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Italian passenger ship S.S. America |
Ignazio soon got a job in a large tailor shop in Greensburg
near the train station, on Harrison Avenue. This was probably the shop opened
by Anthony Robert in 1914. But over the
next two years the news from Manoppello was not good. His parents’ health grew worse.
First his mother died, then a year later, his father.
Even the news about Italy was bad. With continued poverty there was political unrest and
violence. The new Fascist party and its
armed thugs, the Blackshirts, began a campaign of strike-breaking and attacking
socialist politicians. In late 1921
Benito Mussolini renamed them the National Fascist Party, and in the fall of
1922, Mussolini organized a march on Rome to demand power. To avoid bloodshed, the King made him prime
minister. It was the beginning of terror, warfare and the Fascist dictatorship.
By then Ignazio and G had already decided she would join him
in Greensburg, and they would remain there.
|
On her 1976 visit to Manoppello, Gioconda with her sisters: Serafina, Suor Carla, G., Onorina, Stella; with Rose Severini.
|
For Ignazio, there was now no close family in Manoppello to
return to. His sister was with him in
Greensburg and his older brother Giovanni emigrated to Ohio. His parents and their generation may have
been the last Severinis to live out their lives in Manoppello. A survey of
names in a mid-1990s telephone directory—just about the last time such a
directory was a source of fairly complete information—showed no Severini
listed. But there were 39 Iezzis listed
in Manoppello. G’s family in fact still
lived in the same house as she had. All but one of G’s sisters had remained in
Italy. Her younger sister Clarina
became a cloistered nun at the Capuchin monastery. She was Suor Carla.
Another factor in Ignazio and G’s decision could have been
the new United States laws to limit immigration, specifically from Italy and
Eastern Europe. (Immigration from Asia had been almost totally banned for
years.) The Emergency Quota Act of 1921
would become the sweeping Immigration Act of 1924. The 1921 Act continued to allow close relatives of U.S. residents
to join them, provided they were either spouses or would vouch for their
support. But there was no guarantee
that this provision would remain.
Gioconda might have gone as early as 1921, when her youngest
sister, the 19 year old Prosperina, sailed for America and headed to
Greensburg, where she was to marry the 32 year old Joseph Romasco, originally
from Manoppello. Instead G. waited until Flora was a little older. Just a
month after Flora’s second birthday, they took the train to Napoli to begin
their journey to America.
Gioconda was traveling with her cousin Giuseppina, also a
Iezzi, who was also married to a Severini, Ignazio’s cousin Raffaele. Raffaele Severini lived in Newark, New
Jersey. Guiseppina also had a daughter
with her, Antoinetta, who was eight years old.
Before they could get on the ship, they were herded into a
building with more people than she had ever seen in one place, G.
remembered. Doctors examined them and
they were dusted with powder for lice.
The officials were not mean but most of them showed no feeling but
impatience. The people were scared and
so tried not to offend the officials who would decide if they were allowed to
board the ship. Some travelers would get no farther than this: if they were
found to be too sick, or for reasons that remained mysterious, they were turned
away. They were careful, because if the
officials in New York sent them back, the steamship company would have to pay
the fare.
But G and Guiseppina and their children were allowed to
board. It was a big steamship with two
smokestacks. It was called America.
There were many steamships called America over the years,
from several different countries. This S.S. America was an Italian ship built
in 1908 that made its maiden voyage from Genoa to New York in May 1909. It’s
the same ship that brought Ignazio’s sister Anna Severini to America in 1914,
also from Napoli. It continued taking
passengers from Europe to New York, including returning American soldiers after
World War I. Just two years after this
1922 crossing, the ship changed destinations to South America, and four years
after that it was scrapped.
More generally, G’s voyage in 1922 was very near to the end
of an era that had begun at least thirty years before. With the restrictions of the 1924 law, the
ships full of immigrants soon stopped crossing the Atlantic.
But now safely aboard and with one worry behind her, G.
faced the voyage itself. They were deep
in the belly of the huge ship, and there were so many people. The only light came through the tiny
windows, but she did not like to look out, because the water was right there,
and it seemed it would cover them over at any moment. G. did not trust the food, nor some of the people around
them. But Guiseppina helped with the
baby, and Antoinetta played with her.
Once on the nearly two week voyage G. wrapped Flora in a
blanket and took her on deck to see the sky.
But the next day Flora was sick, and so there was another worry. What if they didn’t let her into the country
because her daughter was too sick?
Then they arrived in New York Harbor, on November 1, 1922:
The Feast of All Saints. Some had gone
on deck to see the Statue of Liberty. Then they approached their destination: Ellis Island.
They all were herded off the ship and
into even bigger buildings than in Napoli, as big as cathedrals. There were many more people there, all
talking different languages.
The building was cold, and they stood in line to be examined
again by doctors. Everyone was
frightened because if they did not pass they would have to go back. G. was worried about Flora. If they were sent back, she might get worse
on the return trip. Their money would
be gone, and they would be separated again from her husband by an ocean of a
size she now knew too well.
As they stood, they watched the people in front of them
being examined. They saw that some
people had an x marked in chalk on their clothes. Some worried when they did not get the x, but G. guessed that the
x was bad, and she was right. Those
were the people who had to go back.
They got to the front of the line, were quickly examined and
the doctors passed them. Now there was
another line, and at the end of that would be Ignazio, there to vouch for her
so she and Flora could stay.
But again she was worried because some said the boat had
arrived early. And when she got to the
official who looked at her papers, no one was waiting. She had seen Guiseppina and Antoinetta ahead
of them in another line, and her husband Raffaele Severini standing with them.
He lived in a city nearby, and could come to Ellis Island every day to see if
her ship was arriving.
She watched the official carefully. As he looked at her papers he frowned. He was not going to let her in. She did not know why.
Then another official came.
He spoke Italian. He told the
first official that her husband was here.
Without him, she would be turned away.
She thought it was a miracle.
But Ignazio was still in Greensburg. The man ready to sign for her
was Raffaele Severini, Guiseppina’s husband.
The first official looked at his identification, with the same last name
as hers. He passed them through. They had landed in America.
G. and Flora went to Newark with her cousin’s family, to
send Ignazio a telegram saying she had arrived. G. learned that it had been Guiseppina’s idea that Raffaele pose
as her husband. There were so many
people in so many lines that he was able to sign as the husband of two
women. Besides, to them, all Italians
looked alike.
Ignazio arrived in Newark the next day, looking very
handsome in his new raincoat, tailored suit and his beret. But Flora would not let him touch her
mother. She screamed at him in the
Italian of Manoppello: “Get away from my mother! Don’t stand so close to my mother! I don’t want to see you here,
you frog face!” This was a story G. told.
|
Harrison Ave. Greensburg |
They took the train, past the wide farm fields of central
Pennsylvania, through the mountains and around the Horseshoe Curve outside
Altoona, to the giddy hills of Greensburg, with trees everywhere, all along the
tracks. It was most of a day’s travel. They got off at the bustling Greensburg
train station, very near the tailor shop where Ignazio worked.
By American standards, Greensburg was an old town. There is evidence of Native Americans living in the area for thousands of years. The Lenni Lenape (Delaware), the most prominent in this part of western Pennsylvania when Europeans first arrived, were relative newcomers. The town itself was
settled by these European transplants before the American Revolution, a place of inns and taverns a day’s
ride on horseback from Ligonier to the east and Pittsburgh to the west. The young George Washington made that ride,
and helped establish that road.
Incorporated just after the Revolution and
named after one of its generals, Nathaniel Greene, Greensburg became the county seat
for Westmoreland County, the last county established by the British government
in the United States. There had been a
regular stagecoach stop just across the street from where the train station was
now. A hotel was built there before the
Civil War, and a hotel was still there in 1922, the Lincoln Hotel.
The town, and especially this part of the downtown, was
still growing. Much of that was due to
the railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad
carved out its roadbed and started service in 1852. Soon it was linked to the rest of the state, and then the rest of
the country. Hauling freight, carrying away the region’s coal and coke, and
bringing passengers, the railroad still dominated in 1922. It was in that year
that hundreds of people lined the Greensburg tracks to watch the latest
demonstration of the railroad’s power: the largest train of locomotives to
travel across the United States, a total of fifty steam engines.
As Ignazio and his family got off the train at the large and
ornate Greensburg station, opened just ten years before, they likely could see
just outside of it on Harrison Avenue, across the way from the Lincoln Hotel, a
much larger hotel under construction, the Penn Albert. It would be eleven
floors tall, and after it opened in 1923 it would be a center for community
events and entertainment, with its meeting rooms, the Crystal Room ballroom and
Chrome Room restaurant, and the Roof Garden for music, dancing and big events. Many years later, one of those events would be the wedding reception of their son.
And these were not the only hotels nearby. There was the Hotel Rappe about a block
away—it was almost as large as the Penn Albert—the old Cope Hotel, and soon
there would be the Keystone Hotel.
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Hotel Rappe, later Greens- burger & General Greene |
At the other end of Harrison Avenue, past the Merchant’s
Hotel, the heart of Greensburg’s commercial downtown began. There were big banks and the county Court
House. A new department store called Troutman’s was opening next year, where
the old Hotel Zimmerman was. There was McCrory’s five-and-ten and other shops.
All of that promised a steady stream of customers for the tailor shop, though
it was by no means the only tailor shop in the downtown. But it was the closest to the railroad
station and the hotels.
The house on Hamilton Avenue where they were first to live
was on the western side of Greensburg, near the crest of a hill and a corner of
Pittsburgh Street, a major road to downtown. G. must have been pleased to learn
that St. Anthony’s, a Catholic Church that served mostly the Italian community,
was a short walk away.
Ignazio, Gioconda and Flora lived there with Ignazio’s
sister and her family for about a year. Their second child was born in
Greensburg, on July 28, 1923. She was
baptized Antoinette Marie Severini.
Shortly after her birth, the family moved to a house on nearby Vannear
Avenue, which was close to the Westmoreland Hospital on Pittsburgh Street.
Though they were in a new country with a new language to
learn, and they faced the possibility of some hostility and prejudice against
immigrants and Italians, they were also surrounded by relatives and friends,
and generally people from Manoppello who spoke the same language, the same
dialect, with each other. There were also Italian clubs and lodges organized for social events, education and mutual
support, and their numbers were growing.
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Picnic 1957 of lifelong friends: Carmen DePaul, G., Mrs Armelia De Paul, Vince Di Pasquale, Mary Di Pasquale. Ignazio taking the photo.
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The relatives and friends from Manoppello saw each other
frequently. They were working and
starting families but they were still young.
When G. arrived in Greensburg she was 26. Ignazio was 29. Years later Vince DiPasquale recalled the fun
they all had, on picnics and outings and in each other’s homes. Often their get-togethers would include
playing musical instruments, singing and dancing. Ignazio—Natz to his friends—played guitar and mandolino.
Besides Vince Di Pasquale and his wife Mary, they remained
close for years to several other families including Carmen and Armelia DePaul,
and Rocco and Chiarina (Clara) Mazzaferro.
Armelia De Paul was born in Manoppello, and her maiden name was Gloria—the same
last name as Ignazio Severini’s mother—so there was likely a blood
relationship. She was born in 1896, and arrived
in the U.S. in February 1924.
Carmen--originally Carmine DiPaolo-- came from Polla in southwest Italy
in 1913.
Rocco Mazzaferro was born in Manoppello in 1893, and arrived
in Greensburg in 1910. Chiarina (Clara)
Mariani came from Manoppello in 1919, aboard the Dante Alighieri. They married and had a daughter in 1934,
Angelina, who would often be in the Severini home. Gioconda Severini may have been her godmother. Rocco was a tailor who eventually had a shop
on Otterman Street in Greensburg.
The Severini family
was probably still living on Vannear Avenue when G.’s father Carlo Iezzi
suddenly appeared. He stayed with them
while he opened a shoemaker shop in a little village nearby called Red Dog
(probably the village of Edna in Hempfield Township), where there was a coal
mine. Many Italians lived there. It was
called Red Dog because its streets were paved with the crushed stones that came
out of the fires the miners made to purify the coal. The stones were pink and black and red. They were used to pave other roads, and even to make bocce ball
courts.
One day in 1927 Carlo returned and said that he had sold his
shop and had lots of money, and he wanted to take Antoinette to the movies. She
was four. But G. didn’t trust his drinking.
So he went out alone and didn’t come home that night, or the next.
Then Ignazio read in the paper that a man named Charlie
Nezzi had been found badly injured on the railroad tracks under one of the
bridges in Greensburg—the Main Street or Maple Avenue bridges. He thought it might be Carlo and called the
hospital.
The hospital said that the man had died. Another man had
been with him, but they didn’t know if Carlo fell from the railroad bridge,
jumped or was pushed. They knew he had been drinking. He had lived for a while
after he’d been brought in, but no one could understand him, to find out where
he lived. Sometimes he spoke English,
sometimes Italian, sometimes French.
Carlo had been back and forth to Quebec, and some of his friends called
him Frenchy.
Natz told G., and she called her sister Prosperina, who
lived in Greensburg. She was married to
Giuseppe—now Joseph—Romasco. They had
three girls: Mary (1922), Jenny (1924) and Stella (1926). They would have a
boy, Louis, in 1929, and another daughter, Joann, in 1931. Prosperina called herself Pearl now, but G.
continued to use her Italian name.
G. wanted Prosperina to go with her to the hospital, to
identify their father’s body.
Prosperina refused until G. got angry, and finally she agreed. They went together but when it came time to
go down to the morgue, G. had to go alone.
They went down flights of stairs to the hospital’s
basement. G. was taken to a body that
was under a white sheet, with one arm dangling down. She knew immediately it was Carlo. She knew it was her father’s hand.
But the doctor and another man there insisted she could not
identify him officially unless she looked at his face. Finally she allowed them to pull back the
sheet. The next thing she knew she was
sitting on the floor, with the doctor looking at her as the other man held her
up. She had passed out and swallowed
her tongue.
Despite the uncertainty about how he died, Carlo Iezzi was buried in the Catholic Cemetery in Greensburg.
In 1928 Ignazio Severini was able to buy a small house at
637 Stone Street, not far away on the western side of Greensburg, with a $100
down payment. It was valued at $3,000.
Stone Street was a short, quiet street of houses. Across a large field was Grove Street, which
shortly intersected with Hamilton Avenue, but this was some distance south from
where they had first lived with Ignazio’s sister. At Grove and Hamilton, looking west just beyond the new Sacred
Heart School (it opened in 1922), there was a creek and a steep hill with nothing
on it but dandelions and trees. It was
where the city of Greensburg ended. G.
would take Flora and Antoinette up that hill to pick dandelions for salads.
|
Flora Severini, First Communion |
Flora was around
eight years old when they moved to Stone Street and just beginning school. It’s
likely that she attended the Fifth Ward public school on Spring Street, just a
few blocks away, at the corner of Grove St.
Antoinette would be of grade school age before they moved again, so she
may have gone there briefly.
But within a few years from their move to Stone Street,
there would be new challenges arising from events and forces far beyond
Greensburg. After the New York stock
market crash in the fall of 1929, the American economy began to weaken until by
1931 President Herbert Hoover was talking about “a great depression” taking
hold. When corporations lost stock
value they invested less, stopped expanding and eventually cut production. Families cut their spending, to ride out the
temporary downturn. But it only kept
getting worse. Banks failed (over 5,000
of them by 1932) so people lost their savings, and businesses could not get
loans. People lost their jobs.
Businesses closed. Some people lost
their homes, and some went hungry.
|
Johnstown 1934 |
In the early 1930s, all this was in plain view for everyone
to see. But the numbers remain
staggering. In just three years, the US went from a 3.2% unemployment rate in
1929 to nearly 25% in 1932. Pennsylvania was hit especially hard, with an
unemployment rate at 37% in 1933. In
places like Johnstown it was closer to 50%.
Every kind of job was hit. One of the first was
construction, which dropped nearly a third in 1930, and nearly another third in
1931. Manufacturing was not far behind:
US Steel cut wages in September 1931, and cut them again in the spring of
1932. Between 1927 and 1933,
Pennsylvania lost 270,000 manufacturing jobs.
Westmoreland County had a diversified economy, but parts of
it were troubled even before the Depression took hold. Coal and coke production had been declining
in the 1920s, so a combination of played-out mines, resistance to unions and
then a drop in demand in the 1930s saw 40% of the remaining mines close.
Much of Westmoreland County was farm country, and that
included Hempfield Township, which completely surrounded Greensburg. But farm income generally had been falling
for years. The Depression made it worse.
There was plenty of food, and no money to buy it. Farmers couldn’t sell overseas—there was
Depression in Europe, too, and by 1931 the European banking system had collapsed.
|
Unemployment line Pittsburgh 1933 |
The result was human suffering and uncertainty. In Sept 1932
Fortune magazine estimated that there were 34 million American men, women and
children without any income at all, 28% of the population, and this study did
not include 11 million farm families. By 1932 some 270,000 families had been
evicted from their homes. In 1932, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was trying
to respond to some 324,000 families seeking relief—the highest number in the
US.
Those with the least income—and the last workers hired, like
the black steelworkers of Pittsburgh—suffered first, and worst. But the middle class was not exempt: across
the US, teachers, nurses, ministers, engineers and middle managers were among
those sleeping in parks, or living in tents with their families.
A million men
were jumping onto to trains, piling into boxcars, and riding the rails back and
forth across the country in permanent transit.
People were desperate, and some did desperate things, adding
to the sense of a world spinning out of control. There were many instances of people organizing to fight
back, regardless of legality. Farmers
in every part of the country stopped bank auctions of their neighbors’ farm
equipment. In the Allegheny County borough of Rankin, members of the Unemployed
Council halted a sheriff’s sale of the furniture of an unemployed man and his
daughter by disarming a police officer, keeping out bidders while they
themselves bought all the furniture for a total of 24 cents, and then returned
it to the owner. In Wilkinsburg,
adjacent to Pittsburgh, another Unemployed Council seized a Duquesne Light
truck to prevent it from shutting off power to an apartment building.
1932 is considered one of the worst years of the Great
Depression, if not the very worst. So
it was not an ideal time to be starting a business. Yet it is likely that 1932 was the year in which Ignazio Severini
started his.
It is true however that the Depression also provided
opportunities. Such an opportunity
arose for Ignazio when, in nearby Youngwood, the town’s only tailor went out of
business.
|
Gioconda Severini |
According to Gioconda Severini, the person who talked to him
about it was Domenick Gelfo. It’s not
clear how the two men met, though it was likely through one Italian-American
organization or another. Gelfo had
arrived in America in 1907 from his birthplace of Vilarosa in Sicily.
By 1930 (and probably earlier), he and his wife Carmilla were
living in Youngwood. Carmilla would become one of Gioconda’s close friends. They had three sons: Samuel, Joseph and
Eugene. Their first child had been Angelina, born in 1916, who died six months
later. On October 3, 1920 they had
another daughter they named Angeline.
She would become Flora’s best friend.
They’d been born 20 days apart.
In the early 1930s, Domenick was moving his barber shop from
his home at 207 Depot Street in Youngwood, to a building he bought in the
middle of the next block at 313 Depot Street.
There was room in the building on the ground floor for a tailor shop as
well. Domenick would even give Ignazio
free rent for awhile.
The Sons of Columbus had established their A & B Club in
Youngwood as both a social club and a mutual support (the initials stood for
either Americanization and Beneficial or Association and Beneficial, depending
on who you asked.) Domenick suggested
that they would probably provide Ignazio with a loan to buy the equipment the
previous tailor left behind. The price
would likely be low.
Youngwood was a much smaller place than Greensburg, just six
miles away. Only about 3,000 people lived
there, while 16,000 or so lived in Greensburg.
But still, Youngwood needed a tailor, and Italians in nearby places
might be attracted to a tailor who speaks their home language.
At that time Ignazio may have lost his job in Greensburg
when the tailor shop closed, partly because the owner died. Though the 1930 Census confirms that in that
year he owned their home on Stone Street, he subsequently may have lost that as
well.
G. recalled that he
was riding streetcars to McKeesport to work in a tailor shop there. But at least he was working, so starting his own shop would
be taking a risk. Ignazio talked it over with G. They’d always planned that he
would have his own tailor shop, and here it was.
There is a photograph of Ignazio in his shop published in
Youngwood many years later that dates the photo at 1929. This so far is the only evidence that he’d
opened the shop by then, and there is more evidence to the contrary. According to the U.S. Census, Ignazio was a
tailor working as a “wage or salary worker” in 1930 rather than self-employed
or a business owner. That suggests he
hadn’t opened his shop yet, especially since his 1940 Census form said that by
then he was “working on his own account,” which was Census code for self-employed.
The more plausible
date for the opening of the Severini tailor shop in Youngwood is 1932 (give or
take a year), since according to Domenick’s daughter, her father opened his new barber shop in that building in 1932.
It’s not a quibble, because the difference is that most of
1929 was before the Depression, but 1932 was in the thick of it, and Ignazio
was taking a bigger chance. In any
case, he was certainly in business during the worst years of the Depression.
One important
event in the Severini family definitely took place that year of 1932: the birth
of Ignazio and G.’s son Carl on January 27.
He was their third and last child.
A few important national events in 1932 might also be
mentioned. That spring, thousands of
American World War I veterans gathered in Washington, D.C. to petition Congress
to pay them now the war bonus they’d been promised for 1945, because they were
in desperate straits. They remained
there in makeshift encampments, many with their families, through the
summer. The press covered the story extensively,
dubbing them the Bonus Army. This may
have attracted Ignazio’s attention. As a World War I veteran himself, he
may have been interested in the fate of his American counterparts.
Things were at an impasse in late July, with Congress
failing to provide the bonus and with President Hoover opposed to it. It was
then that a police officer trying to clear away a crowd from the entrance to
the Treasury Department panicked and shot a veteran dead. Hoover called out the Army to settle things
down. Instead, General Douglas MacArthur
decided to make war on the Bonus Army.
MacArthur, with his officers including Major Dwight D.
Eisenhower and Major George Patton, deployed tanks and tear gas, routing the
veterans and burning down their camps with gasoline. Patton led a cavalry charge with drawn sabers against unarmed
men, women and children. In a deadly
irony pointed out by historian William Manchester, among those that Patton’s
attack routed was a World War I veteran decorated for saving the life of Patton
himself. Though newspaper stories of
the day tended to support the government line that the Army had thwarted
dangerous criminals and radicals, Hoover never recovered his political
reputation.
After the rout, the Army rounded up Bonus Army participants
and their families, put them into trucks and drove them west on the Lincoln
Highway, Route 30, with an undetermined destination. But the Mayor of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, offered the marchers a
park where they could set up a new encampment.
So just beyond Jennerstown, where Route 30 climbs steeply up Laurel Hill
and trucks slowed in low gear, hundreds jumped off the back of the trucks. Many made their way to Johnstown, while
others presumably straggled into Ligonier and Latrobe and other western
Pennsylvania towns. Those who remained
on the trucks would pass through Greensburg (where there was more opportunity
to jump off) on the way to Ohio and points west.
Also in 1932, the baby boy of aviators Charles Lindbergh and
Anne Morrow Lindbergh was kidnapped from his crib in an upper floor of their
estate. A ransom note was found, a
ransom was paid, but two months after the kidnapping, the boy’s body was
discovered. The story was covered
extensively in newspapers and magazines and on radio. With her own infant son
asleep in his crib, this may have attracted G’s attention. But for certain, among those who followed it
avidly was 12 year old Flora Severini, who never forgot it.
Then in November came the historic 1932 presidential
election, with President Hoover the Republican candidate for re-election, and
New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt the Democratic candidate. In local elections, newly naturalized
Italians often voted with the ruling majority of their time and place, or for
the candidates supported by their employers (usually Republican), because (as
was often the case in the coal patches) their jobs might depend on it.
In presidential elections, Italians had generally supported
the Republican candidate until things began to change in 1928, when the
Democrats ran Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated by a major party.
His campaign was met in Oklahoma by the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan. But among primarily Catholic Italians that 1928 candidacy began their move to the Democrats that
became a majority in 1932 for FDR. Nevertheless, when FDR won the presidency in
a landslide in 1932, Pennsylvania was one of only six states he didn’t win.
President Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By the end of
the year the new administration made many changes. Price supports began
improving farmers’ incomes. Rules for
businesses and industries, a minimum wage and protections for workers
(including a ban on child labor) were increasing profitability and
incomes. The federal government started
projects to get electrical power to rural areas.
The government
supported relief efforts in all the states and began public works on what today
is called infrastructure. An early
example was probably the Greensburg Post Office building on Pennsylvania
Avenue, erected in 1911, which was essentially doubled in size and modernized
in 1934-5. It later become the
Greensburg-Hempfield Public Library.
Also by the end of the year the federal government increased
confidence in the banking system by guaranteeing deposits for the first
time. Even by the spring the banking
system was stabilized and working again while the country began moving away
from the gold standard (I recall G. telling me that when the government called
in the last gold dollars, Ignazio kept a few as souvenirs. To my knowledge, they never turned up. But I do remember that for gifts he often
gave silver dollars.)
So by the end of 1933, even though the Depression still
gripped the nation, things were looking up.
But there were other changes as well.
The growth from immigration that had characterized Italian communities
in the U.S. since the late 19th century came to a dead stop in the
1930s. The ships carrying thousands of
Italians no longer sailed. In fact,
more people were leaving the U.S. than entering it. That included Italians who returned home, where the money they
earned in the U.S. would go farther, and family and social structures were
better adapted to making do.
But those who stayed were establishing themselves and their
children in their communities. Still,
the support within the Italian community remained important, as did
organizations like the A&B Society in Youngwood.
According to G., for awhile after he’d opened his shop,
Ignazio Severini supplemented his earnings by taking several streetcars into
Pittsburgh a few days a week to do tailoring work there. Otherwise, he was commuting by streetcar
from Greensburg to his shop in Youngwood.
G. remembered meeting him at the streetcar stop at 5:30 each day, with
her baby Carl in her arms, or later, holding his hand beside her. They were followed both ways by their cat.
But Ignazio worried about the snowy mornings when the
streetcar tracks might be blocked and he couldn’t get to the shop. Soon he began to look around for a place for
them to live in Youngwood. G. didn’t
want to leave Greensburg but finally agreed when a house became available a
short block from the tailor shop, across the street from the Gelfo residence.
It was available because the store on the first floor facing the street had
gone out of business. (This may or may not have been Jake Rueben's fruit market, which according to
what Angeline Gelfo Miller remembered, was on this block but closed during the
Depression.) The owner agreed to rent the house to them for $10 a month.
Perhaps after a brief return to living with Ignazio’s
sister’s family in their house on Hamilton Avenue (which had since been
expanded), the Severini family moved in 1933 or 1934 for the last time, to 200
Depot Street in Youngwood.