Italian Voices: Making Minnesota Our Home

By Mary Ellen Mancina-Batinich

A boardinghouse keeper finds her kitchen in a mess after Saturday-night revelry and refuses to cook on Sunday. An iron miner pries frozen ore from a car in 40-below temperatures. A grocer makes sausage, brews wine, and forages for mushrooms and dandelion greens. In Italian Voices, Minnesota's Italian Americans share rich stories of everyday life in communities in the Iron Range, Duluth, and the Twin Cities between 1900 and 1960. Mary Ellen Mancina-Batinich, a native of the Iron Range, had unequaled access to the state's immigrant generation during the twenty years she spent documenting the lives of these Minnesotans, in their own words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780873516747

Mary Ellen Mancina-Batinich

Mary Ellen Mancina Batinich (1923-1996), a high school teacher and principal in Chicago, was active in Italian American organizations and a tireless oral historian.

Book preview

Chapter 1. The Promised Land or the Island of Tears?

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The Promised Land or the Island of Tears?

’Merica, ’Merica, ’Merica, cosa sara la sta ’Merica?

America, America, America, what is this America?

From a song popular among Italian migrants at the turn of the twentieth century

Thomas Bartoetti and his family, Hibbing, about 1913. Standing, left to right: Thomas, Frank, Charles; women: Clementina, Michelina; children: Amelia, Angelo, Adolph, Tina

Like other international migrants, Italians often left their homes because of economic difficulties, moving wherever they could find work. Minnesota’s Italians were not the first to emigrate to seek their fortune; before the late 1800s, many Italians sought their pane e lavoro (bread and work) elsewhere in Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Italians increasingly sought new opportunities overseas, not only in the United States but also in Canada and South America. During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century almost nine million men and women left Italy; 60 percent of these went abroad, almost all to the Americas. The United States received some 3.5 million, while Argentina lagged behind with one million. Over 200,000 Italians on average entered the United States each year.¹

When Italian men migrated, they usually went alone, planning to work hard, live cheaply, save as much money as possible, and return home to buy property with their savings. In France they became coal miners, quarrymen, and ditch diggers. In Germany they found jobs as stonemasons, coal miners, and construction workers. In Austria-Hungary they cut lumber and worked in agriculture and construction. Other men migrated to different parts of Europe, as well as to North Africa, Argentina, and Brazil, where they labored as chimney sweeps, masons, carpenters, fishermen, shoemakers, and farmers.²

Italian women also left home in search of work during this era. In France they gardened and worked in the vineyards. In Germany they found work in the cotton, silk, and jute mills. In Switzerland they were hired in factories and slept three to eight to a room. In Austria-Hungary they did agricultural work, spraying vines with heavy pumps on their shoulders, harvesting grain, and cultivating with the zappa (hoe). Even Italian children found work abroad: making stove tiles in French glass factories and blacking boots on the streets of Paris; working in Germany as street musicians and chestnut vendors; sorting rags in Switzerland; and doing farm chores in Austria-Hungary.³

My father, James Mancina, Sr., was among those who left Italy in the early 1900s. He was one of many men who left and returned each year from San Giovanni in Fiore, a town of about 20,000 in the Southern Italian province of Cosenza, Calabria. For these Italians, annual migration in search of work was both a long-established tradition and a rite of passage; according to my father, men from his town had sought work elsewhere for several centuries before he joined their ranks in 1912. Almost every one of San Giovanni’s 8,000 able-bodied men left home each year in the early twentieth century in search of employment, leaving the town’s women behind to learn the lessons loneliness and pazienza (patience) had to teach. When the men returned at Christmastime for four weeks of vacation, young men and their sweethearts lined up at the parish church to be married, and fathers met, for the first time, the infant sons and daughters who had been born during their absence.

Italy after 1899

While earlier generations of migrants had traveled primarily within Europe in search of work, by 1900 the young men of San Giovanni often journeyed overseas, as my father did, in search of pane e lavoro. As steamship lines expanded, transatlantic fares became cheaper and the ocean became less of an obstacle. Ellis Island, known to many immigrant groups as the island of hope, island of tears, was often their port of entry. As news of good wages in the United States spread like an epidemic through the Italian countryside, the number of emigrants grew dramatically; by 1915 the total would reach nearly three million. Male migrants often came alone at first, forming the nucleus of a colonia (colony) as friends or relatives followed them. After a man migrated alone, he sometimes sent for his wife and family, or for the girlfriend from his home village who was waiting to marry him. Within a few short years, an ethnic enclave thrived. Such patterns of chain migration were common to many immigrant groups.

Yet many other Italian migrants returned home after a period of time. With the money they earned during their time in the United States, these birds of passage were able to live out the age-old dream of returning to the Old Country with enough wealth to own their own homes and land. Repatriation reached its peak between 1900 and 1914. Emanuel Carnevali, one of those who returned to Italy, explained, I am the foreigner [in the United States]. They like me and admire me, but I am a foreigner. As indicated in poems he wrote upon his return to Italy, Carnevali believed that the United States—though young and strong—had no traditions of its own, and thus little respect for the traditions of others. American cities swallowed up Italians and their way of life.⁴

Emigrants cited many reasons for leaving Italy during this era, whether their destination was the United States or elsewhere. Pasco Fedo of Duluth says that his father, caught up in the potential adventure of an exciting new life in the United States, enthusiastically proclaimed, "America per me! (America for me!) when he left Rosarno, Calabria. In contrast, Marietta Brama and her husband left Orsana, Perugia, to escape the poverty of agriculture and the heavy burden of taxation: The governamento, it take half of what we pick in the garden and put it sotto la terra [under the ground]. Before he came to the United States, Evaristo Delzotto’s father, along with two of Evaristo’s uncles, ran the family farm in Portenons, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, but, as Evaristo explained, There wasn’t enough money in the farm for all the brothers to live on, so my father took off for America."⁵

Migrating to Minnesota

Before it became a U.S. territory in 1848, the vast area that now forms the state of Minnesota was covered with forests and prairie, abundant in wildlife and dotted with American Indian villages and trading posts. The region’s primary industry during the first half of the nineteenth century was the fur trade, with the lumber industry ranking a close second; Minneapolis’s first major industry was lumber milling. A decade after becoming a territory, Minnesota had attracted enough settlers to become a state. Minnesota’s earliest Euro-American settlers hailed from many different countries of origin, and included a number of immigrants from both northern and southern Italy. By the 1850s, a handful of artisans and merchants from various parts of Italy had settled in the Twin Cities.⁶

Of the over two million Italians who entered the United States between 1899 and 1910, fewer than 10,000 reported Minnesota as their intended destination to U.S. immigration officials. Its Italian-born population peaked in 1910 at 9,688 and then fell steadily. However, this statistic is misleading, given how many immigrants lived in more than one location before settling in the United States on a more permanent basis. Many of Minnesota’s Italians first lived in other states, including West Virginia and Pennsylvania, where they had worked in coal mines, and Michigan, where they had mined copper. While working in these locations they learned of the abundant job opportunities in Minnesota’s mining industry. Others came to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where mill jobs were plentiful. Still others moved to the Twin Cities only to relocate again to other parts of the state.⁷

The Iron Range

The earth’s geology shaped the work choices of many Italian immigrants. One and a half billion years ago, the sediments of a vast, shallow sea covering the northeast part of Minnesota formed the immense iron deposits in three areas now collectively known as the Iron Range. The Mesabi Range (Ojibwe for giant) is sometimes referred to as the Prostrate Giant because it resembles a human form stretching 120 miles across the landscape in a southwesterly direction. Intense heat and pressure transformed some of the sediment into a hard, flinty rock called taconite, which promised wealth to the mining companies and employment to the immigrants. In addition to the Mesabi, there are two smaller but equally significant iron ranges in Minnesota: the Vermilion, far into the Arrowhead region in the northeastern part of the state, and the Cuyuna, in the state’s center.⁸

By the 1880s, immigrants were arriving on the Vermilion Iron Range, lured by rumors of streets paved in gold and by the real need for workers to mine Minnesota’s rich iron deposits. Minnesota needed other workers, as well, to lay the railroad tracks, dig the ditches, build the sewers and streets, and lay the cornerstones of buildings in the state’s growing cities and towns. Minnesota’s Iron Range provided the majority of the iron ore that built the factories, bridges, and skyscrapers of a developing United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The mines also provided the raw material needed to build the military equipment with which the United States and other nations fought two world wars. Although people from the Mezzogiorno (southern Italy) constituted the bulk of Italian immigrants to the United States, those who came to the Iron Range were predominantly from the northern and central regions. They settled, for the most part, in distinctive neighborhoods, creating for themselves the ethnic enclaves that became known as Little Italies. These ethnic communities helped the migrants preserve their customs and traditions as they settled into new lives in Minnesota.

By the late twentieth century, the richest of Minnesota’s iron veins were largely exhausted, and the mines were once again abandoned. The deep pits and vast shafts that remain are cemeteries for many immigrants’ dreams, the places where they spent their lives underground in backbreaking labor, using piccone e pala (pick and shovel) to wrest the valuable ore from the earth.

Duluth

Duluth is a hilly city at the mouth of the St. Louis River, where houses cling to a hill sloping toward the lakeshore at the western tip of Lake Superior. Its harbor provides a natural link between the Iron Range and the Great Lakes shipping lanes. The tiny hamlet grew into a city almost overnight in 1869, when the railroad from St. Paul reached the area. Iron ore, shipping, and the railroad industry built the city and provided the work that attracted immigrants. Iron ore cars rolled down its hills to the harbor, where cargo ships transported it to the hungry steel mills in cities around the Great Lakes. Most of Duluth’s Italian immigrants settled in the Little Italy that crystallized at Eleventh Avenue West and Superior Street, an attractive location because it was within walking distance of jobs in the railroad yards and coal docks. Other Italian colonie appeared in Hunter’s Park, West Duluth, Gary–New Duluth, and the Raleigh Street area. As Duluth grew, subsidiary industries related to the shipment of iron ore, as well as dairies, grocery stores, and other essential services, sprang up throughout the city, providing additional employment options that many Italian migrants found appealing.⁹

Minneapolis–St. Paul

The prairie that begins near the Twin Cities and stretches south and west across Minnesota is home to some of the world’s most fertile farmland. As the logging industry exhausted the belt of forests at the prairie’s edge, railroads opened the Red River Valley in northwestern Minnesota to farming in the late 1800s. Farmers on Minnesota’s prairies and throughout the Midwest shipped their spring wheat to Minneapolis, where St. Anthony Falls, the only waterfall on the Mississippi River, provided the energy for both lumber mills and flour mills. Minneapolis, the home of enterprises like the Washburn-Crosby Company and Pillsbury Company (which merged in 1928 to form General Mills), became Minnesota’s Mill City; from 1880 to 1930, it was the flour milling capital of the world. Many Italian immigrants made a living in the flour mills, while others found work in secondary industries, including commercial bakeries. A significant proportion of Minneapolis’s Italian population lived in Maple Hill (or Dogtown, as it was sometimes called) in the northeastern part of the city.¹⁰

Just east of Minneapolis, overlooking the Mississippi River from bluffs that rise as much as eighty feet above the river’s edge in many places, St. Paul began its life as a river city. It served as the practical head of navigation on the Upper Mississippi, both because steamboat travel was difficult upstream and because two convenient clefts in the bluffs created natural levees at the river’s edge where boats could land. Italian newcomers to St. Paul settled primarily on the Upper Levee, on Phalen Creek, and at Lower Payne Avenue. The Upper Levee, Minnesota’s oldest Italian neighborhood, housed about one hundred families at its peak; most of the Italian immigrants who settled there came from Casacalenda and Ripabottoni, two small towns in the southern Italian region of Abruzzi-Molise. The triangular-shaped Upper Levee neighborhood was situated on low ground along the Mississippi River below West Seventh Street and in the shadow of the High Bridge. Like the Levee, the Phalen Creek (or Swede Hollow, after its original settlers) neighborhood sat on low ground. Many Swede Hollow homes were only four or five feet from the creek; being steps from the water had its advantages when it came to washing clothes, but also left one vulnerable to flooding. Many, though not all, of the St. Paul residents whom I interviewed worked in food-related industries. Some worked at local deli counters, grocery stores, and restaurants; others were retired gourmet chefs, bakers, or packinghouse workers.¹¹

The Upper Levee neighborhood in St. Paul, 1938

Dilworth

Dilworth is near the Red River on the state’s border with North Dakota, about halfway between Minnesota’s northern and southern borders. The town’s largest employer was the Northern Pacific Railroad, whose divisional headquarters and repair shops were built in 1906 south of the tracks. Italian immigrants from Sicily, Calabria, and Molise occupied an isolated seven-block neighborhood between Maple Street and Marion Street, south of the railroad’s headquarters. A second Italian neighborhood was situated north of the tracks. The South Dilworth community, known as Little Italy, also went by the name of Shatishat. According to Sam and Lena Frisco, residents of Shatishat for over four decades, the South Dilworth community is where most of Dilworth’s Italians lived. The people on the north side would not have anything to do with the people on the south side, Lena remembered. We were the underdog.¹² Given the town’s railroad connections, it is not surprising that many of the Italian men who lived there were employed, as Sam was, by the railroad company.

The Italians who lived in these communities worked as factory hands, railroad maintenance workers (gandy dancers), housewives, miners, office workers, barbers, upholsterers, grocery store clerks, and ditch diggers. They came to an alien world of their own free will and struggled against daunting odds to uphold their values. Despite the obstacles they faced, they managed to preserve their dignity and to build a rich family life, religious community, and cultural existence.

Chapter 2. Bread and Work

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Bread and Work

La ricchezza è frutto di lavoro.

Riches are the fruit of work.

Italian proverb

Italians in Minnesota, like migrants throughout history, spent the prime years of their lives engaged in the ongoing struggle for subsistence and identity in a strange new culture. As workers from rural backgrounds, often with little formal education and little or no ability to speak English, Italian migrants were not in the most effective position to bargain with prospective employers. Because they usually entered the workforce as unskilled laborers, immigrants usually had to accept the most dangerous and demeaning jobs. Yet Italian immigrant laborers took great pride in their work, deriving dignity and satisfaction from performing even the dirtiest, most difficult jobs well. Flexibility was essential: immigrant men typically changed jobs at least five times, and professions at least three times, during their working lives. Laborers needed to adjust quickly—if at times reluctantly—to develop the new skills that would enable them to survive in an ever-changing labor market. While railroad jobs or mining work occupied the majority of Minnesota’s Italian men, a number held manual labor jobs in other sectors of the economy. Still others found work in the trades, as barbers, knife grinders, bakers, and accordion players.

When it came to locating work opportunities, men often relied on suggestions from relatives or friends. In the case of Enrico DeBernardi, an emigrant from the northern Italian town of Gallarate, a few choice words in English went a long way in getting him a job. As his daughter Antoinette Thompson explained, DeBernardi found work in Ely’s Chandler Mine on the Vermilion Range through the help of his brother-in-law, who taught DeBernardi his first long English phrase, How’s a chance for a job? Thanks to practicing this phrase over and over again, DeBernardi was at the peak of his confidence when he met the foreman. Because he could recite this phrase without stammering, and he did not hesitate when approaching the foreman, he managed to land a job.¹

The railroads in St. Paul, Duluth, and Dilworth attracted many workers like Sam Frisco. Railroad workers often worked ten hours a day for as little as fifteen cents an hour; as Frisco commented acerbically, You never got nothing that time I worked. Poor wages often meant even poorer living conditions. Boxcars that had been retired from service as unfit to carry freight were considered adequate living quarters for the workers. Their bedding was the straw that covered the filthy boards of the boxcar floors, and they warded off the cold with vermin-infested old coats and horse blankets. For lunch they were served water and bread, for which they paid nine cents whether the bread was too moldy to eat or not. The padrone (bosses) considered the workers appropriate targets of verbal and physical abuse, with or without provocation. The immigrants were willing to do the heaviest, dirtiest, and most poorly paid jobs, yet this earned for them both the resentment of Americans and the disdain of employers. A railroad official blithely summed up the attitude of the Great Northern Railway in 1907: White men coming to Duluth will not work. Dagoes only men who will work. Send more dagoes and shut off white men.²

Italian section gang from St. Paul, 1913

The cracks in the rickety boxcars where railroad workers lived at least provided ventilation. The stark holes in the ground where miners worked offered no such advantage. Nonetheless, some Italian migrants found mining work, which paid around three dollars a day in 1916, more attractive than railroad jobs. But mining was one of the most hazardous jobs in the world in the early 1900s. The stagnant air was full of choking iron dust, and the dangers of death from cave-ins, premature explosions, and railroad accidents were ever-present because mine officials often ignored what minimal safety precautions existed at the time. My father died in a cave-in because there was a mistake by the engineer, recalled Sam Aluni. He run him [assigned him a work area] and there was a drift [mined tunnel] underneath. That’s where the miner can never guard.³

A severe injury could be a more frightening prospect than death, for an injury could prevent the miner from supporting his family. Since little financial help was available either from the mining companies or the mutual benefit societies (self-insurance groups usually organized by ethnic societies), an injured man would become a burden. Between 1905 and 1935, fatalities among St. Louis County miners, per thousand, ranged from a high of 7.48 in 1905 to a low of 0.83 in 1931. From 1909 to 1913, 106 Slavs, 105 Finns and Scandinavians, 38 Italians, and 28 Americans were killed in mine accidents in the United States.⁴

At the dawn of each new day, anxious thoughts loomed in the minds of every miner: Which of the late-shift workers will not return this morning to fill the beds the early-shift miners are now vacating for them? Which of these lunch boxes being packed will not return home this afternoon? Every waking moment contained prayers that the workers would all return safely, for no one knew when a premature explosion in a gopher hole (a mined pocket) would kill or maim everyone in the vicinity; no one knew when the timbers supporting the mine shafts would collapse, crushing or suffocating workers under tons of rock. A miner’s wife was alert to unusual underground noises. She knew that the mightier-than-usual whistle blast, with an accompanying rumble that shook the dishes onto the floor, meant it was time to drop everything and run to the shaft to see if her husband would be one of those to emerge safely.

Company politics outside the mine could also make life difficult. Contract mining meant that bosses could dole out contracts for working in lucrative areas to those who made themselves favorites, and there was an obvious way to curry favor. As Peter Del Greco asserted, For mining captains and shift bosses, this meant a side of beef, or a ham, a bunch of sausages, ten gallons of wine, or money should go his way!⁵ But those who raised their voices against the mining company could forget about ever working in mines around the Great Lakes again. The mining companies’ blacklist was harder to crack than the ore itself. Advocating a union or failing to follow a company decree meant instant dismissal, and spies in the mines prevented union organization and controlled community life. My grandfather Antonio Mancina lost his job as a mine blastman when he failed to vote for the company’s man in a local election, as the company learned through one of the family’s boarders; my grandfather was never rehired.

Although most Italians were not associated with militant unionism, they did play a significant role in organizing the mining industry. Organizing a union in the iron mines was no simple task. Besides promoting union principles in the community—often in secret hiding places—the organizers visited Italian communities, canvassed door-to-door, and distributed Italian-language circulars. Those who undertook this work faced the hostility of employers, the police, and even fellow workers. When the Oliver Iron Mining Company, U.S. Steel’s largest subsidiary, decided not to bargain collectively with workers, company officials resorted instead to blacklisting and insidious espionage. Patsy Serrano from Buhl belittled those native-born miners who hung back and played it safe, rather than joining the effort to better all workers’ lives: The Italians and the [Slovenians], we had the guts…. The rest of the Americans lay in the brush…. We make it nice and safe for them. Then they take over!⁶

Sam Aluni remembered Joe Greeni, an Italian immigrant miner who left the Alpena Mine in Virginia over dissatisfaction with the pay system. Greeni next worked at the St. James Mine in Aurora, where he encountered the same pay practice. When they cheat him of his pay, he throw down the pick and walk off the job, 1916, then the whole Iron Range, they do the same thing! explained Aluni.⁷ Greeni’s actions spurred the miners to turn to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a militant labor organization that advocated the end of capitalism. The IWW sent their most able organizers to assist the strikers, including Carlo Tresca, Joseph Ettor (Ettore), Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Big Bill Haywood. Some of Aluni’s friends and co-workers worked closely with Tresca and Gurley Flynn. The miners’ demands included an end to contract mining, two paydays per month instead of one, payment on discharge, an end to kickbacks to foremen for more lucrative or high-grade ore spots to mine, and the firing of the brutal mine guards accused of murdering miner Joe Alar at a demonstration in June 1916. Although supported by local businessmen and the IWW, the strike was destined to fail, not because of the importation of strikebreakers from Europe or the violence of the strike, but because of the meager financial resources of the miners.⁸

As geographer Leroy Hodges noted in 1912, cities and towns on Minnesota’s Iron Range were an amalgamation of nationalities: Finns, Swedes, Montenegrins, South Italians, English, Irish, Bohemians, Frenchmen, Hollanders, Syrians, Belgians, Croatians, Danes, Russians, Magyars, Bulgarians, Germans, Greeks, Scotchmen, Welshmen, Dalmatians, Norwegians, and Servians [Serbians]. The immigrant miners survived by using broken English, the so-called mine English, or by learning some of the other men’s languages in a crossover culture. The opening of the lunch pails down in one of the rooms (large work areas of the mine) released a cacophony of languages and a veritable United Nations of smells: the Italians’ garlic-scented pork chops or peppers and Italian sausage; the cardamom-laced pulla bread of the Finn next to him; the walnut potica, a traditional sweetbread of the Slovenian across the way; and the savory pasty, the meat-vegetable pie of the Cornishman, at the other end. Sharing of one another’s foods was common. Yet whatever language issued from a miner’s mouth and whatever food went into it meant nothing when an overhead timber broke, water suddenly flooded the shaft, or the dynamite misfired. Those who worked together died together.⁹

Domenico Stinziani

barber/insurance broker

St. Paul Domenic, eighty-two, had long been a leader in the St. Paul Italian community. As we spoke, I could feel his positive attitude almost physically, and it was easy to imagine his charisma as a leader, as someone who would find solutions to problems. His fervent desire to speak fluent English shone through with equal clarity.

If a person applies himself all his life, he will never have to beg or mooch. If a man puts out 110 percent of what he wants to get, he’ll get 100 percent, but if a man puts out only 90 percent, he won’t even get 90 percent. He’ll get only 79 percent at the most.

I was born February 4, 1904. I worked from when I was very young on my father’s land in Casacalenda, Campobasso. My father raised fruits, vegetables, grains, and grapes on land he owned, four and a half kilometers from our house. I did everything. We had to make our own wood to keep us warm in the winter months—I used to climb the tall oak trees and cut down branches that we’d use for wood. I still maintain an interest in gardens and have a little one outside in my yard…. My father also produced cheese, which he showed at local fairs. From visits to these fairs with my father, I discovered something about travel and I began to yearn for adventure.

I came to America in 1922 because of adventure. When my father returned home from Canada, he offered me a piece of land and begged me to stay in Italy, but there was a lot of beautiful propaganda being circulated around Italy in those days concerning the advantages of coming to America. We heard how men who never went to school became engineers and they could run locomotives…. Although I wasn’t interested in running a locomotive, the story that they told was of interest to me. It was a case of wanting to see what actually was in America.

Some of my family was already here on the Upper Levee, so when I arrived in New York, I headed for that spot. My brother John met me at the train depot. I lived with my mother’s younger sister and her family on Mill Street. At this time the Upper Levee was about 90 percent Italian. There were about ninety-five homes in this little area west of Chestnut Street along the Mississippi River. It was not a dangerous place to live until they constructed a nine-foot channel, which raised the water level in that section of the river. As a result, severe floods occurred in 1951 and 1955. Many of the homes were flooded out and from then on became almost uninhabitable. The sturdier-built homes, though, they stood up even against the floods. They were there until the St. Paul Housing Development Association came along and tore it all up.

My first job in America was with the Omaha Railroad in the section gang. I used a pick and shovel. During this eleven-month job I lived in a caboose, which was not too pleasant or comfortable. Then I decided to get another job because I wasn’t learning to speak English, since most of the workers spoke Italian. A few spoke German—none spoke English. Through a friend of mine I learned jobs were available at the MacMillan Packing Plant, beneath the High Bridge, where the workers spoke English. I got a job packing sausages, but that brand of English wasn’t what I was looking for, either. See, they spoke pretty rough language, at least to my way of thinking.

Domenic studied citizenship and English in night school before entering barber school.

Nick Delmont told me I had to go to school before I could became a barber. As a young boy in Italy I had the desire to be a barber, and hung around the barber shops during the winter months…. In Italy the saying goes, "Altro sotto tetto, e Dio e benedetto," meaning if you had a trade and worked inside under a roof, God would bless you, then you never had to fear the rain or storms.

After three weeks of barber college the instructor told me to go out and get a job in a shop. That was the beginning of my seventeen years as a barber. I first worked in Sam DeMaio’s Barber Shop [in 1914]. In a month I was offered a job playing clarinet and saxophone in an orchestra in a St. Cloud Theatre, but after a week, I gave it up and returned to the barbershop. This was the era of syncopation and jazz, and [the music was] too fast for my sight-reading ability. This would mean I would also be away from home too much. So back to the barber chairs for me, first at the St. Francis Hotel, then to the old bus depot on Washington Avenue, [then] in the Hamms Building and at the Lowry Hotel for seven years. I never yearned for my own shop, for fear of hiring someone who might make a mistake in cutting hair.

In 1928 I became a United States citizen. After the Big Depression came along and the wpa [Works Progress Administration] started, the night shift in the barbershop was halted and we had to close the shop at six pm. That’s when I went back to night school. I moved a third and last time before my marriage and lived in an apartment at West Central Park near Mechanic Arts High School. This was my home for two years. I spent another year going to the same type of school but nothing was happening that I wanted to happen. I really wanted to start English from the beginning and learn the basics of the language such as the cat, the horse, the chicken, but it was not available. The best they could offer me was a seventh or eighth grade class. So I struggled with that but when I still wasn’t satisfied with my progress, I got an opportunity to enroll in regular classes. I went to school in the morning three days a week and worked in the shop from noon to three o’clock. I arranged with my employer, Mr. Mora, a very nice gentleman, to allow me to attend these classes. I remember him saying, We are both going to lose a little money, but education is so valuable that it’s worth it to you and certainly a pleasure for me. I still feel grateful for his consideration, and I often think of the old gent.

While working as a barber, Domenic married a widow with two sons and had four children of his own. His growing family was part of his reason for seeking "a better living."

The barber business wasn’t too good and I always had a desire to become a salesman…. In 1942 I was encouraged to get into the insurance business by Melvin Vollhaber. He was inducted into the army and wanted me to continue the agency while he was in the service. It was a difficult time, because no young people were looking for insurance and I was new in the business. I worked until 1966 and then turned the business over to my son, Joe. I didn’t get rich or anything, but I raised a nice family.

Giovanni (John) B. Caola

scissors/cutlery grinder

Minneapolis John, nearly 85, and his wife Orsolina celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1984. He made a point of introducing her to me, interrupting her work in the kitchen. Talking about his forty-five years as a cutlery grinder prompted him to call over and introduce his son, to whom he had passed the trade. John was a private man who did not volunteer his feelings readily. It wasn’t hard to learn the trade, he told me matter-of-factly. If you got a thing to yourself, you are inclined to learn. John had vivid memories of his childhood in rural Italy’s Rendena Valley.

I was born in Pinzolo, provincia di [province of] Trento. Pinzolo is one of seventeen villages in the Rendena Valley at the foot of the Brenta Dolomites. Our village was the most important one because so many grinders come from there. In the town is a monument dedicated to the moleta [grindstone]. Grinders from Italy and all over the world had a hard time in their job, that’s why they made this monument.

I was the youngest of a family of eight children. My father was a farmer in Pinzolo. The field was close by, all around the house. My mother stay home and take care the children and she work in the