In a fast reactor, we evaluated a new core concept that prevents severe recriticality after whole-scale molten formation in a severe accident. A core concept in which Duplex pellets including neutron absorber are loaded in the outer core has been proposed. Analysis by the continuous energy model Monte Carlo code MVP using the JENDL-4.0 nuclear data library revealed that this fast reactor core has large negative reactivity due to fuel melting at the time of a severe accident, so that the core prevents recriticality. Regarding the core nuclear and thermal characteristics, the loading of Duplex pellets including neutron absorber in the outer core caused no significant differences from the normal core without Duplex pellets.
Nel corso della propria vita, ognuno ha a che fare con emozioni, sensazioni, comportamenti e, quindi, più in particolare, con le parole che lo mettono di fronte a ciò che tanto la propria cultura, quanto le rappresentazioni che da questa discendono classificano come menzogna, verità, falsità, passione, ira, desiderio, inganno, bugia, sdegno, impulso, sentimento, emozione, odio ecc. A queste parole del vocabolario comune corrispondono, in realtà, dei costrutti mentali che ci appaiono come dei grandi apparati significanti. Per questo contributo, si è scelto un tema tipico del discorso filosofico, letterario, psicologico, antropologico, semiologico e sociologico: la menzogna. In realtà, la linguistica si colloca, in un certo senso, in una dimensione che costituisce un osservatorio particolare e privilegiato cui non è possibile rinunciare. Essa, infatti, si trova in una condizione specialmente favorita, poiché possiede la strumentazione necessaria per descrivere minuziosamente quanto una lingua mette a disposizione dei parlanti quando questi, per i casi delle loro vite, s'imbattono nelle nebbie della bugia, dell'ira, della passione amorosa, di quella politica ecc. Cioè quanto una lingua rende disponibile all'uso comune. ; Over the course of life, each and every one of us has a certain relation with emotions, sensations, behaviour and thus, in particular, with the words that each of us place in front of that which both in the culture itself, as well as in the representations that come from these, are classified as lies, truth, falsity, passion, ire, desire, trickery, untruths, indignation, impulse, sentiment, emotion, hatred etc. These items of common vocabulary in reality correspond to mental constructs that appear as the greater apparatus of meaning. This current article has chosen a subject typical to the discourses of philosophy, literature, psychology, anthropology, semiotics and sociology: the lie. In fact, linguistics is situated, in a certain sense, within a dimension that constitutes a most particular and privileged observatory, an opportunity that should not be missed. Linguistics actually finds itself in an especially favoured condition, as it possesses the instrumentation required to minutely describe that which a language places at the disposal of its speakers when, in the normal course of their daily lives, they find themselves caught up in the mists of untruth, anger, amorous or political passion, etc. That is, it can describe everything that a language makes available to common use.
In an effort to decarbonize the marine sector, there are growing interests in replacing the contemporary, traditional propulsion systems with nuclear propulsion systems. The latter system allows freight ships to have longer intervals before refueling; subsequently, lower fuel costs, and minimal carbon emissions. Nonetheless, nuclear propulsion systems have remained largely confined to military vessels. It is highly desirable that a civil marine core not to use highly enriched uranium, but it is then a challenge to achieve long core lifetime while maintaining reactivity control and acceptable power distributions in the core. The objective of this study is to design a civil marine core type of single batch small modular reactor (SMR) with low enriched uranium (LEU) (<20% 235U enrichment), a soluble-boron-free (SBF) and using mixed D2O+H2O coolant for operation period over a 20 years life at 333 MWth. Changing the coolant properties is the way to alter the neutron energy spectrum in order to achieve a self-sustaining core design of higher burnup. Two types of LEU fuels were used in this study: micro-heterogeneous ThO2-UO2 duplex fuel (18% 235U enriched) and all-UO2 fuel (15% 235U enriched). 2D Assembly designs are developed using WIMS and 3D whole-core model is developed using PANTHER code. The duplex option shows greater promise in the final burnable poison design with high thickness ZrB2 integral fuel burnable absorber (IFBA) while maintaining low, stable reactivity with minimal burnup penalty. For the final poison design with ZrB2, the duplex contributes ∼2.5% more initial reactivity suppression, although the all-UO2 design exhibits lower reactivity swing. Three types of candidate control rod materials: hafnium, boron carbide (B4C) and 80% silver+15% indium+5% cadmium (Ag-In-Cd) are examined and duplex fuel exhibits higher control rod worth with the candidate materials. B4C shows the greatest control reactivity worth for both the candidate fuels, providing ∼3% higher control rod worth for duplex fuel than all-UO2. Finally, 3D whole-core results from PANTHER show that the use of the mixed coolant contributes to ∼21.5 years core life, which is a ∼40% increase in core life compared to H2O coolant (∼15.5 years) while using the same fuel candidates and fissile enrichment. The mixed coolant provides excellent core lifetimes comparable to those of HEU military naval vessels (∼25 years vs. ∼21.5 years) while utilizing LEU candidate fuels.
The understanding of the mechanisms behind nucleotide recognition by Argonaute 2, core protein of the RNA-induced silencing complex, is a key aspect in the optimization of small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) activity. To date, great efforts have been focused on the modification of certain regions of siRNA, such as the 3′/5′-termini and the seed region. Only a few reports have described the roles of central positions flanking the cleavage site during the silence process. In this study, we investigate the potential correlations between the thermodynamic and silencing properties of siRNA molecules carrying, at internal positions, an acyclic L-threoninol nucleic acid (aTNA) modification. Depending on position, the silencing is weakened or impaired. Furthermore, we evaluate the contribution of mismatches facing either a natural nucleotide or an aTNA modification to the siRNA potency. The position 11 of the antisense strand is more permissive to mismatches and aTNA modification, in respect to the position 10. Additionally, comparing the ON-/OFF-target silencing of central mismatched siRNAs with 5′-terminal modified siRNA, we concluded: (i) central perturbation of duplex pairing features weights more on potency rather than silencing asymmetry; (ii) complete bias for the ON-target silencing can be achieved with single L-threoninol modification near the 5'-end of the sense strand. ; This study was supported by the European Union (MULTIFUN, NMP4-LA-2011-262943), the Spanish Ministry of Education (CTQ2010-20541), Generalitat de Catalunya (2009/SGR/208). CIBER-BBN is an initiative funded by the VI National R&D&i Plan 2008–2011, Iniciativa Ingenio 2010, Consolider Program, CIBER Actions and financed by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III with assistance from the European Regional Development Fund. We are indebted to Dr. Elisa Pedone for her helpful advice and for providing technical assistance. We acknowledge support by the CSIC Open Access Publication Initiative through its Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI). ; Peer reviewed
Part seven of an interview with educators in the Leominster, Massachusetts area. Topics include: How education and the family system has changed from generation to generation. How grocery shopping has changed. The types of food people ate and family dinners. Different Italian dialects. Playing games with neighborhood children. The difference today between the parent, child, and teacher relationship. ; 1 SPEAKER: Um, but from the time that the war ended, um, I was in school. My parents demanded that I go to school. Uh, at the school, I, I did what everybody else did. Uh, we had a dozen sheep or so and, uh, one of my older cousins, uh, who was out of school, you know, she's completed her fifth grade and was apprenticed to a tailor in, in town. Matter of fact, she made my first pair of pants. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: I still remember that. [Laughter] Um, he would, he would take the sheep out to the fields during the morning, and, uh, I would release them in the afternoon after school. Now, the school day was like maybe 9 o'clock to about 12 o'clock, 12:30. Um, you know, you arrived, you know, when you arrived. Oftentimes you had a, uh, a slice of bread with you, you know, the half of breakfast, and you were not allowed in the classroom if you're going to be eating anything, so you have to… SPEAKER: No free lunch? SPEAKER: … you'd have to wait out in the hallway. SPEAKER: No free lunch? [Laughter] SPEAKER: No free lunch, right… SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: … until you had your piece of bread or whatever you brought with you then you went in. The school got out roughly 12 o'clock, 12:30 because there were no lunches served, and, uh, every-, everybody went home. So at that time, I would go to relieve my older cousin and, you know, then [unintelligible - 00:01:19] I'd bring the sheep home. Um, but coming to this country, it's when -- my father went to work as I said in a coalmine, came to Leominster, went to work in a plastic shop like so many others. My mother as well. Uh, we were fortunate that my grandmother, my mother's, uh, mother, lived with us for a while. So she was able to watch over the children and, you know, helped with the 2 household chores and so on. My mother, you know, went to work. But I can never remember my parents ever entertaining the thought that, you know, when I became 16 or 15 or whatever that I should quit school and go to work. They just kept telling me that education was the future and encouraged me and paid for my college education and supported me, including having a car to drive. [Laughter] SPEAKER: Whoa! You got that? SPEAKER: And money for Saturday night dates. [Laughter] SPEAKER: That was the common… that was the common statement of most Italian parents, and I'm sure the other parents, too. There was no discussion whether you were going to continue school. If you look down the street at 7 o'clock in the morning, you saw husbands and wives walking to the factory, okay, and coming home at 5 o'clock. Okay, and they would say to you, the common term was, "You're going to have it better than I have." There was no discussion about going to college. It's where you're going to go, where can we afford you to go. Okay? There was no discussion of, "I'm not going." You will. Okay? Or you took a trade. Let's not forget that. Lots of kids took trades, which was, as far as I'm concerned, I'm a big supporter. Okay, so electricians, plumbers, and many, many Italian plumbers and electricians [unintelligible - 00:03:09] in the city of Leominster and other cities. But to answer your question, there was no discussion. You were going to do exactly… SPEAKER: Never any questions. SPEAKER: No. SPEAKER: And I know my mother's family, they were all high school graduates except her oldest brother. And my grandfather has had a stroke, and my mother was the youngest of seven children, and because of that had to be the bread earner and delivered milk at 4 o'clock in the morning in the city of Boston and things like that 3 [unintelligible - 00:03:47] kept the family going. But all the girls went to high school. My aunt went to [unintelligible - 00:03:53] State. In those days, for Italian women to have a college education, I mean, I'm talking about late '20s and early '30s, it was one of the few things. My mother had the option to do that and elected to get married instead. So she didn't follow through with that. But as far as my dad's family, he was the second oldest. He was the oldest of nine in this country, but he had an older brother in Italy that didn't come until he was maybe 11 or 12 years old. So when my dad was in the eighth grade, two weeks in the eighth grade, my grandfather found the opportunity at that time to go to work at DuPont. So that was the end of his education. And he went to work at DuPont to help support the family, and that's part of the reason that he had later on had to study for the civil service type exams. All of that, but there was never any question. [Laughter] I don't think it ever came up that you weren't going to go to school. I mean it was just a given. It was a given. SPEAKER: Thinking of progression of the parents who came from Italy, the next generation, which would be our parents, us, and now our children, every generation had it so much better than the one before that, and each one contributed to the latter going [unintelligible - 00:05:41]. SPEAKER: The American dream? SPEAKER: Yeah. My kids have it so much better than I do, I think, in many ways. But in many ways they don't. We didn't have the hecticness of the world today. SPEAKER: No. SPEAKER: We had wars, but we didn't have the [unintelligible - 00:05:50] television, drugs, rapes, bombings, you know. We didn't have that. We didn't have that. SPEAKER: No. 4 SPEAKER: Divorce. Divorce. If you hear about a divorce in the city of Leominster in 1940, it was gossip all over the room. That was a big thing. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:06:07]. SPEAKER: Yeah. You know, today it's common that people live together. Imagine if someone lived together not married… SPEAKER: I was the first one in my family and all of my aunts, uncles, cousins, the first one to be divorced. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: And I don't think that that… it was a trial. I mean, I can't even describe the guilt that goes with that. But you also know what you can live with and what you can't live with, you know. But I thought it was the end of the world, but my parents were so accepting of that. SPEAKER: They were a little more [modern]. SPEAKER: I suppose and trusted enough to know that it wasn't a frivolous thing. I mean, it wasn't something that, you know, people are married for two or three months like [unintelligible - 00:07:02] now and then they divorce. This is the thing, you know. And that was a very difficult thing to do. You felt also like a failure because no one else before you… you know, all your family that preceded you, no one… SPEAKER: The family system worked. I guess that's my point. The family system worked. Each generation, as Stella said, you know, it gets a little better. They have a little more. My father had his first car at 15 years old. We would walk up town, go to [unintelligible - 00:07:39], Missouri and [unintelligible - 00:07:41], which was downtown. They didn't have big supermarkets. And we would carry the bundles once a week and we would shop daily for our meats. We would go to [unintelligible - 00:07:52], our local [unintelligible - 00:07:52] right down the street, and you charged. 5 Let's try to do that today. We went to the Italian market. We'd say, "Jeff, charge it. My mother will pay you at the end of the week," and they pay. SPEAKER: That's right. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:08:09] on the hamburger and salami. SPEAKER: They have Italian colonial store prior to [unintelligible - 00:08:14], one on Lincoln Terrace and one on Lancaster Street. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: The Coop. Yup. SPEAKER: Italian Coop. SPEAKER: Yup. SPEAKER: Yup. \SPEAKER: And you'd go to buy groceries and they would write down the cost right on the bag and add it up. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: They do. [Unintelligible - 00:08:30] is probably charged. SPEAKER: And they were quick, too. I'll tell you something about a charge because I worked at [unintelligible - 00:08:41] but Luigi's Market. SPEAKER: Luigi's. SPEAKER: It was the old burger chain. And you're right. We used to have sludge that we kept in a little metal container so that, you know, Mike would be getting out a [unintelligible - 00:08:49] and come in and pick up some milk or bread and call me Mashy. Right Mike, Mashy? SPEAKER: Mashy. SPEAKER: Mashy. SPEAKER: Mashy. SPEAKER: Put on my slip. "Okay, Mike." I'd write it down. And then at the end of the week or whenever payday was, you know, they would all come in and say, "Okay, what do I owe?" And they will pay. 6 Well, I remember one time, Mike and Lucy were both there, and they said, you know, "Mashy, how much do we owe?" So I pulled out the slip and I said, "You owe," at the time, I'll say, "seven dollars and fifty cents." "Really? What did I buy? I don't remember getting that." SPEAKER: [Laughter] JEAN: "Hey, Mike, don't you remember you bought this, you bought…" "Uh, I don't remember that." But as it was, he had a brother. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Okay. And his brother had come in and bought that and I put it on his tab. [Laughter] SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: I still remember that, and he couldn't figure out, "How come I owe you all that money?" [Laughter] We straightened that out. [Laughter] SPEAKER: You know, maybe we should [unintelligible - 00:09:48] the city and there were many that were set up like the Italian [unintelligible - 00:09:55] over there. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:09:58] market was on what? SPEAKER: On Mechanic Street? SPEAKER: Mechanic Street? SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Oh, yeah. SPEAKER: It was to the church there. SPEAKER: I think there's another one on Crescent Street, but I can't think of the name of that one. SPEAKER: Geronimo. SPEAKER: Right near South Cotton, is that Cotton Street? SPEAKER: The Geronimo. SPEAKER: The Geronimos were on the… SPEAKER: Okay. 7 SPEAKER: The flea market, The Geronimos. SPEAKER: It's not a flea market. It was [unintelligible - 00:10:18] the Geronimo. SPEAKER: Okay. SPEAKER: On Salisbury Street. SPEAKER: The Geronimos on Salisbury [unintelligible - 00:10:23] going on what? Mechanic, the beginning of Mechanic? SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Near the paint store. SPEAKER: Not only did the grocery stores give you a charge, they delivered your food. SPEAKER: They delivered. SPEAKER: All you do is call up and say, "I want this, that," and they delivered. SPEAKER: My mother had a bleach man, a chicken guy, and I had to always [makes beheading noise], right? A bakery guy and [unintelligible - 00:10:47] clothing guy. Remember the guy from Fitchburg? You have two bucks a week or a buck a week. And Savetelli's downtown. You go buy a vacuum cleaner and you give him a buck a month. SPEAKER: Would they make house calls, or where do those…? SPEAKER: They make house calls, except… oh, Savetelli's. Do they come around? SPEAKER: No. SPEAKER: No. SPEAKER: But all the other ones did though. SPEAKER: But all the other ones did. Milk, bread, bleach, chickens, bakery. SPEAKER 3: The rice man. SPEAKER 2: Mr. Freda, Joe Freda, and [unintelligible - 00:11:11]. SPEAKER: I never heard of a bleach man. SPEAKER: Oh, there were, yeah. You had to use bleach. 8 SPEAKER: The cabinets were clean. Laughter] SPEAKER: Ice man. [Laughter] SPEAKER: I mean, I saw all these others, but never the bleach man. So, what? Would they come with a…? SPEAKER: Well, it was mostly because of the product that would, you know… it came in glass containers. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: I could remember many times in Luigi's you know, my banging up against the gallon of bleach that was on the floor and breaking it, and then, oh, I don't like the smell. Then you had to clean it up. So I couldn't understand it, but you know, the charging obviously was a way of life at the time and very helpful, you know, very helpful. But in Pennsylvania, we talk about [unintelligible - 00:12:01], the coal mining town. When I first visited it again, I brought my wife with me. As we approached the town, it was a hilly area, and you could see the rows of houses. They're all duplexes. Okay? And down at the bottom of the hill was where the coal mines were. Okay? And the houses were all up on little narrow roads, a row of houses. They were all duplexes and about 50 feet behind them, a row of outhouses. Okay? They all had them. Eventually they were converted to little sheds for the garden. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Because, you know, indoor plumbing came. But remember the song "Sixteen Tons"? SPEAKER: Yup. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: "I owe my soul to the company store." SPEAKER: The company store. SPEAKER: Because the company owned the store and you charged everything, and they let you charge but you're also indebted to them. Okay? 9 So when times were hard and you went on strike, they supported you. They allowed you to charge, you know, for your groceries. And the houses were all company houses you rented. And so they didn't throw you out. Okay? But by the time, you know, the three-month strike or six-month strike, you know, ended, you're in serious debt. So you owed your soul, and that's exactly what it meant. Okay? You couldn't leave. You were pretty much chained, you know, to that company. And it's very visual as you approach the town and you see the homes. Now, they're all, you know, individually owned. Some people bought both sides. Most people bought one side. And what's funny about it is they modernized. Okay? And you drive into the town now and you go up the street, and you'll see one side of the duplex has got cement porch, wrought-iron railings. The other side still has the old, you know, wooden porch. Okay? One side decided to put aluminum siding on their house. The other side still has the asphalt shingle or the roofs of different colors. [Laughter] It's hilarious, you know, looking at it. But you know, I mean, even there, the idea of, you know, being able to support yourself during a time that was difficult was there, whether it was family or the company. But there was also a price to pay for that. You know, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And the services of delivering. I mean, that was one of my pleasures when I went to Luigi's. Take an order right on the telephone, just tell me everything you want, and then I put it in a basket and ring it up and put it in a box and bring it to your house. SPEAKER: And [unintelligible - 00:14:40] whoopee pie. SPEAKER: And it was great. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: And it was great. 10 SPEAKER: And then a big treat was Mr. Kelly had a truck, and on Fridays, he came with fresh fish in his truck and went to neighborhood to neighborhood. And he had fresh vegetables, too. SPEAKER: And the ice man? SPEAKER: Oh, yeah. I felt one of the times that you… if you wanted 20 pounds of ice, you would put a [unintelligible - 00:15:07] all numbers around it, and the number at the top would tell the ice man how many pounds of ice you wanted. [Unintelligible - 00:15:11] soup on Monday. We always had soup on Monday. That must've been an Italian custom. Right? And then there was going to the neighborhood grocery store at [unintelligible - 00:15:20], and it was like every Monday to go get a soup bone… SPEAKER: Right. SPEAKER: … probably 15 cents. SPEAKER: Yup. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Oh yeah. Right. SPEAKER: That was… SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:15:31]. SPEAKER: Usually leftovers. That's how Menestra came into being. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:15:40]. SPEAKER: Most people didn't have a car. As I said, my first car came when I was 15 years old, when my father got his first car. SPEAKER: Mine's a piece of junk. SPEAKER: Mine, too. SPEAKER: Couldn't heat the oil. SPEAKER: Mine, too. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: I still have the nice car that she's talking. SPEAKER: Yeah. [Laughter] 11 SPEAKER: My father had a car even before he got married. He was one of the first [unintelligible - 00:16:01]. SPEAKER: He was rich. SPEAKER: And his big thing was to go to Boston and buy an Italian newspaper, and he read that newspaper over and over and over again until he went back a month later to buy another newspaper. SPEAKER: I know that. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Over and over, the same thing. SPEAKER: That's right. SPEAKER: I can remember taking my father's car, your mother, my mother, and a bunch of old Italian ladies, that'll be six or five or six of us, and driving them around town in a Sunday night, and I didn't have a license. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: And my mother thought I was wonderful. And then I gave her lessons. I gave my mother lessons, and she would get me so upset because she did so poorly. I'd get out of the car and walk home. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:16:45]. SPEAKER: I remember my family giving my mother lessons and it was in a little Chevy, like a two-seater. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Anyway, we were on [Victory] Market where Lancaster Street is now. SPEAKER: The [unintelligible - 00:17:00]. SPEAKER: Yes. SPEAKER: The [unintelligible - 00:17:02]. SPEAKER: Yes, that's right. SPEAKER: And we lived in a three-decker across the street from Joe on Graham Street [unintelligible - 00:17:08] even a block. 12 SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Lots of times, I'd be in the back. By the time we got to the… SPEAKER: Sandbank. SPEAKER: … sandbank, [people had already left]. [Laughter] That was the end of the lesson. [Laughter] SPEAKER: That was the end of the lesson. Right? SPEAKER: [Laughter]. [Unintelligible - 00:17:29] my mother eventually did drive home. My dad [unintelligible - 00:17:30], he had no choice. But she had to take lessons from you know… SPEAKER: A professor? SPEAKER: Yeah, right. [Laughter] But I remember telling her [unintelligible - 00:17:43] end of the street [laughter] it was already the end, because of the way, you know, she was learning, so… SPEAKER: I was in a similar situation as Joe was describing. My father never got his license. My mother didn't get a license until she was about 50 years old. So I was the only one with a license and had to drive everybody everywhere. On Sunday, when we visited relatives or wherever, it will be [unintelligible - 00:17:43] you know, driving wherever, you know, we needed to go. Going to work, that was… it didn't matter. Whether it was Saturday night I had a date, you know, the one night a week, whatever it was, my father worked 11 to 7, and at 10:30, I had to be home to pick him up and bring him to work. And Vinnie's father used to work in the same place, and I'd pick him up. So there were three or four that I would pick up and drop them off, and then I'd go and continue. Oftentimes my date would be kind of with me. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Or if we were at the [unintelligible - 00:18:37], I'd say, "Well, I'll be back in 45 minutes." SPEAKER: There were times when we'd eat canned foods for the longest time. I can remember my mother canning 200 quarts of tomatoes every 13 year, and all kinds of fruits and vegetables. And they always wanted everything fresh. And my father liked to go to the beach, so [unintelligible - 00:19:02] pack it up. My mother would spend the whole week cooking, getting ready to go. However, the spaghetti had to be cooked fresh, and he had a Bunsen burner. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:19:19] and they didn't have that, however. So he was going to make something so that he could change up, because he didn't like the sand in his bathing suit. So he got pipes and made a rectangle and then got canvas and covered it. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: So he went in, and the cops came by and it's not allowed. You have to keep it up three feet from the ground. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Everything was done by community. Every Sunday morning in the summertime, the bus would go up to the markets [unintelligible - 00:19:52] and up on Lincoln Terrace. And the people would come and pay a couple of bucks and get in the bus and go to the beach. SPEAKER: The beach? SPEAKER: The one down… SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:20:04]. SPEAKER: That's right. SPEAKER: The beach, right. SPEAKER: Yup. Yup. SPEAKER: Today, you… [unintelligible - 00:20:08] pick and choose. But you got on the bus and you went to the beach. What a big day that was. SPEAKER: It was a time when family activities… because you didn't have the communication, because you didn't have the opportunities that you have now. Now, every kid has got a job. Any kid who wants a job 14 has a job. That gives them money. That gives them independence. Okay? They have automobiles. I mean, now they go to proms, they're in limos, they're in tuxes and whatnot. And all that's been good in a sense. You know, when Joe talks about every generation has made life easier for the next generation, well that's true in some sense, economically. Okay? But in another sense, there's always a loss. There's always a price to pay for that. SPEAKER: That's true. SPEAKER: And a lot of the things that we're talking about—families being together, whether it was going to the beach—you did it out of necessity at the time because you didn't have other opportunities. Okay? So you went as a family. You did the cooking because, you know, they didn't have their faith in canned goods or whatever. But there were activities that brought the family and kept them, you know, kept the ties together. And today with transportation being what it is, communication, as many said, anything that goes on in the world we know about at the same hour, and we'll see a picture of it, okay? Whereas you know, Lucy's father, you know, would have to wait a month to go into Boston to get a newspaper, you know, to find out. So it's been good in many ways, but in other ways, you know, there's been a price. And I think if we all think back to our growing up, I think we can recognize, you know, some of that price to be paid for that. SPEAKER: You know, life was so simple then. Life was so simple then. SPEAKER: But did they think that? Did we think that? SPEAKER: We thought that as kids. We thought that as kids. But you think of what your parents would've been going through. You know, in Italy, I was the happiest in my life growing up in Italy. We were poor. I don't think I ever had more than one pair of shoes that my father had made for me. It was a pair of boots because I could wear those in the wintertime. You weren't going to get, you know, 15 shoes that you could wear in one season. It had to be… the rest of the country was barefoot or your mother made moccasins or, you know, whatever. And oftentimes, you know, meals was skimpy. At a wedding, my uncle's wedding, we were told -- my younger cousin, no, a cousin that was the same age as me, the other cousin was 5 years old -- "You, you can have one meatball. You two, you're going to share a meatball." So all they got was a half. Those were the instructions at this wedding. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: I remember that. Okay? You know… SPEAKER: What about meetings when we were deciding on the menu for the retired [unintelligible - 00:23:16] that we always have. SPEAKER: Right. SPEAKER: You know, we always select the same things, the fish and whatever [unintelligible - 00:23:25] brought me back to the days where we had the same meals seven nights in a row. [Laughter] SPEAKER: That's right. SPEAKER: I never forgot that. SPEAKER: That's right. SPEAKER: I had six children. This was during the Depression, and on Mondays, they had soup bones, too. But each child had his own bone, so after they ate their pasta… SPEAKER: Oh, really? SPEAKER: Yeah, after they ate their pasta, they sucked on their bone to eat all that meat. And we thought nothing of it because that's how they grew up. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: And then one of the boys brought his girlfriend home, and she sat there and watched everybody suck on bones. SPEAKER: [Laughter] 16 SPEAKER: Yeah. I mean, pork was common because, you know, people raised pigs. But beef, I don't remember ever having beef in Italy. I remember having… SPEAKER: I know. [Have I?] SPEAKER: Saturday nights in my house. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Smells great. SPEAKER: I know. And [good food]. SPEAKER: And we're making… I hate it. Smells great. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:24:18] anymore. What was it, like pinkish? SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Remember polenta? When was the last time you had polenta? Okay? SPEAKER: I don't have that. SPEAKER: Well… SPEAKER: I like that. SPEAKER: Oh, I love it, too. But you know what's funny? You know, what's funny? Vinnie will remember this. That in Italy, the only time we had cornbread or polenta was when we ran out of wheat. Okay? Because corn was something that you just didn't eat. SPEAKER: That's… yeah. SPEAKER: Okay. It was more for the animals. SPEAKER: When your stock ran down, okay, all the stock you had in your storeroom, your bags of beans and potatoes, you know, whatever, that you raised because everybody raised their own food and you started seeing polenta, then you know that you were down and needed stock. Okay? And the only way that we could put any kind of flavoring on that was trapping little birds. Okay? And I used to take little mousetraps, and I'd set them outside in the winter, outside in the garden in the snow, buried in the snow with a 17 little piece of stale bread or something just showing, and little birds will get caught in there. Okay? And then you plucked them. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: I mean, can you imagine how much meat there was in little birds? SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: But that's it. That's the only meat you had that might've gone in the sauce. So when you had, you know, polenta, which was the cheapest meal you could get—it's nothing but cornmeal and water spread on a big board—but you enjoyed it. You enjoyed it because you just make a game out of it. You just try to make designs, maps, or whatever. I'll meet you over here and you'll eat your way there. [Laughter] That was fun. SPEAKER: Women would get together, and I'd forgotten whose house it was with [unintelligible - 00:26:03] the area, and the polenta would be out on the board and they'd have one section that has like sausage. There were different kinds of things, you know. [Laughter] SPEAKER: Right. SPEAKER: I was so [frightened], but I don't know… there were no men and no boys there. SPEAKER: [They didn't like it]. SPEAKER: It was like a ladies' night out. SPEAKER: Do you know what? Sunday [unintelligible - 00:26:26] wintertime, my mother would say to us, "What are we going to have today? Ravioli?" All the things you die for at a restaurant, that you pay big time in a restaurant, we took for granted. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: And I would roll, you know, heaps on the fork or crimp the… SPEAKER: Ravioli. SPEAKER: … and we had food for two or three days. And I was in a [unintelligible - 00:26:47] because my father was on the football team. [Unintelligible - 00:26:49] next door. [Unintelligible -18 00:26:52] and I own the football field. And I could tell who I didn't want there [unintelligible - 00:26:56]. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: In the baseball field, the baseball would go to the [unintelligible - 00:27:01] and my father would come home. SPEAKER: My mother baked bread every week. You should make enough for the whole week, but the biggest treat for us kids was to eat American bread. SPEAKER: Right. SPEAKER: White, sliced bread. That was a big treat. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: We used to call it the… I can only remember maybe twice by nine years in Italy ever having white bread. We used to call it pane degli angeli, the angel's breath. Okay? Because it was white. And we thought that was terrific. Now, years later, I'm over here and I want to buy a whole wheat bread and I pay twice as much. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:27:40]. SPEAKER: When I was 4, I had this all the time. [Laughter] Now that I got a few bucks… SPEAKER: I miss junior high school… and then ham and pickle sandwiches with mayonnaise. You didn't have the mayonnaise in those Italian homes. SPEAKER: No. SPEAKER: Never. SPEAKER: No. SPEAKER: And I liked it. My mother said [unintelligible - 00:27:57] "I like it." Wow! SPEAKER: [Laughter] 19 SPEAKER: And when they made us a lunch, they made us submarine sandwiches. It was embarrassing to go to class with submarine sandwiches and everyone had their white bread. SPEAKER: Yeah. A brown piece of bread, right? SPEAKER: Today, we all like the submarine sandwiches. SPEAKER: Yeah, but then we used to roll up the paper bag and take it home. We were told, "You have to bring that home. You don't want to waste that. Use it again." And by the end of the week, it was so oily [laughter]. SPEAKER: Matthew Mcgloster and Joe Mcgloster would go to school every single day with eggs and peppers in it, and the bag used to leak. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Their sandwiches were absolutely wonderful, but they used to leak every single day of the year [unintelligible - 00:28:39]. SPEAKER: Those were the days when the most you had to wrap that sandwich in was wax paper, and that didn't hold anything, so… SPEAKER: Right. Right. SPEAKER: And I used to go up to work at the apple farm, and I'd have an Italian round bread, cut, okay, [unintelligible - 00:28:54] meatballs, cut in half, the whole thing. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Most of the guys in those days were just so [unintelligible - 00:29:01]. You ate well. SPEAKER: You were lacking in some of the basic stuff. Like I said before, I can remember being you know, poor as you could be, I guess, eating nothing but maybe, you know, a bowl of milk and some stale bread that you threw in in the morning. And you had the milk because you had sheep or you had goats. And not eating again until suppertime you know, when… SPEAKER: But you know, you never knew you were poor. SPEAKER: No, that's the thing. You see…20 SPEAKER: You only know you were poor… SPEAKER: What I'm saying is… SPEAKER: … if you feel poor. SPEAKER: I can remember being cold. I can remember you know, not having enough to eat. I could remember, you know, not having money, money in the household, and I'm wondering how the parent… you said, you know, but how did they feel? You know, we thought we had it good. There were good times. But how did the parents feel? Because they had the responsibility. We didn't. Okay? But throughout all of that, and I think all of us will say the same thing, we might've been lacking in a lot of material things, but I don't think any one of us in our family has ever doubted that we were not loved. Okay? And that's the key ingredient. Okay? It didn't matter what you had or didn't have. I had a -- one of my friends in Italy, after the war, communism was big, okay, and then one show we'll remember, all the speeches from the piazza off the balcony of the municipal building are political speeches that you, you know, listen to. The town was small. I mean, they would harangue and you could hear them across town. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: And of course, the kids all stayed out late. That was just part of life. You stayed out late. But one of the friends that I had, his father was communist. And during the day, when you're outside playing, oftentimes you know, you get hungry, okay, want a snack. But we didn't have fruit. You know, we didn't have refrigerators, so you didn't have fruit. The best that you could have was maybe to go in and get a slice of bread. And my mother used to bake, you know, the [unintelligible - 00:31:07] loaves. Once a week, it was a communal bakery. Ovens, okay, we just have to… SPEAKER: There were a lot of them. 21 SPEAKER: During the holidays, like Easter, you'd have to sign up and take turns. Your family's time to bake was maybe two in the morning. And of course, it will be a family affair. You don't leave your kids at home. You brought them with you. And everybody had fun. But the kids would say, you know, "We're hungry." So I'd go in and I'd get some bread slices. I'd get a slice of whatever we had. Okay? I could still remember the day that—and his name was Alfietto—he said, "Well, come on over my house." So we went to his house, and he wanted some bread. He couldn't have it. And I looked at the bread box, and it had a lock on it. SPEAKER: Oh, my goodness. SPEAKER: And only the father had the key. So, as poor as I was, I recognized that he was poorer. Okay? But I also recognized, I don't know how, but I also recognized the difference in relationship between the parent and the child. Okay? For the parent to do that, have so much control, okay, that they would put a lock on the bread box, told me something, and I knew I had something that he didn't have, and it was more than just being able to get bread. Okay? Somehow I recognized that at the time. SPEAKER: Right. Trust? SPEAKER: Did your mother have bread pudding? SPEAKER: Pardon me? SPEAKER: My mother would save all the old bread, and once in a while, I'd get home and there'd be a big bread pudding. That was wow. Cut you… cut off a slab. SPEAKER: And you grated your own bread crumbs, you know. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:32:48]. SPEAKER: Oh, yeah. SPEAKER: Oh, yeah. SPEAKER: And cheese. And how many times have you skinned your knuckles grating cheese? [Laughter] 22 SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: And put her on the oven and then sprinkle it with sugar. SPEAKER: Yes. Yes. SPEAKER: And I had a go. SPEAKER: Sugar or… SPEAKER: I had a go. SPEAKER: … olive oil or oregano. SPEAKER: Remember that? [Unintelligible - 00:33:02] I had a go. SPEAKER: Remember that, Vin? Olive oil and oregano and just a slice of bread. SPEAKER: Oh, beautiful. SPEAKER: That was, that was it. SPEAKER: I come home one day… SPEAKER: I can have a couple of episodes about bread. SPEAKER: Go ahead. SPEAKER: Go ahead. Your kids… SPEAKER: Plus, I just wanted to insert my goat story. [Laughter] I come home one day, and the goat [laughter]… he [unintelligible - 00:33:21] tree with a string. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: My father was in the house. He called my uncle down on Elm Hill Avenue. We came with the wheelbarrow, and they had a feast. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Watch it. SPEAKER: Oh, I'm sorry. SPEAKER: I had pigeons, goats, rabbits, and I found that wasn't safe. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Vinnie, what were you about to say? SPEAKER: That's okay. Talking about bread, one of the first recollections I have about bread is something striking because I don't think I could've been more than five, six years old. And I remember that I 23 used to go with my grandfather to the field. He would go there with the [unintelligible - 00:34:03] vines and do some of the work. And he would be my babysitter, because my mother would be somewhere else working. And as he worked, he would tell me stories. He had spent his youth and a lot of time building roads in South America, Argentina and Uruguay, and he would tell me, "When you grow up, you have to learn things about the world [unintelligible - 00:34:41] you should go to America." By America, I think he meant South America. "And when you're there, you'll find that things are aplenty there. Tomorrow, you won't eat today's bread." And I said, "How come? They only bake a little bread so that it's all gone by the time you want to have a second meal?" And I didn't quite understand. Then I asked him, "How come they only bake a little bread and tomorrow you don't have yesterday's bread leftover?" He said, "Oh no, there's fresh bread every day." And to me, the idea of fresh bread every day was completely inconceivable. I mean, how could that be? He says, "And there's meat. There's lots of meat. You can have meat anytime you want." And as a child, we saw meat as sausages, as bacon, the pigs that we slaughtered once a year. SPEAKER: Right. SPEAKER: When that was gone, it was gone. SPEAKER: Gone. SPEAKER: That's it. No more meat. But there, you had meat every day and fresh bread. "You didn't eat yesterday's bread. What did you do with it?" "Well, feed it to the animals, do whatever you want, but you don't eat it." Later on, when I was going to elementary school, we used to play ball in the street, soccer, or kick the ball. And for lunch, once in a while, we'll have a slice of bread with olive oil on it, and sometimes it would be toasted so you could have a little garlic on it. 24 SPEAKER: Right. SPEAKER: I would go outside and watch my friends play ball and sometimes join them. Every so often, the ball would land on my bread [laughter] and it would fall. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: And well, okay, I'd say, "I'll go inside and get another piece." And one of my friends would pick it up, clean it up, and eat it. And I didn't realize until I thought about it much later that's probably what they intended to do. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: They had no bread available. They were hungry. They were so proud that they wouldn't ask me for a slice of bread, and that was the only way to get some food in their belly. SPEAKER: Plus, we call that garlic bread today. SPEAKER: But it was toasted in the fireplace, not in the toaster, in the fireplace, and you took a clove of garlic and cut it, and you rub that on. That's how you got the garlic on. You didn't have garlic salt or whatever. But in a child's mind, when Vinnie talks about he could not conceive of bread not being available, okay, to us it's inconceivable that he couldn't conceive of it. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Okay? But a similar incident for me was coming into New York Harbor. Okay? This was February 1, 1949, and of course everybody was up on deck with the [unintelligible - 00:37:45]. It's cold and everything, but I don't remember that. And looking out into the harbor, into the city skyline and seeing this big bridge which might have been the Verrazano Bridge, I don't know, but I'd see all these things going back and forth. Now, in my experience, for 10 minutes, I debated as to whether they were dogs or cars. SPEAKER: [Laughter] 25 SPEAKER: I said, "Wow!" Now, this was from a distance obviously. You can't make out what they are except you see objects, you know, going across the bridge. And I kept debating. "Those are dogs," I said. "No, they can't be dogs." And then I would say, "They're cars. No, there can't be that many cars in the world." I mean, in our town, we had a doctor who had a motorcycle, there was another doctor who had a car, and there was somebody who had a truck. Everybody else walked. Or, if you were fortunate, you had a bicycle. Nine years old, I could not convince myself if those were cars because there could not possibly be that many cars in the world. That's how limited, okay, our thinking was growing up in that little place. Now, you multiply that millions of times across the earth, whether it's in Vietnam or it's in Kenya or it's in Alaska, okay, how narrow the world is to an individual that doesn't have that communication. Okay? And that gets us back, you know, to education, because that's what it was. It was a lack of education, whether it was not having a radio available through which you receive communication, your parents did not have those experiences that they could share with you because they grew up in the same kind of environment. When you talk about the autostrada, you said they have beautiful roads in Italy. Yes, from the 1950s on when they started building the autostradas. As we would ride in the autostradas on the bus and then in our car that we rented, and you look up because it's very mountainous, and you look up and you see all these villages up in the mountains and you see these little lines, okay, those were the roads. No wonder that people from one town never knew people from another town. How could you get there except by walking? And even then, we didn't dare to because we were told by our parents that the people on the next town were no good. [Laughter] SPEAKER: [Laughter] 26 SPEAKER: And had different dialects anyway. SPEAKER: The different dialect is unbelievable. You know, he talked about some of the towns. It was Popoli. It couldn't have been more than three kilometers away. Okay? On Saturdays, my parents would take whatever, the few vegetables or whatnot they had, and go and set up in the open air market, and I would go with them. And I'd be sitting there next to the blanket, [unintelligible - 00:40:38] people would come, and I remember a lady come in and asked me whatever the price of tomatoes or whatever it was. I didn't have the vaguest idea what she was saying. I didn't have the vaguest idea. I had to ask my mother. Okay, now being grown up, they had heard the dialects often enough, okay, that they could understand each other. But as a youngster, never having been out of the town and being exposed to that, I didn't understand. I'm not talking about an accent. I'm talking about something completely different. Okay? The words [tremendously shocked]… I'll give you an example. The word andiamo, which means, you know, we're going, you know, andiamo a scuola -- iam, you see I-A-M. The A-N-D is gone. The O in the end is gone. [Unintelligible - 00:41:31] SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:41:32]. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Not andiamo, it's iam. Now, how do you get to…? SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:41:37]. SPEAKER: And at different times, they all said the words differently, the same basic word but differently. I mean, Latin, you talked about Latin. Latin was still very pronounced in the influence in the dialects, because a lot of it stemmed from the old, you know, Latin. The letter V, you know, we say veni, vidi, vici. Well, it wasn't veni, vidi, vici. In Latin, it was weni, widi, wici. Okay? The V was 27 pronounced as a W. Okay? So the street that we lived on, the Villa dela Valle, we would say Willa dela Walle. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: How is that close to Villa dela…? You'd never understand. The Italian teacher we had in high school, Mr. [unintelligible - 00:42:25], I used to talk to him like that, you know. SPEAKER: You didn't have Lucia? SPEAKER: No. I'd love to hear what you… they're all dead. [Laughter] We're the younger generation. Okay? But that's the way it was. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: I have a question. We were talking about how poor we were, but when you look at photographs that were taken when our parents got married and shortly after, they were always well dressed. SPEAKER: Oh, yes. SPEAKER: The wedding pictures were just beautiful. How could they afford all those [if they were poor?] SPEAKER: Took care of what they had. I had… your father, he had, I had dress pants, play pants, a pair of sneakers, and a pair of shoes. And we took care of them. SPEAKER: That's right. SPEAKER: Okay? But you weren't in Italy. SPEAKER: No. I'm talking [unintelligible - 00:43:23]. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:43:23]. Oh, yeah, they always -- the wedding pictures are gorgeous. SPEAKER: I mean, they always had big hats. SPEAKER: But there's an Italian saying—correct me, Vinnie—"[foreign language - 00:43:32] fare una bella figura. You have to make a good picture." SPEAKER: The most important thing. SPEAKER: You have to make a good impression. Okay? So that impression to them was very important. So in something like, you know, a 28 wedding or having somebody at your house as a guest, you have to present yourself well. You have to make a bella figura. Okay? So you went all out. You went all out with those things. SPEAKER: Did you have a sitting room? SPEAKER: No, we had a kitchen. SPEAKER: My mother had a power and nobody ever… SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Yeah. We didn't have that till we came here. That's when we had too much. [Laughter] SPEAKER: Yes. SPEAKER: Yes. SPEAKER: Over there, all we had was a kitchen. SPEAKER: No matter where we lived, we had a sitting room, and we had a kitchen going, so… in two of the houses we lived in. SPEAKER: No, but that's true. Impressions have always been very important. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Yeah. And of course, that… SPEAKER: The women show you the red carpet face. SPEAKER: It goes along with the pride. SPEAKER: Right. SPEAKER: Exactly. SPEAKER: And at a wedding, a family affair… SPEAKER: Well, you described… SPEAKER: … you put out the best that you have even if you have to borrow to do that. And you go kind of go overboard. SPEAKER: Are you also impressing the people that you left behind to show them that you're doing well in this new country? SPEAKER: Absolutely. Absolutely. SPEAKER: Probably. SPEAKER: No, no, I went back, like I said, 1996 and I met all my first cousins. I'd never seen them because they were all younger, so it's the first 29 time that I met them, and they're adults, you know, for the most part. The second cousins were [laughter] younger but the first cousins were all, you know, married you know, for the most part, have families of their own. And I was at the time, you know, 57 years old, so I was retired. I don't know if that made them… you know, because they asked me, [foreign language - 00:45:28] you know, "Do you have a pension?" I said, "Yes." Now, maybe to them that was inconceivable [laughter], okay, to use that word, that I was able to go there, take a tour, you know, rent a car and whatnot. But they had cars, too. They had cars, too. And maybe, maybe from an economic viewpoint, they might've been impressed, but I probably left there being more impressed with them and their families than they had of me. Okay? SPEAKER: My mother's family, most of them stayed in Italy, and my father had never met them. But whenever they took pictures and took these snapshots and sent them to my mother's family, they always made sure there's a car within the picture. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: That's right. SPEAKER: Absolutely. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:46:17] trying to tell the in-laws that your daughter married okay. SPEAKER: Do you still have the wedding pictures? SPEAKER: Make a bella figura, eh? [Laughter] SPEAKER: Speaking of funny pictures, my mother's now in the nursing home. And straightening up and things, I found this rolled up picture -- well, 1932. Can you figure out how brittle that was? And it was a picture of their wedding reception with the hotel name there at the bottom, March 1932. And I was amazed at how many people that I recognized because it had all the guests, too. The family was all lined up at the back. I think it's the only picture that I have that 30 has the entire family. And of course they're all mostly deceased. There are three living people out of that entire family. SPEAKER: Wow! SPEAKER: And then of course all the guests were in the foreground. Well, there were people that I didn't know, and Smithy [unintelligible - 00:47:27] I see him once in a while and I know he's a possible relative. So I showed him the picture. You know, he knew this one, he knew that one, so I added a few more names and wrote them down. And a couple of them, [unintelligible - 00:47:43] I said, "They can't drive. [Laughter] I couldn't believe this." Well, how did they get from Leominster to Boston…? SPEAKER: Exactly. SPEAKER: … to this wedding in March [unintelligible - 00:47:56] the whole bit, they took cabs. I could not… I still… it's inconceivable to me that they could have done that. SPEAKER: Right. Right. For that kind of an affair, they have to present themselves in a positive light. SPEAKER: They didn't have [unintelligible - 00:48:12]. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: No. SPEAKER: You went to here, you went to Littleton, [unintelligible - 00:48:16]. SPEAKER: Oh, yes. SPEAKER: It used to take us four hours to get to Littleton. SPEAKER: You know what? Your neighbor, your ex-neighbor just died recently. SPEAKER: Mrs. [unintelligible - 00:48:23]? Yeah. I heard that. SPEAKER: Yeah, Vinnie was talking about playing soccer. It was a ragball. SPEAKER: Both. Whatever you could get. 31 SPEAKER: Just a stocking filled with rags. You keep wrapping the stock around it until, you know, and then you sewed it up, and we all did it. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:48:38]. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:48:45]. SPEAKER: It wasn't until after the war -- we used to get packages on occasion from the relatives in the United States, and it was always a big family thing when a package arrived. It was the town news. You know, the [unintelligible - 00:48:56] family got a package from America. And so, all the kids would gather around it, they open it up, and there might be some clothing or this and that. One time, there was this real ball. Okay? A real ball. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: So my cousin and I took it outside and we were so proud to show, you know, to all the kids we got a real ball, rubber ball, and we're playing soccer and damn it, we can kick that thing to make it go where we want. We just had a heck of a time with it. Okay? SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Years later, we come to the United States. In the summertime, we played baseball. And come the fall, I see these kids out—this is in Pennsylvania—and they're throwing a ball around. I look at it; I reckon it's a football. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: We had no idea what that ball was. Okay? We were trying to play soccer with a football. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: And so, I was laughing about it years later [laughter]. Okay, thinking of these little ragamuffin kids barefooted trying to play soccer with a football. We had no idea. We didn't know what a football was or a baseball. Soccer's the only game that we knew. 32 So whatever it was, we were going to play soccer with it. [Laughter] SPEAKER: Remember the baseball? Every Christmas, somebody would get a new baseball. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: And that lasted us all summer catching it. [Unintelligible - 00:50:15] SPEAKER: I remember we played baseball on your [unintelligible - 00:50:24]. SPEAKER: Oh, yeah. SPEAKER: And the Mazafarro was owned by [unintelligible - 00:50:29] and oh, yeah, you know, you never forget those neighborhoods. You just don't forget them, you know. And we used to go [unintelligible - 00:50:36] and entertain yourself. I mean, made up your own rules. You know, you learned leadership that way as well. You know, everything is planned [unintelligible - 00:50:47]. SPEAKER: Yeah. Getting along with your peers, right? SPEAKER: We were all playing. SPEAKER: When I came to Pennsylvania in 1971, almost every single principal in the city of Monticello was Italian. Remember that? SPEAKER: Mm-hmm. SPEAKER: And who would have ever thunk that we would elect an Italian mayor? That never happened before. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:51:08] city council. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Okay. That I guess is the determination and trust that maybe this ethnic group [unintelligible - 00:51:16]. SPEAKER: As I said, my dad was the first Italian congressman. SPEAKER: That's right. That was amazing. But I'll tell you what, he'd walk on the street. I remember one Halloween going uptown, he had 33 peashooters, bows, [unintelligible - 00:51:31] peashooters, wax, the whole… SPEAKER: The whole thing. SPEAKER: The whole thing to get [unintelligible - 00:51:36]. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:51:38]. [Laughter] SPEAKER: We never… we got to the edge of town, picked them up… SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: Do you remember the wax, Wanda? SPEAKER: What of it? SPEAKER: What we were referring to about wax? [Unintelligible - 00:51:51] what we did with the wax. SPEAKER: Hold it. After this story, though, we have to end. SPEAKER: Yeah, okay. [Laughter] SPEAKER: It's getting late. But it was very enjoyable. [Unintelligible - 00:52:00] SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:52:04] get all that stuff and we melted the wax on top of it to preserve it. SPEAKER: Like paraffin. SPEAKER: Like paraffin. SPEAKER: Yup. SPEAKER: And on Halloween. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:52:11]. [Crosstalk] SPEAKER: Uh-huh. SPEAKER: My generation is [unintelligible - 00:52:18]. SPEAKER: You never had peashooters and stuff like that? SPEAKER: No. SPEAKER: Oh, yeah. SPEAKER: But I probably wouldn't have to [unintelligible - 00:52:24]. SPEAKER: I do remember just to add. And you asked me how my grandparents probably got to this area, and through our conversations it was the building of the Clintondale… 34 SPEAKER: Okay. SPEAKER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Oh, yeah. SPEAKER: That's where it was. SPEAKER: It took me a little while trying to put that together. SPEAKER: Yup. SPEAKER: Maybe we should end just with an education question. I was wondering, if you could tell me what the difference is nowadays between the parent, child, and teacher relationship? I think it was Joe that mentioned that if you did anything wrong, you were really worried about what your parents think, that… SPEAKER: Yeah. I mentioned it, so I'll start it. I relate to my mother—not my father, my mother. Mothers for some reason, in Italian families were the ones that took care of the school business and all that kind of stuff. And we were taught certain things, okay? And we were taught respect and, you know, parents respected professionalism. Okay? The teacher was a professional. When the parent went to the school and the teacher said this, that was accepted without question and you were expected to represent your family as a gentleman, right or wrong. The last few years, I spent in education, and I spent a number of years doing something [unintelligible - 00:53:43] filling in at interim, okay? Today, the child is never wrong. They go home and they tell their parents, "The teacher did this or said this." Their mother picks up the phone and calls another child. I called so many kids. This is getting to be common in the school. Okay? Right or wrong, the kid is going to say, "Oh, yeah, Jeremy was right. The teacher was wrong." Recently, I witnessed when an excellent teacher was dismissed on the say-so of a few kids who fabricated the story, and I know they fabricated it. I wasn't the principal. It would've never happened… but I guess the word I want to use is trust and respect, 35 and they don't happen today. The kids run the show, and the principals and the superintendents and the teachers are frightened of litigation and fabrication. And it's absolutely… [I worked at destroying, kids were surviving but it certainly makes things] [unintelligible - 00:54:49]. SPEAKER: Anything else you can add on that note? SPEAKER: I guess, you know, if we talk about the world getting smaller, so much more of the outside has come into the school. Schools used to be more closed. [Unintelligible - 00:55:04] any of your classes, you close the door and the teacher taught and so on. But as we've expanded, as the school has opened up to the world to educate kids, the world has also come into the school. It's been a two-way street. And I still believe that parents basically want what's best for their kids. Sometimes they may not know what's best for their kids. Sometimes they might lack the parenting skills. Because in that respect, life is a lot different today than it was 40 years ago. And so it was simple in that respect. You had clear lines of authority. Whatever your parents said, that's what you did. Relatives supported that. They would never contradict your parents. Parents never contradicted the school. They might think the teacher was wrong, but because the teacher was an authority figure and it was instilling the respect of authority that was more important than the incident itself, okay, that's what they were trying to deal with. And some of that has been lost. I mean, I agree with Joe. But I still basically believe, you know, the occasions that I've had disagreements with parents over kids obviously, when you sit with them one on one and you communicate to them that you understand they want what's best for their youngsters, just respect the fact that I also want what's best for your youngster. We're together on this, okay? Let's not have the confrontation between us, because that moves us away 36 from what the object of the conversation was, and that's this youngster. That's what we're trying to deal with instead of satisfying our own egos. Okay? SPEAKER: Let's say we did do well… SPEAKER: So there's more dialogue. There's more dialogue now between school and home. Okay? There wasn't before. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:57:07] is to get parents and discuss. And most of the times, I would say we want to get the point across and the people would leave happy. Okay? And we took the time to get them in. But we also had staff that understood, and they took the time to get on the phone and work with kids [unintelligible - 00:57:27]. We teach to a [testing]. We have a [unintelligible - 00:57:33]. I swore to God that I hope we never became New York. We have to ace the test. But we teach to a test. SPEAKER: I never [unintelligible - 00:57:43] day that we would teach to a test. SPEAKER: Well, you two are an unusual pair though. I mean, one of you was always ready when there was a CORE evaluation. I know schools with principals who [unintelligible - 00:57:55] in a CORE. SPEAKER: That is important. SPEAKER: Right. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:58:00]. SPEAKER: Right. SPEAKER: But there are schools where principals [unintelligible - 00:58:02]. SPEAKER: Some say special education, bilingual education, anything out of the mainstream, has been outside of their realm of responsibility. So the special education is the realm of the special educator and the director of special ed. It's a SPED problem, let him handle it. Joe and I always work on the premise that if it's in our four walls, they belong to us. Whether it was bilingual or SPED, they were our concerns and our problems. Lucy is right. It's one of the 37 things that I don't see today. There's a lot of administrative involvement in some of those areas. And there should be more, because the principal controls the resources in the building. It's not the SPED director, it's not the LD teacher who will be sitting there and promising that we're going to do this or that or make this modification for the benefit of the youngster and then can't follow up on it because somebody else sitting there disagrees. Okay? Somebody has to be the arbiter of that. Somebody has to, and that's the principal. SPEAKER: Lucy never has to make an appointment to see us. I mean, no teacher ever had to make an appointment. I guess that's what's happened today in schools. SPEAKER: Open door. SPEAKER: Yeah. I know the schools in Leominster, you have to make an appointment to see the principal as a staff did. Christ, that's sacrilegious. A parent has to make an appointment. I know a parent went into a school not too long ago, he was told to come back tomorrow. [Unintelligible - 00:59:33] my telephone number because if it were a small problem, you never let it get to be a big problem. [But times are changing.] SPEAKER: We just need to… there's only a few minutes left on this. So thank you very much though. I could stay here for hours. SPEAKER: [Laughter] SPEAKER: All of you were so informative. And thank you again to Lucy. Thank you very much. SPEAKER: [Unintelligible - 00:59:56] a lot of fun [unintelligible - 00:59:59] negative. SPEAKER: This is the end of the interview./AT/mb/es
