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During the early morning of August 6 1957, I faced my first real struggle in life. I was born more than a month premature and only weighed five pounds twelve ounces. An ounce before the doctors considered placing me into an incubator. It was rather critical for the times as the medical technology of the 1950's was archaic compared to what's available in today's world.
After surviving my initial brush with fate, my parents brought me home from Chicago's Garfield Park Community Hospital in my father's pizza delivery car. He hand painted his late 1940's Chevy with the same colors as the Italian Flag. I think he must have thought it was a smart advertising ploy to help generate more business for his fledgling pizza parlor. I was weaned on pizza, and nearly killed when I fell off the table where my mother was rolling out some dough.
My dad made a great pizza and won several awards for his master cookery. However, he had not yet honed his business skills in the early days of his career. To make matters worse, an unscrupulous business partner was stealing money from him. As a result, his pizza place went out of business and he faced trying to find another job to support his family.
After suffering the loss of his business, my father was able to secure a job at a corrugated box company and initially worked as a utility man in the factory and would later move into a sales role with the same company. He was the oldest of five children and grew up in an Italian neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. My mother had grown up in the small town of Evergreen Park, dominated by people of Irish and German descent.
My parents first met when they were both 19 years old while attending the Chicago Teachers College. By the early age of 20, they decided to get married as they were expecting me. My mother had been studying nursing at the time but soon dropped out to raise her new family. My father was enrolled in a business curriculum but due to the financial pressures of raising a family, he also dropped out of college. Most people got married very young in those days with an average age being in the early twenties. For the most part, people stayed married even if they were miserable. Divorce was very rare and carried a stigma for both men and women.
During the first few years of my life, my family lived in a small two-bedroom apartment on the South Side of Chicago. We later moved to the tiny village of Crete, a far south suburb. As the result of a failed business and the monetary pressures of a family beginning to grow in numbers, my father's finances began to suffer. In an effort to survive, my parents decided to move into my grandmother's basement apartment located on Hermitage Avenue on Chicago's South Side. At four years old, this is where the memories of my earliest childhood and the lessons from my father, would begin.
Surrounded by excellent cooks from an early age, I helped to prepare many different and exotic foods influenced by my father's Italian heritage, and my mother's German descent. Raw clams, squid, and homemade Italian sausage, with ravs and a variety of other pastas smothered in red and white sauces were part of the menu. It was my family's custom, upon turning five years old, to suck down a raw clam from its shell and swallow it whole. The tradition always followed a toast with my father and uncles. I can remember gagging a bit on my first experience, but have enjoyed this custom around the holidays ever since. Living in my grandmother's basement had its benefits. My aunt Liz, was only six years older me. She was more like a big sister and would walk me down to the corner store and allow me to fill up my brown paper bag with penny candy. A dollar back then bought a lot of candy of all shapes and sizes.
We always seemed to have enough money for our jaunts to the candy store and most other things, but money was tight for my parents during this time. My grandfather, Paul was born in America in 1910, and was one of 24 kids born to my great grandparents, Luigi and Josephine Rega. Tragically, a number of his siblings would soon die having been afflicted with the1918 flu pandemic, otherwise known as the Spanish flu that killed an estimated fifty to one-hundred million people. Most were young, otherwise healthy adults, making it one of the most deadly natural disasters in human history.
"There seemed to always be a coffin in the family's living room," one of my father's aunts would later tell me as she described the horror. My grandfather escaped death from the flu and was the youngest of four boys and twenty girls. Unfortunately, he would pass away at the age of 47 after battling heart disease for several years. He had suffered rheumatic fever as a young boy and the doctors suspected that the disease damaged his heart.
My father's aunt Annie married a relatively ambitious Sicilian by the name of PeteAmbrosino who first ran alcohol for Capone and later graduated to making wine in his bathtub. That built him a stake to start his own business, and when my father was nine, the Ambrosino Italian Market was a landmark in Little Italy on the South Side of Chicago.
The store was walking distance from my grandmother's house. With our red Radio Flyer wagon in tow, I would sit impatiently during a several block trek to where my grandmother would do most of her grocery shopping. My great aunt and her husband, Uncle Pete would look forward to me and my grandmother's weekly visit. When my aunt Liz turned nine, she would often bag groceries at the store and she would already be working when we arrived. She loved the store, especially since she could snack on Lu Lu Beans, an Italian delicacy the size of a quarter and an occasional Italian Ice.
It was an old store in the heart of what was mostly an Italian neighborhood. Its wooden planked floors creaked as you walked across them releasing a pungent aroma of oregano, basil, and garlic into the air. Many other dried spices and exotic Italian seasonings were everywhere stored in open bins. Several large wooden barrels of fruits and vegetables, as well as olives, peanuts and beans were stored in large wooden barrels strewn throughout the store.
Uncle Pete, who was rather slim, had quite a different build than his wife, and at 5'5'' had a ferocious temper. He had dark brown eyes and jet black hair that was always combed straight back with gobs of grease. He watched over the open barrels of peanuts like a hawk, waiting to catch anyone that dared steal anything, while my aunt tended to the customers. When he suspected that a theft had occurred, he would rush over and stand with his arms crossed, yelling at the kids to get the peanuts out of their pockets.
There were several wooden barrels of live snails throughout the store. As I walked down the aisles, I would have to step over some of them that had crawled out of the barrels. One of my aunt Liz's dreaded jobs was to arrive about a half hour before the store opened so she could collect all the snails that had escaped from the barrels. Numerous kinds of cheeses and lunchmeats were aligned in neat rows, stored behind a glass encasement. Dried and salted Bacalhau, along with several varieties of cheeses and salami hung by thin white string from the rafters, permeating the air with the pungent smells of Italy.
Customers would fill their own brown paper bags full of spices, some falling to the ground, and disappearing into the cracks of the wooden floor. I had my first experience eating a whole cucumber when my aunt Annie, who was quite a cook, offered me one out of the wooden barrels. She cut off the end and sprinkled it with salt and said, "Here Pauly, take a bite!" The fresh taste of cucumber and salt exploded in my mouth.
My father's memories of his aunt and uncle's store were not as fond as my aunt Liz's. He was often instructed as a young boy by my grandfather to take his wagon down the streets of old Chicago and pick up some of the rotting fruits and vegetables that couldn't be sold in the store. This trip would prove to be different. The ritual always seemed to be the same—across Paulina, down two alleys, up to the side yard where the rotten vegetables were stored, ready for the garbage truck the next day. Heaped on my dad's wagon could go three, four, or sometimes five bushels of tomatoes, peaches, and peppers.
This time, my father was instructed to go into the store and ask Aunt Annie for a package for his daddy. As he entered into the store, my aunt, all 300 pounds of her, was behind the counter where she rarely left her oversized chair. "My father says you have a package for him," he said quietly, hoping Uncle Pete wouldn't hear him. Looking like a fugitive and noticing Uncle Pete across the other side of the store, she quickly passed the package around the other side of the counter and said, "Ok, now go!" Before my father could make it out of the store, Uncle Pete came running over and snatched the package from his hands, tore it open, and started throwing the ends of dried out, old salamis, at Aunt Annie screaming, "Beggar, beggar, beggar!"
My father, now crying, ran out of the store through a side door, leaving his wagon full of rotten fruit and vegetables behind. He didn't stop running until he got home where he would encounter my grandfather who wasn't pleased that he had failed to bring home the package. My father wanted desperately to escape the old neighborhood, and erase the memories of a young boy growing up poor in Chicago. The early lesson would serve to shape his thinking as an adult, and motivate him for the rest of his life.
