The Luck of the Italian
👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson and welcome to 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 a memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Book summary in 50 words)
Below is a middle chapter, which immediately follows last month’s chapter about Grandma Kay’s father emigrating from Croatia to the United States. Hope you enjoy it!
The Luck of the Italian
Across the Adriatic Sea in Italy, my other great grandfather, John Gemello, cultivated wine grapes in a small village of Piedmont. By 1912, a year earlier than Ivan Volarevic’s voyage to America, John had already grown frustrated by northern Italy’s harsh winters, and how it would ruin his crops each year. This had happened three out of the past four years.
He, too, had ambitions of coming to America. His friends, who had immigrated to San Jose, California, would write him letters about opportunities in America with a more favorable climate.
John was no stranger to packing up and moving in pursuit of better wages. He was born in 1882 in the Italian-French Alps border-town of Buttigliera Alta, about 16 miles from Turin.1 The rural community of Buttigliera is where John learned to pasture pigs, lamb and oxen as a child.
By 13, he was helping to prune a vineyard and drive a team of oxen. In his early twenties, he took his blue collar skills to France and Germany. Wherever the labor was needed.
But before he did that, he made a pivotal life decision, one that went against his mother’s wishes.
Great Grandpa John Gemello & his son, MarioThat year - 1895 - John planned to leave town for some time to go work on a farm, and his mother suggested he spend the next week visiting his uncle in a town called Moncucco, about a dozen miles east of Turin. In that short time, a neighbor, two doors down, named John Casaligna also needed a farm hand and attempted to recruit John.
“I can’t,” John told him. “I already committed to another job somewhere else.”
“What are they paying you?” Casaligna asked.
“Twelve dollars a year.”
“No problem. I can match that,” Casaligna said.
When John told his mother he got a job in Moncucco and was staying, she said don’t do it. “It’s not good to work for relatives or friends of relatives,” she advised.
He ignored the advice, and accepted Casaligna’s offer. He stayed for the next three years.
What drove that decision of 13-year-old John Gemello? More money? Better work environment? Regardless if either of those elements were true, John was likely encouraged by an ulterior motive; the companionship of Casaligna’s 14-year-old daughter, Teresa.
“We begin to talk, that means we’re ‘going together’ in the old country,” John said in retelling the story years later.
They discussed getting married a few years later, but decided not to because John was set to join the Italian army.
Teresa said, “I’ll wait for you.”
Teresa didn’t have to wait long, though, because John’s service ended in rapid fashion - one year - due to his father’s unexpected death. Six months after his return, John and Teresa got married on Easter Sunday, April 3, 1904. The original plan was to get married at the courthouse. But since it was closed, the mayor married them.
They moved to France about a month later so that John could pursue a higher paying job, assisting a home-builder with his bricklaying skills. He was earning 3 francs per day in the French Alps.
When Teresa became pregnant with their first child, Joseph, she returned to Piedmont to live with relatives. Joseph, unfortunately, was struck with polio. Unlike today, there was no polio vaccine. He died at age two.
Sometime after getting the sad news, John left France for work in a German border town when he learned he could make twice as much as a miner.
Upon arrival, he was asked if he had experience in mining.
“Sure,” he lied.
“Great!” the boss said. “Do you want to work in the small or large mine?”
“The big one, of course.”
The first day he just inspected the project. He met a miner who was put in charge of the mountainside.
“I think I’m going to use four sticks of dynamite,” he told John.
“Yeah, that’s what I would use,” John agreed.
Moments later, the guy blew a hole in the mountainside.
The next day John found the place where he was going to start drilling, and he wanted to prove he was better than his coworker. So, he stuck 20 sticks of dynamite in the mountainside. Lit the fuse.
KAPOW!
A hole was blown into the mountainside.
“There was a lot of smoke. You wait 10 minutes before you go in after an explosion,” John said, recalling the event.
The inspector went in later and saw debris all over the place. “I’ve never seen anything like that. You must know what you are doing,” he told John.
“I must!” John said, marveling at his own success.
There were 20 cart loads of rock; It took all day to clear. John said he was lucky because some times you light the dynamite and nothing happens. And every time he did it, it led to a giant explosion and successful drilling.
John said later he was more lucky, thaen skilled. But that luck made him one of the top performers in the German mine.
Turin is internationally known for several things. In 1900, entrepreneur Giovanni Agnelli launched the Fiat auto factory, which became the brand’s headquarters for 115 years, before getting acquired by Chrysler in 2014. Turin also hosted the 2006 Winter Olympics.