Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (12 page)

“
What’s wrong?” Ida whispered to Valletta.

“
You know Mrs. Jones?”

“
Sure do.”

“
Well, she wouldn’t let Momma eat with them.”

“
Why not?”

“
She and her kids sat down for lunch at the dining room table. Thinking nothing of it, Momma pulled out her sack lunch and sat right down with them. Mrs. Jones told Momma to eat by herself in the kitchen. Because that’s where ‘the help’ eats.”

Mrs. Huckins felt humiliated, both for herself and for her family.

Ida and Valletta were in the same class in school with the daughter of Mrs. Jones. But Mrs. Jones made it perfectly clear that she was not in the same class as Mrs. Huckins.

“
I guess Momma’s just not good enough for her,” said Valletta.

Ida and Valletta were high school juniors on Sunday, December 7, 1941. Ida heard the news on the radio about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor.

When Valletta came over to do her homework, Ida told her the news. Valletta went home crying. Her only brother, Buddy, was already in the navy.

The next day at the high school assembly, the voice of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt boomed over the radio loudspeaker: “We are at war!”

Tears streamed down Ida’s face. Her only brother, Ralph, was a member of the Iowa National Guard, which had already been inducted into the U.S. military service in anticipation of the war. Ralph would be one of the first to go.

Ralph was pretty lucky. As soon as he reported to duty at Fort Dix, New Jersey, he learned that the army needed more officers. Like most of the sergeants and corporals in his company, he applied to officer training school and was accepted. He attended school for three months at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was immediately promoted to second lieutenant in April 1942. Officers like Ralph were known as “90-day wonders.” He was groomed not to fight on the front lines but rather to orchestrate the battle from areas near the front lines. He would manage the flow of personnel going into battle and then ship the survivors home.

Buddy wasn’t quite as lucky. A Japanese submarine torpedoed his aircraft carrier, the USS
Wasp
, on its way to Guadalcanal in the South Pacific on September 15, 1942. Moments after the torpedo struck at 2:45 p.m., Buddy plunged into the water and held onto a log. He saw the
Wasp
burst into flames high over head and its fuel oil burning on the surface of the sea. “I’m a goner,” he thought. But those who were still alive aboard ship lowered themselves into life rafts or just threw mattresses overboard. Buddy swam to one of the rafts. U.S. destroyers rescued him and thousands of others. At 9 p.m. that evening, the
Wasp
sank by the bow. Of the ship’s crew of 2,247 men, 193 were killed.

Back in Mason City, Ida’s senior year of high school was mostly a sad one. Many of the boys were going off to war. Some were already dying.

But one unusually bright memory of that year stuck with Ida for the rest of her life. Her mother, Maria, worked at Mason City Tent & Awning to sew tents for U.S. troops overseas. Maria worked alongside two of her best friends. All three of the women were immigrant mothers who had known each other since their days in Farindola and had since become U.S. citizens. Once they set to work on their tents for U.S. troops, something wonderful happened. They hated to leave their stations. They ate their homemade lunches right there so that nothing would impede their productivity. “They sewed up a storm!” said Ida. Not only were the immigrant women proudly serving their adopted country in its hour of need, and not only were they having a ton of fun together doing it, but at the age of 50, Maria, who had toiled so hard for so long in so many ways, received a formal paycheck as official recognition of her worthiness and value for the first time in her life. “She had never been so proud of herself!” said Ida. And for the first time in Maria’s adult life, as she sewed her tents at her station and as she returned home in the evenings, her eyebrows rose along with the sides of her mouth as she smiled.

Ida was the top-ranked girl in the Class of 1943 at Mason City High School. She ranked third overall in a class of 403. The school newspaper,
The Cub Gazette
, splashed her wallet-size photo, along with those of 15 other distinguished seniors, across the top of the front page of the June 4, 1943, edition.

The girlhood expression, with its cheeky grin and delighted eyes, peered from the front page of the newspaper, albeit through the rimless glasses of a 17-year-old young lady whose face was framed by the jaunty upsweeps of her bouncy black hair. Filled with enthusiasm for what lay ahead, she still looked cheerfully and expectantly for guidance—and a push in the right direction.

West.

Ida had no second thoughts about leaving Mason City and joining Mafalda in California. Like many of her peers who were marching to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” on graduation day, she saw her hometown as a good place to grow up but as a place with no future for her beyond high school.

She had other reasons for leaving as well.

The era of Lehigh Row, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the relocation to town had left entirely different impressions on different members of the Di Gregorio family. The contrary perceptions of Elsie and Ida, who had such comparable life experiences, exemplified this distinction. Elsie and Ida were born just two years apart. They shared many of the same classes in school once Elsie fell behind two years because of her acute tonsillitis. And they were two of the youngest members of the Italian immigrant family, giving them the best seats in the house to observe what happened to almost everybody else in the house as they adjusted to life in small-town America. Despite their virtually identical points of reference, Elsie and Ida developed virtually opposite points of view regarding life in their hometown. Elsie found her place there. Ida did not.

The 20-year-old Elsie felt privileged for everything that she had. For her, the years on Lehigh Row and in town were years of immense pride and promise. She felt especially proud of her parents because of how hard they worked. They had come to this country with very little money and yet managed to give their kids a stable home in the tight-knit village of Lehigh Row with its swimming hole, baseball field, forest, and circus. “What more could a kid want?” Elsie sighed. During the Depression, simply having a job qualified a man as a success, and her father almost always had a job. Her mother worked equally hard, if not harder, at home. Elsie felt prouder than ever when her parents bought the house in town with the big messy yard and transformed it into a magnificent garden. There were plenty of wealthier families in town; but no other family, either native or immigrant, had such a beautiful garden. Elsie felt better off than anyone else in town. She felt triply privileged because of who her father was, who her mother was, and what their garden was. Her parents had built up the immigrant family in that town and gained the respect of others as hard workers, good neighbors, honest farmers, and solid citizens. No matter how much Elsie ever wanted to carouse around with her friends from school, she felt an even greater sense of pride in her family. Her parents had made her proud, and she would make them proud, too. She would uphold the family honor. She would wash the vegetables from the garden every night before dinner. She would peel the potatoes, snap the green beans, and can 600 quarts of fruits and vegetables a year. She was grateful for her hometown, too, for having given her family so many opportunities to improve its lot. Even when her peers kept moving away to California, life kept getting better for her in Iowa, because she kept moving up the ladder at the packinghouse. “They made new openings for me,” she said. “It worked for me to stay.” There was no place on earth where Elsie preferred to be other than Mason City, Iowa. Her goal in life was to live the very best possible life exactly where she was. “I just love it here!” her body tingled with glee. “The garden. The town. Everything. I live well. But I work hard for it. And that makes it all the sweeter!”

The 18-year-old Ida felt grateful for what she had, too, but something troubled her about her all-American hometown. Most of her memories of Lehigh Row were fond ones, but even the quaint immigrant village seemed to have its dark side. “People there stuck together,” she began. “It didn’t matter what country people came from. We were all in the same boat.” However, some people there showed little tolerance for those in different boats. Ida remembers, with a good deal of shame, her collusion in the attack on the Christian lady. She was just a kid then, but she and the other kids had come from a place where the adults objected so vehemently to fraternizing with people from different churches that the village kids could turn violent because of it. The intolerance of religious differences accompanied an intolerance of economic differences. If one Lehigh Row family improved its lot relative to the others, as did the Di Gregorios, some people became resentful, and the upwardly mobile family could no longer be part of the clan. On Lehigh Row, it seemed to Ida, people from all over the world stuck together as long as they fit the poor immigrant mold. Then when the Di Gregorios moved to town, Ida detected a whole new set of resentments that were less blatant but no less barbed. She recounted the strange things that happened to her elders in town from the very beginning: the way the homeowner raised the price of the house by 20 percent as soon as her father offered to pay the asking price, the way the cement plant supervisors from town laid him off as soon as he moved to town, the way Mafalda could never collect a paycheck in two years of working full-time for the taxpayer-funded county attorney, and the way Ralph was laid off from a new job on his first day, according to Ida, “once they realized he once lived on Lehigh Row.” Ida acknowledged that the Di Gregorios had never experienced official discrimination or physical abuse for being Italian, for being Catholic, for being immigrants, or for being from Lehigh Row. She knew that the family had risen to a level of considerable material comfort in town. However, she still sensed considerable social discomfort in town. For Ida, her family had received too many messages that they were not really wanted in town for her to feel truly accepted there. “You had it, but you didn’t have it,” she boiled it down. “It was heaven, but I couldn’t wait to get the hell out.”

What bothered Ida the most about living in town wasn’t intolerance of Italian Catholic immigrants from Lehigh Row. What bothered her the most was intolerance of people who were poor. People like the Huckins family. Despite their Anglo heritage and native-born Protestant credentials, the Huckins family tumbled to the status of social misfits, said Ida, “just because they didn’t have as much money as other folks in town.” That irked Ida more than anything else. The Huckins family had opened her eyes to the way things could be in society—by respecting one another despite their differences—and yet there seemed to be no room in the small-town society for the Huckins family. It made Ida’s stomach turn. It upset her that people seemed bent on aligning themselves with snobby social circles and excluding others from those circles. It was not the way that she had been raised. It was not the way that her parents had shown her how to live. It was not the ethic of Farindola. Ida found herself yearning for the egalitarian early days on Lehigh Row when everyone had a lot less but looked after everyone else a lot more. “Everyone seemed a lot happier when they were all poorer,” she groaned.

Ida concluded that her all-American hometown was a chronically cliquey place. It was ethnicity-conscious, even though just about everyone was European. It was religion-conscious, even though just about everyone was Christian. And it was class-conscious, even though just about everyone was middle class. It was impossible for Ida to discern if any single factor—ethnicity, religion, or money—weighed more heavily than the others in determining the relative status of cliques. All she knew was that she wanted nothing to do with any of them. She was fed up with the silly pecking order she saw all around town. “The whole place seemed like it was just an extension of high school.”

Some of Ida’s siblings and classmates disagreed with her take on the town. Others agreed. There was no reason for anyone to argue about it. Those who disagreed were more likely to stay. Those who agreed were more likely to leave. Free country.

As Ida prepared to leave, she wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She had a better idea of what she didn’t want than what she did want. She didn’t want another Lehigh Row, which had a strong sense of community but its own homegrown forms of intolerance. She didn’t want another place like the rest of town, which was wealthier but couldn’t seem to afford as much community. She wasn’t looking for a place that would combine the best of Lehigh Row with the best of the rest of town, because the two worlds seemed mutually exclusive to her. Nor did she suspect that anywhere else in America could offer anything much different or better in these respects than could be found in her all-American hometown.

At the age of 18, Ida just wanted to get the hell out of town and go live with Mafalda in California. Ida had no idea how much she would come to rely on her hometown later in life.

3. Another Kind of Depression

My father entered the world in a land torn by conflict.

His original name was Jozef Godzisz. He was born in the town of Rozlopy on the southeastern plains of Poland on January 22, 1924.

Rozlopy was his father’s hometown. A predominantly rural community of about 1,000 people, it lay on the outskirts of a bustling city called Szczebrzeszyn, a trading center of maybe 10,000 people.