city of Split | Pollux - Fachinformationsdienst Politikwissenschaft

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

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