Flaims of Tregiovo History

There are numerous Flaims spread around the world. They can be found in various communities throughout the USA and Canada, and there are some even in South America. Their historical home base, however, remains in the neighboring villages of Revò and the smaller Tregiovo in the Italian Alps, namely in the Province of Trento, which, until the end of World War One, was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Flaims have resided in these two villages for over five centuries, although some have gradually spread out to other nearby communities or migrated far away. I will take a brief look at them, focusing on those with whom I am closely related.

There is little, if any, hard data on the origins of the Flaims and on the meaning of their surname. What little information exists points to Hungary as the area of origin but leaves one guessing as to the meaning of the name. According to my sister Veronica, now 83 (2003), Hungary was the area toward which, in her youth, the elders of the village would point as the original home of the Flaim contingent. This claim appears to be supported by a recent statement in a magazine of the province of Trento, “Trentino Emigrazione.” According to this publication, the name “Flaim”, often written as “Flaym” in early documents, first appeared in the provincial records in the 15th century after the migration of “Hungarian gypsies” into the area.

A recent search of the baptismal records of the parish of Tregiovo (by Pietro Micheli, a retired priest), found an allusion to a Flaim dating back to 1491. According to Micheli, who has written various historical books on Tregiovo and neighboring villages, the original settlers of the village were likely to have first resided in Revò, which lies at the foot of the Ozolo mountain, whereas Tregiovo lies halfway up on its Western side.

I will describe Tregiovo, my native mountain village, as I remember it around 1940, having lived there from my birth in 1929 until my departure in 1947. I will then try to compare these early impressions with the actual status of the village around the year 2000, having visited it several times in recent years and having seen some official census figures.

Tregiovo is a small mountain village located in the Italian Alps, at an altitude of about 3,300 feet (1,000 and some meters), not too far from where Austria and Switzerland meet. Its humble beginnings date back to the early part of the past millennium. Suffice to say that in the 15th century it was deemed large enough to require a bell to call the inhabitants to the religious services, and that the bell, still in use, was cast in 1430.

Jumping to my lifetime, the population of Tregiovo has declined considerably during this period, from about 225, as we used to write in our school books around 1940, to barely over 150, as shown by the 2001 census of the population. The reasons: there has been a general decline in the birth rate and a considerable amount of out-migration, largely to the United States. Both phenomena are the continuation of trends that appear to have begun late in the 19th century, when the village’s population must have amounted to at least 300 persons. According to my father, there were about 80 children in the village elementary school in 1890.

These downward trends seem to have finally run their course. There has not been any significant out-migration in recent decades, and the birth rate seems to have stabilized, though at a very low level. It was standard to have 7 or 8 children per family -- and in the family of one of my close Flaim relatives, there were actually a total of 18! That is no longer the case. It is now rare to find a family with more than three children.

Being fewer, the people of the village live immeasurably better now than in the years of my infancy. Then, the agricultural production was essentially for family consumption, and barely sufficed. Every family had to grow a bit of this and a bit of that in order to feed both its human members and its farm animals. And the fields, mountainous to begin with, often lacking the proper fertilizers, were generally stingy. People did not go hungry, but they did not eat well, and had to work so much for so little. Furthermore, the male heads of household usually had to look for work elsewhere, at least from spring to fall.

The less said about sanitary conditions in my youth the better. Suffice it to say that potable water was not piped into individual houses until the early 1950’s. Until then, water had to be carried into each house in buckets from two “fontanas” at each end of the village. The water, which was toted Chinese-cooly style and usually by women, was used mostly for cooking and for washing one’s face and hands… Clothes had to be taken to the “fontana” for washing, and showers or baths were simply unavailable, and probably regarded as superfluous luxuries. Each house had a privy, but there were no American style toilets.

These conditions have changed radically. To begin with, many village families have now abandoned agriculture altogether, keeping maybe a small field for growing vegetables. And the 10 or 12 families still engaged in agriculture, who work some of the land abandoned by others as well as their own, are infinitely more productive. They concentrate on dairy farming and produce at least five times as much milk as the entire village produced in my youth. The milk is transported by truck twice a day to a nearby village for processing into butter and cheese. Thus, the village is no longer as isolated as it used to be.

In my youth, the county seat in Revò could be reached only after a two-hour walk on a tortuous, up-and-down mule road. Now there is a fairly straight, paved road, making Revò easily reachable from Tregiovo. So, those who take jobs in nearby villages and small towns, where some small manufacturing plants have actually sprung up, can easily “motor” home to have dinner with their families. And their homes have nearly all the modern conveniences found in ours.

Unfortunately, with the population having declined considerably, there are many empty and decrepit houses in the village. This is true particularly in the central core, where the houses are hundreds of years old and, seemingly, built largely for housing cattle and all that was needed for their maintenance during the harsh and long local winters, with only the space left over being available for the housing of people. Actually, there are a few new and very modern houses on the outskirts of the village, and even in its core a few houses – including my family’s -- have been completely renovated. A couple have in fact been torn down and rebuilt in place, using modern designs and building methods. But some are still crying out for renewal.

Other changes that I must note with a little nostalgia are these: There is no longer a priest in the village; no more local taverns for an after-mass glass of wine; no local school and the teacher assigned to it; and no more mail delivery by a local and well-known villager. These activities are now the responsibility of persons who reside in Revò, the county seat. Also, you no longer see any signs of the itinerant repairmen who, during my youth, used to go -- on foot -- from village to village and from house to house, announcing their presence and their specialty; fixing your pots and pans, restoring your umbrellas, or repairing certain farm implements. Instead, you are now likely to meet North-African immigrants peddling tablecloths and area rugs, and driving fairly expensive cars.

As is the custom in villages of the sort, all families, or family groups, are given, or willy-nilly they gradually acquire, a nickname, which may relate to a common ancestor, a particular attribute of an ancestor, a geographic place of origin, a former owner of the family’s house, or other attribute. My family lived in a house known individually as “Tony’s”, based on the name of a former owner (whose descendants now live around Seattle, Washington) and was also a part of a larger group of about six paternally related families known as “Sborzi ”. The word is a corruption of the German “Schwartz” (black), probably relating to an ancestor of dark complexion. (The German-speaking area within Italy begins only one mile north of Tregiovo, and it includes at least one German-speaking Flaim family.)

Other Flaims in Tregiovo were grouped into family clans known as the “Flaimi,” the “Zendri,” the “Zani,” the “Morezioti,” the “Stefenoti”, etc. with the last three relating obviously to ancestors named, respectively, the local equivalent of John, Maurice, and Steven. Many of the Flaims transplanted to this country came from the Sborzi or these other families.

Based on the quality of the land the Sborzi originally owned in Tregiovo, one would have to surmise that they were relatively late arrivals in the historical development of the village, and thus had to settle for what was left. The land they acquired and tilled was clearly of marginal value, even by local standards. It was generally very steep, not easily accessible from the village, and had to be terraced by means of high retaining walls in order to make it tillable. The Sborzi, in fact, became known in the area for the walls they tended to build. Indeed, my sister Veronica has an old document, dated May 3, 1875, in which the parish priest of Proves, a nearby, German-speaking village, testified as to the good job some of our Sborzi ancestors had done in building a wall around the local cemetery.

I know very little about my paternal grandfather, Pietro Flaim. According to the baptismal records, he was born in Tregiovo in 1836. His parents were Giovanni Flaim and Caterina Paternoster. He had migrated to Argentina soon after the birth of my father in 1880, leaving the family temporarily behind, as was often the case in those days. He was working in that South American country, namely in Rosario, North of Buenos Aires, when he suddenly perished in 1882, the victim of a construction accident. He was interred locally; his remains were never returned to Tregiovo.

During his youth, my grandfather Pietro had married Orsola Micheli, also from Tregiovo. They had seven children; three girls, Cristina, Giuditta, Rachele; and four boys, Alfonso and Giuseppe (both dead in infancy), Pietro, and Daniele (my father, born in 1880 and the last of the seven children).

My grandfather was a stonemason-farmer, and according to the local lore, he was also known as the man who could fix broken arms and legs (a useful know-how in a place hours away from traditional medical care). At one point, he was also supposed to have had a run-in with the Austrian “gendarmes”, who were investigating him for, allegedly, manufacturing his own gunpowder. He took advantage of the fact that the word “polvere” (powder) can also be translated locally as “dust”. He supposedly showed the gendarmes how easy it was to make “polvere”. He took off his jacket, threw it under the bed, and pulled it out all covered with dust or “polvere”. The gendarmes shook their heads and let him go.

Daniele, my father, was born in 1880 and went to elementary school in Tregiovo at a time when there was not yet a school building in the village. The classes were held in the few private homes with a large room to spare (the Stefenoti at one point, and the Florianini at another). There were then many more school-age children (around 80) than there are now. According to my father, the Miauneri, a group of houses North of the village, supplied no less than 20 pupils at the time. How things have changed! The state or local authorities, that later built a school for the village, shut it down about 20 years ago when the number of children of school age finally dropped to only five for the entire village. (There were about 25-30 when I was going to school around 1940.) The remaining few, (there are about a dozen now, bearing witness to a mini resurgence of the birth rate), are bussed to a larger school in Revò, the county seat.

In the late 1890’s, my father, yet a teenager, emigrated to America, by way of Le Havre, France, and worked for several years in the coal mines of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. While mining coal in Hazleton, Pa. -- and hunting in the hills and dales nearby, as he loved to do -- he and several other miners, including his brother Pietro, all from neighboring villages in the Val di Non, dreamed up the idea of going back to their native mountains, building a brewery, and profitably selling the beer in the local area. They returned to their villages, built the brewery, mostly with their own hands, and ran it, not very profitably, I think, until the outbreak of World-War One in 1914.

At that point, beer production (directed by a “braumaister” imported from Moravia) had to come to a halt due to lack of grain and other raw ingredients. As it turned out, the closure of the brewery became permanent. In effect, at war’s end, a competing brewery paid the surviving partners a given sum not to re-start the enterprise. However, by then, my father and his brother had already sold their shares of the business due to some alleged dissention among the partners, one of whom was presumed to have been “dipping in the till”. While uncle Pietro at that point re-emigrated to America, leaving his family behind, my father, who was to accompany him, was allegedly moved by my mother’s foreboding tears, and decided at the last moment to remain near his growing family.

However, destiny did not cooperate. Soon thereafter, in mid-1914, World War One broke out, and my father was immediately drafted into the Austrian Army and sent to the Eastern front. He was quickly wounded, captured by the Russians, briefly hospitalized, and finally imprisoned in Siberia for the next four years. I have he bullet which the doctors extracted from his leg, and which he had welded on one of those old-time watch chains.

For the first three years of his imprisonment, my father was assigned to a baron who was a large landowner in Siberia and who treated him and other prisoners fairly well. To pass his time during the long Siberian winters, he drew his family’s genealogical tree, which my sister still has and which is reproduced on page B-1. He also made an elaborate snuffbox out of many layers of bark of the white birches that grew in abundance in that area. I have and cherish this snuffbox in his memory. (See picture in section E).

In the meantime, back in Tregiovo, the then village chief, a colorful person known as Barbarossa, who had been a Western sheep owner during a previous stay in the U.S., talked my mother into investing the proceeds from the sale of my father’s share of the brewery in Austrian government bonds. Needless to say, since Austria lost the war, the investment (the amount of which is unknown to me) went up in smoke.

My father returned home at the end of the hostilities in late 1918, and he spent the next 30 years working as a mason in nearby towns and villages, usually among strangers, occasionally with one of his sons. He also knew the basic facts about blacksmithing, and he often worked at the forge and anvil, sharpening the tools of his fellow workmen. I remember watching in awe as he made the sparks fly in every direction.

In his old age, my father was stone-deaf, and he tended to attribute the condition to the noisy machinery he had tended to in the brewery. I think he died without ever learning about the development of such things as hearing aids. He adjusted as best he could. Being a deeply religious man, he would usually go to an early Sunday Mass, and would then stay home and read the Bible during high Mass, as he could not hear the weekly sermon. He made the family kneel to recite the Rosary every night during the winter, and he wanted me to lead it because I could raise my voice high enough for him to hear. Unbeknown to him, however, I would “cut corners” or, in this case “beads,” and lead the family into only 8 or 9 “Hail Marys” per “Mistery”, instead of the usual 10. By so doing, I wouldn’t have to kneel for so long!

On the tragicomic side, while employed in Cloz, a nearby village, near the end of the war, he would keep blissfully working on the walls of the “oratorio” even when allies’ planes were strafing everything that moved on the nearby road, oblivious of the fact that his co-workers had taken immediate refuge in a nearby basement. He would join them only after he would finally realize that they had disappeared, and that he was the only one still working.

My father died in 1949, my mother having died four years before, in late 1945, and his brother Pietro having succumbed to cancer in 1946. (As a cruel twist of fate, on the very day of Pietro’s funeral, his family finally received notice of the death near the end of the war, of one of his sons, also named Pietro. The latter had been my schoolteacher for a while, and the fact we were closely related never affected his occasional use of the rod on my rear.

Some years ago, I wrote a poem in honor of my father, entitled “Me Pare”. It is written in Nones, the local dialect, and was published by the Trentini nel Mondo magazine in its November 1996 issue. It is shown with its English translation, on page C-3.

My mother was born in Tregiovo in 1883 and baptized as Maddalena Micheli. She was soon dubbed, and known for the rest of her life, as Lenota, a diminutive nickname based on the last part of her Christian first name. Her father was Giovanni Micheli and her mother was Rosalia Flaim, yes, another Flaim! Her family of birth was, and still is known locally as “Giasperi”, based probably on a predecessor who was known by the local equivalent of Gaspar. She had three brothers: Ambrogio, Giuseppe, and Giacinto, the last two of them cabinetmakers; and a sister, Melania. We obviously knew them all as our uncles and aunts. (I have, and cherish, an ornate porcelain pipe with a long stem, dated 1899, which had been issued to Ambrogio (whom we called Eto) as a souvenir of his service in the Austrian army and given to me in 1955 by Barba Beppi, his brother.)

I know little else about my mother’s early years, except that her family’s home, one of the oldest in the center of the village, where the houses seem to have been heaped helter-skelter one upon the other, burned down with several others in 1894. It was subsequently rebuilt, somewhat more isolated, in another part of the village, using money that her father had

She married my father, then a recent returnee from America and a budding beer maker, around 1907. They had their first of nine children in 1908, and the long childbearing string finally ended with my birth in 1929, when my mother was already 46 years old. Naturally, I know only what I was told about the happenings in those years.

I do remember trudging for many hours over the mountains with my mother to visit the grave of one of her brothers (Ambrogio) when I was eight or nine years old. He had died of a heart attack where he was temporarily working, near Merano, and his family could not afford to have his body brought to our village for burial. He had to be laid to rest where he died, and we were visiting his grave for “All Saints Day” at the beginning of November. My shoes did not fit properly and, though it was already cold in the mountains, I had to remove them and walk barefooted most of the way.

I also remember very clearly my mother’s despair about the economic condition of our family in the late 1930s. My father was usually away in those years, working or looking for work in nearby towns, and I used to take advantage of his absence by often sneaking into my mother’s bed. That way, I wouldn’t have to go downstairs (yes, downstairs) to share a bed with my two brothers near the family cow. The price I would have to pay is that often I would have to listen to my mother’s pessimistic musings, addressed mostly to herself, I guess, about the dismal state of our family’s finances. She simply saw no way out of the morass.

Those were really the bad years for our family. Several of us were still in school, and the ones who had completed school could hardly find a paying job. Some of my sisters worked as maids, but their earnings amounted to a pittance - the employers thought they were doing them a favor by simply feeding them. My mother was often at a loss in deciding what to put on the stove for the next meal. The shelves were bare or nearly so. The family was heavily indebted, and further credit was simply unavailable.

Later on, when we were finally all grown and the state of the family’s finances was improving, her health began to deteriorate. First, it was gastric ulcers, for which she was successfully operated around 1940. Then, a long and finally losing battle with uterine cancer, which brought her to her grave in late 1945, when I was 16. Fortunately, Veronica, one of my sisters, assumed my mother’s responsibilities. She eased my father’s transition into widowhood and kept the rest of the family together.

I have honored my mother’s memory with another poem in Nones, titled “Me Mare,” which was published by Ciacere en Trentin, a publication to promote the use of dialects. It is shown with its translation into English, on page C-5.

During their 40-year marriage, my parents brought nine children into this world, seven of who lived into adulthood, while two, Matteo and Albino, were the victims of infant mortality. Of those who lived into adulthood, only two survive as of 2003: Veronica, born in 1919, and myself, (Paul, known locally as Paulino) born in 1929. The other five have already died. All are described briefly below.

Pierina, the oldest of my eight brothers and sisters was born in 1908 and died in 1963. She never married and spent her life working the meager land owned by my family and doing various house chores (which included taking care of the one and only cow owned by my family in those years).

Matteo, (the second child to whom that name was given, the first one having already died) was born in 1914, never married and worked with my father and others in construction and other odd jobs. Like our father, he was a very religious man and never cursed. Nevertheless, he had a good sense of humor, and he liked to entertain the villagers with his own brand of folk tales. He lived with my sister Veronica and her children until his death, brought on by Parkinson’s disease, in 1993.

Veronica, born in 1919, worked as a maid in various locations during her youth. She then settled down in Tregiovo as the wife of Giuseppe Flaim and had four children; Paul-Anthony, Giuseppina (Pina), Gloria, and Daniela. Her husband migrated to America in 1957, a few months before the birth of the last child. His departure soon turned into a complete desertion of the family, leaving Veronica to fend for herself in raising her four children. She struggled, and, with some help from myself and other family members, she managed it.

All her children are now married and have children of their own. Paul-Anthony, the oldest, migrated to America in 1967, and is now a small plumbing contractor. He and wife Brenda have two boys, Paul and Andrew; and two girls, Christina and Victoria. Veronica’s other children, Pina, Gloria, and Daniela, remained in Italy and married men from villages near Tregiovo. Each of them has a couple of children.

Gloria, who now shares the old family house with her mother Veronica, married Rino Gasperetti from the nearby village of Tuenno. They have two children: Claudio and Roberta. Pina married Elio Togn and lives with him and their two daughters, Erica and Elena, in Roverè della Luna, his native village, about 30 miles from Tregiovo. Daniela married Ugo Odorizzi, originally from Pavillo, and lives with him and their two daughters, Cinzia and Elisa, in a very nice house they have recently constructed in Tregiovo. They are all of comfort and assistance to Veronica in her old age, and they gather often by her in the old homestead.

Veronica has really been the glue that kept our family closely knit. She tended to our parents during their sickness and death; she made the arrangements for their burial as well as that of other family members; she struggled to raise her children; she has assisted them in bringing up their own; she has been of help to others in the village, and she is still happy to welcome all visitors.

Bruna was born in 1921 and died in 1984. During her youth, she also worked as a maid in various locations. During WWII, she was drafted to work on a farm in Alto Adige, where the German owners actually treated her very well. When we went to Italy in 1972, Bruna asked me to take her, her husband Celestino, and son Albino to visit these former employers. They were very happy to see each other again and reminisced about old times.

Bruna had married Celestino Fedrigoni in 1954 and had gone to live with him in Marcena di Rumo, a few minutes from Tregiovo. Their first child, Paolo, was born in 1955, followed by a daughter, Nicoletta, and another son, Albino. Paolo went to the seminary as a teenager and, at one point, was sent to England to learn English. He was ordained into the priesthood in 1982, and I witnessed the ceremony along with my son, John-Paul, my brother Ottavio, and nephew Paul Anthony. After his ordination, Paolo served in Kenya for a few years as a missionary of the Order of the Consolata. Once he returned to Italy, Paolo went to law school, and became a lawyer. He lives in Torino where he now handles legal matters for his order. Later in 2003, Paolo expects to go to Mongolia to set up a mission in Ulan Bator, the capital.

Nicoletta became a teacher and married Silvano Martinelli, a bookkeeper for the local dairy. They have three children: Massimiliano, Francesca, and Nicola and live in Placeri di Rumo, near Tregiovo, in a beautifully renovated apartment in Silvano’s family home.

Albino, the third of Bruna’s children, is a policeman, married to Patrizia Marchetti (whose father and uncle own a very modern and successful pantyhose factory which we visited a few years ago). They visited us on their honeymoon, and they now have a daughter named Sara and live in Castiglione delle Stiviere, within the province of Mantova, about two hours away from Tregiovo.

Barbara was born in 1924. She never married and lived at home until her death in 1969. I remember my frustrated father helping Barbara with her math studies, which she found extremely difficult. During her life, she helped with some of the work in the fields and with various chores around the house.

Ottavio, the eighth child, as the name implies, was born in 1926. He went to Elementary School in Tregiovo and afterwards worked at various jobs; cutting trees, building roads, picking apples, and doing farm work. He and I migrated to America in early 1947, about one year after our mother died. We embarked from Genoa on an old troop transport, named the “Marine Perch.” The trip took thirteen long days, and we landed in New York on March 18, 1947. And we soon got a taste of America’s generosity.

We were almost penniless, and we were planning to ask our relatives to wire us the necessary funds for the rest of our trip. However, since we were considered to be American citizens (by virtue of my father having acquired American citizenship in 1902 while working in Hazleton, Pennsylvania), some mysterious agency of the U.S. government assisted us by informing our cousin, Virgilio Paternoster (Maria’s father) of our arrival, by taking us to the train station and actually seeing that we got on the right train, and, more importantly, by providing us train fare and a small amount of spending money for our trip to Roanoke, Virginia. (We have never been asked for a repayment of these funds.)

Once we arrived in Roanoke, my brother and I went separate ways. As prearranged by my relatives, I stayed there, went to work in a restaurant and lived with the Gentilini family, friends of my cousin Virgilio. Ottavio went on to Wyco, West Virginia where we had two other cousins, Silvio and his brother, Rudolph Pedri. Ottavio lived with Silvio, his wife Annie and their seven boys. Ottavio worked with Silvio in the coal- mines for a few years. While there, he suffered an accident in which he lost three toes, causing him to limp slightly in his later years.

Around 1955, Ottavio moved to Washington, DC to work as a stonemason for a contractor named Battista. In 1956, he married Barbara Johnson. He worked around the Washington area until his retirement in the late 1980s. He died, childless, in 1993. His widow, Bobbe, still lives at their home in Riverdale, Maryland.

Paolo Olivo Flaim -- I was the youngest and 9th child, born on June 17, 1929, when my mother was already 46 years old. I was delivered with the assistance of one of my father’s sisters, aunt Cristina. For the first years of my life, we lived in the ancestral house we shared with uncle Pietro’s family. Around 1933, we moved to another house across the extremely narrow street, now called “Via Vecchia Osteria” in deference to the old tavern that once operated practically next door to us. The verb “operated” is really a stretch, as the place was usually deserted, coming alive only on Sundays, when some of the old villagers might stop in for a glass of wine after Mass, and when some of the young villagers would sit down for a game of cards or an ear-splitting game of “morra”.

As a child, I usually slept with my brothers Matteo and Ottavio in a dark room downstairs. (Ottavio and I later installed an electric light in the room.) The family cow bedded down in a stall only about 20 feet from our room. I went to the local school for eight years (four of which I spent in the fifth grade, as there were no higher grades in our village, yet one was required to attend school until the age of 14). During the summers, I helped with the work in our meager fields, gathered wood both for our need and for sale in nearby towns, and, of course, found some time to play with my friends, usually with toys we would fashion on our own.

One childhood event stands out in my memory. In 1938, I was picked to recite a welcoming poem to the Bishop of Trento, when he made a rare pastoral visit to our village, riding on a horse owned by a well-known villager, Stefenot. I studied and rehearsed for hours, and all went as programmed until I finished my recital. At that point, the Bishop patted me on the head and showed me his big flashing-red ring. I kept staring at it, not knowing what else I should do. Nobody had told me I was supposed to kiss the ring. Finally, a young priest accompanying the Bishop whispered in the local dialect: “Kiss it. Kiss it. It won’t burn you.” I meekly complied.

Another interesting thing that I remember about my childhood is that during one summer, when I was about 10, my mother would send me weekly to Cloz, a nearby village, to bring food to my father (sauce made from wild mushrooms we gathered in the local woods, which my father would then eat with the ever-present “polenta”). The journey through mountain paths, always on Thursdays, used to take me about one and a half hour, each way. I remember these weekly treks very vividly and have written a poem about them, “El Zobia,” published by Trentino Emigrazione in their July 1997 issue and reproduced on page C-7.

I went to a one-room schoolhouse, in which one single teacher managed somehow to juggle five different classes: the first through the fifth grade. The teachers were obviously normal people, but they did not shy away from using the terror approach when they felt it was needed. I will illustrate this by noting some episodes, the first of which marks me as the culprit.

I was in the first grade when, due to some circumstances I do not recall, I made “poo-poo” in my pants. It was near dismissal time, and the teacher, having noticed the unpleasant odor, wanted to know from whom it was emanating. She lined us up in the hallway and, applying the terrorizing approach, threatened us with this and that unless the guilty one “came clean”. I admitted nothing, but the kid next to me (Beppino Eccher, now dead) succumbed to her approach and broke down crying. Suddenly, all hands pointed to him as the guilty one, and I was able to go home with my reputation – if not my rear end – unsullied.

it as “Piove Roberto”, without a pause between the two sentences. The teacher tried several times to correct him, but with no success. Finally, frustrated and enraged, the teacher dragged the kid to the window, and asked him point blank: “Look. Is it raining now?” Though the skies were clear, the child, having been properly terrorized, answered “Si.” (Yes.) … and started urinating in his pants. The teacher looked at him and resignedly said: “Oh, I see. It ‘s raining in your pants!”

When I was about 11 or 12, the village priest convinced my parents that I should study for the priesthood, and I began preparatory studies with Emilia Flaim, a college graduate who later became a nun. After a few weeks of very strenuous studies, I quit. Breaking my mother’s heart, I had decided that the priesthood was not for me, or, actually, that the path towards it seemed too steep to me. So it must have seemed to my two friends and co-students, Iginio Corrà and Fabio Flaim, who also quit. (The latter, however, is now a lay deacon who serves in a Brooklyn, N. Y. parish.) After abandoning the clerical trail, all three of us returned to our village‘s elementary school, and, in summer, helped tilling our scrawny fields.

I actually took another stab at higher studies after a year or two, taking the entrance exams for the “Scuola di Avviamento Tecnico Professionale” (a highly touted trade school, I guess). Although I passed the exam, nothing came of it. The war was intensifying; nearby towns were being bombed, and Tregiovo, being a remote mountain village, was not a bad place to stay put at times like those.

At that time, especially in the last two years of the war, many youths would come to our house in the evenings, mainly because we had a borrowed radio where we could listen to news about the war on “Radio Londra” (BBC). My father was always happy to welcome our friends and neighbors. Although he always went to bed very early, he would often get up late in the evening, come briefly into our kitchen, and proudly count how many of us had managed to squeeze in. By then, my mother was already in ill health.

We did not suffer much during the war. While certain basic things such as salt were very hard to come by, we managed to grow enough potatoes and other basic crops to fill our hungry, youthful stomachs. So, while we certainly had to make some sacrifices, the isolation of our village -- not yet accessible by any type of motorized vehicle -- turned out to be a valuable asset during the war years. It allowed us to act as spectators, watching the bombing and strafing of other, more important communities.

Some of the actions we took to ensure our family’s survival and to maintain a small stream of personal income during the war years were of dubious legality, if not outright infractions of the law. For example, while still in my early teens, I participated in the cutting down of several county-owned trees, which we would then sell to unscrupulous local merchants. Among the doomed trees, there was perhaps the largest beech tree then in existence for miles. Its demise was really a childish act, in which I participated with an older youth, Silvio Paternoster, now deceased.

We really bit off more than we could chew in our childish attempt to fell and sell such a majestic tree, whose presence, we childishly thought, was known only to us. We barely managed to fell it; we could never harvest or sell any part of it, as our deed -- though not the doers -- was discovered soon after the tree fell to the ground. Subsequently, the county authorities had the tree trunk hauled to the village square. It served for various years as a rustic bench on which some village men would often sit late into the night to discuss such things as the downfall of Mussolini and the progress of the war on its various fronts.

Even more daring -- and potentially more dangerous -- was our “taking” in the winter of 1944 or ‘45, of about 100 pounds of butter, requisitioned by the Germans and temporarily stored for them in the local village dairy. I, then 15 years of age, participated in this venture with another friend of mine, Gustavo Paternoster, now also deceased. We accessed the butter – Santa Claus style – through the dairy’s short chimney. (I was picked for the chimney trip for two reasons: (1) I was relatively small and (2) I had some “previous experience”, having been dropped through the same chimney once before to retrieve a key which the dairy operator had forgetfully locked inside.)

With the butter, which we hid in various places, the food of our families went down rather smoothly the ensuing year. At war’s end, we secretly sent the dairy more money for the butter than they would have gotten from the Germans. This wartime deed and the identity of its doers is now an open secret in Tregiovo.

I have written a poem in Nones about another adventure in my youth, “En ziro col’agola,” which deals with a Halloween-type all-day trek in the search for eggs. It was published in the April 2001 edition of the N.O.S. magazine and is shown (slightly modified and with a translation into English) on page C-8.

After the war’s end, I worked at odd jobs here and there, with some annual stints in Cloz, a nearby village, where I helped with various tasks on a very modern apple plantation. While I was working in Cloz, two of my cousins (Dario and Lino Flaim) were going to the American Consulate in Milan to see about their possibility of emigrating to the United States. My brother Ottavio gave them our father’s old citizenship papers (about which my father never talked) to see if they were still valid. My cousins were told that the papers appeared to be quite valid and that my brother and I could probably come to the United States, at anytime before we were 21. After finding that our cousin, Virgilio, the son of one of my father’s sisters, who lived in Roanoke, Virginia, was willing to pay our passage and look after us, we decided to try our luck on these shores, and we bed good-bye to Tregiovo, our alpine village.

As described above, the trip to America was a long one. European transportation systems were still in disarray in early 1947. Cattle cars were still being used to transport people on the railroads and troop transports were still in use to transport civilians on the high seas. Nevertheless, nearly a month after leaving our home in the Alps, we finally arrived at our destination in Roanoke, Virginia, in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The train trip from New York, though mostly at night, was full of revelations to us. I remember being particularly amazed at the sight of the many multi-color neon signs flashing on and off in the distance -- and being particularly proud when I could actually understand what some of them said. Having just passed Philadelphia, there was a sign that proclaimed “ELECTRICITY IS CHEAP IN CHESTER”. And I could actually understand its message! The English I had studied, essentially on my own, was already beginning to pay off!

We arrived in Roanoke early in the morning on April 19, 1947. As pre- arranged by our cousin Virgilio, who was considerably older than us and who was to become like a father to me, Ottavio soon went on to other relatives in the “coal fields” of West Virginia. (Not, however, before biting into an unpeeled banana, which my future landlady, Mrs. Gentilini, offered us and which neither of us had ever seen before, and thus didn’t know how to attack.) I remained in town and began to work in a pre-arranged job at “Station Lunch”, an establishment frequented by a few train travelers, some taxi drivers, and occasional prostitutes.

I worked there, at 14 dollars a week, later raised to $15, for about six months. I swept and mopped the floor, washed dishes, and was even made to wait on some customers. So, being forced to engage in much human contact, I quickly expanded my knowledge of the English language. But, with taxi drivers and prostitutes being often my teachers, the language I learned was rather “salty”, as I was later to discover.

At any rate, after about six months, being somewhat disenchanted with my career prospects, I quit, switched occupational paths, and started working, first, as a helper, then as an “apprentice stone mason” with my cousin Virgilio. I was now making 80 cents an hour, a possible $32.00 a week, if it didn’t rain. Life was looking up!

The Gentilinis became like a second family to me. Maria was the matriarch and my landlady, but acted at times like a mother. She lived with her daughter Carolyn, a WWII widow, and granddaughter Gloria in a very modest house near the railroad yard, on Shenandoah Avenue. Maria’s other children visited often, and I became good friends with some of them. To this date, I still keep in touch with Gloria and her husband Melvin Divers and visit them once in a while in Roanoke.

During the years I lived in Roanoke, I would travel occasionally to Wyco, WV to visit my brother Ottavio and our cousins Silvio and Rudolph Pedri. They both had children who were close in age to us, and we became good friends.

In early 1950, being unemployed in Roanoke, I decided to try my luck in Baltimore, where, according to a friend, there was plenty of work in my newly chosen occupation. My cousin Virgilio, who was really acting like a second father, accompanied me on this trip and made the arrangements for my next job. It was with Albert D. Battista, who many years later became Ottavio’s employer. I worked for a year on the construction of the Loyola College Chapel; finished my three-year apprenticeship; and, meanwhile, took courses in architectural drafting at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. I continued working as a full-fledged stonemason until mid-1953, when I was drafted into the U.S. Army.

I went through four months of training as a “tank gunner” at Fort Knox, Kentucky. While there, I took and passed with flying colors the high school equivalency test and got my G.E.D. I was then sent to Linz, Austria, where I served for 18 rather pleasant months. I bought a 1950 Ford from a captain returning to the States, and was able to take various trips to Tregiovo, my native village across the border. On one of these trips, I took my cousins Jimmy and Adolph Pedri, then garrisoned in Germany, to see their parents’ ancestral villages and meet some of their relatives.

After my discharge in 1955, I returned to Baltimore and resumed my life as a stonemason. I also enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, where after eight years of night school, financed almost entirely by the G.I. Bill, I graduated with a BS in Business Administration in 1963. In the meantime, I had made another – and final – career change. In early 1962, I put away my stonemason tools and began working for Uncle Sam, first as a translator and then as “claims authorizer” for the Social Security Administration at its Baltimore headquarters.

Many of my relatives and friends gravitated to the Baltimore/Washington area in this period. I was instrumental in getting jobs for several, starting with my brother Ottavio and my cousin Severino. Also, cousin Silvio retired from the coal- mines of WV and moved his family to Baltimore, where his son Severino, already lived with his wife Gina. By then, sons Ernest, Jimmy, and Bruno had moved to Detroit and were working for General Motors, while Louis, Raymond and George were still living at home. I used to visit Silvio and family frequently at their home in the Dundalk suburb of Baltimore. I joined them for Sunday dinners many times. Annie, the mother, would often serve “polenta” with the rabbits and squirrels that Silvio and his sons had hunted. In the summer, they would often go crabbing, and we would later eat the crabs in their backyard.

Other relatives soon joined our community. Daria, my cousin Dario’s oldest daughter and her husband Isidoro, came from Italy around 1960 and settled in Washington, DC. Later, her mother Lina and her younger children, Pietro, Dora, Mariano and Margherita also settled in Washington and lived in the same neighborhood where Ottavio and his wife resided at the time. Later on, Elsa who had been a nun in Italy, also decided to come and join the rest of her family. Tullia, her husband Lino Paternoster, and their children came to America in 1972. The only member of the family who remained in Italy was Ada, another nun.

Meanwhile, some of my other Tregiovo relatives settled in the Big Apple. My cousins Lino, Fabio, and Romano, three brothers, came via Uruguay, where the first two had acquired local mates—Silvia and Deolinda. Their mother, Mary Flaim (Virgilio Paternoster’s sister), the one with 18 children who was born in Pennsylvania, had already emigrated from Tregiovo after her husband died and was living in Brooklyn with some of her children: Umberto, Graziella, and Lucia. Daughters Rosetta and Alma settled nearby with their husbands, Luigi Fellin and Augusto Paternoster, respectively. Maria, my cousin Virgilio’s daughter, and her husband Gustavo and daughters Evita, Edda, and Fernanda also settled in New York. So, in the course of a few years, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, many of my Tregiovo relatives moved, either to the shores of the Potomac, of the Chesapeake Bay, or of the Hudson River.

Besides my close relatives, many others also emigrated from Tregiovo in those years. Some settled in the New York area (Pio Eccher and his brothers); some moved to the Chicago district (Marino, my childhood friend, and other Ecchers, Ferdinando Flaim and family); others went West to Wyoming (Celestino Flaim); and some joined us here in the Nation’s Capital. Among the latter there was a close friend of mine, Luigi Flaim, who moved his whole family to the Washington suburbs in the late 1960s. He is a prize-winning cabinet-maker, now retired, who has worked in the White House, the Blair House, the Supreme Court, and the US Senate.

Returning to my personal story, after two years with Social Security, I decided to try for a master degree at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a branch of Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. During my first year at SAIS, I commuted from Baltimore three days a week. For my second year, I decided to move to Washington. I roomed at Hartnett Hall, a glorified boarding house at 22nd and P Sts., NW, where my friend and classmate Phil Supina, as well as many Latin Americans, Vietnamese, and other out-of-towners also lived. Since I hoped to work in the international field, I specialized in International Economics at SAIS.

After my graduation from SAIS in 1966, I returned to the Federal Government as a labor economist in the international area of the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in Washington. During my first year, I was a Management Intern and in that capacity, rotated to various positions within the Department of Labor. One of these assignments was working for the White House Special Commission on Hispanic Affairs. Another assignment was the analysis of employment and unemployment data. I particularly liked that work, and after my internship year, I chose to work permanently in that field, taking a job with the Division of Employment and Unemployment Analysis. Incidentally, BLS was then located in the General Accounting Office Building (at 5th and G Streets N.W.), on the construction of which I had worked as a young stonemason in 1951. An unusual development, indeed!

During my professional career at BLS, I served in various positions and made several career advances. I had the opportunity to travel widely, visiting Puerto Rico and far-away places such as Sweden, Switzerland, France, Canada, Italy, Mexico, and Panama, representing the United States at various international conferences and meetings.

During my first two years at BLS, I shared a very small apartment on M St., NW with a young man from Italy, Riccardo Patti, a classmate at SAIS. He stemmed from an old noble family, and received mail addressed to him as “the Count of San Giorgio”. But he kept very quiet about his roots and his “nobility” never affected our relationship, or that with our mutual friends. To us, he was simply Riccardo. In 1967, my nephew, Paul A. Flaim emigrated from Italy and moved in with us. At that point, we moved to a larger place on Marlboro Pike in the Washington suburb of Hillcrest Heights.

More importantly, early during my renewed career with Uncle Sam, I met a lovely young lady from Puerto Rico, Lourdes Nieves, then studying for a master degree, also in economics, at Catholic University. Lynn Bartlett, who at the time was working with me and studying with her, introduced us to each other. After a brief courtship, which Lourdes’ father, Don Juan, or more officially Dr. Nieves, loved to liken to a “blitz krieg”, we were wed on September 14, 1968 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Riccardo Patti, “Count of San Giorgio”, served as my “best man” at the wedding. My nephew Paul A. and my cousins Pietro Flaim, Louis and Raymond Pedri also attended and participated in the wedding. We honeymooned in the Virgin Islands and subsequently established our temporary residence in a small but very comfortable apartment in the Washington suburbs.

Lourdes soon became an integral part of my extended family. Together, we would often visit Lina Flaim and her family in Washington, the Pedris in Baltimore, and even my relatives in New York. We have tried to maintain these relationships and have encouraged our sons to do likewise.