15. WAR

hen my brother Tony graduated from Hirsch High School in 1939, he went to work for a company that made inlaid woodwork for expensive furniture. Later, Uncle John got Tony a job with Chicago Surface Lines as a requisition clerk and timekeeper at the shops at 77th and Vincennes. After World War II began, Tony entered the Army.

     Tony left with advice from his father: "Whatever you do, don't volunteer. They'll tell you what to do anyway, so there's no sense volunteering for it."

     It was September, 1942. Tony was twenty-one years old. During his first year in the service, Tony trained in warm-weather states: Louisiana, Florida, Virginia. This caused everybody in the family to believe that Tony was destined for duty in the South Pacific fighting against the Japanese, rather than in Europe where he might be called upon to fight against Italy, which had sided with Germany.

     While at Camp Pickett, Virginia, Tony dated a girl in Lynchburg, about sixty miles away. Her family owned a farm in Appomattox, where Lee had surrendered. The Lynchburg girl asked Tony to come home one weekend and have dinner and meet her family. That week, however, the Army shipped Tony overseas: to Europe rather than to the South Pacific. Later, Tony received a letter from his girl friend saying she was engaged to someone in her hometown.

     Back in Chicago, our family hung a small flag in the window: white with a red border and a blue star. The flag signified to anyone who passed that that family had someone in the service. A gold star in place of the blue indicated that the serviceman had been killed in action.

     As was common throughout the country, each block organized to support the war effort. The block chose air wardens to watch for enemy planes, on the unlikely chance that any should appear, and to make certain that lights were extinguished during blackouts. Families saved fat and aluminum foil from chewing gum wrappers and rubber bands. They tended what became known as Victory Gardens, converting their back yards and the vacant prairies around their homes into lots for the raising of food. Our family, of course, had always had their home garden.

     Each block also selected one site where the names, and often photographs, of their sons serving in the Armed Forces could be displayed with honor. At a block meeting, despite his normal antagonism for volunteering, my father said he would erect such a place of honor on his property.

     Pa selected a plot of ground approximately six feet by six feet square in the lot to the east side of our house. The square plot faced 87th Street. Around this square, he erected a picket fence, each picket cut by hand in his basement workshop. The pickets were painted red, white, and blue. Within the square Pa poured concrete to support a flagpole, which he made rudely out of pipes. Standing to the left of the flagpole, supported by two legs, stood a glass case with a triangular pediment atop it. The case also was painted red, white, and blue. Within the case were photographs and names of those who served, including my brother Tony.

      When the occasion arrived to raise the American flag for the first time over this place of honor, our family invited our neighbors on the block to join us for the ceremony. We served coffee at our house. My parents were proud to demonstrate to those neighbors that, although Italy was allied with the Germans because of the foolishness of Mussolini, we were Americans who supported the war effort. The square was symbol of that support and the family's commitment to their new home. When Marion graduated from grade school, she posed for photographs within the square in white dress, white stockings, white shoes, holding her rolled diploma and smiling.

     Over in Italy, Marianna Molinaro had lived with her husband Massimo in Rome since the early thirties. When war began, even though fighting was in the north far from that city, Massimo decided that his family would be safer in Falconara. Marianna boarded a train headed south with her four children. The oldest was a girl, Domenica, more often called Menica, sometimes by the nickname, in Italian, Minnie-koosh. Menica was thirteen in 1941. Marianna's two oldest boys, Giovanni and Franco, were nine and seven. Giovanni later would move to America, where he would become known as Johnny to distinguish him from his grandfather, my Uncle John. Franco had the nickname Cheech, later simply Frank. A fourth child, Roberto, later Bob, had just been born. A fifth child, Antonio, later Tony, would be born after the war in 1949.

     Falconara, tucked high in the mountains, distant from the coastal railroad and highway, was hardly of any strategic value during World War II. It was almost as though the seven families, drained physically and spiritually from their historic struggle against the Ottoman Turks, had chosen a location that would never need to experience war again. A self-sufficient village for more than four centuries, Falconara's people depended for their survival on what they grew in the fields around them: grains, corn, beans, various fruit. Meat, usually pork, remained somewhat a luxury in Falconara, but as the war progressed the villagers, raising pigs on the lower levels of their homes, probably had more meat than the people in the large cities.

     Although the villagers of Falconara could stand on the hill near the cemetery and look down to the main coastal road, nearly 2,000 feet lower in elevation, and see army trucks pass, it was impossible to tell whether those trucks were Italian or German, or later American. As the war continued, and the allied forces began their invasion of Italy, moving upward from Africa and into Sicily, occasionally bombers would fly overhead, but they were headed for more important targets, including Cosenza inland. When the Molinaros first returned to Falconara, Marianna sent her daughter Menica to Cosenza to attend a convent school run by the nuns. But later in the war, it became too dangerous to stay in that city, so Menica rejoined the family in Falconara. One day an American plane flew over Falconara and dropped leaflets warning the citizens to flee, because they were going to bomb the village. The Americans never did, which was fortunate. As my cousin John Molinaro later would say, "One well-placed bomb would have blown Falconara off the map."

     The bombers did attack Paola on the coast, because it was a switching station for the railroad. One American two-seater airplane was hit by artillery and crashed onto the beach. John Molinaro would remember walking down from village to the seashore just to see the wreckage. After the Americans began their march northward, the Italians in the south had more to fear from German planes. On at least three occasions, the Germans tried to demolish the railroad bridge near the Falconara train station. They failed to strike the bridge, but the fragment of one bomb flew through the air and landed in the main piazza before one of the town’s churches. That was as close as Falconara would come to the actual fighting.

     The main impact on the people of Falconara was the arrival of the folati, as they were called. Folata, the singular form of the word in the Italian language, means a "gust," a sudden wind, but also a great number of anything at one time. There is no equivalent common word or phrase in English, but folati were people from coastal cities threatened by the war, who were evacuated to inland villages where they would be more safe. By 1943, because of the arrival of the folati, not to mention former Falconarese like the Molinaros who had returned home, the village's population probably doubled from the 2,061 counted during the last previous census, seven years earlier.

     Every family had to accept strangers within their home. A government commission decreed where these strangers would live. Five people (Marianna Molinaro and her four children) occupied the house overlooking the valley owned by Uncle John. Now the commission assigned five more to share the house with them: a dentist from Reggio Calabria along with his wife and their three children, two girls and a boy.

     The dentist and his family took over the ground floor, the bedroom once occupied by Zia Chiara and also the downstairs living room. The Molinaros lived in the room upstairs next to the kitchen. There was a single bathroom downstairs, which had to be shared by both families. Within that bathroom was, due to the largesse of Uncle John, a bathtub, apparently the only bathtub in Falconara at that time. There was no standard plumbing in Falconara and water would need to be brought in from the town square to both flush the toilets and fill the bathtub, but it was a definite symbol of luxury and a demonstration of the status held by the Musacchio family within the village, not to mention the great wealth of their relative back in the United States. Uncle John had purchased the tub from his earnings of $40 a week as a street car mechanic. "The midwives of the village would come to bathe in our tub," John Molinaro would recall.

     The arrival of the folati was the first time that Falconara was exposed to an outside influence other than that of the transient Falconarese who went abroad to work. John Molinaro remembers the contrast between people such as the dentist from Reggio Calabria and the people of the village. "They made fun of us and we made fun of them," he says. "Their lifestyle was different from ours. They dressed differently in clothes they bought at the store. We no longer wore the Albanian costumes, but still dressed in rougher, homemade clothes."

     The Falconarese were more used to homegrown food, including small potatoes, normally looked down upon by Italians from the cities as fit only to feed pigs. And there was the language difference, the fact that the Falconarese spoke the Arberesh dialect. It was no longer the same language spoken in their former land of Albania, and included many Italian words and transmutations of Italian words, but it nevertheless it was almost totally incomprehensible to the village's temporary residents.

     Of course, the Falconarse were bilingual and also spoke Italian, so had no difficulty communicating with their guests--when they wanted to. Ironically, that generation of Falconarese spoke a "better" form of Italian, having learned the language of their country in school from educated teachers rather than from their semi-illiterate parents. Thus, they learned the Tuscan dialect, the form of the language considered more pure. Most of the Italians who had become temporary residents of Falconara, however, spoke the thick Calabrese dialect that people in the north looked down upon as being the language of farmers.

     Although John Molinaro played with the dentist's son, who was near him in age, he would not recall that person's name. Nor would his mother remember the name of the dentist years later, despite the two families having been jammed together into the small house. The house was so small that the Molinaros had to invade the living quarters of their guests to go to the bathroom. They sometimes found it easier to go outside.

     There were arguments. Marianna thought the small sum paid her by the commission for keeping the dentist and his family was insufficient and that he, being a man of some means, should have supplemented that sum. On one occasion, following an argument between her and the dentist, Marianna took several flower pots that the dentist kept on the balcony overlooking the valley and dropped them over the side.

     The south side of Chicago also was far removed from the war, being hundreds of miles from the Atlantic coast, and thousands of miles, beyond that, from the continent of Europe. The usual flow of consumer goods to the average American citizens had slowed somewhat, but like our relatives back in Falconara, we were not consumers of expensive and difficult to obtain goods.

     Pa did have an automobile, however: the Plymouth he had purchased just before the war. It perhaps was less important as a means of transportation--after all, he worked in the basement of our home--than as a symbol of his family's success. He kept the car in a garage behind the house on 87th Street, and one morning he went to the garage and discovered that his car was sitting on cement blocks. Somebody had broken into the garage and had stolen the tires from the car. Pa was furious and filled the air with words that, fortunately, none of his neighbors could understand. Rubber was difficult to obtain, but somehow he managed to purchase another set of tires. On the other hand, Ma would have been just as happy if the car had remained on blocks for the remainder of the war, if not afterwards. She felt that her husband's automobile was a symbol that their family could not afford. He still barely gave her enough money to run the household and put food on the table. Occasionally Ma would need to borrow a few dollars from Mrs. Van Ness across the street when her purse was empty, and she needed to make some necessary payment. Ma always paid the money back, but invariably would have to borrow it again. Fortunately, Mrs. Van Ness did not charge interest.

     One day the mailman brought a letter. Pa was puzzled, because there was no return address on the envelope and their name and address was crudely scrawled as though written by a child, or by someone attempting to write like a child. Inside was a sheet of paper on which had been pasted words cut from the newspaper, as though in a kidnap letter. "You dirty Italians," was the message. "You're nothing but Nazis! What right do you have to be in this country?"

     Tony Musacchio arrived in Great Britain in October, 1943, a member of the 28th Infantry Division, which before the war had been a national guard unit based in Pennsylvania. Its divisional insignia was bucket-shaped, like the insignia of the Pennsylvania railroad. Because of high casualties the division would suffer during the war, the 28th would become known as the "bloody bucket" division.

     Tony's unit remained six months in southern Wales, then three months in southern England, preparing for the invasion of France. They trained daily scrambling down rope ladders into landing crafts, charging onto beaches, returning to the ship. The 28th originally had been part of the First Army, but then was shifted into the Third Army to serve as infantry support for General Patton's tanks. Scuttlebutt said that the 28th, along with the 29th Infantry Division, would be among the first wave of troops to begin the inevitable invasion of northern Europe. "One morning in June of 1944," Tony recalls, "we were called out of our barracks to stand in a large field. Soon we saw airplanes, literally thousands of them, heading over our heads."

     One of the officers announced: "The invasion is on, men. We have landed in Normandy."

     The 29th did participate in the invasion, but not the 28th. Tony's unit would not land in France until July, well after the beachhead had been established. Tony disliked his unit's role as support infantry for tanks. Tanks were noisy and smoke poured from their exhaust pipes, making the tanks easy to spot. Immediately, they would draw artillery fire. "If there's anything infantrymen hate," Tony recalled, "it was artillery fire. When you're fighting other infantry, you feel at least you have a sporting chance. But with artillery, the guns are three or four miles away firing at you, and you're helpless."

     Tony's unit marched through San Lov, Berz, Montiage, Percy, chasing the 15th German Army Corps. Patton advanced at the rate of thirty miles a day. The infantry rode on the backs of the tanks. If they encountered resistance, they leaped from the tanks until the resistance crumbled, then mounted the tanks again. Within a few months, Patton pushed to the Siegfried Line on the borders of Germany. He stopped only because he had outrun his supply lines.

     The Germans were beaten. Their armies were crumbling; their cities back home were being bombed to rubble. The war, for all practical purposes, was over. The German generals wanted to surrender. General Rommel was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler that might have ended the war in the summer of 1944. Rommel and many of the generals believed that all they were doing in continuing the fighting was to succeed in seeing that more of their own people were killed and insure that the armistice terms would be even more harsh. Tony would have time to ponder the politics of war later; at the time, he was more worried about whether there might be someone with a gun behind the next tree, whether he would have time to dig a foxhole before a mortar or artillery round would kill him. All he was thinking of was his own survival.

     His unit was shelled continuously by the Germans. One time a shell hit the house in which he and several other soldiers had sought shelter. The house caught on fire, and they had to run to another house. On August 9, 1944, his sister Bea's tenth birthday, Tony's unit came under fire. Later, Tony would not remember being wounded, except when he looked down at his leg he saw blood. He had been nicked either by a bullet or piece of shrapnel. The medics gave him first aid, then evacuated him to a hospital in the rear. Tony would be absent from his unit for less than a month.

     On the south side of Chicago, we had mock air raids. A plane would fly overhead and drop a streamer, supposed to indicate that a bomb was coming. People would stand in front of their homes and watch the streamer, slowly descending to earth, and wonder what a real air raid would be like.

     Our family had not heard from most of our relatives in Italy for years, but we assumed they were safe. The fighting had now bypassed southern Italy and, to my parents’ relief, Italy no longer was at war with the United States. Mussolini was through as the country's leader and eventually would be assassinated by partisan troops. But while the war continued on Germany's eastern and western fronts, my parents continued to worry about their son, our brother, fighting in France. Marion recalls her mother frequently crying because of Tony. "It was all Ma could think about," says Marion. Ma loved her daughters, but she had the typical Italian woman's love of her male son, in this case the child who had been her only companion during the early years of her marriage when her husband was off in America and she lived in the house above the church.

     Ma had a mirror on the wall of her bedroom. One night we returned from visiting relatives, and Ma found the mirror broken on the floor. It apparently had fallen off the wall during our absence. Ma, like most of the villagers from Falconara, was very superstitious. She cried all night, because the cracked mirror was going to bring bad luck, and she was sure Tony was going to die.

     During the summer of 1944, Marion, Bea and I had our tonsils removed. It was a happy experience, because all we could eat was ice cream. Our

cousins--Virginia, Helen, Clara--came to visit us. Soon after the operation, Marion was sitting in the living room looking out the window when she saw a car stop in front. A man wearing a uniform got out of the car. He started up the steps to their house, envelope in his hand. Marion announced frantically: "Pa, Pa. There's a man coming with an envelope!"

     My mother started screaming. My father went to the door, blood drained from his face, almost in a daze. The man at the door wore a Western Union uniform, and he saw immediately the fear in Pa's eyes. The Western Union deliveryman knew what the telegram said, because there was a code on the envelope that told him whether or not it was bad news, and how bad the news. "No he's not dead," the deliveryman hastened to explain, "just slightly injured." After that, everyone in the family relaxed. "Maybe they'll send him home," hoped Ma, wringing her hands.

     There was little chance of that. Soon after the delivery of the telegram, Tony returned to his unit.

     Tony remained a private first class. Unlike his father, who had enjoyed his years in service, Tony could not wait for the war to be over so he could get home and shed his uniform. Once, at the front, Tony was offered a promotion to sergeant. Tony refused, preferring the single stripe of the P.F.C. Tony had noticed that lieutenants, sergeants, and corporals, usually led the troops, waving them on. "If you're sitting on the other side of the line with a rifle," Tony claims, "the first thing you look for is the guy standing up making the motions, because he's the commanding officer. You want to get rid of him right away."

     As winter approached, Tony's unit had crossed into Germany and they were fighting in the Hurtgen Forest before reaching the Rhine river. They bivouacked near the town of Braznik. One of Tony's cousins, Eugene Formosa, whose parents also had come from Falconara, was also a soldier with the 28th Division, but in the 112th Infantry Regiment. A combat engineer, Formosa was in another small town, Schmidt. The Germans attacked in force one day, killing or capturing almost everyone in that regiment. At the time of the battle, Tony's unit was only three miles away. Tony heard the artillery firing and could see the fighting from a distance.

     Tony's unit rushed to reinforce the 112th, but arrived too late, after the battle. Tony walked into a basement filled with wounded German soldiers. "There must have been a dozen of them," recalls Tony. "We could do nothing, but let them die. There was insufficient medical facilities. The Germans just lay there. You'd hear a little noise, and pretty soon you didn't hear anything."

     Tony went to a first aid station to complain, "Aren't you doing anything about those German soldiers?"

     The medic told him, "We don't even have time for our own."

     After the war Tony would learn what happened to Eugene Formosa. Formosa, wounded, hid with several other American soldiers in a basement. A German tank rolled up to the doorway and pointed its barrel into the basement. A German soldier yelled in English, "Do you want to surrender, or shall we fire?" They surrendered.

     Formosa had been wounded in the leg. The German who spoke English told Formosa, "Don't admit your leg hurts, because they amputate very fast." Imprisoned, Eugene Formosa eventually was freed as the Germans continued to retreat.

     On another occasion, Tony was sent as a messenger to a command post. It was night. When he walked inside the command post, he stepped on something soft, which he thought was snow. When Tony's eyes became more accustomed to the dark, he realized he was standing on German bodies! They were frozen stiff, but would give a little as he stepped on them. Because it was winter, there was no smell. "There's nothing worse than the smell of dead flesh," states Tony.

     As winter approached in late November and early December, the allied march into Germany stalled because of poor weather. The soldiers in Tony's unit sat around in foxholes waiting to be told what to do next. Tony had to urinate, so left his foxhole for a minute, when he heard the sound of an incoming round, whether mortar fire or an artillery shell, he later could not remember. He was familiar with the sound of artillery, which reminded him of the rumbling street cars that came along 87th Street and, as they approached the corner of St. Lawrence, put on the brakes to skid to a shrieking halt.

     "That's what artillery sounded like when it was close," recalls Tony. "When it was farther away, it sounded more like a flutter. The closer they get, the flutter is more pronounced. When they're real close, it's almost a scream. The mortars are noisier than the shells, but the shells would come in faster. If you saw a mortar fired, you could follow the path of its projectile, very slow moving. You never saw an artillery shell."

     Whether mortar or artillery shell, the round landed close enough to Tony to knock him unconscious. He awakened dazed, but alive and unbloodied, to be taken to a first aid unit, then a field hospital, finally shipped back to a hospital near Paris.

   After Tony recovered, he was called into the office of a doctor only a few years older than he was. "How do you feel?" the doctor asked. "I feel fine," Tony admitted.

     "How would you like to go back to the front lines?"

     Tony laughed. "You know, Doctor, a man would have to be crazy to say he liked to go back. And I don't think I'm crazy."

     The doctor said he was disturbed by wounded who wanted to go back. "You know what I'm going to do with you?"

     Tony laughed again. "You're going to send me back to the front lines, like the Army wants you to." After more than two years in the army, Tony had become resigned to his fate. He disliked the service and thought he was fighting people he did not know for reasons he did no understand. He felt that usually the people that have the least to do with getting the war started are the ones who do all the work and get shot at and killed. Meanwhile, the people who started it are sitting back enjoying themselves, reveling in the excitement and power brought to them by war. It was the standard infantryman's lament. Tony may have had the blood of Scanderbeg flowing through his veins, but he did not have the old Albanian general's love for combat.

     The doctor, however, surprised Tony. "I'm going to put you on

limited service and say that you are fit for everything except combat."

     "Why are you doing that?"

     "I'm just doing it," said the doctor. "Do you mind?"

     Tony didn't mind. "Tony was much too gentle to enjoy the service," my sister Marion would say of him. Tony was shipped to a replacement depot in a town near Paris for several months. In March, 1945, he received a transfer to a unit in Le Havre on the coast of France. At the end of April, Russians approaching from the east, Americans and British from the west, Adolph Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. Within a week, the Germans formally surrendered.

     It would be months before the American soldiers could return home. Although the war in Europe had ended, the war in the Pacific continued, and the possibility remained that Tony might be sent to fight elsewhere in the world. One day, not feeling good, Tony reported to sick call. His top sergeant warned him, "Whatever happens, don't let them send you to the hospital." Tony's unit was due to move forty miles to a different location, reportedly easy duty. The sergeant worried that if Tony went to the hospital, he might miss the move.

     Tony had a temperature near 102 degrees. The doctor wanted to send him to the hospital.

     "No, I don't want to go," said Tony.

     "What do you mean you don't want to go?" asked the doctor. The doctor observed that most soldiers wanted to enter the hospital to avoid duty.

     Tony explained about his unit being shifted. "Just give me some pills," was his request.

     The doctor provided a prescription and a note specifying easy duty. Within two days, Tony's unit received its transfer to near Pavilly, a town of 3,000 people, about seven miles from Rouen.

     Tony knew no French and mostly avoided the French people. His unit used as its living quarters the grounds of a large chateau. After hours, they had freedom of movement. Several of his friends began going into the village and met several local girls, one named Monique, another Huguette. Monique had a red-headed sister named Ramone, who they wanted to introduce to Tony just to get rid of her. "I don't speak the language," pleaded Tony. "How am I going to converse with her?

     His friends countered, "We'll loan you our dictionaries."

     Tony didn't care for Ramone, but one day he saw another sister watching them from the window of their parents' house. "Come on down," Tony called to her. "You look better to me than the redhead." The girl couldn't understand him, but came out to say hello. Her name was Gilberte Fosse.

     After several dates, Tony discovered he could speak a few words in French, which bore similarities to the Italian he had learned while growing up in Falconara. Gilberte learned a few words in English. Mostly they smiled at each other. Gilberte's sister Ramone remained, mainly as chaperone for the others.

     As Tony returned frequently to see Gilberte, he realized that her parents would not invite him into their house. Gilberte's father was a truck driver for a textile factory; Gilberte and her sisters also worked in the factory. The Fosse family, protective of their daughters, tried to keep the American soldiers politely distant, even though the Fosses respected America's part in liberating France. Americans also had rescued their son, Roger, a member in the French underground. Roger Fosse, after being arrested by the Germans, had been sent to Buchenwald as a slave laborer. Later, Roger returned with such glowing reports of his American rescuers that the parents softened their previously haughty, but typically Gallic, attitude toward the American soldiers in their midst. Only then was Tony permitted in the house.

     Tony would bring cigarettes and candy. The Fosse family would sell these items, then go to farms in small towns nearby to purchase meat, butter, and eggs. In August, Americans dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing Japan to surrender. The following month, Tony's unit was about to be transferred to Germany as part of the occupation force. By then, Tony had enough points for discharge and did not want to leave Gilberte. A sympathetic commanding officer agreed to transfer him to another company so he could remain near Le Havre.

     His new company commander showed less sympathy and refused even to grant passes to his men. Each weekend, Tony would sneak out of the post and walk to the highway, hitchhiking a ride to Pavilly. One day, military police arrested Tony, and he received company punishment, remaining inside his quarters for a week. The next weekend he requested a pass, but was refused. Tony told his commander, "If you don't give me a pass, sir, I'll just repeat the same offense." The commander laughed at Tony's honesty and issued the pass.

     In Falconara, John Molinaro first learned of the war's end when the woman who lived next door came out on her balcony and said she had heard the news on the radio. The people of Falconara were relieved, because it meant that the folati, who had crowded their village and had made life

difficult, would leave. Within a short time, the dentist and his family packed their bags and returned to Reggio Calabria. Although they stopped before departing to pose for pictures, smiling with their hosts, there would never be any contact between them and the Molinaros again

     The end of the war, as well as the end of fascist control, caused a period of political upheaval in the village, mainly between the communists and the democrats. The democrats wanted a return to the old order, perhaps the monarchy. The communists, at least those in Falconara, had little knowledge of Marxist philosophy or sympathy for Russia, but they saw this new doctrine as a means of bettering their lives. They hoped that communism would mean they could take over somebody else's property. As people of property, the Molinaros saw little appeal in this approach. When Massimo Molinaro came down from Rome to finally rejoin his family, he called for a farmer who worked on land they owned. The farmer had been negligent in not paying Marianna rent for the land, particularly several goats. Massimo demanded the goats. The farmer told him, "In the next elections, the communists will take control, so I'm not paying you anything!"

     Massimo, who was not a dainty man, grabbed the farmer by the neck. He dragged the farmer out onto the balcony where he hung the man, by his jacket, on an iron hook that was used to hold the shutters. "This time I hang you alive," Massimo shouted, waving his finger in the farmer's face. "The next time, I hang you a different way." The farmer eventually

paid.

     The Molinaros eventually boarded a train to return to Rome. It would take them three days to make a journey that in other times would take six hours. The Italian railroad system had been severely damaged by the bombing, first by the Americans, later by the Germans. At nearly every major city, they would need to descend from the train, carrying their luggage, and walk across the ravished ground to where they could board another train.

     John Molinaro later would look back on the war years that brought strangers into the village founded by the seven families: "It was an educational experience for Falconara. I think it opened a lot of peoples' eyes, because after the war Falconara progressed. Roads were built. Repairs were made to houses. Sewers were laid. There was more lighting. The people were exposed to many different ideas. Falconara would never again quite be the same."

     For almost a year after he returned to the south side of Chicago, my brother Tony wrote Gilberte. After his discharge he went to work for the Surface Lines, then quit to go into partnership with his father repairing shoes. But Tony found it difficult laboring beside his father, particularly since Pa did not have enough work to keep him busy. Eventually Tony also went to work for his Uncle Angelo, who was easier to get along with, almost courtly in his manners. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Tony worked with Uncle Angelo; Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, with his father.

     Tony eventually wrote Gilberte and told her to come to the United States, and they would get married. My sisters and I became excited about meeting this French woman our brother was going to marry. But during Tony's absence, Gilberte had become sick with worry, afraid that she never would see him again. When Gilberte arrived, she had lost weight, looked sickly. I had read about French people and went to the airport anticipating my future sister-in-law to be tall, dark-haired. When I realized Gilberte was short and blonde, I was surprised.

      With Gilberte now in town, Tony began to have doubts about getting married. His mother, however, sided with Gilberte, who still knew only a few words of English. Ma remembered her first few months in this strange, new country that was America and tried to make life as easy as possible for Gilberte. She instructed her daughters to be very accommodating to this French girl, who they soon began to call "Gill," because everybody had difficulty pronouncing her French name properly. They gave Gill a few simple tasks so she would feel that she was part of the family.

      One evening we were washing the dishes, Gill drying. In broken English, she inquired, "Where do I put the dishes?"

     I told her, "Put them in the cabinet?"

     Gill looked puzzled. "Cabinette?" she inquired.

     "Yes."

      Gill began walking with dishes in her arms out the room and to the bathroom. Only then did the girls realize that cabinette in French was the word for toilet.

      Tony continued to panic over the prospect of marriage. "I just couldn't see myself getting tied down," he recalls. One morning in April, 1947, my mother marched into his room and told Tony, "Get up. You're going to get married."

     "Today?" worried Tony.

      "You called for her," raged Ma. "You made your bed, now you sleep in it."

     They drove downtown to City Hall to be married before a Justice of the Peace. This bothered Gill, who took her Catholic religion seriously, but she was not in much of a position to protest. Even if she did protest, few people among her new family would have understood her. To the mélange of Albanian, Italian, and English spoken by our family had been added French.

     For the wedding, we dressed in our best clothes. Afterwards, we went to an Italian restaurant in the Loop. Tony and Gill left for a short honeymoon. When they returned, Ma decided the newlyweds deserved a party, so she rented a hall and invited all the relatives. The happy couple received many gifts.

     During the war Uncle Angelo, who had been a bachelor all of his life, had begun living with a woman named Edna, who had two previous husbands and a daughter Jean. While working for Angelo, Tony had grown close to him. When Uncle Angelo began to talk about moving to California, Tony decided to join him. They could open a motel, or what in that era was more often referred to as a "tourist court." Later, when Tony and Angelo arrived in California, they discovered that tourist courts were overpriced. Examining the want-ads one day, they spotted an advertisement for a tourist court near Phoenix, Arizona. They drove to Phoenix and discovered that the tourist court was badly dilapidated, but they purchased it anyway.

     Tony later would state the reason for his move: "The reason why I went to Arizona was because I wanted to get away. A new place. A new life."

     That had been part of the motivation for the seven families who five centuries earlier had fled Albania. And it had been the motivation for the Falconarese, who after that long period of time, finally decided to abandon their village for America. The children of Pa and Ma would not remain even one generation in Chicago before going in many directions away from the hearth. In twentieth century America, life simply moved much faster.

Chapter 16 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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