| Chapter 1: | The Family |
where an appendectomy was performed. In the recovery ward, she was given water to drink and this mistake led to her death. While my paternal grandfather was working shoveling coal for Con Edison, his children were roaming the streets of East Harlem unattended by any adult. Public authorities stepped in and the children were placed in the Mount Loretto Orphanage in Staten Island. Salvatore was told that he could reclaim his children if he could provide adult supervision for them.
A man named Visconti from San Fratello owned a creamery in Stockertown, Pennsylvania and three retail Italian cheese stores in New York City and wished to sell his entire business. Salvatore, his brothers Charles and Al, and his brother-in-law Rosario, pooled their resources and purchased the creamery and the stores. Salvatore went to work in the creamery taking his children with him while each of his partners ran the stores in Bayridge, Brooklyn, One Hundred and Twenty-first Street in East Harlem, and Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. When Rose and her husband died, Rose’s brother Fred took care of their three sons, sharing his apartment with them on One Hundred and Sixth Street. Later, Salvatore took care of them in his apartment in the Bronx.
The creamery was a large stone structure with the factory on the first floor and ten rooms above it. The coal-burning stove didn’t always work and in the winter the children slept with their clothes on. The boilers used to transform milk into curd provided some heat during working hours. The children went to school, worked in the creamery after school, and occasionally helped local farmers with their chores. When they grew older, they worked in the