My Inspiration: My Italian Grandparents

My grandparents Dominico and Lucia Pettoruto came to Lawrence in

the late 1800s. They owned and operated Pettoruto’s Market since

1906. Though they were a part of the 1912 Strike and crisis, they never

talked about it to their seven children or grandchildren. But I grew up

in their midst. As I look back while doing research for my book, Three

Whistles, I believe that they lived the legacy and fallout from the 1912

Bread and Roses Strike, the 1918 Spanish Flu, the passions of Sacco and

Vanzetti and World War II.

There are many things that cannot be put in words: all the many years

of research, the many questions I was not able to ignore. If you picked

up this book, what I hope Italian Americans knew, like their fellow

immigrants --the Irish, Armenians, Jews, Lithuanians Greeks and French

Canadians – were that there were things that they could not put into

words. Some 45 different nationalities lived within 7 square miles

during that time and in that immigrant city. The world of the immigrant

strikers during the 1912 Strike was different entirely from the world of

the owners of the mills and properties. Even their happiness was

different, but tragic. As it was, they found comedy and existence. The

protestors, when fighting for the life of one of their own – Sacco and

Vanzetti – were different from the politicians and lawyers who accused

them. There were moments, such as during World War II, when a

mother lost seven sons in battle; as when the wife of the protagonist,

Betty, who as the years slip away becomes the feminist of today and

invites us into a woman’s voice of yesterday.

Lawrence, Massachusetts will forever have the same seven square

miles, but in the year 1912, the one year everything changed, this small

city housed 300 to 600 people per square acre and competed with

Harlem as one of the most densely populated areas in the country.

Lawrence was a magnet for women who were called by the Yankee

aristocracy and upwardly mobile immigrants “factory girls.” Lawrence

women had no drawing rooms, no literary circle or fashion nosegays.

To the upper class, they occupied a meager place in the world. They

were not full-fledged members of society but women who supported

themselves and their families. They were socially invisible, but not to

themselves. They lived in a community and in one way or another, they

used the opportunity of the Bread and Roses Strike to make life a little

better. They wanted to matter, but here’s the thing. They did matter

and no one cared.

Without people like Sara Axelrod, who hauled wagons of provisions to

the strikers -- potatoes, sugar, bread, chicken and pigs – the strikers

would have been starved into submission. Then there was Annie

Welsenback, who came to the US when she was two years old, had

earned a reputation of strength and courage and was the highest paid

operative on the shop floor. She spoke English, Polish and Yiddish. She

wore hats, stylish dresses and cosmetics. She popularized the hat

because she wore them to the Strike meeting and this often-divided

women strikers. Women who wore shawls kept watch for scabs, has

and powdered faces. In addition, there was Sadie Zamon, a Syrian

pioneer who kept watch for scabs, scanning the streets from her 3 Rd

floor window, often throwing water on them as they walked by.

Robert Coles tells us “No immigrant in Lawrence factories believed

himself to be a free man.” “The Truth about Lawrence,” he goes on to

say, “during this time the immigrants sought security in their clubs, in

the mills and in their desperate efforts to be Americans. The Strike was

a paradox to the unseeing. It revealed an un-American city where

security was utterly lacking.” But, to those who knew, like my

protagonist Pasquale, it would be marked by the emergence of

Lawrence as an American city with all the security that the term

American means.