An American Life: Challenge & Achievement

By Ernest Boniface

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2009
• ISBN: 9781669860068

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Copyright © 2009 by Ernest Boniface.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

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from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 12/17/2022

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CONTENT

Prologue

Background and Youth

In the Navy

Coming Home and Beginning Again

Courtship and Marriage

Building a New Home

Advancing in the Union

Starting Our Own Company

On My Own: Growing The Business

A Speech in Hawaii

TO MARGIE

For a lifetime of labor and of love

that I could never adequately thank her for.

PROLOGUE

Someone once said that memory is the diary that we all carry about with us. That’s why I seriously regretted not having spent more time with my father and mother, before they passed away, asking them about their early lives: about life in Italy before they emigrated; about their difficult voyages across the Atlantic; about their first impressions of America; about their meeting and marrying; about the challenge of raising a growing family during the Great Depression; and much, much more. They both had rich memories that I wish I had tried more often to explore even though both of my parents were intuitively reserved about such matters. But I think it’s important to learn as much as we can about our forebearers, because the more we learn and understand them, the more we come to understand ourselves.

When reflecting on these thoughts at one point, I realized I didn’t want this kind of void to exist in my own case. So I decided shortly after that to try to set down on paper some of the major events and influences in my own life, a life that from early years seemed filled with eventful challenges and to reflect on how I responded to those challenges. I wanted to record some of my own memories so that perhaps years from now if some family member from a later generation wondered why his father or grandfather acted in a particular way, the questioner might find the answer in these pages and maybe the answers to other questions as well.

Initially I dictated almost all of this material randomly into a small tape recorder. I asked my brother-in-law, Carroll McGuire who had earned his living as an editor, to take these tapes and transform them into an organized manuscript. I’m most grateful to him for all his help. And I’m grateful, too, to his daughter, Patricia Jemaa, and granddaughter, Annie Quinn, for all the typing and for their patience in turning out several drafts. I also want to thank my brother Peter for carefully reading the manuscript and offering several helpful comments which were eventually incorporated into the text and especially for urging me from the beginning to take on this whole project.

This is the outline of one man’s life in America in the second two thirds of the 20th Century and the early years of the 21st Century. I hope in future years that someone may read the story here and find it interesting and, perhaps even instructive. I am thankful to have been able to live this story and to have lived it fully with energy and enthusiasm—and I hope, a touch of humility as well.

Ernest Boniface

September, 2009

BACKGROUND AND YOUTH

I was born June 27, 1925; my parents were Ida Ossi Boniface and Peter Boniface (Bonifacio). The little I know about my ancestors I learned from a few handwritten notes my mother put together in 1977. This is a summary of those notes.

The Ossis

My mother’s grandfather, Matteo Ossi, married a women named Teresa Zanetti who was from Borca and was one of several children. Matteo himself was a memorable character, an enthusiastic hunter of chamois and a celebrated mountain climber who was the first person to climb the daunting 10,000 foot Antelao in the Dolomite Alps. As a result, his picture hangs in the San Vito Municipal Building.

Matteo and his wife had 10 children, the sixth of whom was Ida’s father Arcangelo Michele. As an aside, the 10th child, Angelo, who my mother described as tall, blond, and fearless migrated to America to seek his fortune. However, on his way home from work in a Pennsylvania mine one day he was brutally murdered and his empty money belt discovered beside his lifeless body. A terrible blow to the family. My mother noted that only two of the 10 children remained in San Vito, Giovanni and Caterina who died rather young leaving two small children. The rest of the family eventually moved down from their cold mountain area where their ancestors had lived for centuries, having been one of the earliest settlers in San Vito. The family home in San Vito, built in 1550, is still there. And my mother noted that the Ossis may have been there since 1200 or even before. She also mentioned the fact that a number of her ancestors had been prominent people: teachers, a notary, a military officer responsible for the defense of the Veneto, many priests, and a missionary bishop. She added, Their coat of arms, which goes back to the 13th century is a simple field with three bones across encircled by the letter O

Now my mother’s father, Arcangelo, married a women named Teresa Palatini, and they, too, had 10 children of which Ida was the seventh. Arcangelo at one point decided to sell his belongings in San Vito and buy a farm down in the milder plains area. My mother felt that he made the move in all probability at the urging of his wife Teresa who was born and raised in Vittorio Veneto in a family of easy circumstances even though that family originally came from San Vito as well. Teresa apparently did not like the hard life and frigid climate of San Vito, so in 1898 when my mother’s sister Maria was just 40 days old, the family moved to a farm in the Scomigo section of Conigliano where in 1901 my mother was born. Two years later, in 1903, Arcangelo sold this farm because he deemed it inadequate for his growing family, and bought a more desirable place in San Giacomo di Veglia which is still owned by family members. My mother came to this country on November 1, 1920 at the age of 19 aboard a ship called the Regina Italia out of Genoa.

The Bonifaces

Now my father’s grandfather Angelo Bonifacio, married a woman named Margarita Lorenzini. Angelo and Margarita, in turn, had a son also named Angelo, who lived between 1867 and 1929. He married a woman named Luigia Cazzetta who lived to the age of 70 and passed away in 1930. Angelo and Luigia had four children: a daughter Margarita, and three sons, Matthew, August, and Peter.

Angelo decided in 1892 to leave the small mountain village of Pescul in the province of Selva di Cadore and took a long and arduous journey to the United States before my father was born. Angelo arrived in America on April 11, 1892 aboard the liner La Gascogne out of Le Harve, France. He became an American citizen in 1899. The rest of the family remained in Pescul, until after grandmother Margharita died. Then on November 5, 1902, they all came to the United States, including my dad on a ship called La Champagne. My father first saw his father at this time, when he was 10 years old.

My mother mentioned in her notes that the commune di Selva lacked old records because of a destructive fire at one time. But the name Bonifacio appeared in a deed over two hundred years old, from the time they were mining iron in Pescul. The Cazzetta family also settled there before records were available. My mother wrote that the Bonifacio house in Pescul was destroyed by time and neglect. But when she saw the crumbling foundation back in the mid 70’s it looked to her practiced eyes as though it had exsisted for 500 years or more. It was built in the shadow of Mont Pelmo, and I say that because in the middle of the winter the sun did not reach their house, she wrote.

The early years in America, too, proved hard ones for my dad. At one time in later life he wrote a brief summary of his early work history. In 1905 at the age of 13, my dad went to work full time as a mill hand in the Waldrich Bleachery in Clifton, New Jersey for $4.00 a week. After working at several different low-level jobs, a few years later he applied for a job at the Falstrom Co. which at that time was looking for someone to take care of a horse and serve as an apprentice sheet metal worker. This incident started the Boniface family in the sheet-metal industry.

Sometime after that he did sheet metal work in the maintenance department of the Ford Motor Company in Highland Park, Michigan for $20.00 a week. The next year, 1918, as war raged in Europe, my dad entered the United States Army. Eventually, he served on the battle front in France and was wounded at Thiaucourt on September 26, 1918 in an enemy poison gas attack while stringing barbed wire in the aptly labeled no man’s land. In June 1919 he was honorably discharged. That same month he was hired as a sheet metal worker in the maintenance department of the Ford Motor Company in Kearny, New Jersey. He spent six years there and his salary rose from $30.00 to $48.00 per week. And from 1925 to 1931, my dad worked for several sheet metal contractors, mainly for the Carrier Engineering Corporation and the Robert McLory Company, always perfecting his trade. He joined local 10 of the union in 1925 and was the first Italian to do so.

Actually my dad’s courage and perseverance during these hard early years in America serve as an obvious source of the deep pride, admiration, and affection for the man and his memory in each of his grateful children and, hopefully in their progeny as well.

Earliest Memories and Childhood

In trying to recall my first recollection of life, I remember kneeling on the kitchen floor with my mother sitting on a green kitchen chair, saying our bedtime prayers. My mother was a very religious person, who did not wear her religion on her sleeve as the saying goes, but practiced her beliefs quietly in her daily life. She and my father were practical people who loved each other and their family with their whole hearts and souls, and demonstrated their beliefs by the way they lived their lives.

The house we first lived in, at 20 Park View Avenue in Belleville, N.J, was owned by my father’s oldest brother, August, who occupied the first floor with his wonderful wife Elvira, and their four children: Albert, Claire, Henry, and Flora.

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This attractive photograph of my mother and father was taken, I believe, at one of the many Boniface weddings, because they both are so handsomely turned out.

On the third floor lived Elvira’s brother in-law, John DeLotto, whom we all called Uncle John. He was a kind and gentle person we liked a lot. He lost his wife who succumbed to an embolism following a still-birth. He had three children: Madeline, George, and Louis. He often allowed us to play in his apartment and gave us on occasion peppermint candies. I believe my mother and father lived in that apartment earlier and that’s where I was born. As the DeLotto family grew, they moved to their own house in Clifton, N.J. and my brother Rudy and I took over the front room of the upstairs apartment for our bedroom and cousins Albert and Henry took over the middle room for their bedroom.

A Secure Childhood

At 20 Park View Avenue life felt pretty secure. The railroad-type apartment included a kitchen, dining room and sun parlor in front with two bedrooms on the side. A coal stove in the kitchen, where we hung out most of the time, was lit all the time in the winter. My father would light a second stove in the dining room on Sundays. And on Sundays we would read the comics and occasionally listen to New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia reading the funny papers.

I recall the discipline we were raised with. When we gathered for dinner my, mother always had a white tablecloth on the table and we were expected to come with our hands washed, hair combed, and be there promptly at 6 PM.

My mother was an excellent cook and I have memories of her preparing the vegetables sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper spread out to work on. She made great meals and made sure that they were also nutritious.

After we ate each child had a chore. One cleaned the table, one washed the dishes. Another would dry and put them away and another would sweep the floor. Once a week we would switch responsibilities. My mother would retire from the kitchen and move into the dining room to work on her pedal powered sewing machine, making and mending our clothes. My dad’s routine was to go to the basement to work or head out into the garden to tend to his crops. We also were given haircuts by dad with a hand clipper. It seemed like it took hours for him to do this job.

I remember that our parents were always working. We grew up in a very serious environment. Dad had his own automatic garage door opener. When he came home from work he would blow his horn and one of us would run downstairs and open the door for him.

As I mentioned, we kids had lots of chores. Rudy and I had some additional chores. We kept the stoves going, bringing the coal up from the basement and taking the ashes down there. On Saturdays one of us washed the kitchen floor and the other washed the back stairs. The next week we reversed those chores.

One time I remember my mother was