The Immigrants

The Unhealed Cut

Copyright 2014 Matt Cairone

All Rights Reserved

He was born Anthony Mario Cappelletti. But they called him Tony, from the very beginning. 

Tony’s mother and father were Italian-Americans. 

Tony’s maternal grandparents were from Northern Italy, the Trentino region in the foothills of the Dolomites. They spoke Ladin, a rare dialect interweaving Italian and French. Louis Rossetta, his grandfather, came to the United States when he was seventeen; he came to escape hard times, to get a job building the railroads. Louis settled in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania, smack in the middle of the Snow Belt. He must have felt right at home. Tony’s grandmother, Antoinette, came to the United States via Ellis Island. Antoinette came alone when she was sixteen. She came after Louis was established with a job and reliable income. They were married in a small Catholic church in Port Allegany, Pennsylvania, with no family or friends at the ceremony. The witnesses were railroad workers Louis met driving steel nails into wooden rails. The Italians in Port Allegany didn’t speak Ladin. Louis and Antoinette learned to talk to each other.

Tony’s paternal grandparents were from Southern Italy, the small village of Positano on the Amalfi coast. They were accustomed to warm summers and mild winters with an abundance of lemons, tomatoes, olives, pasta and wine – la dolce vita.  Tony’s grandfather, Andrew, came to the United States when he was nineteen to build the railroads. Andrew ended up in a small town near the coast in southern New Jersey. Tony’s grandmother, Maria, came with him; they were already married. They set off right away to grow vegetables, grapes, and adapt as best as they could to the new land.  

Italy is a big country, culturally distinct from north to south. Tony’s grandparents were Italian, but very different: stoic figures who could survive the cold, harsh life in the mountainous region, on the one hand, and free spirits content with the sweet, soft life by the seaside, on the other.  They adapted to life in a new country, taking and using their respective, disparate backgrounds to meet the challenge.

From these new Americans came Tony’s parents, Joe and Angie.

Angie was born and raised in Port Allegany. Angie had two sisters and one brother. She grew up in hardscrabble Northwestern Pennsylvania. Winters were long and cold and hard. Summers were short and hot and humid and filled with bugs. 

Joe was born in Malaga, New Jersey, and he grew up near the shore, one of eighteen children. He grew up in a square, white clapboard house with a large garden. There was a chicken coop for eggs and meat, grapes for the wine, and vegetables to help feed the huge family. Joe was somewhere in the middle according to age.

He was one of three in the family who went to college, graduating from LaSalle in Philadelphia during the height of the great depression. He majored in finance and accounting, but there were no jobs when he got his degree. He got work where and when he could. Frustrated, he joined the Army in 1940. The Army shipped him to a paradise in the South Pacific called Hawaii. The army trained him on a base there, at Pearl Harbor. He was there on December 7, 1941, the day paradise was lost.

The army moved Joe to North Carolina. He enrolled in officer training. When he completed the training, he shipped off to northern Africa to fight in an anti-aircraft unit supporting Patton’s army against the desert rat, Rommel. He stayed in the war until it was over. His youth spent, he returned to South Jersey and took a job with the government as a special agent in the Treasury Department.

Angie moved to the small town in New Jersey where Joe lived because her older sister found work and a husband there. She found work too, and then she found Joe.  

Because of time lost to the depression and the war, Joe was thirty-five and Angie was thirty-two when they married. 

Life was good. The post-war years were prosperous. Life was easy for most Americans. 

But, there was an ugly undercurrent. Tony grew up with the deep, unhealed sore weeping pus all around him.