Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (9 page)

Serafino knew that across America in those days, and especially in small towns across rural America, liquor was associated with lower-class Catholic immigrants. And because Prohibitionists suspected liquor of being an instrument of the devil, lower-class Catholic immigrants were suspected of being, well, instruments of the devil. As a social, political, and religious movement, Prohibition pitted rural, native-born, Protestant fundamentalist Americans against mostly urban, Catholic immigrants. Prohibition was an anti-liquor movement by law, but it tended to be an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant movement in spirit, cleaving the country between dry states in the heartland and wet states on the fringes. In the dry state of Iowa, Serafino knew that he was a likely suspect no matter what he did.

Yet the law was the law. He did not want to raise his children to flout the law.

“
But I also want to raise my children,” his upper lip stiffened. He wanted his children to see doctors when they needed to see doctors and to have tonsillectomies when they needed to have tonsillectomies—without having the family be gouged for it.

“
What is the ethical thing to do?” he asked himself. “It is not necessarily the legal thing to do,” he posited. “Not in this case. Not for this tonsillectomy.”

He made an ethical bargain with the law. He decided to sell just enough wine to cover the remaining medical bills for Elsie’s illness, protecting the family against any further losses because of it. At the same time, hoping to shield the family from any repercussions, he made a solemn vow: “I’ll accept full accountability for whatever the consequences might bring.” He’d have to be careful. He might face charges. But he felt, on balance, that taking the risk was the right and responsible thing to do. Serafino, the inveterate vintner, walked through the front door of his home and became a bootlegger.

His unique blends of wild grapes, tame grapes, and raisins were a hit. He intended the operation to be a clandestine one, but the fumes emanating from the burners in the basement were so thick that they seeped up into the house and stung the eyes of whomever happened to be there. He cooked the wine, poured it into his barrels, and let it ferment. He stored the finished products covertly in old olive oil cans in the basement. He sold his wine by the gallon.

Within a few months, he earned enough money to cover the cost of Elsie’s tonsillectomy. She recovered rapidly, requiring no further doctor visits. Seeing no further need to keep selling his wine, Serafino began to wind down his operation.

But the authorities had caught wind of it.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the
Mason City Globe-Gazette
newspaper printed stories each week describing how undercover police officers sniffed out the homes of bootleggers, raided the homes, and imposed fines on the perpetrators. In one account from Lehigh Row, the undercover police obtained an incriminating note from “a friendly, unsuspecting foreigner” who had mistaken the officers for customers and pointed them toward the home of a neighbor.

According to other accounts from Lehigh Row, the police bought ice cream cones for the children to try to tempt them to tattle on their neighbors. On yet other occasions, some bootleggers pointed the police toward other bootleggers to reduce the competition.

Ida remembers the night the police pounded on the door at 30 Lehigh Row. She watched from atop the stairway as the police ransacked the basement, spilled the wine from the barrels all over the dirt floor, and confiscated some olive oil cans as evidence.

Serafino paid a fine, losing whatever money he had earned by selling wine. Financially, it ended up being a wash. But the cost turned out to be greater than the fine.

“
Somebody snitched on us,” said Ida. “Somebody who knew us. We had some ideas, but we couldn’t know for sure.” The Di Gregorios were left to wonder if there was someone in their community whom they could no longer trust.

Neither doctors nor cops were seen regularly on Lehigh Row. Other than merchants and the honey man, the only people from the outside world who visited the neighborhood on a regular basis were those who brought religion.

Holy Family Catholic Church, located in Mason City proper, built a satellite church on Lehigh Row to accommodate the swelling demand. The immigrant families from southern Europe, eastern Europe, and Mexico were overwhelmingly either Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox. For the Roman Catholics, a priest from Holy Family came to say Mass each week at the satellite church, called Immaculate Conception Church. The nuns from the Catholic parish also came to the satellite church to teach the kids catechism during the summer. The parish even hosted picnics in East Park, the big public park near downtown Mason City, just for the kids from Lehigh Row.

Ida ate it up. To her, religion was like music. With all its liturgies, hymns, and prayers, religion was another form of communication that she could fully share with her parents.

Learning about religion also allowed Ida to connect in a deeper, mystical way with her mother, who recited the rosary daily. Ida could not understand all of the Latin or Italian words of the prayers being chanted, but she could see and hear how much the rosary meant to her mother. It was obvious to Ida that Maria derived infinite solace and encouragement from her daily meditation on the circle of beads with its interlocking stories of sorrow and glory. No matter what affliction, accident, or animosity befell Maria or her family, the soothing incantation associated with that simple string of beads seemed to help her find peace with all things immanent and transcendent. Beneath the often-inscrutable words, Ida found in the rosary a direct link to her mother’s soul.

Maria prayed the rosary each morning. Serafino blessed each of his children with the sign of the cross as they lay in bed each night. And Ida loved her catechism. She colored the pictures in her coloring books that were filled with Bible stories about the seven days of creation, Noah’s ark, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. She learned about the church, how to sing the songs, and how to say the prayers. She never missed a catechism class. She looked forward to it.

“
My first Holy Communion really meant something to me,” she said. She was officially welcomed to the table as part of the holy family.

She also learned from just about everyone she knew on Lehigh Row that it was a sin to go into other people’s churches. In those days, it was Catholic or nothing.

That created a problem, because one of the religious people who often visited Lehigh Row was a Protestant missionary, Reverend Ida O’Halligan. Some of the Catholic kids in the neighborhood referred to her scornfully as “the Christian lady.”

She wore black high-top heels and black glasses, tied her hair in a bun, and drove a Model T. She brought Christmas gifts and threw parties for some of the poorer families on Lehigh Row, many of whom were Catholic. Those families, according to some of the Catholic kids, weren’t “good, practicing Catholic families”; otherwise, they’d never let the Christian lady get anywhere near them. She kept her distance from the so-called good, practicing Catholic families and the other folks who had food on their tables. The good, practicing Catholic kids chastised the Christian lady as a “do-gooder” who came to Lehigh Row just to round up the sorry folks who “couldn’t manage their money.”

A few of the “good” Catholic kids decided to take matters into their own hands one day. Ida was among them. They were primed and ready for the Christian lady.

The approaching Model T stirred the dust in the distance. The advancing rumble of the engine called the kids to arms.

“
The Christian lady! The Christian lady!” cried the kids who had been keeping vigil outside. Other kids spilled out of their homes.

The unsuspecting Christian lady drove directly between two rows of duplexes. She parked her car, opened the door, planted her black high-top heels into the gravel road, and shut the door behind her.

“
Get her!!”

Rocks and green apples pelted her from all sides. She ducked for cover and fumbled with the door latch. She slipped inside, mostly unscathed, and sped away.

Her hasty retreat exhilarated the kids. They kept screaming, as if on a warpath: “The Christian lady! The Christian lady!”

A few days later, Ida greeted a nun outside Immaculate Conception Church as the kids were gathering before catechism class. Ida unveiled her broad grin and proudly told the nun about the attack on the Christian lady. “We sure kept
her
away!” Ida chuckled.

The nun refused to laugh. She lowered her stiff black habit, gazed sternly into Ida’s eyes, and informed her of the stunning revelation: “We’re
all
Christian!”

“
Oh,” Ida turned her head away, feeling ashamed of herself. She was seven.

The next time Reverend Ida O’Halligan came to Lehigh Row, Ida took a second look. It amazed the little seven-year-old girl how this woman of the same name hopped into her own car and drove herself around. Few men drove back then, let alone a woman. And she was a minister. Ida had never heard of a woman minister before. And she worked outside the home. As far as Ida knew, any woman who worked outside the home couldn’t get married, or else she’d lose her job. “That’s just the way it was back then.” Ida gaped in awe at this strangely independent woman who had apparently chosen work over marriage. Reverend Ida O’Halligan was a complete mystery from the outside world.

Leola turned 16 in 1933 and felt even more pessimistic than Ida about the employment prospects for women. Leola resigned herself to a fate of working at the only place in town that was hiring a good number of able-bodied young women as well as men: the meatpacking plant. It was officially known as Jacob E. Decker & Sons. It was commonly known as Deckers.

“
I can either work at Deckers,” Leola told her mother, “or I can work as a cook, a maid, or a whore.” Leola pulled no punches. “What’s the point of school?” she spewed the term with contempt. “I might as well go to work right now.”

She quit school at the end of the ninth grade in June 1933. She lied about her age so she could join the assembly line at Deckers. The packinghouse hired her without delay. She went to work trimming the fat from the pork.

In December 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealed the Eighteenth Amendment. The age of Prohibition came to an abrupt end, to the surprise of nobody.

Six months later, in June 1934, Serafino surprised everybody.

A ramshackle farmhouse went up for sale in Mason City proper. A sagging, rotting barn stood about 30 feet from the house. The house and barn, however, were but warts on a beauty. They rested upon a stunning expanse of almost two acres of unkempt but unblemished flat land smack in the middle of an upstanding neighborhood filled with homes with nowhere nearly as much land.

The street names in the upstanding neighborhood followed the order of succession of the first 14 U.S. presidents: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Quincy, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, and Pierce. On the other side of town, just a few blocks away, the parallel street names paid homage to the states in order of their admission to the union: Delaware, Pennsylvania, Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Carolina, Hampshire, Virginia, York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and so on. Almost all of the cross streets in town were numbered streets arranged into a neat grid pattern. The two main bisecting roads in town were named Federal Avenue and State Street. Federal Avenue and State Street sliced the city into roughly equal quadrants and intersected at Central Park in front of City Hall. The entire map of Mason City proper was a metaphor for the federated republic.

Built in 1900, the run-down farmhouse with the big messy yard among the presidents stood less than two miles from Lehigh Row—but a whole world away. In the new world, there were paved roads instead of gravel lanes. There were green lawns instead of gray dirt. There were cement sidewalks leading practically everywhere instead of just a single set of railroad tracks leading to town. And there were very few Italians.

The farmhouse belonged to an absentee landlord. Serafino walked to the landlord’s house, located in another part of town, and knocked on the front door.

The Anglo landlord answered. “The house is on the market for $5,000,” he accentuated each syllable of the price, as if to discourage, deter, and dismiss the stranger.

Serafino, who knew the price beforehand, offered cash on the spot for the full amount.

The landlord raised his eyebrows, stepped backward, and took a deep breath. “The price has just gone up to $6,000,” he exhaled.

Serafino shot the landlord a look of disbelief but could do little else. Serafino didn’t have the extra $1,000 either in his pocket or in the cigar box at home. He bid the landlord goodbye, walked home along the railroad tracks to Lehigh Row, asked his brother-in-law for a loan, and returned to the landlord’s house with the full $6,000.

The landlord took one look at the stack of money and surrendered. “You win,” he agreed to the sale. He refrained from further price hikes, knowing he’d be hard pressed to find another buyer at the already-inflated price.

The Di Gregorios got the house—but not much of a housewarming. The lukewarm reception came from both parts of town.

Some people on Lehigh Row congratulated the Di Gregorios, but others didn’t. At the Lehigh Row grocery store, bakery, and pool hall, some people snickered and sneered.