- other than myself all my brothers were ready to retire. Well, one other brother, the one next older to me, he had passed away. So it was just the two oldest brothers, and it was too much at that time to run the business of that, because we built another plant after that. The original plant was at -- our second plant we were doing 8,000 a day, so -- but it's, it was competitive, and getting out to sell them and everything else, it was quite a job. So I decided -- well, what happened was actually while I was out doing all my things at the time, I left. I was still part owner, but I left to do my motels and everything else with it, and they did get in trouble financially. And I went in and helped them straighten it out again, and when we straightened it out. That's when I told them we're selling the business, and so that's what we did. So we sold it in good graces [unintelligible - 00:38:47]. LINDA: So did any of your sons -- well, you have one son, but you must have some nephews. They didn't want to take over the business? BABE: We tried and it didn't work out. My son actually went to college and so forth, so he didn't fit into that. Then my -- there weren't too many boys in the family [unintelligible - 00:39:12], and Red had two boys, and one didn't want nothing to do with it all, and the other tried and he didn't like it. So it really was limited as to who could run it after that. LINDA: Now, did you sell the blocks locally or out of state, too? BABE: Well, out of state, New Hampshire, we sell New Hampshire. And we made a special block that we did one delivery in New York City with a special block, but we also had -- my brother had invented a new face for the blocks, and the -- it was a glazed block, and we did manufacture them, 19 and there are three school in Leominster have them. The Army has it in Leominster, and we sold a school in Gill, Mass. and [unintelligible - 00:40:07] and in Worcester, so that we did do quite well with that glazed block, which did very, very good. But like I say, age probably got that business why we finally sold it. LINDA: So the blocks though were they pretty standard size? BABE: They were all standard. LINDA: And then it only changed when your brother invented the glaze? BABE: Well, they were a standard block; it was just something added to it. LINDA: Added. Did he patent that invention? BABE: We worked on patenting it, but surprisingly when you patent something, there's always something close to it. In other words they did a whole lot of research on it and we didn't think it was patentable at the end, because the concrete goes way back year and years and years, and there's always somebody that did something close to it that you -- it just wasn't patentable. LINDA: So how did he develop the glaze? Do you know? BABE: Just working at it. In other words he just -- that was Joe, and Joe was the one in the family that was probably ahead on thinking of doing things and so forth. He was the one that always experimented, in other words, come up with ideas of doing special things. LINDA: So during the time as you're part owner of this company, you did other things. Can you explain? BABE: Did he do other things? LINDA: Yes. BABE: Yes, I did all those things that you wrote down in the book there. There were a few of them. LINDA: Yeah, I know. But could you explain some of them? BABE: Okay. What do you want me to start off? Which one, the first one, the ice cream place? 20 LINDA: Is that the first one that you started? BABE: Maybe I had a little of father in me that you do different things, you know. I went to an auction, and they had an ice cream machine, a brand new one, at the auction for sale, and I bought it for $1,000. And before I left, the salesman that sold it from the Mills Company came there and he found out that I bought it, and he offered me $1,500 for it. The minute he said that I immediately said if this thing is worth $1,500 to the salesman, I'm going to see what this machine will do. And I built an ice cream place around it. That was the beginning of Babe's Ice Cream at the time. LINDA: And where was that located? BABE: On Route 12. LINDA: Route 12. BABE: [Unintelligible - 00:42:44] started that, which is very interesting. We were going to open up on July 4th, and this was in 1950. On July 2nd it was one of those hot, miserable days, miserable, real miserable, [unintelligible - 00:42:56]. And this busload pulls in. There was 38 people on the bus, and one came out. They were monks from Rhode Island of the Vow of Silence, and one came in and he said could he please have 38 glasses of water. So my wife and I packed up 38 sandwiches, 38 ice creams, 38 cold drinks, and the bus leaves. And as the bus is going out of the circular driveway, there's a bus leaving, people just funneled in. And of course I knew most of them, and they said, "Babe, how can you be so lucky that you aren't even open and you get them by the busload?" not knowing what happened. And I said I hope I don't get too many busloads, I don't want to close before I get -- so that's how we started that there. But it growed real fast after that, just kept on growing and growing and growing. It meant nothing to sell a thousand ice cream cones on a Sunday afternoon. LINDA: So you knew nothing about ice cream? 21 BABE: I knew nothing about ice cream. I knew nothing about motels, and I built a motel and ran that. I bought another motel and ran that. But the -- I didn't know anything about subdivisions, but I did that. I think a lot of my father's in me. In other words, you just keep going. As long as you do what's right, work hard, you accomplish it. In other words I won't take no for an answer when it comes to trying to do business. Because I've had people, when I went into the [unintelligible - 00:44:41] and doing hardware, I didn't mention that one. When we were doing hardware, in other words it was on the wholesale level to sell to contractors. I did that, and that was very, very difficult because they felt that I should have went to school, you know, because you got to know what hardware's proper for certain jobs. You've got to know your fire codes and so forth. And a lot of people in the beginning wouldn't sell me. They said in other words we don't want to sell to you, you do things wrong and it could come back to us. So I made it clear to them if I got to go from here to California I'm going into the business and I'm going to buy the stuff. You're either going to sell it to me or somebody else is going to sell it to me. And what that did, I got them, built up that business, which was real good. So I just did it. I think maybe I was just blind. I just went into some of these things. We got kind of carried away. We're supposed to be talking on the Italian Colony, aren't we? ROSA: This is all part of that. LINDA: This is all part of it. But as far as getting the ice cream machine and maybe the motel, were you just in the right place at the right time? Just kind of… BABE: That's probably the story of my life, yeah. I think that -- I really believe the gift of the seventh son really played a part on me. Because everything always works out. 22 LINDA: So would you like to tell us a little more about Lincoln Terrace? You're the first person I've interviewed, I'm thinking, isn't it true that grew up on Lincoln Terrace? BABE: You read this book? LINDA: I've looked at it. I haven't finished it. BABE: You haven't finished it? LINDA: No. BABE: Our family's mentioned in that quite a few times. But first of all he just about hit it on the way it was, you know. It was close-knit, Lincoln Terrace, and it was different than what today is. If you did something wrong and somebody scolded you and you went back and told your parents that the neighbor or whoever it was did this to you, you would get a call down again from him. It isn't that knock at the door saying what -- like today, you got assault and battery like that. In other words, they all watched one another. It was really a family unit up there. So you couldn't do anything wrong, and if anybody came on the street that wasn't part of the street, everybody knew about it and they watched them. So it was quite a neighborhood, it really was. And like I say, we enjoyed the -- now, the early part of it is I can look the -- they all had gardens the way they all had pigs in the back of the house, and when the fall of the year come they would all slaughter and they'd all help one another. I got that on film by the way, 8 mm. LINDA: What, the slaughtering the pigs? BABE: Yeah. LINDA: Oh, that's interesting. Now, was there a smokehouse? BABE: No. They did things themselves. They take the hams and they make the prosciutto out of those. You know how they do that? LINDA: Nuh-uh. BABE: Actually, they take the hind of the pig, and they really salt it and pepper it, all that it will take, and then they put it in most cases in the cellar up 23 against some beam or another beam, and then with a hydraulic jack or whatever kind of a jack, they keep squeezing it until the ham starts this big until it [unintelligible - 00:48:37] that big, but the salt and the pepper is actually curing it out. You heard of that, did you? No? So they did that. They made the meat, they made the sausages. Very few people used to cook the blood. We never did that, but a few of them did and make the… use that. But the whole pork chops, the whole thing, they saved every bit of it. LINDA: Now, did most people have a pig? BABE: In Lincoln Terrace they did. LINDA: They did. BABE: Yep, in those days. LINDA: So they'd all get together on one day and … BABE: They always worked together. Helped one another do things. LINDA: Was that day called something in particular? BABE: No. LINDA: No. BABE: No, and then like the -- I got a large grapevine. See, the whole hill did [unintelligible - 00:49:37] grape used to make his own wine. Then they all had big gardens. And another thing the Italian women up on Lincoln Terrace, on tomato time they would actually make tomato paste. I don't know if you ever saw that. They would have all these boards of pine nice and clean, they spread all the tomato on it, and then put one of those nets on it that they used to cover babies in a carriage to keep the flies out and so forth. And just by working that they made their own tomato paste. And they'd do all different things like that, you know, which they don't do today. It's easier to go to the store today and buy it. 24 LINDA: So when they slaughtered the pig and they made the prosciutto and et cetera… BABE: [Unintelligible - 00:50:24]. LINDA: When they slaughtered the pig, how did they store the -- how did they store what they had made? BABE: Mostly in the cellar. The meats [unintelligible - 00:50:34] like they'd make the sausage and they'd hang them up to dry. They had them covered and they'd hang them up to dry, and they would dry until they dried out with the [unintelligible - 00:50:45] it was all ice boxes what they had then, you know. But they'd have a place in the cellar which was damp enough or so forth that would last -- none of it wasted; they certainly ate it all before anything got to be wasted. LINDA: Was there any trading between families? BABE: I wouldn't say so, no. They had it all. They would give it to somebody like that, but there wouldn't be any trading. If somebody needed something, they would give it to them. LINDA: For some reason I can't remember what you call this, but when you dig out, let's say, a little hill when you keep food in it, what is that called? BABE: They didn't do that. They had it all in the cellar. ROSA: They just used the cellar cold. They can't do it today -- you can't do it today with the heat in the houses, but in those days the cellars were damp and cold sausages could be strung up in the rafters. And prosciutto. They made their sausages with the tubing, I remember seeing them. LINDA: Was that a long process, making the sausage? BABE: Well you got a 300-pound pig; you got a little work to do. You've got quite a bit of meat there to… ROSA: They'd grind it … LINDA: Now, was that woman's work, men's work? BABE: Oh, they all worked. The women did the cooking. They did a lot of that there, and the women probably -- some of the women would put the 25 [rosin] in the hot water to clean the hair of the animals. Hot water and rosin [unintelligible - 00:52:29] take the hair all off. LINDA: Was the skin used for anything? BABE: Yeah, they cooked that up. ROSA: Salt pork. BABE: Yeah. LINDA: So that's really what salt pork is? BABE: There was no waste. Probably threw the hoof away, didn't use that. ROSA: The head. LINDA: Did they throw the head away, or did they use part of it? BABE: Some people ate the head. Yeah some did. We didn't. ROSA: The ears, too. BABE: They all had chickens. LINDA: [Unintelligible - 00:53:05] throw the head away! BABE: And they all had chickens. In fact, my mother had her own little hobby [unintelligible - 00:53:11] times she had chickens and the eggs, and you know, feed the family, and if there's any eggs over she would sell them to the neighbor. So she would do that. My mother never learned to speak English too well even though she did the answering for my father, but it was -- my father could interpret what she would say even though she was saying it wrong. Like there was a company called Bowen and Fuller in Leominster, and my father always said this to people that they called my mother and have your husband come, we've got some deliveries to make, and she asked what company they said Bowen and Fuller. She said "Damn Fool?" He said no, Bowen and Fuller. She asked two or three times and yes. So my father came home, and she said, "Damn Fool wants you to pick up." So he knew them when he went there. The guy says, [unintelligible - 00:54:09] your message and the guy says yes. But they did understand one another. Of course the guy knew that she wasn't doing it to insult him 26 or anything. She didn't know any different on that. But she never learned the -- very, very little English. My father, working with the French people, he learned to speak French, and he learned the English right away, and of course he had the Italian. LINDA: Well, what about you and your brothers and sisters? Did you speak Italian? BABE: We understood it and so forth. They can speak it, but very [unintelligible - 00:54:50], and I can understand quite a bit what happens. Incidentally the three oldest children went to a French school at that time, and they learned French also. LINDA: What school? St. Cecelia's? BABE: St. Cecelia's, yeah. They went three years and then the French people needed a school for themselves and they transferred to St. [unintelligible - 00:55:14] school. LINDA: Now, I heard some people tell me that they weren't allowed to speak Italian in their homes after they learned English at school. Was that true for your family? BABE: Nope. No, we always spoke it. But my wife now, when she came over -- she came from Italy, and I didn't -- and when she came home with the school -- she's not from here, she's from Pennsylvania. But she refused to learn English until the teachers got -- one friendly teacher, "But why don't you want to learn?" She says, "I won't be able to speak to my mother and father then." She thought she'd lose the English. And after that day she made all kinds of honors in school. So she -- but in our house, now, my children, two of them they didn't speak -- we never spoke in Italian, but -- so we [unintelligible - 00:56:12] secret family thing when you're in front of the children, we'd speak Italian, my wife and I, not to be heard, but that's all done now because my daughter went out and became a professor of Italian history, so that brought us out. We can't even… 27 LINDA: So was it important for your family, your father and mother, for their children to assimilate, to become more American? BABE: We never discussed that. I don't think that ever came a thing -- you do the best you can do. That was about the biggest teaching that my father ever gave. Do the best you can do, stay out of trouble. And the other thing he always was a stickler for was he said you always respect authority. He said if someone does something wrong you respect it, you do it when you come home, you tell me about it, and I will take care of it. Of course it was just [unintelligible - 00:57:06] he never did anything everything after it, but meanwhile he kept peace in the family. LINDA: So he didn't want you to confront an adult; he would. BABE: Nope, and you know, in most cases you don't win with authority. You listen to it, and that's it. LINDA: So tell me about your mother. What was she like? BABE: My mother was strictly a loving for her children. She'd do anything for us. To quote my wife, which we shouldn't put on tape… LINDA: You don't want to? BABE: No, I'll tell you what my wife says about my mother. If it's not on tape. LINDA: If it's not on tape, okay. BABE: One of the things that happened though before [unintelligible - 00:57:56] we got married, my wife would go with my sister shopping and so forth. And in our house everybody -- they're all married now, but everybody would end up at the kitchen table at nighttime after the day's work, and my mother would -- you know, there was just the two of them, my mother and father at home, but there was always two or three pounds of spaghetti made, and we'd all eat there and then go home and say we're not hungry. But there was this one day we're there and my wife and my sister went shopping. They were late when they came in, so my brother-in-law and I said so let's have some fun. So the minute they came in, I says "Tina, where have you been? You know I worked all hard all day. I come home 28 and I want to eat." And so she says, "Well, we shopped." And my mother spoke up, she says, "That's not right. You got to feed your husband when he comes…" Well, then my brother-in-law to my sister says the same thing, you know. And my mother spoke up, and maybe she had something important to do. Same conversation. So -– but she was [unintelligible - 00:59:07] she was sick for a while. She had lost one eye too, and so for a while she was a -- but she could find -- after that she could find things that we couldn't, with that one eye. We would lose something and she would find it, even a pin or something like that, but… LINDA: Did she come from -- she came from Italy but differently than your father? I mean … BABE: Three years later. 1909 she came. LINDA: Did she come directly to Leominster? BABE: Well, she landed in Boston. Now, how she got there from Italy I don't have any information on that. LINDA: Do you know how your parents met each other? BABE: Probably out in the farm someplace, I would guess, because that's all they did; they were farmers. Even the woman worked the farms out there and so forth. So, a lot of them out there worked in [unintelligible - 01:00:03] actually who worked for the people that owned the land. LINDA: Where? BABE: In Italy. LINDA: Oh, they knew each other in Italy? BABE: Oh yeah. LINDA: Oh. 29 BABE: When she came here she -- well, that picture there shows her when she came in 19 -- with her children there, that's the picture when she came in 1909. LINDA: Okay. BABE: One of those. LINDA: Okay, so they knew each other in Italy? BABE: Yeah, they got married in Italy. They got married in Italy. LINDA: Then came here separately. BABE: Yes. LINDA: Not at the same time? BABE: No. LINDA: Okay, I didn't understand that. Did they have children [unintelligible - 01:00:45]? BABE: Yeah, yeah. This one here it was 1910 when she came. There was three of them. There was the three. They would be 1, 2, 3 that she came back with. Of course she came here in 1909, 1910 there was another one added at that time. LINDA: So your father came without the family first and then brought them over? BABE: They all did that. They all boarded. If you will look at the directory, they all, the Italians all boarded someplace. They -- none of them had their own home or anything like that in the beginning, so their wives came over and then they would find a place. LINDA: So growing up and you're working with your father, did you work six days a week? BABE: Sometimes seven. Not too often, but sometimes we'd have things to do and we'd do it. So in other words you have to realize when I got to the working age, I was in the Depression, actually. So you took it as you could get it as far as work is concerned. LINDA: Did you work out during the daylight hours? 30 BABE: Oh yeah. We generally got home [unintelligible - 01:02:06] unless there was an emergency job you stayed later. We'd get home about five, five thirty from a job, start at eight o'clock in the morning. LINDA: And then you would eat dinner with your parents? BABE: Mm-hmm. LINDA: And who made the dinner? BABE: My mother. LINDA: What about your sisters? BABE: They were married by that time. Don't forget, they were completely -- they were much older than I was, so they were -- by the time that I started eating, you know, they were married. LINDA: So tell me what kind of things you ate. The types of things your mother made. BABE: All the good things that I like. LINDA: Which is what? BABE: She made spaghetti, pasta [la jour], even polenta. I know you know what that is. LINDA: Mm-hmm. BABE: In those days that was a poor man's meal. Today you go in restaurants you pay a fancy price for it. LINDA: I should have said no, I don't know what it is so you can explain to us on tape. I'll have to get that sometime. So what's polenta? BABE: Lentils, I like lentils. She used to make that, different soups. I'm sorry, what did you say? LINDA: What's polenta? What is it? BABE: Corn -- mush is what it is, actually. LINDA: How would she serve that? BABE: We'd put it on the board, on the table, you spread it all over a board, and then what we'd do, the fun we'd have is try to decide what we're going to carve, and everybody would just carve whatever shape we wanted. And another thing she'd do too at times would be so we would eat all of it, 31 she'd put meat in the middle, and you had to work your way. If you didn't work your way you wouldn't get to the meat. You know, whether it was a meatball a piece of pork chop something like that. LINDA: So it was kind of polite eating. You eat from the outside in? You don't just dig in. BABE: No, no you have to work your way in, clean the road as you go. But on holidays, surprisingly, my father would do the cooking. I know on Easter especially he would make the ham and fix it all up and put the garlic in it and so forth. He always did that. LINDA: Now, during the Depression, did you eat meat at all, or was that really a luxury? BABE: It was a luxury. LINDA: Were different foods prepared on a Sunday compared to the rest of the week? BABE: Yes, Sunday you would have a bigger meal. And during the height of the Depression, we'd probably get oranges at Christmastime, maybe a banana at Christmastime. The rest of the year you didn't need it, so you didn't get it. LINDA: Do you want to go back to your jobs then? BABE: My jobs? LINDA: Yeah, jobs. BABE: Such as? LINDA: Or your companies or your interests. Like the motels. How did you get involved in the motels? BABE: Well, we went out to get some materials. It was in New Jersey, picking up some pallets for the block plant at that time, and it was next door to a motel, the pallets and so forth, and I started talking to the fellow and so forth. And [unintelligible - 01:05:44] the business, and now I had the ice cream place, I had the tourist stopping, so the brain just clicked in it would be nice to have a motel in Leominster. We had none. That was the first one. So that's what I did. I built a motel. 32 LINDA: Where did you build it? BABE: On Route 12 right next to my ice cream place. So that -- I didn't have any money at that time, so that was a problem. I went to the bank, it was the first bank I went to, told them I wanted $25,000, to borrow $25,000, said what are you going to do and I explained. They said you can't do that for that price. I said oh yes, I can I buy all my materials wholesale, and I do all the work myself. And he said well, in that case you have to give me a list of what it's going to cost you because I can only loan you 80 percent of what you're going to pay. So my answer to him was you really don't want me to build the motel, do you? But I fought it. Like I say, I made up my mind I was going to fight it and I did, so I just kept going and we built it. LINDA: So did you end up borrowing the money from a bank? BABE: Oh yeah, I got money from a bank—not that bank though, another bank. But then I started with eight rooms and built another eight and built another eight, and then four more on that same site, and so that worked out good. That was a good business. LINDA: And you kept the ice cream business in addition? BABE: Yeah. LINDA: So who ran the motel? BABE: Hmm? LINDA: Who ran the motel? BABE: I did. There was nobody else to run it. My wife was busy with the children at that time. LINDA: I thought there were only 24 hours in a day! That's why I'm asking. BABE: Well, I still slept three hours. You get up in the morning at eight o'clock. About eight we'd go have some breakfast and then close about two o'clock. Three nights a week I'd make ice cream until about three or four o'clock in the morning. Then with the motel beside it, you get -- break up during the night, people checking in late, so that was the schedule for a number of years. 33 LINDA: Where were you living at this time? BABE: We built a house in back of the motel and ice cream place. LINDA: Okay. So did you advertise for the motel? BABE: Yeah, we did advertise on that. LINDA: So who was staying in the motel, people visiting? BABE: We had -- mostly it was a commercial motel and we had mostly salesmen, engineers, buyers. It was all very good class of business that we had, and tourists and so forth, but we had quite a reputation that we even had quite a few of the national companies that if they were within 50 miles of our place such as Gates Rubber from Colorado, Singer Sewing Machine, if any of their people were within 50 miles of our motel, we had direct billing with them, they'd stop with us. But we made it very, very comfortable for them, because we learned very early that a salesman or an engineer or anybody that's traveling alone is the most lonesome guy in the world. So the thing that we would do is if a guy comes in and he could be with the plastic industry, he's alone, somebody else we know is in the motel in the plastic business he's alone, we have them meet one another. They'd go out and from then on they'd come back, because they knew that it was always -- they were going to meet somebody there instead of just sitting in a room all night long. And we built up a wonderful business that way. In fact, even -- we had a regular customer of ours once got in an automobile accident, and he couldn't go back home and we were full, and we asked [unintelligible - 01:09:51] two people of other customers that one of our customers was in an accident and can't go home, would you mind packing up and leaving? They did. LINDA: Wow. BABE: You know, which is so unusual. We explained what it was, but even that was a family affair that they would. It was a lot of fun. We had a lot of 34 fun doing that. One of the regulars that came in would we would always be pulling jokes, stuff like -- one time he brought somebody in and my wife was in Florida with her mother at the time, so I don't know what made me do it, but this guy was saying I've got to meet your wife, I hear so much about it from the other guys. So I said, yeah, but you know, when you talk to her she's hard of hearing, so then I pick up my wife and I said this wonderful guy from Chicago is in room 9. Wonderful guy. He was doing management surveys for the [unintelligible - 01:10:58] on Adams Street. So I told Tina he's hard of hearing. So now when they come in, they're all there, because they always -- we had a lawn area that we sit at, and so I said, Tina there's the guy, so, "How are you," and they're hollering like two idiots back and forth, and everybody starts laughing. But it was good for a joke. But they all accepted it as such, and that's it. Now, the one I got to say on the ice cream place now, I'm going to take a [unintelligible - 01:11:30] had his favorite place. I gave ice cream to every church in Leominster but my own. We'll have to continue. LINDA: We were talking about you had a story about churches and giving ice cream. BABE: Yes, I gave ice cream to every church in Leominster but St. Anne's, my church. Because what would happen, even the synagogues, the Jewish would call up and they want ice cream, how much is it. And I'd say $5 a tub. When I'd bring it up I'd give them a receipted bill. My own people, when they'd call, they'd say, "Oh, we can buy it for $4.50," so I never had the opportunity to give it to them, right? LINDA: Really? BABE: That was in six years I think I gave to every church in Leominster but my own. Now, I never told them I was going to give it to them for nothing. They asked me what the price was. The price was $5 a tub. So I guess that's all right. We all still made it. 35 LINDA: How long did you keep the ice cream? BABE: From 1950 to 1958. LINDA: And what about the motel? BABE: Motel, sold that in '64. LINDA: You had two didn't you? BABE: Yep, sold the other one about the same time. The other one I bought. I didn't build the other one. LINDA: And what was that, West… BABE: West [unintelligible - 01:12:59] Motel. LINDA: Is that the one that's across from -- well, it's Sam's now -- I mean, not Sam's, Walmart. Is that the one? BABE: No, it's up further. It's at the junction of 110 and 12. LINDA: All right. So again, give me an idea of what a day was like for you when you owned both the ice cream shop and the motel. BABE: Hectic. Get up in the morning, help out at the place… you know, noon time was busy there and so forth. And then at night start checking in people at the motel, then come back and make the ice cream. Like I said, I did all my building in the wintertime, too. [Unintelligible - 01:13:48] like I built the motel myself, I did that all. And the other thing we did during that time again was one summer, which was really -- my wife got me involved, and we built -- with the people of Leominster now, they're very generous; we built a swimming pool for the Nazareth Home for Boys. So I'm the owner, I'm doing the blocks, and I'm doing all the rebuilding of it. And people always like to have fun, and I had fellows working for me, a police officer mowing my lawn at the motel and stuff. And I know that the day I laid blocks I was just about dead, and I come home and [unintelligible - 01:14:35] is really doing good you hired people to do work for you, you're getting lazy. 36 But that was all, it was a lot of work, just busy, busy. But I enjoyed it. I think someone said one time that work won't kill you, and it didn't. LINDA: It sounds like your wife was supportive. Very supportive. BABE: Yeah, she is. She did. She had to take care of the children, and she also, at the same time, she was taking care of her sister's. She was one of the waitress I had. She had to waitress, she took care of their two children too, then at night she would come up and help with serving customers. Although she was a troublemaker. She's the one that liked to joke with the customers. For example, we used to have -- a new product came out, the ketchup that you squeeze it, the pump it, they called it. On Saturday night we'd get those big gang of dancers come in, dress suits, ties. So this one guy was trying to get the ketchup on and it wouldn't work on a hamburger. We said, "Tina, why don't you throw these away? They don't work." So she says, "You don't mind if I squeeze it at you?" "Go ahead," he says, so of course, ketchup all the way down his face. She never worked on Saturdays, but one Saturday she's working and one of our good customers from Connecticut would come by every Saturday with his wife and family going to New Hampshire camping. I'm outside talking to the guys and he came out and said, "You know, I don't know who that new waitress you got, but you better fire her or you won't have no customers left." I said, "Which one?" I said, "I can't fire her, she owns it!" But it was always funny, and I think that's what kept it going. It wasn't -- we enjoyed it, and that's probably what kept us going. We didn't look at it as a job or as work. We looked at it as something to do, and we were happy while we did it. LINDA: Did you have many employees? 37 BABE: Well, probably on the weekends was the most. It was probably about eight or nine of us on a weekend working. LINDA: Working at the ice cream shop, or… BABE: As far as the motel, it only required -- two girls would work just in the morning. That was separate girls, you know. A few hours they would have the rooms all ready. Then my children, we had the miniature golf. LINDA: Oh, that's right did. You built the miniature golf next to the ice cream shop? BABE: Yeah. LINDA: Now, where did you get that idea? BABE: I saw one, and I thought it would be nice to have, so I built one. LINDA: So, again, would that be the first miniature golf place in Leominster? BABE: No, there had been one for years and years up on North Main Street behind the bowling alleys. The motel was the first one in Leominster. LINDA: Well, then tell me about building the miniature golf. You actually designed it and built it? BABE: No, I didn't design it. The people I bought the equipment from did the designing of it. But I built it, I put it in there. Everything was designed by them, and I bought all the fixtures and so forth from them. LINDA: And then your children worked there? BABE: Yeah. LINDA: So how did you and your wife feel about education for your children? BABE: We felt tops for education. We probably made a couple of mistakes educating our children. To be very honest, I think St. Ann's, my son went there, and I think that was a mistake because there was [unintelligible - 01:18:44] 60 kids in the first grade. And had he went to where I went to school, they had 11 children. It would have been almost like a private tutoring. So what we did with him to pick up, we sent him to Julie Country Day afterwards, which is a private school, and from there he went to Worcester Academy. LINDA: I guess I'm interested to know how something like that happens. 38 BABE: Like what? LINDA: Like that you went to the 9th grade, you said, and your father is an immigrant who came over here to work so hard, and you know, he may not have had much schooling, and then all of a sudden your son is going to Worcester Academy. BABE: Because I wanted him to go there. LINDA: Because you wanted him… BABE: Oh yeah. LINDA: And why did you want him… BABE: In fact, [unintelligible - 01:19:34] when people ask me what I did I say I'm a bum. And of course my son must have heard me two or three times and, I know when he was ready to go to college, he said, "Dad, I don't want to go to college. I want to be a bum." I said, "You're going to be an educated bum." And he went to college, which he did very, very good [unintelligible - 01:19:51]. But no, we felt that the he lacked the basic knowledge at the very beginning. /AT/pa/mlb/es
In: CIC Addante, Annelisa and Max Brow - Final.pdf
Topics include: Max talks about his grandparents: their Italian heritage, the food they prepare, and the Italian words his grandfather taught him. Annelisa talks about growing up in Fitchburg, MA. Attending Catholic school. Her father was proud to be Italian. Growing up with Italian traditions. Visiting relatives in Italy. Her mother was Italian-American and did not boast about her heritage like her father did. Religion. Working for her father and eventually becoming a podiatrist herself. The value of education to her family. Her father's education and the GI Bill. Italian food and cooking. Working in Fitchburg and the sense of community there. How her grandmother sparked her interest in Italy. ; 1 SPEAKER 1: -with the Center for Italian Culture, A. January 14, 2002. We are at the home of Annelisa Addante and her… Max Brown. Annelisa is the daughter of Joe Addante and… in Fitchburg at 378 Still River Road in Bolton. So the first interview is with Max Brown. Is it Maxwell? ANNELISA: You can talk too, that's okay. SPEAKER 1: Did you ever consider giving him an Italian name? ANNELISA: No. No, I think… well… no. SPEAKER 1: Your grandfather, Dr. Joe… MAX BROWN: Well, he is a podiatrist, and… um… SPEAKER Tell me again, when do you see your grandfather? MAX BROWN: Um, on weekdays at school; and, um, sometimes I go on the computer and sometimes for dinner. Yeah, definitely a lot. SPEAKER 1: -talk about being Italian? MAX BROWN: Uh, yes. He goes to Italy a lot, and I have gone to Italy and, um… SPEAKER 1: You've gone to Italy with him? MAX BROWN: Yes. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. MAX BROWN: I went to their house, actually. SPEAKER 1: -that like? MAX BROWN: Uh, well, it was pretty cool. I was sort of young, so… and then we went to… SPEAKER 1: And how old were you? MAX BROWN: Four. For a birthday. SPEAKER 1: How old are you now? MAX BROWN: Nine. SPEAKER 1: So… a lot of Italian cooking, Grandmother Addante? MAX BROWN: Sort of. Mm-hmm. Well, I just remember, like, pasta. I really like everything, basically. SPEAKER 1: Anyone ever ask you what nationality you are? MAX BROWN: Uh, sometimes; but not really regularly. Well, I am an Italian and… SPEAKER 1: Italian?2 MAX BROWN: Well, a little. Yeah. SPEAKER 1: Why do you consider yourself Italian? MAX BROWN: Because I eat Italian food and I know that my grandfather is there most of his life and, um, I just think I am definitely Italian. SPEAKER 1: Are you? MAX BROWN: Definitely Italian background at least. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. Does your grandfather ever teach you Italian words? MAX BROWN: Uh, yes. He taught me "good morning," and how to get to a restaurant, and how to leave, and, like, to say good morning and then the reply and stuff. And that's really all. SPEAKER 1: Which school do you go to? MAX BROWN: [Unintelligible - 00:02:56] SPEAKER 1: Were you in kindergarten there or…? MAX BROWN: Yes, I was in kindergarten for three years and now I was three because my birthday is in September. SPEAKER 1: And your grandfather's proud of you? MAX BROWN: Uh, yeah. SPEAKER 1: What makes you think that? MAX BROWN: Uh, well, he says it so much. SPEAKER 1: You know that you grandfather's father used to make shoes? MAX BROWN: Mm-hmm [unintelligible - 00:03:25]… well, he repaired shoes and stuff. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm… grandfather ever take you to the places in Fitchburg… by bike? MAX BROWN: Well, no, not really, because most of them [aren't actual places and… just stuff]. SPEAKER 1: Your grandparents are Brown. do you call them Grandma and Grandpa Brown? MAX BROWN: Well, Nana and Grandpa. SPEAKER 1: What nationality are they? MAX BROWN: I think a little Scottish and Irish and a little French; I don't know, a little American? Canadian? I don't really know.3 SPEAKER 1: -talk about what they are? MAX BROWN: Not really. If they do they don't really talk about… discuss it and stuff. SPEAKER 1: Do they have any special food that they cook? MAX BROWN: Um, pasta mostly. SPEAKER 1: Do you think they talk about their heritage as much as your Grandfather Addante? MAX BROWN: No. Definitely not. SPEAKER 1: You mentioned that your Grandfather Addante talks a lot about being Italian? MAX BROWN: Yes, definitely. SPEAKER 1: Are you proud of being Italian? MAX BROWN: Sort of, yeah. SPEAKER 1: But someone like me goes around and tries to interview people. Why? MAX BROWN: Well, to get more information… SPEAKER 1: Italian and… MAX BROWN: Background and… SPEAKER 1: Back to Italy? Any plans to go? MAX BROWN: Um, well, I don't know any time soon, but I'd like to go skiing there. SPEAKER 1: You'd like to go skiing? MAX BROWN: Uh, yes. Race-skiing. SPEAKER 1: (I don't think that's the problem. I don't know what the problem is but now it's back on again… ) Would you like to tell me anything else about your grandparents? MAX BROWN: Not really. On the Brown side, my grandfather is an avid golfer and… SPEAKER 1: Has he taught you? MAX BROWN: Uh, yes. SPEAKER 1: So you are already a golfer and a skier? MAX BROWN: Golfer, and a skier, and a soccer player; I love sports. SPEAKER 1: Did Grandfather Addante ever play sports? Do you know? MAX BROWN: I don't think so. He says he does but I don't really suspect… 4 SPEAKER 1: Does he look Italian? MAX BROWN: I don't know. Yeah, I guess. SPEAKER 1: -really never ask you if you are Italian? MAX BROWN: No, not just anyone… just, like, in school… SPEAKER 1: Do you have any interest in becoming a podiatrist? MAX BROWN: Definitely not. SPEAKER 1: Definitely not? MAX BROWN: Definitely not. SPEAKER 1: Why is that? MAX BROWN: I'm more into something like [unintelligible 00:06:13]. I really don't like it in the office; definitely not a podiatrist. SPEAKER 1: No? MAX BROWN: Definitely not. Anything but a podiatrist SPEAKER 1: Really, do you ever…? [Laughter] So you go to the office? MAX BROWN: Uh, yes, sometimes after school. I don't know if I am to tell you but every year we cook smelts and baccala for Christmas dinner. Not really any special Italian traditions, you know [unintelligible 00:06:40]. SPEAKER 1: Are there foods that your mother cooks? MAX BROWN: Uh, well, she makes only pasta and… I don't know, but [unintelligible 00:06:52] here in Italian. I… mostly, I think. SPEAKER 1: [Anything] else? MAX BROWN: No, not really. SPEAKER 1: No? Is your Grandmother Addante Italian? MAX BROWN: Yes; well, she came from… she didn't come from the exact same place when she came… her parents came from Italy. SPEAKER 1: Does she talk about Italy at all? MAX BROWN: A little, but not like my grandfather. SPEAKER 1: What do you call your grandparents? MAX BROWN: Grandpa and Grandma [on the…]. Well, Grandpa Joe and Grandpa Dick on the other side. SPEAKER 1: So Grandpa Joe never said, "Why don't you call me, what is it, "noni"'?5 MAX BROWN: I know some other people that are called that but I don't really… SPEAKER 1: And your soccer − the Italian team or… ? MAX BROWN: Yes, I do. Definitely. I don't know… yeah, maybe… SPEAKER 1: Now we are talking to Annelisa Addante… Back in Fitchburg…is that true? Can you tell me a little bit about… did you go to public school there? ANNELISA: No, actually… the private catholic school, which basically was ethnically mixed. The school I went to was run by the same order of sisters that ran the school my dad − when he was younger − he belonged to. He belonged to St. Anthony's parish. SPEAKER 1: You were saying something about Abbot's school that was run by the same order of nuns that… ANNELISA: He went to St. Bernard's, which was "The Irish School," in those days. So I think my loss was language, because at St. Anthony's grammar school Italian was taught and it wasn't at Holy Family. I think that is where I might have had the opportunity to learn to speak and continue speaking. SPEAKER 1: Did they have… ANNELISA: Fitchburg and Leominster and surrounding towns. It is very much like students commuting to a school today; because they didn't grow up with neighborhood kids, they didn't grow up with the children in my parish. You know, they were from here, there and everywhere. SPEAKER 1: And where was that? ANNELISA: It was on South Street in Fitchburg. SPEAKER 1: Okay. Now that's where your parents live now. ANNELISA: They do. If you went down the hill a little bit on the opposite side you'd see the complex there, used to belong to the city; I believe the city superintendent has his office there and it's called… I don't think it extended so much outside the house. My father is definitely a [force]. He has always been very 6 proud to be Italian. He always tried to maintain traditions and, you know, there were certain things that we did, certain things that we ate, certain thing that probably he talked about, but that was more at home than being outside of home. Yes. SPEAKER 1: Do you feel as though they… ANNELISA: I can't think of anyone that I grew up with whose family participated in more traditions than my family did. No. my father… [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: Speaking of that word [laughter]. ANNELISA: So I would say, one is eating at the dinner table every single night, having to be home for dinner and all being together to eat. It didn't necessarily have to be Italian food, but the fact that we all did get together; we always get together for holidays. There is some food… Dad is a good historian − local historian and world historian − and so he would often refer to… in terms of the Romans and the contributions of the Catholic Church and how it influenced history. I always found it really interesting. I had taken a few Italian lessons outside of school when I was young. When I was 12 I went to Italy for the first time. It was a school trip; really for students older than myself. But my aunt was going as a teacher and so I was allowed to go, even though I was only 12. And that… during that trip we went to visit some of the relatives. So we went back to the village where my grandparents had come from, and met cousins that were approximately my age and that was really interesting. And I did not really view them so much as Italian as I did, you know, kids my age, basically. And it was just really a good time in life to connect and to this day I am still friendly with some of those cousins. We have traveled back and forth. SPEAKER 1: Did you write to them? 7 ANNELISA: We wrote, mm-hmm. Definitely we wrote. We made some phone calls [laughter]; she came to visit. She later sent her son to spend a month with us one summer and still are in touch. SPEAKER 1: You said… ANNELISA: One in particular is just a few month older than I. And then another is about… Well, I was speaking a little and they were speaking a little English and we managed. SPEAKER 1: Really? Did you father …. ANNELISA: No, not really. He would speak to my grandparents in Italian and sometimes they would answer in English. They would speak in Italian when they didn't want us to understand what they were saying, but they really didn't make an attempt to teach us to speak Italian when we were young. You know, I think they regret that now and later on I studied Italian in college and one of my brothers did as well. But you know, I did two years and when I went to sign on to year three they weren't offering it. So I would like him to learn and we periodically pick tapes. We always take the tapes before we go on the trip. That's not really adequate but it's… I think the fact that we all sat down together to eat dinner, that was one. Some of the foods were different. The travel was different. And the topics of conversations were different. I am not so sure that it was more sort of ethnically oriented. Well, let me see… I think a large part of it was due to my dad's interest, you know, that we acted with this notion that we had an Italian heritage. SPEAKER 1: Now your mother… ANNELISA: Oh, my grandfather was born in Italy and her mother was not Italian, although her mother learned to cook from her sister-in-law and she actually learned to speak Italian. I guess you would say she was an Italian-American. There wasn't a lot of conversation about her being Italian when we were young. I mean, my father always talked about being Italian; my mother really didn't. I think her family… for her family, it was important to assimilate more than my dad's family. 8 SPEAKER 1: I wonder why? ANNELISA: Her father had come at a younger age. Her grandparents had come to this country; my father's grandparents had not come here. It made the difference − but that was the difference. SPEAKER 1: What would…? ANNELISA: I would have to say Italian-American because I have had my consciousness raised [laughter] for a long time about my family heritage and I had an interest in the family history. And we make, you know, some effort at maintaining some traditions, although I do think that it's been watered down a whole lot [laughter]. SPEAKER 1: Lack of time, or…? ANNELISA: Mostly lack of time. I mean, I think of all the things my grandmother did. But she was home; she never drove. I'm barely home; I'm driving everywhere. So the… you know, we like to cook. It takes time; we don't do as much of it as my grandmother… tried to maintain a garden in the summertime, transplanted the grapes but we still haven't got around to making the wine. I am not sure it will ever happen. The interest is there, but the time is not. SPEAKER 1: No. ANNELISA: [His] family is mostly French; a little Irish, a little Scotch. That's where the Brown comes from. I don't think he really aligns himself with a nationality, necessarily. We really don't talk about family heritage. They talk about relatives but not ethnic background [laughter]. He is very easygoing person. I think he found my father interesting because it definitely widened his horizons in a whole lot of ways… Island or two, but had never really left the country before we got married; so, you know, he found himself traveling and the joke is that we are still trying to find out something that Rick doesn't like to eat. He's got a wide palate. He's… you know, wide open to new experiences so he didn't hold it against me [laughter].9 SPEAKER 1: Was it important to your mother and father that you made…? ANNELISA: My father used to talk about that when I was younger but that dissipated through the years [laughter]. SPEAKER 1: What about the same religion? ANNELISA: [NOTE: during this section it sounds as if there are at least one and possibly two other women speaking but the voices are so similar it could not be differentiated easily] Up to now he might say something about it but, no. He would. You know, my father was very much like a lot of Italian men. You see them in church when they are young. Then you see them for weddings and baptisms and funerals. And then they get older then you start see them on a regular basis again. My father was not really the churchgoer when we were younger. He is now but he wasn't when we were younger. I think both my parents are very spiritual. Yes. The oldest. There were definitely gender differences. One brother was 11 months younger and the other was four and a half years younger. Being the oldest it wasn't necessarily that I would do something first and a year later my brother would get to do it. We'd sort of always get to do it at the same time because he was a boy. They were definitely allowed more freedoms than I was. No question about it. Socially − yes, but even in the jobs they were allowed to take, my dad really wanted me to work for him in some capacity. Whereas my brothers could go out and they had the experience of a wider variety of jobs; there were certain things they just didn't want me to do. Oh, I had a lot of chores. [Laughter] My brothers were good workers and they had chores but didn't have things that needed to be done daily. Oh, absolutely; my father considered himself very progressive because he has two colleagues that are female. But we are exceptions [laughter]. There were definitely gender biases. And I would need to be able to do all the things that my mother does well, and then do what my father does. 10 I think it just evolved; I would not say that it was undue pressure, but there were certainly expectations. I think I was fortunate enough I was able to rise to the occasion. I think sometimes those expectations can be difficult for some children with a different personality. Maybe I was just enough like my father to cope with the expectation [laughter]. SPEAKER 1: So is it true to say that… ANNELISA: He is very enthusiastic about his profession as he is about his heritage [laughter] so I think in his view there was nothing better I could do. Yeah. SPEAKER 1: Did you ever consider doing something different? ANNELISA: I did at different times but I think that when I was younger, I really wasn't exposed to a lot of job opportunities; or not opportunities, you know − careers. It was one that I happened to know a lot about because my dad's office was downstairs; we lived upstairs. I did different facets of the job, you know, depending on my… I just fell into it. Maybe I was genetically programmed; I am not sure [laughter]. SPEAKER 1: Are you happy with the choice? ANNELISA: I am happy with the choice − I enjoy what I do. SPEAKER 1: I want to say… ANNELISA: No, not really. I don't remember exactly how that came about. I did. SPEAKER 1: What was that like? ANNELISA: Well, actually I had gone away my last year of high school. I had been away to boarding school and my brother had gone off to boarding school as well. To go away was not such a big deal. You know, I was 45 minutes from home, so… SPEAKER 1: Which high school? ANNELISA: I went to Abbot Academy in Andover. I just… it was a four-year school, but I just went away for my senior year. I just went there for one year. SPEAKER 1: So where did you go previously?11 ANNELISA: I really wasn't happy at Fitchburg High School. Initially thought it would; then I sort of thought maybe I explore other avenues and by the time I was senior I decided I that I was going to podiatry school [laughter]. SPEAKER 1: What was that like? Was that a…? ANNELISA: One of the defining moments was when I toyed with going to law school and I went in to take in the boards and I had to be fingerprinted along with every other student and I thought… [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: Oh, gosh! So then you decided. ANNELISA: At that point it was pretty clear, yeah… SPEAKER 1: Other than think, "Gee, I think I am going to podiatry." [Laughter] ANNELISA: No. I think he expected that I would be going [laughter] probably wasn't necessary… SPEAKER 1: How many years was podiatry school? ANNELISA: Four years. SPEAKER 1: Four years? So you went to Holy Cross for four… ANNELISA: I mean home? Yes. Absolutely. But I did two years residency first. SPEAKER 1: Where was that? ANNELISA: I went to Philadelphia for a year and then back to New York for another year and then I came home. [Laughter] I didn't have a particular place; it was just to consider going elsewhere or to go home to an established practice. SPEAKER 1: So when you went… and did you? ANNELISA: For a very brief time. SPEAKER 1: You were practicing elsewhere, but now you are part of your father's practice. ANNELISA: He's semi-retired; he sees very few patients in the Fitchburg office. But he does a lot of teaching in both Rome and London. So he takes off for periods of time SPEAKER 1: Is that something he has tried to get… ANNELISA: Yes, he has.12 SPEAKER 1: Are you interested? ANNELISA: I did some teaching when he had residency program when I first came home to practice with him but I am not interested in doing the traveling now; not because they don't like to travel − that part of it I would enjoy − but because I have a nine-year-old and I want to be home and do things with him. It's definitely not an option at this point in time. SPEAKER 1: Does he have any expectation…? ANNELISA: Oh, definitely. It was his… his profession was his sort of way to freedom, if you will. You know, he talks about his Italian heritage but he became sort of the American doctor and it gave him his independence and respect in the community and that was the way he did it, as many others have done it in both law and medicine; and I think when that happens, oftentimes fathers think well, it worked for me, it will work for you. I think there is great pressure put on children of parents who learn professions; particularly when they were the first generation in this country. I have seen lots of incidences of that. SPEAKER 1: Did…? ANNELISA: Well, yes, and no. If you take it as being first generation only, yes; but he got the education he did was a great thing. It is a reflection of, you know, combination of the GI bill − he described as being one of the best things American did for itself at that point in time − but also his willingness to really work hard. You know, he had the GI bill but he worked nights and went to school days. But also he was very fortunate in that both of his parents could read and write their own language when they came to this country, and a lot of immigrants could not say that of themselves. So they came here and they both went to night school to learn English, to read and write English. And my grandfather probably was unusual in that he educated both of his daughters. They both had master's degrees. So 13 although there were gender differences, they did value education and everyone helped the other to get the education that they knew they would need. He gave up on it because they were both very good at what they did. SPEAKER 1: What did they…? ANNELISA: They were both very artistic. One was a graphic designer. They both were graphic designers; one worked basically for a large company and did in-house advertising and the other did it out on his own as a freelancer. SPEAKER 1: Did they both…? ANNELISA: One stayed in the Fitchburg area and the other went to school in New York and stayed in New York and worked there. SPEAKER 1: Wasn't he…? ANNELISA: He had couple of opportunities to become a president of a podiatry school. And there is sort of lot of glamor associated with living in a large city. But my dad had always returned to Fitchburg. He grew up there and when he finished podiatry school he thought of setting up a practice elsewhere but decided that he wanted his children to know their grandparents. And this sort of roots thing was important to him. And he always returned and as much as he likes to tell us… and I think that he liked being in a small, town. He liked knowing everybody, he liked knowing the history. When he meets a patient he asks, "What was your mother's maiden name?" And he invariably knows somebody connected to them; and that doesn't happen in New York City or Chicago, so… Of work? Yes. I like taking care of people. It's pretty rewarding. It's not the kind of situation where you have to tell people they have cancer or, you know, the horrible day-to-day medical things. Most people come in not feeling too well and leaving feeling a whole lot better so that makes the day pretty pleasant. I think for my mother I got the sense that an education is a very important thing to pursue. She had not done that and she wished that she had the opportunity and made it sound very 14 important. My mother was the silent glue and my father was the noisy glue. They were both always present. She did make some Italian dishes but it was not… but not on a daily basis. We ate a lot of fresh vegetables and fruits and so forth, but it was also the time of frozen vegetables and, you know, sort of the cooking of the '50s was the trend for a while. And then I think my mother has really gotten back to more Italian cooking as everyone become more health conscious with lowering cholesterol and fat and so forth. She's gone back to more fresh vegetables, salads, pastas than we actually had growing up as children. Most of the Italian cooking was done by my grandparents when we were young. Now my grandparents lived in Leominster − so maybe 5 miles from our house − and my mother's mother lived just a couple of miles from us… Italian cooking, right? No, my mom cooked every day, but it wasn't always Italian food. She does more Italian cooking now than she did then. SPEAKER 1: Who taught you how to make pasta? ANNELISA: My grandmothers. SPEAKER 1: Was… ANNELISA: I think it was very informal, just part of the repertoire. I would always sort of watch what they were doing, try to participate… [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: Do you feel a certain allegiance to Fitchburg? ANNELISA: I guess allegiance…I have a soft spot in my heart for it. I know what kind of community it was when I was growing up. I think that there have been economic hardships in Fitchburg but I think it's a great community. I think there is a lot of to offer. I participate in things like the Fitchburg art museum. There are some great institutions in Fitchburg that need to be supported to the benefit of the whole community. I am not sure commitment is the right word. As long as I am feeling interested in working I think that is where I would work. But 15 no, I think, although my dad has been very influential and there have been lot of expectations that I think I made efforts to fulfill, I think that it's important to note that he is pretty much done what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it. And that I should be able to do the same. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: Did you ever get… you know… I don't know. So his father expects… ANNELISA: I definitely see generations. People ask me almost every day where I work, someone will ask me about my dad or my grandfather. And there are patients that I have that I have known the parents and/or the grandparents. All of them… but certainly on a daily basis there are people that have been coming for… I think for me that is the greatest sense of community I have experienced because I wasn't in a school of neighborhood where people typically my age talk about community. I didn't have that; but I have had it more with work than in anything else. I think there were some women who were disappointed that I was not a male doctor. I remember one lady actually said to me, "I thought you would be a big man." And you know, I had to explain that I was the daughter. Because having the same name sometimes people would not… SPEAKER 1: I probably asked this in one way, but do you think… ANNELISA: I am sure he is proud. Yeah. Well, you know, there were all kinds of heights to which my dad would go and would be happy to have me go as well. And I have really chosen the low road but I think, still, in the end he is proud. Oh, yes. Lots of people knew my dad so a lot of people had an opinion. Some really positive and some not so positive because he has always been a controversial figure. SPEAKER 1: Was he ever…? ANNELISA: Not politics. Professionally he has always been on the board of health. Within his profession he was very active politically. He has always been outspoken but he also always been a doer. 16 He does not just sit back and criticize; if he has a better idea he typically acts on it. Geographically it was a compromise for both me and Rick. SPEAKER 1: You mean…? ANNELISA: Work; it's pretty much equidistant from work. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. Where does he work? ANNELISA: Right now he is in [air] but he's on the road. He needed access to 495. I mean, I had a happy childhood. I really didn't know what life would be like in a different kind of community. I lived really close to the downtown areas. I was independent; I would walk to the Y, the museum, the post office, the library. I did all the errands for the office, so I was on the go all the time, I knew most of the merchants on Main; I mean, nowadays there are a handful of merchants, but then every storefront was the shopping mall. Highway access to center of town… SPEAKER 1: Childhood friends? ANNELISA: One in particular stayed in Fitchburg and, as I did, she does what her father did before her [laughter]. SPEAKER 1: Is she Italian? ANNELISA: Mm-hmm, went for a while and then came back home. Lived there part time, lived out of state part time. Not working to have children. I think it's possible that I could be living in the village but the cousins that I know now have moved from the village. They would go back because there were older relatives there. But for the most part the young generation left. I think that the countryside is beautiful; I would be very happy living there. I am not sure what I would be doing for an occupation. SPEAKER 1: What do…? ANNELISA: One of them is an architectural engineer and the other is a shop owner now. She had done sales of various kinds. I think that just because maybe now you are interviewing folks that are talking about their ethnic heritage, but I… well, my husband went to Notre Dame; if you go out to Notre Dame you will meet a lot of guys that are talking about being Irish. It's very17 important to be Irish there. Whether or not you are Irish [laughter]. Exactly… I think it's just the circle you happen to fall into. I am not sure whether is as important as something to banter about. I would say that probably my interest in Italy was sparked mostly from my grandmother, my dad's mother whom I call "Nonni" because she would on occasion receive a letter and she would pore over these letters and she would occasionally receive a photograph and she really handled it as a treasure. And she would tell stories and I could tell it was a place that she really missed, and that there were real people there. I mean, she really made it come alive. They didn't have a telephone or computer to contact people but life in Italy was very real for her and I think that she always missed it. I do think they're important, I think, to help and everyone gets up on their own and… it sort of always embraced the League of Nations at home and at work. And as you get to know other people from other countries, what I find myself recognizing are the similarities in most cultures. Family is very important. I think that is just a human quality. And how you sit around the table may differ but you know those… the way you relate to one another. I think I find myself looking more for the… or seeing more of the common threads rather than the differences. The differences may be food and they maybe holidays and they may be… or things or history. And those things that embellish life but… my curiosity is to know more about my cultural heritage but also to learn about the others. I have always felt pretty strongly about that, I would say, for most of my adult life. I think it puts emphasis on the fact that all you really have in life is some time and you don't know how much of it you have and that you'd best make the most of it. Having lost my younger brother so early, that's something that has been very real for some time, you know. SPEAKER 1: You happy with…18 ANNELISA: Makes you appreciate… And you realize that you are… if you have children you realize that you have one opportunity you cannot make up tomorrow. SPEAKER 1: What do you mean by…? ANNELISA: What you may neglect today you cannot make up tomorrow. SPEAKER 1: Thank you very much. That's the end of the interview. And I am so… /AT/ca/mm
Part one of an interview with Rev. Monsignor Leo J. Battista.Topics include: The Monsignor's family history and how his parents came to the U.S. from Italy. His father's work experience as a water boy on the Clinton Dam and then as a barber. The Monsignor's education at Holy Cross and at Grand Seminary in Montreal. The history of his assignments with the Church. Speaking Italian at home and learning different languages. Attending the Italian missions in Clinton, MA. Fighting cancer around the time he was ordained. Working at St. Anna's in Leominster. The Monsignor's experiences as an Italian living, going to school, and working in different places. His father's experiences being and Italian immigrant. Local social clubs. What his mother's life was like as a house wife. The importance of education to his family. ; 1 LINDA: … Rosenbaum for the Center of Italian Culture. It's Thursday, September 13th, 2001, and we are at the home of Monsignor Battista. I would like him to just introduce himself and his address, and then we'll get started with the interview. LEO: Good morning. My name is Monsignor Leo Joseph Battista. I live at -- I reside, rather, at 35 Julio Drive in Shrewsbury at a facility known as Southgate, which is an independent living home for retirees. LINDA: I thought that we could start with just you telling us a little bit about yourself. For example, your date of birth, and… LEO: I was born on December 27th, 1923 in a small town called Clinton, Mass, which is not too far from here. And I was born of two Italian [non-born] parents, both having come over from Italy—my father, Vincenzo Battista, and my mother, Maria Perrone Battista. My father came over here when he was just 13 years old and began to work as a worker at the Wachusett Reservoir. LINDA: What is that noise? LEO: That's the bird. On the clock. LINDA: Oh, I see. Okay. Try if it will shut up. I wasn't sure if that was a real bird. LEO: No. LINDA: Okay. I'm sorry. So you were explaining when your father was arriving? LEO: He arrived in 1908, I believe he got here. He came over with his dad, and they settled in Clinton because of work that was being done on the Wachusett Reservoir at the time. And he worked here -- he worked there for several years and then went on to take up the trade of being a barber. My mother, of course, she was born in Italy. And I believe she came over here in -- she came after she married my father. My father went back to Italy to marry her. And then she came over, and she was always a homemaker. She never worked outside the home. LINDA: Which village were they from in Italy?2 LEO: They were from a place called Delianuova, which is in the province and region of Calabria. And they were from the large province of Calabria and in the smaller district of Calabria called Reggio. And their little town was in the mountainous area, and it was called Giulinova. LINDA: About their experiences in Italy? LEO: Well, they would from time to time, just how they worked. Not too much though, when I stop and think of it. Because my father was very young, he hadn't had much opportunity to find work there. But he – so, he didn't have any job from there. He just came over here looking for job, looking for work with his dad. And my mother was just a homebody, so to speak. She was just from a family of -- I believe there were seven in her family. She was one of the girls in the family, had two brothers and four sisters. And she just worked around the home. She never really had any kind of a job over there or anything. And they would talk about the different things they would do, the picnics that they would go on and the festivities that they would attend and tell us about those things. There wasn't too much exchange as to what they did over there. LINDA: Did you father ever share with you the voyage? How old was he when he came here? LEO: He was only 12. LINDA: He was 12 in age when he came. LEO: He didn't say too much about that…just that they came over. He didn't go into much detail about it. And I don't know, for some reason or another, we never really asked too much about his trip over other than he came over by way of a boat with his dad. They certainly didn't travel first class. They were part of the immigrants who came landing in New York and getting off at Ellis Island.3 And that was an interesting thing. I often wondered why they used to call him James when his name was Vincenzo. And he then related the story to me one time that the officials at the immigrant registration desk had difficulty in understanding the name Vincenzo. And to them it sounded like James for some reason, Vince for James. So they put down James Battista. And so he kind of assumed that name here; and as he went along in labor, he was more commonly known as James Battista rather than his real name, Vincenzo Battista. But it was one of those mix-ups at the point of immigration registration that I think many Italian people went through. I mean, the people here were just in a hurry to register the people coming in, and if they didn't catch the name in the way it came across to them, they would put in what they thought they heard. And people got these different names from time to time. LINDA: So he worked as a laborer at Wachusett Dam? LEO: He worked as a laborer at the Wachusett Dam as a water boy because he was just, you know, 12 or 13 years old. And then after working there for a while, he was able to get a job in the Lancaster Mills, which was in Clinton at the time. That was a big copper company, and he worked there as a laborer for a while. But then he had the opportunity to pick up the trade of barbering. And I don't know how it was that he picked up barbering, he just seemed to want -- he liked that trade for one reason or another. He never did it as an apprentice in Italy, which was common in Italy. Before you did anything, any kind of work, you always worked as an apprentice for a number of years, and you gradually grew into and then being able to go on your own. Now, whether it was in carpentry or masonry or brickwork or barbering or 4 shoe work, that's the pattern; that's the way they trained over there. They trained as apprentices for a number of years. I remember when I used to help him at the barbershop when I was in high school. And he always used to consider my beginning as an apprenticeship. And then he would tell me about how he had to be an apprentice for a number of years and how he had to just watch the fellow work; that he was training with cut hair before he actually did cut any hair or attempt to make any attempt on cutting hair or trimming people's hair. And I used to be very impatient with that, just standing next to him watching him cut hair and trim people's hair. And I would be going up -- but he said you have to watch the technique, the way it's done. And he then explained that that's just the way an apprentice goes. And at the time, too, there was such a thing as an apprentice license in barbering. You couldn't get a license, a full complete license, until you had accomplished your apprentice training. So going back to his work, that is the way he learned, and then he went into barbering and then was able to open up his own barbershop. LINDA: And where was that located? LEO: It was -- I think it was located in Depot Square in Clinton right next to the railroad station. And he had quite a few really important people that used to come to him. For example, Senator David I. Walsh was one of his customers. And I can remember him going up to the site of David I. Walsh's house when the senator was in town, and he would go up there to either cut his hair or shave him and so forth. And another one of his major customers was Congressman Philip J. Feldman, who used to always come to the barbershop to have his hair cut, or he'd get a shave.5 And I remember how I used to like -- well, I wasn't around when Senator Walsh, David I. Walsh, was coming in, but I was around, working around the barbershop when Congressman Feldman was, and I used to like to kind of prepare him for my father's work on him, like getting him ready to have his hair trimmed and so forth or shaved. Because he used to always give me a nice big tip at the end even though I did nothing but just lather him up or put the apron on around him to protect him from the hair that might have fallen on him. LINDA: So you were expected to become a barber? LEO: Well, my father never expected me. He thought it would be good for me to learn the trade, and if I wanted to do it, to follow his footsteps. But he left it up to me pretty much as to what I wanted to be. And so he never -- I just helped him out. He had other barbers, too. But I used to help out too in the busy time on Saturdays and the weekends. But he never put any pressure on me to be a barber. I think he wanted something more for me because he would always encourage me about studying and to study and to go to school. And one of his high events, one of his great hopes and mission was that I would go to Notre Dame University. He was always talking about Notre Dame, going to Notre Dame. But to go to Notre Dame at that time when I was growing up and in school, in high school, it was during the Depression, and that would cost a great deal of money. And so in my deliberations about where I was going to go to the school or pick, I felt that I would have to go to school around here someplace and commute to school, you know, not to live on campus or that because I didn't think my family could afford supporting me as a boarder in college some place. LINDA: So which school did you go to? LEO: Well, I was all set to go to Boston College, and the reason for that was because generally there was a cost factor. I had a sister who was married and lived in Boston, and I felt I could live with her and commute to school 6 on the trolley, on the tram in Boston. And I was all set and scheduled to go there and accepted. But then one day -- I was an altar boy, and after sitting a mass, one of the priests at the parish said to me, "Have you ever been to Holy Cross?" And I said, "Up to Holy Cross?" And I said, "No." And he said, "Well, I've got to go up there." He says, "You want to take a ride up and see the school?" And of course, at that time I was -- I knew quite a bit about Holy Cross, and so father used to follow their football team and the like. So it was kind of a challenge to go up and take a look at them. Well, when I went up there and I walked around with him and I saw Holy Cross, the whole atmosphere at Holy Cross presented itself in a different manner than Boston College did. And I mean, it seemed to be more scholastically appropriate, I mean. So far as I was -- when I went to BC with my brother-in-law, that visit, it was during the year and there was a lot of commotion, a lot of activity, and a lot of things going on. It didn't seem like I was in academia, you know. But when I went up to Holy Cross with the priest, Father O'Connell, it was -- everything was quiet and there weren't too many people around. It was very [contemporary], so to speak, and I was really impressed with Holy Cross. And so I said to Father O'Connell, I said, "I like this school very much." And he says, "Come on, let's go and get an application." And so I went into the Dean's office, the Dean of Admissions, with him and we got an application. And I filled it in, and I was accepted. And after a few days, I got a letter saying that I was accepted to go there. So that's how I picked. And I felt it was close to Clinton, and I could commute from Clinton to Holy Cross maybe much better than being all the way down in Boston, so. LINDA: How did you commute? Did you have a… LEO: When I graduated from…7 LINDA: Put your hands further. Okay. LEO: When I graduated from high school, my father decided to go look at cars. He decided to buy me a car for graduation. A very good friend of his was a dealer, had taken this car in, and it was a 1937 Plymouth. And it was owned by a young woman who very seldom used it, and there wasn't very much mileage. And he got a terrific buy at the time. I think he paid $315 for it. So that was my graduation gift from high school, which enabled me then to use it to commute to Worcester every day to Holy Cross. And at the same time, there was already a young man in the town who was going to Holy Cross, and so knowing that I had a car, they asked if he could ride with me, and they would pay me so much a week for transportation. And that enabled me to keep the car up and get the gasoline and all that sort of thing. And that was every day, so that's how we used to travel to Holy Cross. LINDA: When you entered Holy Cross, did you… LEO: When I entered Holy Cross, I said that I would -- I put down that I wanted to be a priest or a doctor, let's say medicine or the priesthood. And I would take the AB pre-med course in case I wanted to switch, but it also would enable me to go on for a study of priesthood too because they were the same courses, practically speaking, until you get up into your junior year where you began to take more of the chemistry and biology and so forth. And so I went in with that intention, either to be a doctor or to be a priest. And what was, you would say, the deciding factor at all -- well, I was having stronger, really, desire to be a priest. But I liked medicine because I had two sisters who were nurses, had trained, and I used to get -- hear a lot about medicine and so forth, and that always kind of interested me.8 But then the war -- the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, and that was the year I began Holy Cross in 1941, having graduated high school in '41; and in September I went to Holy Cross. And when the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor in December, then -- at the time at Holy Cross, they were just starting -- it was their first year of starting the NROTC, the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps, and I was tempted to go into that. But then I said, if I go into that, how often -- that would interfere probably with my going ahead to be a priest. So I said I'd wait. But then when the war came, everybody on campus wanted to do something and get into -- be [in place], so to speak. All my classmates were either in the NROTC or they were joining up in the army or the navy or the marines or what. So I went up to join the Naval Air Corps, the D5, and I went into the office where you would sign up and fill your application in to join the D5 Program, which was naval training for air training. And when we -- this other young man with myself -- came up with me… we both had the same idea. Well, when we went in to see the priest who was taking the application, he looked over the thing, and he looked over what our admissions records said. So he turned and he said, "On this admission record you have here that you wanted to be a priest or to study medicine." And he said, "Do you still have that desire?" And I said, "Yes." He says, "Well, why are you signing up for this program?" And I said, "Because everyone else is entering the service." So he took my application and he ripped it up. And he said, "Listen," he says, "Uncle Sam will get all the men he needs in order to fight this war. But the church will need priests in order to serve these men. And if that's your desire, then you go and study for the priesthood."9 And shortly after that, about a month or so after that happened, a letter came down from the bishop in Springfield saying that if there were any young men at Holy Cross who wanted to study for the priesthood, they should now make plans to enter the seminary in the fall, in September. And so I went to see my pastor, and then plans were made for me to go into the seminary. LINDA: So was that in… LEO: No, I was at Holy Cross for three years. LINDA: Three years. LEO: Three years. Because we had gone -- this was in '43. Yeah, by the time I went into my third year and we were totally -- but after -- it was '42 when I went in to sign up for the -- well, I just thought that what he had said that he knew more about life than I did, and I always felt that they were always giving us proper direction. And so I thought, well, this might be the hand of the Lord telling me something, and maybe my time will come to share in some capacity or another, which, you know, it did later on because there again, too, then I was turned down from being a chaplain because I had an operation for cancer. I had a radical resection on my neck. I had three malignant tumors. And when I went to the navy, I went down in Boston to a Navy ad, and the bishop assigned me, called me into going to serve as a chaplain, and they refused my application on the grounds that I was -- I had cancer. LINDA: What year was this? LEO: Yeah, it was in 1951. It was the Korean War. So -- and then -- but that was years later. I always -- after I was ordained, I always felt at the time, well, not that I was being patriotic or anything, but I felt that all my classmates and the young men in my time had gone in and done their duty to the country and served. And so here was my chance in '50, in '51, and I was a priest, and I would go volunteer and then do my part. So I did. I volunteered, and when the bishop called me in to say that he was charging me to go and serve as a chaplain, I went down, but I was turned down.10 LINDA: Okay. Now when you left Holy Cross -- you left in 1943 to enter the seminary? LEO: Seminary. LINDA: And where did you go to seminary? LEO: We were all assigned to the Grand Seminary in Montreal, which was attached to the University of Montreal. LINDA: [Unintelligible - 00:26:40] LEO: No, our bishop then, Bishop O'Leary at the time, for some reason favored the seminary in Canada feeling that it was a very strict seminary, very rigid seminary, and that if you could last it out, then you really had a vocation. He felt that you really had the vocation. And they were very strict. But also there was -- it really wasn't because of the rigidity of the program, and it was a good program. But you know, intellectually it was a good program. But also, there were a lot of French people in the Springfield area, in the Springfield Diocese. And he felt very strongly that it wouldn't hurt to know one other language, for you as a priest to know another language in this area, which proved to be very true because after getting ordained, I used to hear a lot of French confessions even though I was in an Italian parish in Leominster. Parishioners from St. Cecilia would always come over to St. Anna's to confession. When I would go in to celebrate, even though I was in St. Mary's, the people at Notre Dame and Sacred Heart used to come to St. Mary's for confession. You know, another parish for confession. LINDA: Now why is that? LEO: And they were French. LINDA: Did they go to another parish because they didn't feel… LEO: Well, I think one of the things was that maybe they felt a priest in another -- it would be more private for them, you know? So they would come. And then there were other -- then too, it was the proximity of where they 11 were living. And sometimes our parishes were closer to them, the actual living residence, you know, for them to come to us. Those who lived would come to us. They wouldn't have to walk so far. LINDA: So you're saying that you did learn the French language? LEO: Oh, yeah. You had to then because in the seminary, everything was in Latin. Your books were in Latin. Your oral examinations were in Latin. Your written examinations were in Latin. Your texts were in Latin. Your class lectures were in Latin. And the only other language you heard was French. The spiritual lectures at night were in French. So you had to get to learn French. You know, we had to take French in the class, during classes there too. LINDA: Had you taken French at Holy Cross? LEO: I had taken French in high school. But at Holy Cross, I had taken the canon in Latin and Greek. But I never took French in college. But when we went up there, those two years, we had to study French. LINDA: So seminary school was two years? LEO: No, it was six years. LINDA: Six years. LEO: Six years. LINDA: Okay. LEO: So it was two years of philosophy and four years of theology. LINDA: That time, it must have been 1946. LEO: I was ordained -- I was ordained in December of '48, actually '49 was… LINDA: And where was this? LEO: My first assignment was in St. Thomas-a-Becket. LINDA: Where was that? LEO: In South Barre, Mass. LINDA: So maybe five months after that before you went to… LEO: I went from there to Leominster as an assistant, what we used to call a curate, the assistant curate. And I went down -- I went from there, from 1949 to 1951. So in 1951, I went to Leominster. And I went to St. Anna's 12 in Leominster in 1951 to 1953. And in 1953, I was then transferred to St. Mary's in Southbridge. And then in 1955, I was assigned to the Office of Catholic Charities in the diocese in Worcester; and I remained in Catholic Charities from 1955 to 1987. And then in '87, I was assigned to St. Anna's in Leominster, and then as pastor until 1992. No, no, no. Wait a minute. 1995. LINDA: '95? LEO: 1995. LINDA: And what happened after that? LEO: I was retired. LINDA: Retired. First of all, Italian. Did you speak Italian? LEO: I spoke a little at home. I used to speak with my mother, but my father always spoke English, so I didn't speak -- he didn't speak. My mother never really learned English. She would always speak Italian to us. She never even spoke any broken English but strictly Italian. 'Course we understood her. And then when I went into high school, I studied Italian. LINDA: When you were in high school? LEO: They started a new course, when I was in high school, teaching Italian in the public school system in Clinton. Then I took a couple of years of Italian there. That was funny. I was taking Italian, French, Latin, and English. And I used to sometimes get them confused a little bit, like sometimes my French teacher would say, "Well, that's an Italian word you're saying, not a French word." I had the facility to learn languages, and so I didn't mind it. I took -- I started learning languages and there just didn't seem to be any strain to the learning, you know, French or Italian or what. Then when I went to college at Holy Cross, my first three years at Holy Cross, I took Italian as a second language. LINDA: Did your mother urge you to become a priest?13 LEO: They always looked favorably upon it. They left it up to my decision. They never pushed me into it or anything like that. But they were always -- encouraged me along the way, you know, of what my intention was. My father was one who always said, "Well, you continue with school, and when the time comes, when you decide to be what you want to be, then we will do all we can to have you follow through." So my mother wasn't one that really, you know, would push us one way or another other than to be good and learn to do what is right in school and so forth. My mother never had much of an education herself in Italy and coming over here. Education was not a paramount factor in her life. She would just be very happy to see you succeed and so forth. I can find an example in the fact that they would go to mass and learn -- go to mission, canon missions and things like that, and their respect and reverence for religion before the Lord. I think those were the things that were the models for me. LINDA: Explain the Italian missions. LEO: Italian missions were -- because in Clinton, everything was in English. Every once in a while for the Italian immigrants who didn't speak English, the priest, the pastor used to have what they called a mission, Italian mission, and he would invite Italian-speaking priest into the parish for a week. And he would give a mission, like a retreat, you know, for just the Italian people so that they could go to communion and then go to confession, fulfill their obligations. See, at that time, it used to be like that you go at least to confession at least once during the year to fulfill your Easter duty and things like that. And this was the idea. This enabled them to go and speak with the priest, hear their language, hear the Word of God being preached to them in their 14 language that they understood, because a lot of them didn't understand English. LINDA: I had thought that the masses were said in Latin. LEO: They were said in Latin, but the sermons were always in English. Yeah. LINDA: So there wasn't an Italian-speaking sermon. LEO: No. The only ones at that time. There was one in Worcester. LINDA: Was that Our Lady of Mount Carmel? LEO: Yeah. And then there was one in Fitchburg. Those were the only two places during my growing up. And then later on, in 1937, St. Anna's in Leominster re-founded as a parish. But prior to that, there were only two locales in this area that had an Italian-speaking priest: Worcester, and later, Mount Carmel, and St. Anthony's in Fitchburg. LINDA: Now, when St. Anna's… LEO: You know, mother would go up every once in a while to go to confession there. But she would always attend mass at St. John's in Clinton. Because at that time, even though the sermon was in English, then the object was to attend mass, which was in Latin. And during the mass, they would pray and say their rosary and things like that. They had more personal devotion in celebration of the mass rather than in the sermon. The mass meant more to them than what was being said in the sermon. That was their faith, they were communing with the celebration of the mass, receiving communion, saying the rosary and prayers, and that meant more. Those were the acts of devotion, I think, for them. LINDA: Must have been… LEO: In Leominster. Yeah, I always worried more -- your first time or the ∂second time? LINDA: First time. LEO: Yeah. I was hoping that when I was ordained I would be assigned there. But for some reason or another -- I guess I was ordained thinking I was going to succumb to cancer. I had had the cancer operation my last year in the seminary, in my fourth year, and they didn't know whether I would be 15 living to be ordained in my class or whether they would ordain me before my time and before the rest of my class because of the nature of my illness. And at that time, when you were operated on for cancer, you had the -- they used to say the cure came -- wouldn't come until five years later. You had to wait five years to know whether you really got it or not. And so at that time, when I was first ordained, I know that the priest, the pastor who was at St. Anna's, wanted me to go there. LINDA: And who was that? LEO: It was Monsignor Gannon, Father Gannon. And I wanted to go there, too, because I liked him very much. But the bishop had other plans. He sent me to this small parish in South Barre, thinking, I suppose, for health reasons, it would be better for me to be in a small parish. But once Bishop O'Leary passed away and Bishop Wright became the bishop at the diocese, and Father Gannon or Monsignor Gannon then became the Chancellor of the Diocese, I was then sent up to St. Anna's in Leominster where he wanted me before and where I wanted to go before. So I was thrilled. To answer your question, I was thrilled to be at St. Anna's. I always loved that parish and still do. INDA: When you think of St. Anna's, what comes to your mind? LEO: Well, just I liked the people there, and I just liked everything about the spirit that prevailed there. I think I was young at the time, and the people were very cooperative. And no matter what you turned your hand to, it turned into success. And it was a source of great joy and great happiness for me to be working among these people and in the course they were going. LINDA: Were you the first Italian priest to be there? LEO: I was the first Diocesan Italian. When I was -- there was a pastor there when Monsignor Gannon went to become Chancellor, Father John Bassey then became the first Italian priest at St. Anna's, and I became the second.16 LINDA: Were your parents… LEO: Yeah. LINDA: How did they feel about you? LEO: Oh, they liked that. They enjoyed that, because they knew a lot of people too from the area, from Leominster. Leominster and Clinton are very close to one another. And there were a lot of mutual friendships that they had in this area. So they were very pleased with my being there. LINDA: What kinds of duties did you have, first as assistant? LEO: Well, you did everything, you know. You were in charge of the religious education. And you were having the altar boys, to take care of training the altar boys at the time. You had the religious education classes for the children who were going to public schools, setting up the classes for that and the courses for it. You had all of the duties, you know, like visiting the sick and going up to the hospital. At that time, at that time too we had, you know, a lot of activity for the youngsters, the different basketball teams that you were in charge of. But then also putting on activities, different activities. Each year, we put on a minstrel show, and we'd be involved in a lot of the direction of that. So there were all kinds of spiritual activities that you were involved in. You had your hand in almost everything except the administration in the parish. You really did all other work that was assigned to a parish and to a priest. LINDA: So it was much like being a pastor? LEO: Right, right, right. It was very active, very fulfilling. I enjoyed the task, I really did. As I said, the people were great. I mean, they cooperated. One of the great things was having a Humane Society, which was for men. I had the Men's Society; the pastor had the Women's Society. We had built ourselves up to over 400, about 450 men. We used to go to communion as a group every year. Every month we'd have 17 [unintelligible - 00:46:22] Sunday. That was a great joy and task, but I enjoyed it, at Leominster. And the other great thing was I had great rapport with the young people, and especially the high school youngsters and the football team. I used to hear their confessions before the football games. They used to come to communion every Saturday morning before the game. And you'd have all these young high school kids come in to confession on Friday night and then coming to mass on -- even public school kids. We even had the parochial school kids. And they'd come to mass on Saturday morning and they'd receive communion and go home and play football games in the afternoon. That was another wonderful thing that happened that I did. LINDA: Was there a school affiliated? LEO: At that time, no. But that was another great accomplishment that I was there to initiate the beginning of a school and to be in charge of developing a parochial school in the parish that we started. And then the task of setting up the classrooms for the first two classes, the pre-primary and the first grade, and building the classrooms for them and later on laying the plans for the school. So that happened in my time. And I remember saying to the bishop that this was the only thing that the parish lacked at the time was our own parish school. LINDA: When did the school open? LEO: It opened in 1951. LINDA: Was that when you were assigned to Leominster? LEO: It opened up in '53, I'm sorry… '53. LINDA: Okay. You accomplished all that in two short years? LEO: At the school, yeah. Like the first and second grade, but then I was transferred after -- then following that, the school was built. Right after I left, they started to build a school for the other grades that were to follow. LINDA: Okay.18 LEO: There were really no major areas of concern, I don't think, other than they wanted their parish, and then they wanted various services. They wanted educational programs for their children, religious educational programs for their children. And they were very -- the women were tremendous at St. Anna's. St. Anna's Society was a terrific group of women who worked hard and who ran spaghetti suppers and raised money in order to build and redecorate the church and keep different things going to provide for a rectory. And they were very tremendous and very, very much engaged in the parish in order to keep things moving and growing and building. It was really nice and remained -- it was impressive, you know. And at that time when I was there, they had a great program of religious devotions and activities and social activities that brought them together and enabled them to have a wonderful spirit within the community and the parish. LINDA: How did you feel -- I mean, not St. John's but Holy Cross? LEO: It didn't bother me at all. I mean, I just was treated very fairly. I never felt any kind of bias against me or toward me. And I felt I had every opportunity that everyone else did there. I don't think I was looked down upon in any way because I was Italian. I think the whole atmosphere was very good. It was all up to you to do what you -- I was going to Holy Cross because it was a good school and [congregation]. And I never had any -- being Italian never bothered me because there were so many other kids in my class that were Italian. LINDA: At Holy Cross? LEO: At Holy Cross. Especially, you know, from New York and the New York area, other areas of the country. It didn't bother me, you know. LINDA: Did you feel the same way at the seminary? LEO: At the seminary, it was the same. I really never felt that the Italian got in the way, you know, being Italian. The way people accepted you and 19 treated you was, you know, it was [unintelligible - 00:52:51]. You know, you may have to take this off. LINDA: Okay. We had an interruption. We stopped just for a few minutes to make sure that this is working. So please stand by. Okay. LEO: All right. LINDA: Did your parents always feel as accepted as you did, do you think, being Italian? LEO: I think my father had a hard time in the beginning when he came over because at that time, I know he had trouble going to church, in the upper church, that they were not allowed to go up and attend mass in the upper church. LINDA: What does that mean, the upper church? LEO: Well, at St. John's, there was a lower -- there was a church, a lower church and an upper church. You know, two floors, two levels. And in order to go into the upper church -- I think he used to have some troubles because if you didn't have what you called the coinage, the coin of the realm to go in, you were told to go downstairs to mass. And that bothered him. But then after a while, that changed, and it never endangered my father's faith. But it was very hard for him to take initially to be restricted as to where he would go in church, you know. So, you get over that. But I am… LINDA: And when did that stop? LEO: Oh, I think that stopped when he was older, when he was able -- when he became more [unintelligible - 00:55:10] and had the money to pay the initial [unintelligible - 00:55:14] lying on that seat, what they used to call the arbitrary fee in church. And he went in. 20 But see, the Gannon people never had to use money or to give money initially. The state financed the churches usually, so the people were never asked for money. LINDA: Let's stop for one minute, please. LEO: Yeah. LINDA: Linda Rosenbaum again, and we have continued the interview. … explaining about your father, how he felt a little different than you about being Italian because of probably the period of time. LEO: Right. LINDA: And you explained the church in Clinton, and then you were explaining the churches where they were not funded by the people. LEO: Right. And so that was strange for an immigrant, and especially Italian immigrants, to come over here and be expected to give money in order to go to church, for a seat fee and things like that, because they never had that practice in Italy. And at the time, they just didn't understand it. And they weren't ready for it then. But once he got on to the fact that this was the way it is here in this country, then he began to pay for his seat fee, as they called it, the pew fee, and then he -- then there was no problem at all. Although at times -- you see, in Clinton, Clinton was strongly Irish. It's an Irish community, a lot of Irish in Clinton at the time. The Polish had their church, and there weren't many French people in Clinton. The majority were either the Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics. I remember that's where Protestant people, especially in certain sections of the town. So at first there was -- at times, it was difficult to be -- yeah, some people would probably show great prejudice against the Italians in Clinton. In growing up, you know, sometimes you'd hear it. You know, you'd get a flavor of it. But it never seemed to be that much, and my father never 21 made much of it. He never, you know, exposed us to any difficulty in this regard or complained about any difficulty in this regard. He got along very well. He had a wonderful personality and then being a barber, he was well-liked in town, and he got along very well. And then they used to have their own little Italian community, their clubs, and they would go together and sit down, have their own socialization periods together. They would play cards or they'd have their own little friendly meetings in their clubs. And so it didn't seem to bother anyone. But every once in a while, you might get a flare-up of the Irish, being a little strong against the Italians. LINDA: Can you remember anything specific? LEO: Nothing really. I don't remember anything, none that I ever got hurt by, you know. You know, you just have that idea of having experienced or heard it said, you know, or some remark made. But then, you'd say, oh, it's that individual. It's not that whole class of people. It's that individual that has prejudice or bias. But there were feelings, there's no question about it, at times. Because you were Italian you didn't get the jobs or you didn't get the positions in school and things like this, you know. The teaching positions, the Italians didn't get a job as a teacher because of… But that was all political then because they would -- you had to run for an office or have somebody in office to kind of vote you in on the school committee. That was kind of a political thing where the majority of people voting for these committee members were Irish, and they would be the ones who would be in charge of making decisions for these appointments. So it was pretty hard to break the barriers there. But after, you know, really after the war, a lot of that all came crumbling down, you know. LINDA: After World War II?22 LEO: Yeah. During -- you know what I mean, everyone was involved in the war. And all families were there, and young men from all nationalities were involved, and so that whole idea of [unintelligible - 01:01:47] hear this, sometimes I did. But I know I didn't, no more than some place. Some of the Irish Leprechaun Club, you know, I was an honorary member of the Leprechaun Club, you know. LINDA: When was that? Was that in Clinton? LEO: Yeah. Yeah, that was some years ago now. But you know, I think that's -- you wouldn't see that, I don't think, around here now because they're in all kinds of professions in Clinton. LINDA: Uh-huh. LEO: And activities, and so… LINDA: So was that quite an honor, getting an award from the Leprechaun Club? LEO: Well, it was -- to me, it kind of showed that the biases were diminished, you know; that those who were not Irish were getting an award from this Irish Society, so to speak. LINDA: Do you remember about the year that you were awarded this? LEO: No, [unintelligible - 01:02:58]. LINDA: We can look for it later and I can insert that information. But it was not while you -- was it while you were living in Clinton? LEO: No. LINDA: No? LEO: No, I was there, but it was after I was a priest. LINDA: Okay. You were a priest. LEO: Yeah. LINDA: So tell me a little bit about the social clubs you had mentioned. I was thinking of a few things. A, there wasn't an Italian parish in Clinton. LEO: They had the Sons of Italy, the lodge of the Sons of Italy. And one group of Italians gravitated toward that. And then… LINDA: You mean from a particular region?23 LEO: Yeah. They'd be from different regions, you know, or different ideas, you know. There were those who felt that a man should have control of what the society has to say. They didn't want to be paying dues to national societies, you know. And for nationals to be taking away some of the money from the town in order to be supported. That was like -- that was the other group, what they called the Liberty Society; they [had too many progressive] Liberty Society. They were a group of Italians who felt that they had their own social group. But they would run things on their own, and whatever monies they made and so forth would benefit just them. And they would develop their own programs, their own health programs and sick programs and their activities, social activities programs. And so there were the two factions: The Sons of Italy and the Liberty Society. And there were groups, different groups, depending on who you were, and sometimes what sections of Italy you came from that was going to be different, these different groups. But it enabled the groups to have something, and they felt strength in their group, their union, and they were able to do things and accomplish things that would benefit them. So they were pleased with this. LINDA: Which group did your parents…? LEO: My father first belonged to the Sons of Italy, but then he decided to form and become a member of the other group, the Liberty Society. They didn't feel to try to be tied in on a national level. They felt that they could do more for themselves by having their own little organization of their own. LINDA: So did you say that he was a founding member? LEO: Yeah, he would have been a founding member in the Liberty Society. LINDA: And what year was that? LEO: Oh, boy. That would have been in the '30s sometime, early '30s. LINDA: And did your mother get involved with any of these societies?24 LEO: My mother was very -- was never very socially inclined, you know, in that respect. She was a homebody. Her home was everything. Her home and her family were everything, and her own little circle of friends. She had her own little circle of Italian ladies. LINDA: Were they all child-raising like her? LEO: No, no, they weren't. But they were in the neighborhood. They were Italian women in the neighborhood. They were never [unintelligible - 01:06:54], no. They were at different ones, some were in average homes. LINDA: Was there ever a language problem between the Italians? LEO: Between the Italians? LINDA: The different dialects? LEO: Not really. LINDA: No? LEO: No. I never encountered any. But my mother just would -- like, when I used to try to get my mother to go out to dinner, you know, she would always say, "No, we can eat at home." She just wasn't a really social butterfly. She was a hard worker and a great cook. Everyone used to love to come there to eat. LINDA: What kinds of things did she make? LEO: Oh, she'd make everything—[gnocchi], ravioli, lamb, all kinds of spaghetti, tortellini, manicotti, lasagna. She was a tremendous cook. One year we had the bar mitzvah. She made eggplant, you know, parmesan, veal cutlets, you know, all these wonderful foods, different types of chicken, cacciatore. She did all kinds of Italian cooking. And she used to bake, make her breads. She -- my mother used to get up early in the morning and prepare meals, you know. We only had a meal -- we always had three meals, you know, one with lunch and one with dinner at night. But then… LINDA: Was it just your sister?25 LEO: And my uncle. My mother's brother lived with us. Yeah. My four sisters. LINDA: Oh, four sisters. LEO: Yes. Four sisters and myself. [Unintelligible - 01:09:07] LINDA: Were you also the youngest? LEO: No, I was next to the youngest. But I always would get the choice piece. My mother would always make sure I was well taken care of. That used to get me angry at times because I didn't like to be shown favoritism at times. But she -- as I say, she didn't like going to these social -- these clubs. She just stayed at home. I don't know if she was shy or what. I think she was just happy in her home with her family, going with her family, going with her little group of friends. She had three or four Italian ladies, and they would come here. I remember them going out every week, they would make the circle, you know, go from one house to the other houses, spend the afternoon with each other and gab and knit and crochet. And then they had their little cordial drink, you know. And it was good. You know, it was always a great consolation. You know, you always come home and she'd always be there, you know. You never came home from school to an empty house or something. But she was always there. And if she wasn't there, you knew where she was. You knew she was at [the neighbor's], you know, this lady or that lady's home, whoever's turn it was. LINDA: It sounds like education was very important to your family. Was it important to your sisters as well? LEO: Oh, yeah. My father -- yeah, my sisters all -- they all wanted to learn, my sisters. One went to -- two went to training in the same business. One went to Boston College and earned a degree in nursing. And the other went to Georgetown and earned her degree in nursing. Then they went on and got their master's degree.26 And then my younger sister went to business school, you know. She picked up the business. She first started out as a lab technician, but then she didn't like it. And she then picked up a secretarial course. And then my oldest sister was a hairdresser. She wanted to be a hairdresser, so -- but my father always kind of encouraged education. He realized he didn't have it. And had he had an education, he would have done more. But he really maintained that we should go ahead and have a -- he encouraged us to go on. LINDA: What kinds of personal… LEO: Personal? Well, as a priest, it's kind of hard to tie into too many personal -- I got along. I tried to get along with everybody. I spoke up on personal things. They used to drive me around because we didn't have cars at that time. Wherever I wanted to go places or do something, I'd have to rely on somebody driving me, you know. LINDA: What were their names? LEO: One was [Analita Tarsey]. And then there was [Ben Veeny], and then the men of the parish. And [Bucky Angelini]. And [Chuck Antelushi]. He's around -- would be helpful to [unintelligible - 01:13:43]. Do you know Ann? LINDA: I don't know her. LEO: Yeah. And her husband. They're in this area. [Unintelligible - 01:13:58] Priest, you know, very personal. She'd do a lot to help me out. And then I was getting teachers for teaching religious classes, you know, religion classes. We had asked her to serve in this capacity. And I remember when I went back as pastor, I wanted her to become the president of the [Sahara] Society, which she did and did very well. And then when I suggested her name for Our Father's House for the homeless in the Fitchburg area, then she became the chairperson for three terms. So 27 I don't know how many terms she had. She must have been the chairperson for the [Madison] Society for a good ten years. Yeah. LINDA: What type of social clubs were there? LEO: They were -- each, it seemed that each province, different provinces of Italy -- you had the [Markagerian], the Singer or Giovani group where they had their own little social club. You had these -- I already said Giovani Club. We had the Santa Maria, their own convent, they were another group from Point [Saray] and St. James and those places. And then you had the Costo Novito, their group. And then other -- there were probably about three or four different. Salladini, the [Giovani], the Salladini Society. They were people from Pretaria and Commo and those places. Yeah, I would say there were about four or five major social clubs, Italian social clubs in Leominster. The only thing that ever united them was the church, you know. Otherwise, they would stay by themselves out here, you know. But the only thing that they kind of worked together on and would get behind together would be the church. And that was the unifying factor that brought them together in Leominster. They never -- and that was a funny thing, you know. You'd see them, the American Giovani would have their own club, the [Vergini] would have theirs. And then you have all the other people. I mean, they were all different groups. And, but then the church brought them together, and they'd get behind the church. And they were very strong and good. They worked together. They worked well together for the church then. But now most of those -- see, those were the old-timers. Today, you don't -- among the young, you don't see that. You don't see those clubs now in Leominster.28 But that was a way for them meeting together. You know, when they came over as immigrants, in the twenties and thirties, this is where they found their strength, in unity, in their own social gatherings, in their groups. Because, you know, no one else would bother with them, you know. LINDA: It's remarkable that they were able to contribute to not only -- there were conflicts there? LEO: Between each other? LINDA: In the church. LEO: In the church, no. LINDA: Perhaps… LEO: The church -- well, the reason was in the church, they had tremendous pastors. They had great leaders. They were with Monsignor Gannon, who first organized and founded St. Anna's Church. He was dearly, dearly revered by the people, and they would do anything for him. And then so on with the pastors who came along. I must say, they were very dedicated and devoted and loyal to their church and to their priests. They were always nice. They did church communion and would get along very well. LINDA: Did we -- I'm sorry. Go ahead. LEO: No, I just remembered, like the Holy Name Society when there were 450 members. And they'd each have their group line up and come to church, and they were from all different sections of Italy. They were unified in that communion of faith./AT/pa/ke/es
Teaching English to Filipino learners have been challenging especially during the time of pandemic with very limited interaction between the teacher and the students. Different online learning platforms were explored and utilized so that continuity of learning may happen despite the situation. Distance learning was welcomed by every learner both in the basic education system and tertiary levels. Applications were also further accessed so that language learning can become more engaging at the same time develop the communication skills of all learners. However, this scenario was not a walk in the park for many; likewise, it becomes more difficult for those students who have special needs. These circumstances serve as challenges for teachers to reevaluate and reinvent their teaching practices to further accommodate and teach English to diverse learners may it be during times of pandemic or not. In line with this, the book Supporting English Learners with Exceptional Needs by Patricia Rice Doran and Amy K. Noggle was reviewed and evaluated. The authors are faculty in Arcola Elementary School in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland as well as in Towson University. For this reason, this gives us thought that the authors gained inspiration in writing this book through their students to provide them support and intervention. This book tries to address the needs of the learners who have high-incidence and low-incidence disabilities. As reviewers and evaluators of this book, we have our personal thoughts and ideas in teaching English to our learners. Filipino learners who are studying English also possess diverseness and uniqueness which lets us use varied teaching strategies to accommodate different learners' needs and weaknesses. The information featured in this book are useful to better and improve the classroom teaching of English and further develop the skills of the students. The insights shared by the author could be essential for use to devise ways towards improvement of language learning suited for the needs of Filipinos learners. In its introduction, the writers had elaborated the extensive research of the challenges faced in the United States concerning English learners. The data showed that there is a need to reevaluate practices as well as improve class routine since learners are diverse in so many ways. Moreover, these challenges paved way for opportunities to support as well make significant changes in the education system were seen. It is also important to note that the book recognizes the potentials that could be discovered from learners with disabilities if they would be supported and nurtured through a special education system in accordance to the child development perspective. The book is divided into three sections which include different chapters that showcase scenarios in real-life setting, elaboration of key concepts, and more importantly practical approaches relevant in teaching English to learners with learning disabilities. Specifically, Section 1 includes background knowledge related to English learners and students' abilities. Section 2 discussed the classroom structures and framework. Lastly, Section 3 distinguishes the support needed for English learners with disability. Through these sections the strengths, weaknesses, as well as policies for English learners were emphasized together with the necessary classroom approaches and assessments that can be utilized in specializing programs for English learners. The first Chapter of the book is What Do English Learners Bring to Our Schools? Cognitive, Linguistic, and Cultural Assets. In this chapter we are given a realization on how we provide interventions and assessment among our diverse learners. It is elaborated that in the case of a classroom with learners of diverse background we should highlight the essence of strength-based thinking. It also made us reflect on the resilience of our students and their funds of knowledge. The chapter could sum up the need for teachers to develop strategies that will be holistic and honing the context of the uniqueness of each learner especially in language learning. The chapter also put emphasis on educational equity among learners, we must value the strengths and assets of the learners as they attain proficiency in language learning. The second Chapter of the book, Challenges and Opportunities for English Learners in Our Schools, expounds on the concept of dealing with our learners' needs as opportunities instead of challenges. As language teachers we should see a silver lining upon hurdling the challenges of diversity among our learners. It put significant consideration on translating the learners' need which are composed of different life-stressors into meaningful opportunities towards learning. The chapter also presents to us several challenges faced by a language learner which involves not only his cognitive ability but his family and cultural background. The chapter also expounds on several approaches and learning frameworks which can be valuable resources for educators in dealing with learners needs as opportunities rather than challenges. On the other hand, Chapter 3, A Policy Primer reiterates the different government and state policies concerning children right to education and how these policies helped in transforming the language learning landscape for many English learners with difficult situation such as the child who became the point of discussion in the chapter "Eterio". The chapter also traces back the history of how discrimination due to race or disability was not avoided by several state policies such as the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) in 2002, and the 'Every Student Succeed Acts (ESSA)' in 2015. More so, the chapter puts emphasis on how policies put premium on the protection of English learners with exceptional needs as well as those policies that recognizes the need to fund individualized educational services. Section 2 of the book is welcomed by its fourth Chapter, Ecological Approaches and Multitiered Systems of Support: Holistic Approaches to Serving English Learners where in it distinguishes the diversity of learners in a learning community. Given the said situation, it expounds on the significance of an ecological, tiered framework which may present school personnel the chance to back up the learners in several aspects. These may include interdisciplinary communication and collaborative work among school personnel. The chapter also assess the necessity to ensure that the intervention provided for the learners are based from their background and level of development. The chapter reflects on presenting interventions not only based on their cultural perspectives but also based on the whole-child perspective. In Chapter 5, Collaborative Problem Solving for English Learners: The Unique Role of the ESOL Teacher the authors discuss the problem-solving process in language learning. The chapter reviewed the different process that are found conducive towards planning successful classes among English learners. It explains the need for a thorough discussion and observations prompts that may be relevant in solving the problem of a learner. The discussion on collaborative problem solving was given prominence in the chapter as well since it is found to be an important element in providing support in teaching diverse learners. Furthermore, the need of consistency among ESOL teachers as an integral part of the problem-solving process was focused upon since they are expected to distinguish the strengths of the learners, and how these will be used to better facilitate strategies. The sixth Chapter is Universal Supports for English Learners at Risk. This chapter discusses the common problems that the English teachers are experiencing in their classes like lack of parental support and nonacademic factors (lack of sleep, living environment, and daily stressors) which leads to the use of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). This is a framework for curriculum and instruction that is used to provide accessibility, support, and challenge by considering the needs of each learner. Moreover, thin this chapter, it is emphasized that teachers need to identify and consider a lot of factors before providing solutions and interventions. The support provided to students are not confined with the structured classroom adjustments, sometimes students are affected by external factors like family pressures or internal factors like student's disability. Chapter seventh is Targeted Supports for English Learners. This chapter explains the parameters in providing targeted supports and interventions to English learners. Teachers need to consider the prior experiences of the learners including their trauma if there is. Identifying the student's strengths, needs, and unique profile is necessary. It is also emphasized that in the implementation of the intervention, parents or family members are encouraged to take part actively for an effective turnout. Chapter eight is Assessment and Identification for English/ Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners: High-incidence Disabilities. In this chapter, several court cases were featured to gain understanding on the experiences of the people with disabilities and their challenges encountered by the immigrants and minority populations in schools. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990 (IDEA) was also discussed that is made to provide unbiased testing procedures and to address language barriers. Chapter ninth is Assessment and Identification for English Learners: Low-incidence Disabilities. This chapter features how the students with low-incidence disabilities (LID) were specifically evaluated and assessed and the challenges that the teachers faced. The LID students are the ones who are deaf, blind, or having other health impairments. The challenges faced by the teachers were shortage of knowledgeable personnel, specialized/interdisciplinary knowledge, and skill sets, and need for appropriate assessment procedures. The teachers needed the help of some medical, speech, audiology, and assistive technology in addressing the needs of the learners under LID prior and during the learning process. The last chapter is Intensive Supports and Specialized Programming for English Learners. This part talks about the recommended practices in developing and implementing specialized programs for students with low-incidence disabilities and high-incidence disabilities. Teachers may reach to the families of the learners with disabilities. A collaborative discussion is helpful to make sure that the ways in teaching the students were appropriate and fitting according to the needs of the students. Also, schools may provide intensive interventions and supports to students that takes into consideration their level of proficiency and cultural fit. This chapter provided a number of available resources and self-evaluation forms that teachers and schools may use. In the hope of improving the teaching and learning experience of the students and to further address diverse learners, the evaluators recommend this book to teachers of English. In terms of addressing the students' needs and weaknesses, this book provided sample situations that teachers of English usually encounter while providing strategies on how to properly address them. Furthermore, this book tries to ensure that all the learners discover their giftedness and how they could use it in powerful ways.
Since autumn 2009 a new subject – «arbeidslivsfag» – has been implemented as an experiment in 133 selected lower secondary schools. The intension has been to develop a practical subject, as an alternative to students who do not want to learn a new foreign language in grade 8–10. One objective of introducing the subject has been to offer a subject where students can work with practical tasks and where they should learn how to make products and develop practical services. Throughout the course, students should be familiar with the practical professions, and they should be involved in activities related to the vocational education programs in secondary schools. The goal is to offer students who want it, opportunities to work practically and try out their interests for vocational training. Another goal is to offer an alternative way to enhance motivation for school, as well as to safeguard the development of basic skills (i.e. to read, write, and calculate). At the end of the course, all students should receive a grade for the course and some of the students are to be tested through an oral exam. The grades in «arbeidslivsfag» count for admission to secondary school. National authorities have developed a national curriculum for the experiment, as well a guidance to it. The experiment started in 16 schools in autumn 2009 and was expanded to 133 schools in 82 municipalities the following year. Later, the government extended the experiment period, and from 2012 it is possible for all school owners to offer «arbeidslivsfag». At these schools students has been given the opportunity to choose this subject as an alternative to learn a second foreign language in addition to English (i.e. German, French, Spanish, etc.). NOVA – Norwegian Social Research – was commissioned by the Directorate of Educational and Training to evaluate this experiment. The reason was the government's desire to have a knowledge base for making a decision whether «arbeidslivsfag» should be obligatory to offer to all lower secondary school students across the country. NOVA has followed the experiment since autumn 2010 until spring 2013. During this period, it has been published two reports on the experiment (Bakken and Dæhlen 2011, Bakken et al. 2012). This is the final report from the evaluation study. The purpose of the report is to provide an overall picture of how «arbeidslivsfag» has worked after the students have completed the scheduled three-year course and to evaluate whether the intentions of the subject has been realized. The empirical basis for the study is a qualitative case study of six schools (including observation of the teaching and interviews with students and teachers), two large-scale surveys of students and teachers (first during the initial year at grade 8 and a follow-up two years later in grade 10) and interviews with school leaders. In addition we have utilized registry data on all 10th grade students' school achievement, making it possible to compare changes in academic achievement both among students who participated and those who did not participate in the experiment. Characteristics of students in «arbeidslivsfag» The evaluation shows that about one in five students have participated in «arbeidslivsfag». The proportion increased from 19 percent in 8th grade to 22 percent in 10th grade. Two out of three students are boys, and students with weak academic skills are clearly overrepresented. Another characteristic of the students of «arbeidslivsfag» is that parents have lower education and income than the parents of students who attend other courses. Students at «arbeidslivsfag» also tend to skip school to a greater degree than other students. Children of immigrants have participated to a lesser degree than other students in «arbeidslivsfag». 1) «Arbeidslivsfag» has been conducted as a practical subject An important intention of «arbeidslivsfag» has been to develop a practical subject. The evaluation shows that this intention has been fulfilled throughout the experimental period. Even though not all students agree, the vast majority of students believe that after three years of «arbeidslivsfag» they have gotten better to work with practical things, and the list of practical skills that students have been doing, is long and varied. Teachers almost unanimously agreed that the subject has mainly been practical, and students report that they have worked practically in most or half of the tutorials. 2) Both students and teachers are satisfied Another key finding of the evaluation is that the vast majority of both teachers and students are very satisfied. For most students, participation in «arbeidslivsfag» have had positive experiences. A large majority believe that they have learned much useful, and seven out of ten think «arbeidslivsfag» is the best of all subjects in school. The main reason that students enjoy the course is that the subject is perceived as a different school subjects in which teaching takes place under other conditions than the traditional school subjects. They describe a practical subject where they can work on different tasks, and where they can use their hands and body to a greater extent than in other subjects. The fact that «arbeidslivsfag» fills such functions is in line with what was formulated as an important objective when the experiment was introduced. The course was intended to help the school life of the students to become more diverse, and that working methods should be more adapted to the students' way of thinking and working. For the majority of students, «arbeidslivsfag» have worked this way. In general, most teachers believe that the subject has worked very well. Many think that «arbeidslivsfag» has given students a respite from an otherwise theoretically dominated school life, and that the subject has given many students new experiences of mastery in school. The working method of «arbeidslivsfag» is different and provides more time and more opportunities for conversation between teachers and students than many other subjects. Most teachers report that they are satisfied with most practical circumstances surrounding the implementation of the subject, but there are some practical assumptions that limit the quality of education if they are not present. The availability of suitable premises is one such condition. It is therefore worrying that almost half of the teachers consider that the access to and quality of facilities are not satisfactory. Some teachers also report that pupil composition makes it difficult to complete the course in a good way – either because the spread of the student group is very large, or because of the very many students with behavioral problems in one place can be challenging. How to assess students is another area perceived as challenging by the teachers. Even though most pupils are well satisfied, this does not apply to all. For example, almost one in five regrets that they have participated in «arbeidslivsfag». By far the most common reason for this is that the expectations many had that «arbeidslivsfag» should represent something other than what they otherwise experience in school, have not been met. The evaluation has also seen a tendency that more girls than boys are less satisfied with the course. 3) Motivation for school One of the intentions of introducing «arbeidslivsfag» has been to strengthen students' motivation for school. In this area we are more questioning of whether the experiment has had the desired effects. Even though a large proportion of the teachers believe that «arbeidslivsfag» has helped to increase students' overall school motivation, asking the pupils tells another story. Many students find it difficult to assess what kind of impact «arbeidslivsfag» has had on their overall school motivation, but there are also many who believe that the subject has not worked that way. Almost half disagree that they have greater desire to learn other subjects as a result of attending «arbeidslivsfag». This finding is a distinct contrast to the other expressions of «arbeidslivsfag» made by the students. If teachers are right that many students has been more motivated for school by attending «arbeidslivsfag», we believe that it would be reasonable to expect to observe a more positive development in school achievement among students of «arbeidslivsfag» than among comparable groups of students who have not participated in the subject. When we compare the students of «arbeidslivsfag» with such students we found no differences in the development of academic achievement. This suggests that «arbeidslivsfag» in general has not helped to influence the motivation for school neither more nor less than comparable students who have participated in the course. Main conclusion The findings from the evaluation show that we are dealing with a subject that is strongly desired by school leaders, teachers and students. In most schools, «Arbeidslivsfag» has been practiced as a training program where students are given practical work – with a diverse set of tasks and learning goals, which for most of the students are perceived as more relevant, interesting and useful than the tasks and goals they are faced with in most other subjects. A large majority of students are very satisfied and seven out of ten state that this is the best course they have at school. The teachers express a strong enthusiasm for the subject and many are happy with how it worked for the students. Although the main story in the evaluation of «arbeidslivsfag» is a success story, we are still cautious about whether the subject has proven to make students in general more motivated for school. Still, we recommend «arbeidslivsfag» to be an obligatory subject to be offered in lower secondary school as an alternative for students who do not want to learn a second foreign language. ; Dette er sluttrapporten fra en evaluering av et treårig forsøkmed et praktisk fag i ungdomstrinnet - arbeidslivsfaget. Fagetskal være et alternativ til fremmedspråk og har vært innført som ettav flere tiltak for å gjøre ungdomstrinnet mer variert. En av intensjonene med forsøket er å styrke elevenes faglige motivasjon. På forsøksskolene har en av fem elever deltatt i arbeidslivsfaget. Evalueringen viser at arbeidslivsfaget har vært gjennomført som et praktisk fag og med stor grad av lokal variasjon. Forskerne stiller seg imidlertid spørrende til hvorvidt intensjonen om å styrke elevenes skolemotivasjon har blitt oppfylt. Elever og lærere er likevel svært tilfredse med hvordan faget har fungert, og nøkkelen til suksess er at faget representerer en alternativ læringsarena i skolen som gir mestringsopplevelser for flere elever. Rapporten anbefaler at forsøket innføres som en permanent ordning på ungdomstrinnet.
"I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in… the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America"President Jimmy Carter, 1979What was supposed to be a summer of recovery and rebuilding, has instead become a summer of gloom, division and bigotry. The prospects of a double-dip recession still loom high for Americans in the light of a revised GDP report that puts annual growth rate for the second quarter at an anemic 1.6%, not 2.4% as predicted earlier.As with all economic downturns, fear and anxiety about an uncertain future translate into intolerance directed toward "the others". Two weeks ago it was the Arizona anti-immigration law and the anti-gay ban, this past week it was the so called "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy. The underlying angst is thus surfacing in the form of aggressive anti-immigrant, homophobic and Islamophobic sentiments. Most Americans (61%) are against this "Córdoba House" project, which is not exactly a plan for a mosque but for a Muslim Community Center, modeled after the Jewish Community Centers and the YMCA. Its grounds are located two blocks away from Ground Zero. Interestingly, the project was made public by the New York Times as a local lower Manhattan issue in 2009, and went unnoticed. It only exploded into the headlines recently, when public figures such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich leapt at the opportunity of using it to further stoke the flames of division and xenophobia. While the Lower Manhattan community advisory board, several Jewish leaders and Mayor Bloomberg support the project, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League opposes it, arguing that its proximity to Ground Zero would cause unnecessary pain for the families of victims of 9-11. This argument has merit and should therefore be the focus of the debate, but it isn't. Instead, Gingrich compared the project to putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum, and Palin called it a "stab in the heart of the families of 9-11".Daisy Kahn, the wife of the Imam in charge of the project, appeared recently on a Sunday talk show together with Manhattan's JCC director Rabbi Joy Levitt to defend the project. Kahn explained that historically in the United States, as members of different religions and creeds assimilate to the general culture, their practice, attitudes and activities become Americanized: that is the context within which the Córdoba Project should be understood: as a place where Muslims could meet, exercise, bring their children to Day Care and yes, pray. Indeed, contrary to the public image prevalent today, Muslims in the US are, according to Christiane Amanpour ," the most assimilated of all Muslims in the Western World." The United States also has a strong Interfaith Dialogue movement which supports the project.President Obama weighed into the controversy within the first 24 hours, saying Muslims were protected by the First Amendment's Freedom of Religion and had a right to build the center. After being chastised by the usual suspects (the same that insist Obama himself is a Muslim and have doubts about his citizenship), the President later qualified his first statement by adding he had "commented on theright but not on the wisdom" of the project. Clearly, that is what is at issue here: Muslims, like all other religious groups in America, do have the Constitutional right to congregate and worship as they please, but in the light of the deep wounds of 9-11, the symbolic aspect of the location tends to overshadow other valid considerations. However, as everything in today's political toxic environment, it instantly became more fodder for demagogues and added more virulence to the political discourse. By correctly pointing out the discrepancy, Obama was derided as dithering as and insincere.Opposition to the Córdoba House is not an isolated incident that can be explained by its proximity to 9-11, which gives the outrage some validation. There are similar projects that have been put on hold due to protests as far as Wisconsin and California, and in the last few days there was a mosque burnt down in Tennessee, and a stabbing of a Muslim cab driver in New York. Anti-Muslim sentiment is conspicuously strong throughout the country, strong enough to be compared to the Swiss controversy over construction of new minarets. Even if the Mosque issue blows over in a month like other arguments have in the past (think Dubai Ports World brouhaha in 2005, for example) each of these bitter controversies plants seeds of discord that are used by demagogical purposes, mainly to delegitimize the government. People's anxiety about the economy is fertile ground for all kinds of phobias to thrive, whether directed against the Latinos moving into white neighborhoods, gay marriage in their town halls, or mosques being built nearby. Or against the first Black President, whose middle name happens to be Hussein. Angst and pessimism are so widespread that not even what would otherwise be considered good news has the power to cheer Americans up.The official end of the war in Iraq came and went practically unnoticed by a population unsure whether America "won or lost" there. After 7 years of fighting an asymmetrical war that has cost, at a minimum, 5,000 American lives, 150,000 Iraqi lives and 700 billion dollars, the United States is withdrawing its combat troops, leaving behind 50,000 troops in support roles and hoping that the Iraqi forces will be able to defend the population from the sectarian violence that is certain to ensue. The parliamentary elections in March delivered no clear winners, and neither Shiite Prime Minister Al-Maliki nor his rival Sunni former Prime Minister Alawi have been able to form a government coalition. In addition, the power and resource distribution struggle between the central government and the regions is still unsettled, and Iran is likely to step into the power vacuum left by the Americans and meddle in its neighbor's politics for years to come. The counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is not delivering any positive results either, and the American relationship with the Karzai government is at best uneasy. Besides, to paraphrase Frank Rich's recent op-ed titled "How Fox (TV) betrayed Petreaeus", how can you win Muslims hearts and minds in Kandahar if you are at war against Islam at home?No wonder Americans are not celebrating. Instead, they are turning inwards and becoming more isolationists, xenophobic and protectionist. And there is no leadership to pull us through these difficult times. The President is in his bunker, trying to change the topic to Katrina or to Middle East Peace talks (a relatively safe topic, if you think that in probably a hundred years it will still be the main headline of the New York Times). The Republican Party has been hijacked by the Tea Party Movement of Sarah Palin and talk-radio host and Fox news commentator Glenn Beck, who this past weekend held a "Restoring our Honor" march on Washington. From a podium at the Lincoln Memorial, on exactly the 47th the anniversary of Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech, Beck told a mostly white crowd of 87,000 that "Today, America is beginning to turn back to God." He spoke about "restoring the honor to America" and "reclaiming" the civil rights movement, which has been so "distorted". When asked whether he had chosen that date for his rally on Washington to coincide with King's anniversary, Beck responded it was not by intention but "by divine providence".This cynical usurpation of the Black leader's banner by Beck is just one example of how he will go to extremes to maintain his radio and TV ratings. In spite of his theatrical rants and stage hysterics, he is an able manipulator of white anger and racial anxiety. This sad picture of America besot by anxiety about deficits, unemployment and higher taxes, and divided by bigotry begs the question of who benefits. In an election year, the question may sound naïve, but it isn't. Republicans are increasingly worried about the "wacko wing" of the party that has run amok and will be impossible to rein in. Tea Party candidates are defeating incumbents in Republican primaries all over the country. The time is running out for serious Republicans to stand up, stop the nonsense and impose some restraint on its rank and file, while at the same time distance themselves from the most extreme Tea Party rants. They cannot reasonably devote themselves full-time to maligning the President and Democrats in Congress. They need to present a plan for economic growth, jobs and national reconciliation, to show they care about recovery and about governing. By opening the door to Tea Party candidates to win in November, they are in fact giving the President a chance at re-election. At the same time, Obama should move aggressively to the center of the political spectrum, moderate the ambition of his reforms and adopt an agenda of a balanced budget and an extended period for tax cuts. In this way he could win over the Independents, who will most certainly be appalled at the McCarthyist-like atmosphere on Capitol Hill after November, and will vote for him again in 2012, over a Palin, a Huckabee or a Gingrich. This coming year represents a fork in the road for the President: even if the economy recovers in a visible, sustainable way, Obama will have to choose between pragmatism and ideology, between becoming another Bill Clinton or another Jimmy Carter. Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
