The Old Man and the Sea
by Marlene Moore
Unfortunately, Ernest Hemingway laid claim to this title before I did; otherwise I would have used it to describe my grandfather, Nicolo Giacalone, an old man who spent his entire life as a fisherman. Nicolo was born on October 8, 1894, in Mazara del Vallo in Trapani Province, Sicily, one hundred and one years prior to the birth of my youngest son, Timothy. Nicolo’s mother died when he was very young and his own father, Pietro Giacalone, had no choice but to take Nicolo with him fishing, where he learned the Old World art of long-line fishing (stringing his lines with hundreds of hooks in a Mediterranean style handed down by his Sicilian ancestors).
Nicolo originally arrived in America in 1913 at the age of nineteen to work as a fisherman. He sailed out of San Francisco Bay aboard the Star of India (the beautiful iron-hulled tall ship that is now permanently docked in San Diego Bay). His destination was the Bristol Bay Packing Company in Bristol Bay, Alaska for the salmon fishing season where he practiced production fishing, helping catch tons of salmon on the route from California to Alaska. It was during 1913 to 1914 that he served as both a fisherman and cook aboard The Star. In 1915 he returned to Sicily because, as an Italian citizen, he was obligated to join the Italian Navy and serve his country during World War I. He returned to America on October 31, 1919, passing through Ellis Island along with millions of his fellow Italians. He had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on a ship named The Argentina. A search of the ship’s manifest on the Ellis Island Foundation website lists his occupation as ‘angler,’ an apt description for a man who fished from the age of four. The manifest also shows that in response to one of the many questions he was asked, “Length of time you intend to stay in the U.S.,” Nicolo answered “Forever.” One year later his wife, Epifania, answered the same question with the same answer, “Forever,” as did all the other immigrants who made that trip on the same ship (The Providence) as Epifania – everyone planned to come to America and stay. It’s interesting to think of all these young Italians so far from home, so far from everything they had ever known, so far from their families, coming to start a new life in a country they knew nothing about, and knowing that they had come to the U.S. to stay forever, most likely never to return to their home land.
Nicolo and his future wife, Epifania (born on September 8, 1901), who immigrated one year after him in 1920, came at the very end of the Classic Italian mass migration between 1881-1920. He and Epifania both grew up on the same street in Sicily, Via Bambino, and they got married on October 2, 1921 in San Francisco and had five children (Peter, Jenny, Anthony, Salvatore, and Vera). My grandparents actually did return to Mazara two times in later years, but only to visit. Their intention was to close the door on their little village in Sicily and begin anew in America. Upon returning to America after their second and final visit back to Sicily, Epifania told my dad that she was disappointed to see that there had not been any noticeable advances, like in the infrastructure. Mazara had not progressed in the years since she and Nicolo had been gone. Nicolo spent his entire career as a commercial fisherman and he also owned his own small fishing boat, Two Sisters (named for his two daughters, Vera and Jenny).
In April 1980 Nicolo made a trip to San Diego (from his home in the Italian neighborhood of Monterey, CA) to visit two of his sons in San Diego and also to revisit the Star of India. Several media outlets (the San Diego Union-Tribune and the San Diego Log) accompanied Nicolo on his tour of the Star, interviewing him and then sharing his thoughts of returning to his old ship in two print articles, which are included as part of this chapter.
Nicolo never attended school. In 1940, at the age of 46, he became a United States citizen, after having studied (with quite a bit of struggle) to learn English and to also learn the U.S. constitution. My dad, Anthony, is the one who helped Nicolo learn English and prepare Nicolo to become a citizen. When the immigration judge granted Nicolo his citizenship papers, Nicolo said, “For two years I studied very hard. Now that I am a citizen, I want to kiss my flag.” And with that, he grabbed the corner of the American flag and kissed it.
In the book La Storia, Five Centuries of the Italian American experience, the “Identity – Character and Assimilation” chapter speaks of the earlier immigrants continuing to spurn assimilation (226-227), with the immigrants’ children being the ones to more likely want to assimilate. This actually is true of my own family. My grandfather Nicolo had three sons, two of whom legally changed their last name of Giacalone to DeLani and Gaines. DeLani (that was the name my dad chose as the replacement for Giacalone) still retained an Italian sound and appearance but Gaines (the name chosen by my uncle Salvatore) was Americanized to the max. Nicolo was insulted when his two young adult sons changed their name. This personal incident illustrates the original immigrant maintaining a hold on his “Italian-ness” while the next generation/his sons, didn’t mind at all shedding the Old World surname.
Finding the Mother Lode, Italian Immigrants in California, which is the companion DVD film to Pane Amaro, documents the experience of Italian immigrants in California, which is distinctly different from the experience of Italians who landed on the East Coast and stayed there. The film provides a summary of life in the little Italy’s of various California counties, one of them being Monterey County where Nicolo eventually settled. The voiceover on the DVD says that in interviewing senior members of the Monterey Italian community for the film, there were lots of memories of the activity on Van Buren St. and Monroe St., during the time of the early 1900s on Fisherman’s Wharf. Nicolo and his family (including my dad) actually lived on Monroe Street. My dad was born in a house just one street over, on Clay St., and Van Buren was several streets away – all part of my dad’s ‘stomping grounds’ and the setting of his early years.
Many Sicilians came to Monterey (and other west coast cities) due to industrialized fishing and money to be made. There was ‘enormous freedom, acceptance, and welcome in Monterey not felt in other parts of the country.’ The Sicilians were very enterprising and ambitious people, working as fishermen and also working in the canneries. The women played a very central role in the Italian family. While the father was out for long periods of time fishing, the women kept the household and family going, performed both the mother and father roles, made decisions, etc. This description from the film exactly mirrors the experience of my own dad and his parents. While Nicolo was gone for long periods of time, his wife/my grandmother Epifania ran the household, acting as both mother and father, CEO, CFO, and COO. The film also states that fishing as a profession did not last. The children, the next generation, became educated and moved into different professions. They became culturally and socially assimilated. Again, this is illustrated by my own dad and his brother (the two that changed their surnames). Both became civil engineers and draftsmen, both bought homes in the suburbs of San Diego, and although both lived their lives along the San Diego coast, they both broke from tradition, with neither one ever becoming a fisherman. My dad shared with me how, in his younger pre-teen and teen years his dad/Nicolo would take him out to sea in his fishing boat, and it was terrifying for my dad being so far from land. Plus, he became terribly seasick! He did not have any aspirations at all to become a fisherman. Also in the film there were shots of different fishing boats along Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey with names like “Three Sons” and “Four Daughters.” I guess this was typical for boats to be named like this because as I mentioned above, Nicolo named his boat “Two Sisters!”
Nicolo’s middle son (my dad) Anthony, who is now 92 years old, tells me that his neighborhood in Monterey was a mixture of ethnicities, but it was mostly dominated by Italians with last names like Lazarino, Tarantino, Serrano, Marino, Straguzzi, Principato, and Giacalone. The Italian students were the dominant ethnic group at school during my dad’s years of attending public school from about 1931 to 1943. When my dad served in the U.S. Navy during WWII, he said his crew on the destroyer he served on was about 25% Italian.
In my dad’s younger years he spent a lot of time on Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey. It was a place of relaxation, a place of interest, with all the seagulls and sea lions that would occasionally surface. He enjoyed watching all the purse seiners sail out and return with a load of sardines. He liked the smell of all of it. There were no restaurants and tourist attractions on the wharf back then but rather, the wharf was used for practical purposes (fishing). My dad does not recall any discrimination issues in his younger years. He has a memory of life in his Italian neighborhood as being very idyllic.
So this experience of my grandfather/Nanu Nicola as an original immigrant to the U.S. and his son/my dad Anthony as the child of an immigrant differs wildly from what we read about in some of the readings for our class, for example, Christ in Concrete by Pietro di Donato or Helen Barolini’s book, Umbertina. There is a huge difference in the East Coast/West Coast experience of the Italian immigrant. Italians generally found a more accepting environment on the west coast.
Helen Barolini describes how Umbertina was “learning the American story – money was the key to everything. If you were fortunate enough to keep your health and reason in the midst of the purgatorial tenements you were forced to pass through in the New York sojourn, you might be able to get to some other place with the money you saved (67).” So Umbertina, after having lived in the slums of New York for two years, concluded that she and her husband were country people (from their village in Sicily) and proceeded to take steps to get them out of the exploitative N.Y. environment, into the fresh air of California where they fared much better, started a family business, and thrived. In Christ in Concrete, the Italians are relegated to train car style tenements with abhorrent bathroom conditions; the Italian men who are responsible for building the east coast infrastructure are abused and exploited. My grandfather just fished! He and his fellow fishermen enjoyed their west coast life on the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
My grandfather Nicolo passed away in August of 1987 at the age of 93. I think his life as an immigrant, his life experience on the west coast of America, and the lives of his children in Monterey, CA provide a real life illustration of a contrasting view of the life of an Italian immigrant. Much of what we have studied this semester of the immigrant experience is unlike that of my own family.
Works Cited:
Barolini, Helen. Umbertina. New York: Harper & Row. Seaview Books; 1979.
di Donato, Pietro. Christ in concrete. New York: Putnam. 1939.
Mangione, Jerre & Morreale, Ben. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York: Harper Collins. 1992.
Norelli, Gianfranco & Kurien, Suma. Finding the Mother Lode, Italian Immigrants in California. 2014.
Documents:
-Birth Certificate, Fisherman's Union Card, Passport - Nicolo Giacalone
Star of India Cook Recalls Storm of 1914. San Diego Log. 4/16/1980.
Star of India Cook Recalls Storm. San Dieo Union. 4/7/1980