Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (8 page)

“
We used everything but the squeal!” Ralph boasted.

Then Maria took the leftover lard from the previous year’s pig, mixed the lard with lye, and melted the gooey concoction, bubbling on the cook stove, into soap. When the soap cooled and hardened, she and Serafino cut the slabs into bars with a knife.

The family ate wild jack rabbits brought home by Serafino. Unlike other men from Lehigh Row, Serafino never hunted the rabbits, because no guns were allowed in his home after the accident. While the other men felled their prey with shotguns from afar, Serafino simply collected the hapless bunnies that had been hit by trains and lay alongside the tracks not far from Lehigh Row. “Sometimes,” said Ida, “he came home with the biggest jack rabbits.”

Occasionally, Maria broke the neck of a chicken from the chicken coop. The exceptional treat of a roasted chicken cacciatore went a long way at the dinner table. Each member of the Di Gregorio family had his or her assigned part of the bird. Bessie always got the neck and head, her favorite part. Ida always got a wing. Ralph, the only boy, always got a breast. There were just enough wings, breasts, thighs, drumsticks, and spinal cavities on one bird to serve nine people. If there was ever a spare thigh, great anticipation awaited the announcement of whom would be awarded the tiny tender “filet” tucked into the corner of the thigh. The decision, of course, was left to the parents. No organ or tissue went to waste: liver, gizzards, kidneys, veins, or cartilage. As long as they lived, the Di Gregorios could never imagine disposing of any blessed chicken, pig, or cow bone until it had been respectfully “cleaned.”

Serafino and Maria filled Christmas stockings, which were just regular socks, with apples, walnuts, pecans, Brazil nuts, and hard candies. On one exceptionally bright Christmas morning, Ida awakened and ran to her sock. She opened it to find, in addition to the usual goodies, a truly exotic indulgence: a California tangerine. In the dead of a Midwestern Depression winter, the shockingly orange and tartly sweet fruit that peeled so easily made for a giddy childhood treat.

During winter, some families on Lehigh Row didn’t have enough money to buy coal to heat their homes and to keep from freezing at night. Kids walked along the nearby train tracks, hoping to stuff their gunnysacks with scraps of coal that had fallen off the trains and onto the tracks. But sometimes even the tracks were bereft of scraps.

Meanwhile, huge chunks of coal rolled alluringly past Lehigh Row aboard the flatbed rail cars that were headed for somewhere far away. Cruelly, the huge chunks never slid off. They were too big and heavy, some as big as ripe pumpkins. Grown men who worked for the railroad could barely wrap their arms around the biggest chunks and plop them onto the flatbed cars. But the bigger the chunk, the bigger the prize.

People from Lehigh Row resorted to desperate measures to gather coal for their potbelly stoves. Some of the men and boys, mostly the wiry teenage boys, devised a daring maneuver. On a frosty morning, the 13-year-old Ralph joined the older boys and a few men who were stalking a coal train as it idled at a roundhouse just south of Lehigh Row. Because of the proximity of the roundhouse to the neighborhood, the trains could pick up only so much steam before rolling north past the neighborhood. Ralph and the others huddled near the stretch of track between the roundhouse and Lehigh Row, rubbing their hands together to keep warm.

When the train rolled out of the roundhouse, Ralph eyed the oncoming steam locomotive. His wary brown eyes tried to gauge the right moment. As soon as the train curved beyond sight of the workers at the roundhouse, Ralph and the others, adrenaline pumping and hearts pounding, chased the flatbed coal cars, leapt onto their sides, shimmied up the slippery steel ladders, mounted the moving platforms with the huge chunks of black gold, and started shoving them toward the perimeters of the platforms.

Meanwhile, the girls and women from Lehigh Row waited nervously with their wagons in the ditches alongside the tracks near the homes. The six-year-old Ida, her eyes at the same level of the railroad ties, watched the steel wheels of the locomotive churn slowly but menacingly a few feet in front of her nose and circle ominously high over her head. “Now
that
was scary,” she shuddered just remembering it.

As the locomotive accelerated and the flatbed cars advanced toward Lehigh Row, the brothers and fathers pushed, hurled, or kicked the chunks off the ledges and down to the sisters and mothers waiting below. Then, just before the train sped too quickly beyond sight, Ralph and the others flung themselves from the tops or sides of the cars with enough force to land and roll out of harm’s way.

Some of the men and boys did it because they had to do it, or else they would’ve frozen to death. Others did it because they were capable of doing it. Still others did it because everyone else seemed to be doing it.

But for the 13-year-old Ralph, the motivation went much deeper. He never talked about it. He never would’ve allowed himself to talk about it. He just knew what he had to do. He was, after all, the only son in a family of nine. It was a responsibility that had fallen to him. On the surface, it was as simple as that. Beneath the surface, his motivation was unique and personal in a way that went to the very core of his being.

Up to that point in his life, his unspeakable role in the family had been defined by the accident. There had to be some way for him to live that down—even though it had been just an accident. There had to be some way for him to atone for that horrible day. He could never bring back his oldest sister. But if he could put his own life on the line for the sake of the family, then he would leap at the chance. Gathering coal from a moving train was the most obvious way that the 13-year-old boy alone could contribute something essential to the family. For Ralph, the coal was about much more than coal. It was about redemption.

A couple times, the trains accelerated too quickly for Ralph to jump off safely. When that happened, he rode atop a coal car until its next stop in Lake Mills, 40 miles northwest of Mason City, near the Minnesota border. He either hitched a ride home or just walked.

Nobody on Lehigh Row talked about the coal raids outside of Lehigh Row, but nearly everyone there participated in them. “We all did it,” said Ida, “and we all felt sort of guilty about it. People were afraid of getting thrown in jail or deported or something. We didn’t want anyone outside Lehigh Row to know about it.” Nobody said a word.

Few people from the railroad seemed eager to punish anybody from Lehigh Row. Often, the trains slowed down more than necessary as they crept near the neighborhood, as if to make it easier for people to hop on and to hop off. At those times, the conductors seemed to know full well what was happening but looked the other way.

Community solidarity expressed itself in many forms. For the sake of survival, people relied on each other. As in Farindola, so on Lehigh Row.

Nobody on Lehigh Row had health insurance. People saw doctors only in case of emergency and paid the bills out-of-pocket. The Di Gregorio children relied on homemade remedies, starting with the wine that Serafino had made with the wild grapes growing on the porch. When the kids came down with colds or flues, Maria gave them the wine boiled with lemon wedges or with a whole grapefruit. The citrus peels, when boiled with the wine, seemed to ward off the illnesses.

The remedy worked so well that Maria convinced Serafino to make his wine in volume rather than relying on the wild grapes and store-bought raisins. Thus began another annual production. Once a year, Maria purchased 48 crates of grapes and crushed them in the kitchen. Serafino then made enough wine to last a year. He filled two 50-gallon whiskey barrels in the basement, amounting to about a quart a day for the family and guests, with enough to spare for illnesses.

But the homemade remedy did little to alleviate the earaches, nausea, and vomiting that tormented Elsie for two years, from 1930 to 1932. She became sicker and sicker from age seven to age nine. She had difficulty swallowing and breathing, and she couldn’t hold down solid food. She became so dizzy that she kept losing her balance and couldn’t walk straight. Sometimes, she tipped over while just sitting in a chair.

“
A small wind would’ve blown me over,” she remembers.

“
She was just like a limp dish rag,” Ida remembers.

By 1932, Serafino was taking Elsie to the doctor once a week, paying cash each time.

The doctor kept sending Elsie home. “She only needs a good night’s sleep.”

Serafino kept returning her to the doctor.

The doctor kept sending her home, and he also kept charging Serafino $5 a week—half his salary—month after month after month. Between 1930 and 1932, Elsie was so sick so consistently that she missed nearly two years of school.

The savings in the cigar box were being steadily depleted. There were not only doctor bills for Elsie but also hospital bills for the other kids. Leola had her tonsils removed. Ralph had his spleen removed because of a football injury. At least the bills for Leola and Ralph were one-time expenses, but the bills for Elsie seemed endless.

She kept getting sicker. Finally, on Christmas Eve of 1932, Serafino walked to the grocery store on Lehigh Row and called for a taxi. He rode with Elsie downtown to Park Hospital.

The doctor at the hospital delivered alarming news. “It should have been diagnosed long before this,” he leveled with Serafino. “Your daughter is suffering from an acute case of tonsillitis. The poison from her tonsils has spread throughout her body. Either we take them out right now, or she won’t live till tomorrow!”

“
Okay!” said Serafino. “Do it!”

But Serafino wasn’t sure how he’d pay for the surgery—because suddenly, he wasn’t sure of many things. Based on the cost of the tonsillectomy he’d recently paid for Leola, he knew he could afford the bill for Elsie as well. However, he couldn’t avoid a nagging suspicion about the belated diagnosis of such an ordinary illness. He added up the money he’d already spent on two years of pointless doctor visits. All told, it was a lot more than the cost of a tonsillectomy. “This is not right,” an inner voice spoke to him as he stepped out of the front door of the hospital.

On the hour-long walk home—half way across town and then along the lonely railroad tracks that led through the barren cornfields to Lehigh Row—the 46-year-old Serafino thought long and hard about his responsibilities. For two years, Elsie had needlessly languished to the point of nearly dying. For two years, he had dipped into Maria’s cigar box way too much for no good reason. He berated himself for having been duped into squandering so much of the family’s savings. The cigar box still contained a respectable stash of cash, but the sting of the undue losses prompted him to feel more protective about the dwindling reserve. He worried about how much longer it would take Elsie to recuperate from her prolonged exposure to the poison. The surgery could be just the start of another round of bills with no end in sight. Someday, there could be nothing left in the cigar box at all. Then what? He had to find a way to stop the bleeding.

The men of Lehigh Row did many things, legal and illegal, to obtain money for doctors in hard economic times. Serafino had done everything legally up to that point; he had played by the rules. But he found himself questioning the wisdom of the rules that had allowed a doctor, who had been either corrupt or incompetent, to profit handsomely from his corruption or incompetence. “That’s not right,” the inner voice spoke again.

Serafino steadied his balance as he stepped off the paved road at the edge of town and onto the railroad ties that straddled the tracks. He felt proud to pay for bills that were fair. He didn’t expect everything in life to be fair. But above all else, he felt obligated to do what was fair for the family. He didn’t have to think hard about creative ways to cover the cost of Elsie’s tonsillectomy, but he had to consider the potential consequences.

Bootlegging was practically a way of life on Lehigh Row. No one wanted to talk too openly about it, but almost everyone was doing it. Since 1920, Prohibition had opened up a whole new way for a working man to supplement his income, especially a working man who had once lovingly tended the vineyards of Italy. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had banned the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors”—as well as their importation and exportation—“for beverage purposes.” By so doing, the amendment opened up a brisk black market for the stuff. Oddly, the amendment explicitly prohibited the “sale” of liquor but not its “purchase,” practically inviting folks to fill the gaping loophole in the law with barrels of booze.

The people on Lehigh Row who weren’t selling booze were almost assuredly purchasing it from their neighbors. The Greeks were known for their sweet wines. The Italians were known for their smooth wines. Families of other nationalities were known for their beers, whiskeys, or moonshines. Some people made alcohol in their basements and sold it by word of mouth to folks from all around town. Other people bought alcohol from elsewhere and quickly sold it for a profit.

“
But a lot of the stuff floating around town isn’t that good,” Serafino knew. “I could do better.” As he stepped off the railroad ties and strode toward 30 Lehigh Row, he spotted the wild grapevines climbing the arbor against his porch and reminisced about the wine he had sold freely in Farindola, the wine that had paid his passage to America.

On the other hand, Serafino had to think about the law. Under the National Prohibition Act, Serafino was not breaking the law by possessing or even making wine for himself, his family, and his guests. But he would certainly be breaking the law by selling the stuff. If caught, he would end up at the mercy of the hostile social forces that had inspired the law in the first place, codifying into the Constitution the terms of a culture war.