The Severini Family in Youngwood 1930s

 

Flora Severini 1938

The name “Youngwood” has a romantic sound, perhaps suggesting the translation of a local Indian observation about the trees that still pushed against its eastern border.  The reality of the name’s origin was more prosaic.

 It was all woods and farmland in the late nineteenth century, when most of this land was owned by the families of two men: John Young and James Woods.  Then the railroad came through between their land holdings. When a train station was built, they combined their names and called it Youngwood.

 (This is the version told in the commemorative book issued for Youngwood’s 50^th anniversary in 1949.  The version favored more recently on the Youngwood Borough website is that all the land was owned by a John Woods, and he combined his name with that of his maternal grandfather, Young.) 

In 1899, a newly formed land company bought out the owners, designed streets and created lots, which they began selling.  This is considered the birth of the town of Youngwood.  But it really began with the railroad station and the rail yards.  The old wood frame station lasted only a few years before the Pennsylvania Railroad built a brick passenger and freight station on the west side of the tracks.

 Then things happened fast.  Streetcar tracks ran parallel to the train tracks in 1901. Until then a part of Hempfield Township, Youngwood incorporated as a borough in 1902.  As buildings and houses went up, gas and electricity came to Youngwood in 1903.

 The railroad was the town’s first industry.  Some 90% of the coke produced in the United States came through Youngwood. Apart from the track switching stations, the “roundhouse” was a major maintenance and repair facility.

 Then in 1914 the Robertshaw Thermostat company moved from Pittsburgh and established its headquarters and a manufacturing plant in Youngwood.  Many of its employees, including foremen, lived in Youngwood.

Holy Cross Church in Youngwood

 By the 1930s Youngwood was a kind of village, comparable in population to Manoppello.  But it was not an Italian village.  The population was diverse, reflected in the number and variety of its churches. When Gioconda Severini walked or rode up Depot Street to the Roman Catholic church of Holy Cross on Eighth Street, as she did for decades, she passed the First Evangelical United Brethren Church on Fifth and the First Presbyterian Church on Sixth.  The Lutheran Church was on Fourth and Walnut, a Serbian Orthodox Church on North Third (founded by immigrants from Yugoslavia who helped build the train station), the Methodist Church also on North Third, and, after 1933, the Gospel Tabernacle church on Third Street Ext.

 Most of these churches broke ground early in the town’s history.  Holy Cross Church was formally dedicated on June 30, 1918.  Father Gilbert Straub was appointed permanent pastor in 1919, and was still pastor when the Severinis arrived in the 1930s, and for years afterwards.

 While Italians participated in the business and civic life of Youngwood, they were not the dominant group.  But they were a community within the community, especially through organizations like the A & B Society.  And it wasn’t long before the Severinis established themselves within that community.

 Ignazio probably join the A&B Society (or Club) right away.  It was under the auspices of the Sons of Columbus.  In 1935, a lodge for women was established, affiliated with both of these organizations. It was the Principessa Maria Jose #43 Council, and was also a beneficial society as well as taking an active part in civic affairs.  The founders were Gioconda Severini and two of her new neighbors on Depot St, Carmela Gelfo and Christina Mari.  G. was elected as the council’s first president, and was still president for at least the next 15 years.

 (“Principessa Maria Jose” was an Italian princess, wife of the king’s eldest son, who would therefore become Queen.  Italy was still a monarchy in 1935.  Born into the royal family of Belgium, she would become known in the 1930s for resisting Mussolini and trying to broker a peace with the United States.  During World War II she became head of the Italian Red Cross.  After the war she became the Queen of Italy with the shortest reign in history—just one month—before Italians abolished the monarchy.  But she remained a beloved figure, even in exile. It seems from the number 43 that her name was used for other such councils affiliated with the Sons of Columbus.)

 Carmela Gelfo was the wife of Domineck Gelfo, and lived across the street from the Severinis.  Their daughter Angeline and Flora Severini became close friends.  There was less than a month’s difference in their ages, so they were in the same grade throughout school.

  The Mari family lived at 210 Depot Street, closer to 3^rd Street but on the same side as the Severinis. Christina Mari was married to Elvino Mari, a shoemaker who had his own shop at the same address.  Born in 1890 in Acquasanta, in the province of Marche in Italy, he had come to America in 1910.  Christina was born in 1884, and emigrated from Italy in 1913. Several of their five daughters also became active in the Principessa Maria Jose lodge. By 1949, Armelina “Lena” Mari would be Treasurer (while G’s daughter Flora would be Corresponding Secretary.)  Lena also became the organist and choir leader at Holy Cross Church. The Mari family and the Severinis remained close friends, including Flora’s generation.

 Ignazio Severini’s tailor shop in Youngwood was on the ground floor of a large yellow brick building, known as the Wolfe building, at 313 Depot Street.When Ignazio Severini opened his tailor shop in the 1930s, men wore suits with white shirts and ties.  If they wore work clothes on the job, they wore suits on all other occasions when they were in public.  If their jobs did not require special clothes, they wore suits all the time.  It was common for men in “business” occupations to dress in a suit in the morning and not take it off until bedtime.  That was the standard also in the 1940s and 1950s, at least for business hours and public occasions. Men wore suits to watch sporting events, including baseball games.

 So there was plenty of work for a tailor, and Italian tailors were known to be among the best.  For decades, it was generally accepted that the best tailors in the world were Italian, and the very best were in Italy.  The famous London tailors were Italian.

Ignazio Severini in double-breasted suit 1942

 Even in the Depression, Italian men were conscious of style, so they were good customers.  A good suit could be altered to reflect current fashion, which by the late 1930s were being influenced especially by Hollywood films and film stars.  In the late 1930s and early 40s, suits were often worn with vests, and were sometimes double-breasted.

 The vests were often not just a matter of fashion.  A round pocket watch, attached by a chain to vest buttons, was kept in a vest pocket.  Vests were especially useful to tailors, who could keep small tools of the trade, such as tape measures and pencils, in the pockets.

 At noon on most work days, Ignazio Severini walked down the half block to 3rd Street, crossed to the other side of Depot, and walked a half block more to his home at 200 Depot Street, where he would have lunch.  He would walk back after lunch, and walk home at 5 p.m. or so. 

 When he walked home, he would be heading in the direction of where Depot Street began, at the eastern edge of Youngwood. As Depot Street extended from the train tracks in a straight line towards the west, it began ascending a series of hills.  Between the train tracks and Fourth Street was a gentle but steady slope.

Depot St., 4th to 3rd St. 1930s

This first long block between the train tracks and Third Street was also the beginning of Youngwood in time.  Besides the first train depot, the first buildings included a barn at the corner of Third Street, and on the north side of Depot St. was a log cabin. A photograph from the 1930s shows Depot Street as paved with bricks, and with trolley tracks running up the center.

 Streetcars also ran along Fourth Street, as well as the streetcar line to Greensburg which was just across the railroad tracks at the foot of Depot St. Just beyond these trolley tracks was a bridge over Jack’s Run and a swampy area that turned thickly wooded along a winding road leading away, to Mount Pleasant and other places.

  The Wolfe Building with the Severini tailor shop was on the south side of the block of Depot Street between Third and Fourth Streets.  Many of the town’s other large, multi-purpose buildings were on this block, including Youngwood’s oldest, the Love Building at 4^th and Depot, still the home of the First National Bank in the early 30s, though this institution would move in 1936 (the nickname of “the Bank Building” would survive longer.)  Also on this block was Youngwood’s largest building, the Miller Building, which (among other businesses) hosted a succession of large drug stores.

 Down Depot Street and across Third Street was the long block where the Severinis now lived.  In these years and probably since the town’s founding, this section of Depot Street was a lively mixture of commercial enterprises and residences.  Angeline Gelfo Miller described what it was like in the 1930s, in a short reminiscence she wrote fifty years later.

Depot St. from train tracks. 1920s or 30s

 “One can still remember the hustle and bustle on the little section of Depot Street between Third Street and the railroad station,” she wrote. “Saturday nights were extremely busy times; there was hardly room to walk on the sidewalks.”

 The railroad station was itself a busy place. There were four round trip passenger trains to Pittsburgh, and three round trips on the Sewickley branch.  Just across the train tracks, the streetcars from Greensburg or Mount Pleasant stopped every half hour.

 "I remember when there were businesses on both sides of Depot Street up from the railroad station,” Ange Miller wrote. “As I walk down the street, I can still visualize those merchants who provided specialized services for the train travelers and local people.” 

“The main hub was the Hotel Inverness at the corner of Third Street.”  This yellow brick 1903 building is on the south side of the street.  Further down Depot on that side was the Fulmer Bakery and Petrosky’s Restaurant (“they had excellent pies!”) “Frank Sullen's store was next door where my love for penny candy, gum and jaw breakers was satisfied almost daily.”

  “Below the store was the YMCA, a popular spot for the youth of the community. Then the railroad station was below that.”  That YMCA was in a brick building that was one of the oldest in Youngwood, dating from 1890. It was the Ellis residence and store, and had served as the town’s first post office.

 “As I cross the street, I remember the tennis courts on both sides; and on up to Joe Kekich's store where one could buy almost anything in the line of groceries, and more penny candy.”  Also on that side were a shoe shop operated by John Morelli, Maurice Shrader’s barber shop, another barber shop, Elvino Mari’s shoe repair shop, Shrader’s Grocery Store and Pyatt’s grocery and clothing store.

Severini family in 1934: Flora, Gioconda, 
Ignazio, Antoinette, with Carl in front

 In the center of the north side of Depot Street between the depot and Third was the new residence of the Severinis, at 200 Depot Street. Next door on the Third Street side was a large house that had contained the Shrader barber shop but became the long-time residence of the Charles Shoaf family.  Next door to the Severinis on the other side was a smaller building where in October 1933 Joseph Bizub opened a butcher shop.  The Bizub family also lived there.

 Almost directly across the street from the Severini home was Second Street, which came from the south and ended at Depot St. It led from the Robertshaw plant.  Just to the west of Second was the Gelfo house, which had until recently been the location of Dominick Gelfo’s barber shop.

 The Severini home was a wood frame house, which for much of their residence was covered by dark red shingles in a brick pattern.  There were two floors, an attic and a cellar. The street level floor had a front room—where the store had been—a dining room and small kitchen.  There were three bedrooms and the bathroom upstairs. There was a long porch in front, and in back a small yard, a water pump, and a strip of land from the small cement garage to the house, where they had a vegetable garden, with tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, carrots and mint.  Natz built a trellis and grew grapes.  In the  basement he made wine. 

Coming into that home beginning in 1933 was a unique newspaper edited and published in Greensburg: the Sentinel, which printed news stories in English and Italian versions.  I recall seeing new editions in that living room many times over the years.  According to Carl Severini, it was published by the Severini’s close friend, Carmen DePaul.

 But Flora, Ant and Carl were also growing up in a world of radio.  The “wireless” remained a novelty through the 1920s, but broadcasting of news, music, sporting events and a growing number of dramas and comedies began to fill the day in the 1930s.  According to the 1930 U.S. Census, the Severini home didn’t have a radio set by that year.  Only two out of five American homes had a radio in 1931.  Then it was one out of three in 1932.  By 1938, the conquest was nearly complete, as four out of five homes had a radio, usually in a prominent place in the living room.

  Some of the first programs (from 1932 and 1933) were The Lone Ranger, Amos & Andy, One Man’s Family and shows featuring Will Rogers, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bing Crosby and Jimmy Durante, as well as a program that years later Flora would remember listening to: “Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century.”

 Eventually the household included a Victrola in an elaborate wood cabinet, operated by a hand crank, that played thick vinyl 78 rpm records.  Gioconda favored opera, and Ignazio was partial to American marches, especially those of John Philip Sousa.

 From his childhood, Carl remembered a flood that washed out the wooden bridge over Jack’s Run on the other side of the railroad tracks in Youngwood (it was replaced by the stone and concrete bridge I recall from the 50s.)  The floodwaters covered the tracks themselves and pooled at the bottom of Depot Street.

 Though Carl would have been just a few months past his fourth birthday, the flooding he remembered may well have been part of the major flood of 1936 that wreaked havoc from New England to the Midwest.  Known as the St. Patrick’s Day Flood, it remains the worst flood ever in the city of Pittsburgh.

  It came after a hot, dry summer but a winter of record snowfall.  Days of heavy rain and rising temperatures that melted the snow in the mountains swelled the creeks, streams and ultimately the major rivers. The flooding destroyed a bridge near New Alexandria beyond Greensburg that had just been built the year before.  It all led to a major flood control project (authorized by FDR’s Flood Control Act in 1936) that included the Conemaugh dam and a flood plain that forced the abandonment of several small towns.

 This was not the only natural disaster of the mid-1930s.  The Ohio River flooded in 1937, destroying half a million homes in four mostly Midwestern states. A powerful hurricane devastated Long Island and parts of New England in 1938, causing more floods elsewhere. But perhaps the worst catastrophe came as a result of years of drought and overgrazing in the West.  Huge storms blew away millions of acres of land in 19 states over nearly three years, in what became known as the Dust Bowl. In 1934 the remnants of that dust layered on the porches of Greensburg and Youngwood.  

 In November 1936, Pennsylvania joined every other state but Maine and Vermont in reelecting President Roosevelt. Italian-Americans were now a robust part of the Roosevelt coalition. 

 Also in 1936, the Manoppello Group of Westmoreland County was organized in Greensburg, “to promote Americanism, education and brotherhood.”

Flora 1936. Someone--perhaps Flora
herself--wrote on the back of this photo:
"The Dreamer." She was 16.

 After the Severinis moved to Youngwood, Flora and Ant attended the public grade school on 6^th Street, and both went on to Youngwood High School.  Meanwhile, Carl attended the public grade school for first and second grades, and the next five years at the Holy Cross Catholic grade school next to the church on 8^th Street.  He remembered walking up the hill to 8^th Street everyday, walking home for lunch, then back to school and finally walking home in the afternoon. 

 The Sisters of Charity from Seton Hill in Greensburg taught at Holy Cross, as they did in Greensburg parochial grade schools. There were three classrooms for 8 grades, Carl recalled.  One classroom held grades one, two and three, taught by Sister Columba.  Grades four, five and six were taught by Sister Ida Marie in a second classroom.  Sister Marie Elizabeth taught grades seven and eight in the third classroom.  Carl remembers completing the third and fourth grade in the same year. 

 Probably from the late 1930s, Carl also remembers the Youngwood community picnics held at Idlewild Park, near Ligonier.  A train ran directly from the Depot Street station to the Park, so he watched families walking down the street past their house, carrying picnic baskets.  The Severinis would join them. 

Many American amusement parks—including Pittsburgh’s Kennywood—were built by trolley companies, as destinations to lure riders.  Idlewild is unusual because it was built to attract passengers to a new railroad route.  The park was built and owned by banker Thomas Mellon in 1878, who also owned and completed the Ligonier Valley Railroad.  The land is believed to have been the site of a battle in the French and Indian Wars 120 years earlier, with troops under the command of George Washington. Idlewild Park is the oldest amusement park in Pennsylvania, and the third oldest in the U.S. Rides including the wooden roller coaster and a Ferris Wheel were added in the early 1930s.

 The three Severini children all caught their share of the childhood illnesses of the day, such as measles, mumps, chicken pox, colds and flu.  By the time she was in high school, Flora had suffered with the measles four times.  But they avoided the true horrors of the time, especially polio.

 Judging from the warnings Flora and Antoinette eventually gave their children, G. must have been relentless about hygiene, with repeated warnings about fleas, getting ringworm from the back of movie seats, and germs in general.

 Antoinette, born almost three years after Flora, grew up somewhat in her sister’s shadow, she later recalled. When she was in second grade, Ant won a prize (a holy card) for running faster than the other girls.  She remembered this because she was never so thin and strong again.  Flora got the attention. She was the dreamer. Ant liked to sit and read and not be noticed, and watch everything, and listen. 

 They fought as sisters do, but they also shared special moments.  She remembered an afternoon when they were little girls, and their parents had taken them on the train to Pittsburgh to see an opera. They were so filled with music that when they passed a music store on the walk back to the station, they both begged to go inside so their father could buy them a piano.  Or two pianos—one for each of them.

 Their mother started to scold them and tell them not to be so silly and make a spectacle of themselves in public.  But their dad said all right, let’s go in and look.  Unfortunately, the door was locked—it was Sunday and the store was closed.  So he told them to look in the window and pick out their pianos anyway.  Flora immediately chose a white baby grand.  Ant would have liked that one, too, but she also admired the shiny black grand piano.  She picked that one.  Her father nodded and they walked happily the rest of the way to the station.  Later she realized that he must have known the store would be closed because it was Sunday, but she remembered his kindness in letting them dream and choose.

 Then when she and Flora were in grade school, their father sat with them at the kitchen table after supper as they did their homework.  When they were finished, he would copy their spelling and writing lessons, so he could improve his writing in English.

 Things got more complicated when they were older, especially when Ant was in high school. When Flora went out with her friends, especially if there were boys, their mother made Flora take Ant along as a kind of chaperone.  

The Coliseum in Greensburg, auto show in the
photo, but also a venue for Big Band dances

That didn’t slow them down much, though.  When they said they were going to somebody’s parents they might end up at a tavern, drinking high balls and mixed drinks.  Once when one of the boys showed up in an old jalopy with the top down, they all piled in and were laughing like crazy.  They put Ant back in the old rumble seat. The fifth wheel!—that’s where she fit in.  But she still saw a lot.  They were wild, and Flora was one of the wildest—although she couldn’t quite keep up with her friend Ange.

 Her mother would ask her what went on but she couldn’t possibly tell her.  Ant wouldn’t risk losing those times when Flora was nice to her and shared her secrets.  They’d had fun together, too.  Flora had started making movie star scrapbooks with pictures clipped from the Sunday newspapers and the movie magazines.  She pasted the photos into the big custom tailoring books their parents received from the Kling Brothers company in Chicago.  She made a small one on Dick Powell and a larger one on Loretta Young.

 She was going to do one on Carole Lombard and Clark Gable when Ant got interested and they did it together.  The first page showed Gable and Lombard rehearsing a scene from “No Man of Her Own” in 1933, their first movie together. On the second page they pasted a 1936 newspaper photo of them with Flora’s penned note saying that Lombard and Gable are said to be “that way” about each other.  The last picture in the book was from 1938, the year they married, with a clipping that quoted a woman wondering if the couple is expecting.

  Everything was pasted over the illustrations for suits that their father might make, like Model 206, Young Men’s New Wide Notch Lapel (two-button, shapely waistline) or Model 229, Men’s Conservative, or the one they didn’t cover up, Model 209, The New Gable: “attractive two-button, notch lapel, three patch pockets with inverted pleats, shirred back with yoke and half-belt, inverted pleat from the belt down.  Fancy patch pockets available at $1.50 extra.”

 Then Flora got too busy but she encouraged Ant to continue, and bought her a real scrapbook for her birthday, which Ant filled with photos of Don Ameche, Jimmy Stewart, Irene Dunne, Bing Crosby, and Ginger Rogers with her husband Lew Ayres and co-star Fred Astaire. 

Glenn Miller band

Flora was also a fan of swing music and the Big Bands.  Among the places that visiting bands played for dances in the late 1930s and early 1940s was the Coliseum Ballroom in Greensburg, several blocks west of downtown, at Vannear Avenue and Third Street.

Most of the major Big Bands of the era performed there, including Woody Herman, Sammy Kaye, Artie Shaw, Les Brown (with singer Doris Day), Benny Goodman, Lawrence Welk and Cab Calloway.

  For example, between a radio show on September 14, 1938 and a recording date on September 16, the Tommy Dorsey Band played for a dance there.  Glenn Miller and his band played to more than 1500 at the Coliseum in November 1939. Both Dorsey and especially Glenn Miller were among Flora’s favorites, as she said in later years.  

Another highlight at the Coliseum was the Easter 1937 appearance of the Ted Weems band, with new young singer Perry Como.  The Weems band was then a regular feature on the Fibber McGee & Molly radio show as well as hosting their own radio program.  Both Weems (born in Pitcairn) and Como (Canonsburg) were from the Pittsburgh area, with Weems having some unspecified ties to Youngwood.  The Coliseum however came to an untimely end in the summer of 1949 when it burned to the ground. 

Flora graduated from Youngwood High in the spring of 1938.  She got her picture in a newspaper, with a caption noting that she graduated with high scholastic honors.  But her parents couldn’t afford to send her to college, which they remembered with regret for many years.

 About six months after her graduation, and almost four months after she turned 18, Flora kept a diary. She began writing in a small blue diary book that latches closed (but doesn’t lock) on January 1, 1939. Though she wrote in it for less than two weeks (and tore out a page from January 5 and 6) it provides some idea of her life at that moment.

 She’d been to a New Year’s Eve party in Greensburg, and got home at 3 a.m., then got up for 9:30 Mass. New Year’s Day was both a Sunday and a Holy Day of Obligation.  She noted visitors to their home on Sunday and Monday, including family friends the DePauls and Lina Mari, who brought Sister Ida Marie and Sister Columba, two of Carl’s teachers at Holy Cross School.  “They’re just too sweet for words,” she wrote.  Sister Ida Marie wanted her mother to teach her Italian, and while she was there she played piano for them. 

 As a visitor on both days, the diary also mentions “Mary” with what appears to be an “R,” which would likely be Mary Romasco, Flora’s cousin, the daughter of G’s sister Prosperina or Pearl.

 Flora also got callers of her own—a young man with an Italian last name who came with friends, but evidently got the opportunity to tell Flora that he was “madly in love with me.”  She notes that he has the same first name as the last boy she had seriously dated.  “I’m so glad I’m not mad about him anymore.  Boy, I sure had it bad for a good long while.  Today is a year since I had my last real date with him.”  He now had a new girlfriend. “There’s a [her name] from Jeannette in his life now.  And in mine—no one definite for me I think.  Just have mental pictures—dreams.”

 But Ange had a new flame, and she talked about him while doing Flora’s nails or as they washed each other’s hair. (Ange turned this into a profession when her father’s old barber shop in their home was remodeled for her hair salon, or “beauty shop” as it was then called, which she opened in little more than a year, in 1940.) 

 Flora and Ange see each other almost every day, and Flora’s diary entries grow increasingly impatient with hearing about him.  Flora mentions a place they go called the Swing Shanty, where she expects to meet him. She also names a drugstore in Youngwood where she and Ange wanted to go for “a coke and smoke,” but it was too crowded.  She writes that Ange smokes but she is “1000 times glad that I don’t.”

 

Monday January 9 was Washday—an all day event in 1939.  Flora cleaned house, cooked dinner, ironed, helped with the clothes.  “Snuck a little reading in between.  Ate an O’Henry too.”  Earlier she mentioned reading “Charity’s Charm” by R.M. Ayres, a very popular and prolific British romance novelist.

 On Wednesday January 11 she went into Greensburg and bought a new powder blue silk dress and black shoes.  She met “Charlotte” in town—this was probably Charlotte Gettemy, who Carl remembers was Flora’s friend from her childhood on Stone Street in Greensburg.  Based on what she said in later years, she and her friends frequented the Tea Room and Lee's Restaurant on Main St. On that Greensburg trip she also visited “the Vitaces” and saw Ann and Thelma Cremonese.

Main Street with Lee's Restaurant's distinctive sign on left

Charlotte may have been with her when she shopped for a gold chain holding a cross--her main purpose that day. She had lost the one she had and was anxious to replace it.  (I mentioned these entries to Ant in a conversation in the 1990s, and she believed that the chain and cross was a gift from their mother, and Flora was afraid she would find out that she lost it.)

   She found one “something like the original” for $6.50 and paid a dollar down on it.  But she didn’t know where the money would come from. She’d worked for a week at Murphy’s five and ten in Greensburg during the Christmas shopping season, but hadn’t yet found a permanent job.  “Oh, Lord, please help me get a job.  I pray for this everyday.” And later: “Dear Virgin Mother, help me to get that cross paid for.”

 In her last full entry on January 12 she writes that she’s now saved two cents. “Am I rich!” 

The main entertainment for American families outside the home in the 1930s was the movies, and Flora was part of the first generation of Americans to go to the movies regularly.  On January 7 she writes that she rushed to get her housework done so she could go to the Youngwood theater to see “Just Around the Corner,” a Shirley Temple comedy in which Charles Farrell plays her father, a successful architect victimized by the Depression (but of course Shirley eventually saves the day.)  Flora thought Farrell was “swell,” but didn’t like his love interest, Amanda Duff (in her first of only eight movies before she switched careers to become a successful photographer.)

 On a later day she laments that the movie playing in Youngwood is “The Shining Hour,” a drama starring Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas and Robert Young, because she’d seen it in Greensburg after work at Murphy’s one night.  

"You Can't Take It With You" 1938

Her last actual entry (on January 13) is simply a list of the “Ten best pictures of the year,” meaning 1938.  Her choices were:“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” (the first Disney animated feature and the first animated feature ever), the ensemble comedy “You Can’t Take It With You” (with Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur, which won the Best Picture Oscar), “Boys Town” (Spencer Tracy won Best Actor for playing Father Flanagan in this drama), “Robin Hood” (the classic Errol Flynn adventure), “Love Finds Andy Hardy”(judged as the best of the Andy Hardy series of teen song and dance comedies starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney), the costume drama “Marie Antoinette,” and the melodramas “In Old Chicago” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

 Also on the list is “The Citadel,” starring Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell and Ralph Richardson: a morality play drama about a socially conscious doctor, based on a novel by A.J. Cronin.  Much later I remember at least one Cronin novel on our family bookshelves.

  Though Flora’s list includes seven of the top ten grossing films of 1938 (she apparently didn’t like or didn’t see the hit “Jezebel” which won the Best Actress Oscar for Bette Davis), she also doesn’t mention other films that have since become famous: the now classic Cary Grant comedies “Bringing Up Baby” and “Holiday,” as well as the Marx Brothers’ “Room Service,” Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” and the Leslie Howard version of G.B. Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” all released in 1938.

 In addition to movies, she lists 11 radio shows she listens to regularly, all of them known as daytime dramas or daytime serials, or soap operas.  Usually 15 minutes long, they were designed for women who were at home during the day and could listen while doing their domestic chores (which included Flora). They were becoming very popular.  There were ten serial dramas on the air in 1934, which more than tripled to  31 by 1936, and nearly doubled again to 61 by 1939.

 Flora’s list includes several of the most popular: “Stella Dallas” (which first went on the air in 1937), “Pepper Young’s Family “(a pioneer from 1932), “Hilltop House” (from 1937, in which Hilltop House is an orphanage) and “Mary Noble, Backstage Wife” (from 1935.)

 Though it had various antecedents (including comic strips), the soap opera form was radio’s invention.  The exception on Flora’s list is “Vic and Sade” (from 1932) which was broadcast in the daytime but wasn’t a classic soap.  Known for its brilliant writing by Paul Rhymer, it was a unique, gently comic evocation of everyday life in a small town family through the characters’ conversations. It was a program that could only exist on radio. 

 Other radio programs had more direct sources in stage drama, Broadway musicals, vaudeville comedy and dance and concert halls, though radio shows were creative in adjusting these formats. Flora mentions hearing Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, and other stars, either on evening dramas or musical variety programs. 

 Another form that radio pioneered was the situation comedy, and one of the most famous that remained particular to radio was “Fibber McGee and Molly” from 1935. Though she doesn’t mention it in her diary, I know Flora listened to it regularly at some point in its long run because in later years she often quoted one of its famous catchphrases: “T’aint funny, McGee.”  

 On January 3, Flora writes that she was in bed all day with a cold (later in the week she wrote that it was Carl who was sick in bed.)  She then relates the only dream in her diary.

 “Dear diary, I sure had a strange dream.  I dreampt I saw a star in the sky.  It faded and then shown bright again but had a cluster of other stars surrounding it.  They all seemed to descend closer and closer until suddenly in my arms they turned to doves.  I gathered them close and that’s all I remember.  I hope & pray it is a good omen of future success and happiness.”

Ignazio Severini 1939

 For several years in the 1930s—perhaps until 1939—the Severinis rented their house in Youngwood.  But when the owner fell behind in his taxes, he offered to sell the house to Ignazio.  G. recalled that he also offered them another building “next door” as well.  She wanted to buy both but he was more cautious.  So they bought their house at 200 Depot Street for (as G. remembered) $1500 plus the outstanding tax bill.  Now it was legally as well as really their home.