My Immigrant Story

This used to be my great-grandparents house in Morgantown, West Virginia. Though I was not born early enough to meet either Dominick or Carmella Corulli, I have spent the last weekend engrossed in their lives. Both were Italian immigrants who arrived as teenagers to try to make a better life for themselves than the one they might have had in Sicily. Dominick became a coal miner because it was one of the few jobs wide open to immigrants without much formal education, especially in the hills of West Virginia.

Theirs is not an unusual story, but Dominick and Carmella were luckier than most. Her parents had been relatively well off in Sicily and so when he proposed marriage, her mother insisted that she would only let her daughter marry him if he built them a house in Morgantown--not at one of the camp sites out in the boonies. Thus, the entire maternal line of my family was saved from the deep poverty and limited gene pool of most coal mining towns. In fact, this was one of the key reasons why several of their children, and most importantly their grand-daughter (my mother), were able to become college educated: they lived just down the street from WVU. And Dominick did something rather unusual--he commuted to the mine from the city. What a yuppie!

Dominick worked hard and managed to keep his wife and seven children in their family home throughout the Great Depression. There are two reasons often given for how he accomplished this impressive feat. First, it seems that he was such a consistent and reliable worker that his boss at the mine always made sure to keep him on, despite dramatic layoffs. Second, and more relevant for these times, his mortgage was replaced by a loan from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, a New Deal program. In this program, the federal government bought out mortgages from banks (who were happy to exchange it for bonds) and then gave a more favorable (and patient) loan to the homeowner. Maybe worth thinking about nowadays, huh?

Their second child, Josephine, my grandmother, was not able to go to college, having graduated high school during the height of the Depression (1937), and maybe not surprisingly her story is a bit more complicated. Her first marriage was arranged, and it failed--spectacularly. When my mother and aunt were in high school, Jo left her family for the man she had loved since her own high school days. Actually, my favorite photo of her with her second (and third!) husband, Jess, was of the two of them watching a cock fight after they had run off together to Cuba. It's still a sore subject in my family (obviously because it caused a lot of pain and embarassment--I mean this was the fifties), but I personally find it fascinating that my grandmother lived in Cuba on the eve of its revolution. It gives me sort of a wanderlust connection to her. The picture is the one momento I'll be bringing back to Manila with me.

My other favorite memories of her mostly involve obscene amounts of food. Thanksgiving included at least three main course choices--turkey, ham, and maybe even a chop of some kind--plus about a thousand side dishes, the best of which were clearly the stuffed artichokes. Once she was staying with me while my parents were away, and my high school boyfriend came over for dinner. She had prepared her signature dish--true Sicilian spaghetti with her own fresh pasta CUT BY HAND. He naively accepted her offer of seconds, which meant that she piled a new plate taller than the first one. He looked at me stunned, like he wanted me to get him out of eating the whole darn thing. I just shrugged at him. You don't mess with an Italian grandma.

That kind of eating, along with chain smoking and obesity, led to her unfortunate death in 1991. And, in another sad chapter, we headed down to Morgantown this past weekend for the funeral of her widower, Jess. Also an Italian, he was the kind of guy to pack a car full of groceries for a four hour trip to our house at Thanksgiving, because of course no supermarket in Columbus would have the right stuff. On the pepperoni front, I agreed. We had a tradition that he would bring in that bag first. It was a good tradition.

Well, these are my roots. I honestly don't know what, if anything, they say about me, but it's interesting stuff, eh? All in all, a pretty fascinating weekend.