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PATERNAL SIDE
My father's family was Austro-German in origin. During the Revolution of 1848, the
founder was an avid supporter of the Liberals. As the Croat troops crashed through one gate, he
fled out another and didn't stop until he reached St. Louis, MO. In the 19th century, indeed until
"The Archangel Woodrow" (as H.L. Mencken called him) tricked the U.S. into WWI, St. Louis
was a very German city. The schools were bi-lingual, and the street signs were in both languages.
(Now, it is almost exclusively Negro.) I really know very little about him. My paternal great-
grandfather was born during the War Between the States. He lived to be 90 - indeed driving a car
until near the end - so I was able to get some data from him. (My grandfather died in the 1940s,
so I never really knew him; but I did know about him. It seems the famous soprano, Lille
Lehmann, was a cousin of the refugee.)
My grandfather was a high school teacher. He taught Latin, Greek, and German. In 1917,
the plotting and scheming of Wilson - aided by the downfall of the Czar: the cant about "Making
the world safe for democracy" would have been ridiculous with The Autocrat of All the Russias
as an alley - succeeded in getting the U.S. into the war (to make the world safe for the loans J.P.
Morgan, et al. had made to Britain and France). A result was anti-German hysteria that
rose to the level of anti-Jewish hysteria in Germany under Hitler. A mob attacked my
grandfather's house and burned it - his books, his piano, everything. He had been an ardent
supporter of Neutrality and had given several speeches denouncing Wilson's obvious anti-
German bias. Now it's publically known that the Lusitania wasn't sunk by a German
torpedo. It sank in fifteen minutes, because the hold was filled with high-explosives - contrary to both International and U.S. Law.
After losing everything, he fled with his wife and three small children - my father to be
was two - to California, where the anti-German insanity wasn't as severe, and resumed his career
as a school teacher. His eldest child, a daughter, died in the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1919. I
met my grandmother, who never lost that God-awful "Missourah" accent when speaking English,
but spoke German accent-free. She was also from a German-Catholic family, Bavarian not
Austrian. Her one brother, whom I never met, became a Jesuit.
My father grew up in Los Angeles and planned on becoming a musician. (There's a
German proverb that runs, Die Deutschen und Italiener lieben es, wenn Musik gemacht wird -
und die Französen haben Nichts dagegen [The Germans and Italians love having
music performed - and the French have nothing against it.]) The Great Depression changed
everything. My grandfather lost everything, when the bank where his savings were kept folded
and the stock market crashed. He still had his job; however, teachers had to take a 20% pay cut,
as the tax revenues totally dried up. My 14-year-old father-to-be had to settle for instruction at (then)
the Los Angeles Normal School. (Now L.A. City College and nary a Euro-face to be seen on
campus.) This was hardly the USC School of Music he'd dreamed. (His sensitive
younger brother was so traumatized by the Depression, he became a Roman Catholic priest.)
The era of silent movies had created a great demand of musicians, as the major
movie "palaces" had a resident, Mozart-sized orchestra. Originally, movies had been shown in
combination with live performers. Then the big epics, like The Ten Commandments and
Ben Hur, were distributed with the musical scores, accompanied by a live
orchestra. (In the medium-sized houses, a mammoth organ - the fabled "Theater Organ" - was
used. In the rink-dink ones, it was a piano!) The advent of "the Talkies" spelled an end to that,
but Los Angeles became a Mecca for qualified musicians. Every studio and radio network had its
own resident orchestra of Wagnerian proportions. When I was a child in L.A., there were
eight full symphony orchestras going. The vicious anti-Semitism in Germany resulted in
an exodus of extremely talented musicians. The Anschluss of 1938 and the take-
over of Bohemia in 1939 swelled the ranks with refugees from Austria and Czechoslovakia. Los
Angeles was awash with the greatest musicians of the age.
My father took to playing in "Big Bands," as this was the era when "ballrooms" dominated
the scene. He performed on a number of bass instruments: double bass, tuba, and Sousaphone.
He also played the piano. He was in the orchestra at the Hollywood Palladium, one of the larger
and tonier of the ballrooms, when he spotted a really beautiful girl about twenty-one, who appeared
to be accompanied only by another girl, rather mousey, a couple years older. During
break, he went and introduced himself. The girl was, of course, my mother. He was twenty-six,
she twenty-one. The courtship lasted about a year. In 1937, they were (despite grumblings from my
maternal grandfather) married at St. Agnes's Church in Los Angeles. My mother's "dowry"
consisted of a trousseau: the furnishings for their apartment. In lieu of an extended Honeymoon,
which is supposed to be funded by the groom's parents, they received a new car: a 1938 Hudson
Terraplane. It cost a whopping $800! ($25 per week was a respectable income in 1937. Most
people lived on $15 per week, or less.)
Both my mother and father worked. She had a steady income of $12 per week as a nurse,
but his was sporadic. According to my mother, the long periods "between engagement" started
his drinking, which resulted in a divorce in 1941. I'd been born in 1939, nearly killing my mother
and myself in the process. My mother remarried in 1943: another bass-player of Austro-German
ancestry, despite the no-no of the Church. Like most Italians, my mother never let religious dicta
stand between her and practical solutions, even though she maintained a devout posture through
most of her life. One result being my education in parochial schools until I reached the university
level. But that's a different story: mine, not my ancestry. In concluding the Paternal Side, I might
mention that the name "Lehmann" is a very old German name, indigenous to region west of the
Elbe and south of the Danube. It means, in effect, "share-cropper": a free farmer, who worked the
lord's land, paying rent-in-kind. The English equivalent would be "yeoman."
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MATERNAL SIDE
My mother's family came to the U.S. much later than my father's; however, politics was
the also the aegis. My mother's family was Tuscan. In Roman times, it was called Gallia
Cisalpina: "Gaul this side of the Alps." The Celts were the predominating ethnic stock,
apart from the Etruscans, whose origins are in dispute. (Some scholars assign them to modern
Albania, others give the Levant as the region where these people, who provided the Kings of
Rome, originated.) The name "Tuscany" [Toscana in Italian] comes from the Etruscans.)
The Arno and the tiny Rubicon rivers separated Gallia Cisalpina from Italia.
When Julius Caesar, governor of Cisalpine Gaul, crossed the tiny Rubicon (after the Tribunes had
fled to him for protection) he committed one of the three acts that were classified as "treason"
under Sulla's revision of the Roman code: a commander taking his troops out of his province,
without permission of the Senate. "To cross the Rubicon" means an act which cannot be
reversed. Crossing the Atlantic was no different for my mother's family.
Her father belonged to the Civil Service. His family had been in the Tuscan Civil Service
since Dante's time, or not long afterwards. The collapse of the Roman Empire had brought a
multitude of Germans into Italy, especially from Rome north. The population of Northern Italy is
a mixture of the Roman, Celtic, and Germanic. The population of Southern Italy has a strong
Semitic element, from Carthaginian and later Saracen inroads. A common expression among
Northern Italians is that Africa starts forty kilometers south of Rome!
Tuscany had been part of The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The Peace of
Utrecht had awarded Tuscany to the House of Habsburg - more properly Habsburg-Lorraine - as
compensation for the King of France grabbing Lorraine (and Alsace) from its Duke, when Duke
Charles had joined the pan-European army in driving the Turks from the gates of Vienna.
Habsburg rule in Tuscany proved beneficent. When the Kingdom of Italy was formed in 1868,
Florence became the capital. Rome was still under Papal rule. The end of the Second Empire in
France meant the end of the Papal States. The Pope ordered his troops not to offer any resistance,
but he refused to recognize the incorporation of the Papal States into the Kingdom of Italy. The
King offered the Church a huge compensation. The Pope refused it and became "The [Infallible]
Prisoner of the Vatican": a stalemate that was ended in 1930 by Mussolini, when Vatican City -
all 92 acres of it - became a "sovereign state."
The abdication of Grand Duke Leopold meant the end of the Tuscan civil service,
qua Tuscan. It was absorbed into the Italian civil service. Unlike the German Empire
created by Bismarck, the Kingdom of Italy was not federated. To "homogenize" it, the central
government began posting Southerners in the north and Northerners in the south. A practice as
popular among the Northerners as roast pork at a Bar Mitzvah. In 1903 my grandfather, then a
young man, married and with two small children, was transferred from Pistola (where his
grandfather had been sent, because of unflinching loyalty to il Gran-Duca Leopoldo and
the Habsburgs) to Nicastro on the slopes of the mountains of Calabria: Africa! He'd been
born the same year as Benito Mussolini (his later hero!), and not more than 100 kilometers away.
(In fact, he looked a lot like il Duce, save for a full head of hair that
remained with him until he died in 1954.) Of course, it was an impossible situation - akin to
someone from Boston being transferred to Fargo, ND - except that Tuscany is vastly
more civilized than Boston. If one was born into the civil-servant class, he was a civil-servant; as
much as a samurai was a samurai. One couldn't "quit"! His two choices were to stay among "the
goatherders" or emigrate. The question was whether to Argentina or gli Stati Uniti. In
Argentina, he'd have the benefit of speaking a nearly identical language (Argentine Spanish is
heavily influenced by the large Italian element in the population). The Italians in Argentina were
almost all from "the South." That's the last thing he wanted. Besides, there were some distant
relatives in Philadelphia. In the Italian psyche, distant or not, a relative is still a relative. (The
Italian word parenti means "relatives"; the word for "parents" is genatori.) So,
God's Own Funny Farm was chosen. Not Philadelphia, of course. There were two many
"Africans" in the East. He'd studied his geography and decided upon a city which cultivated
European traditions, grew superb wines in the area, and - most importantly - boasted a first-rate
opera house. They would stay with i parenti until he'd mastered Anglo-Sassone -
his French was perfect and his German quite good - and then move on ... to San Francisco.
In the spring of 1905, they left Italy after turning everything (except family memorabilia)
into gold coin and departed from Naples. His wife (my maternal grandmother) was actually from
the petty nobility - a "di" in the same is still a "di" - a cast-off daughter, whose choice was to
marry beneath her station or take the veil. The di Sensis had also been loyal to the House of
Habsburg. As a result, they too were non grata among the Italian aristocrats. (To
the end of his days, my grandfather always spoke respectfully of the House of Habsburg,
especially as the last Empress was the Italian Zita of Bourbon-Parma. He always referred to
Franz-Josef as il Imperatore. How ironic that my youth should be spent among Habsburg-
praising Jews and a Habsburg-praising grandfather. That I had the same birthday as Franz-Josef
made me his favorite grandchild. What a pity that he died penniless.) They'd left Italy with three
children: two boys and an infant daughter. Upon arriving in the U.S., they "abstained," until
circumstances would permit additions to the family. As a result, there was an eight-year gap
between child number three and number four. My mother was the last: Septima. Having
studied English intensely for a year, they were about ready to move on; when my grandfather
picked up a copy of the Enquirer with banner headlines: "San Francisco DESTROYED in
Earthquake / Hundreds killed! Thousands homeless! The city a mass of charred ruins!!" If there
is anything Italians fear more than impotency, it's earthquakes! Back to geography books!
Hmm... there was another city, 500 kilometers to the south, a climate like Naples, La
Bohème had been given its American premiere there, and there was an established
Franco-Italian community. They changed trains in Omaha and arrived at the Union Pacific station
in Los Angeles.
Initially, Los Angeles grew as the street-car lines were laid. (Later, it was to be freeways;
but that was much later.) Henry Huntington would buy up huge tracts of land, and then run his
inter-urban Pacific Electric "Red Cars" out to his fiefs. The Pacific Electric had been given to
him by his uncle, Colis P., the principal builder of the Central (then Southern) Pacific Railroad.
After the death of his only child, a daughter, his nephew Henry stood to inherit the whole empire,
which was extensive. The Huntington Library, his former home in San Marino, CA (the Pattons
were neighbors) boasts one of the finest collections of 18th century furniture and paintings -
including the famous "Blue Boy" and "Pinky"- to be found, along with a treasure of
inculnabulae. My grandfather decided to go into the grocery business. (A grocer's family
never goes hungry!) The building in the Franco-Italian North Broadway district had a grocery
store in front, with a spacious house built atop and around it. At that time, a good-sized market
was about as big as a larger 7-11. Customers ran up accounts, which were billed on a monthly
basis. Cash-&-Carry got a 5% discount. As my grandfather had been a paymaster in the civil
service, he was used to bookkeeping. The business did o.k. It was time to produce more souls for
the Church (which he never went into) to save. He probably would have stopped earlier, but he
kept hoping for another son, while all his wife produced were girls. My mother was the
penultimate child, born at the French hospital in July, 1916.When the last child, a boy, died
within weeks of his birth (from influenza), he regarded it as a sign from heaven that he was
not going to sire another son.(One should be advised that the Italian equivalent of "Bless
you!" after a sneeze is Figli maschi!: Many sons!)
Both my uncles volunteered for the services, which garnered them speedy naturalization. I
don't think my grandfather ever bothered. After WWI, Los Angeles again became a boom-town.
While his eldest son suggested they think about selling the store and buying an orange grove, my
grandfather scoffed that he was not a contradino [peasant]. His customer's called him
"Don Tomaso," and he liked it. What he was interested in was a larger store. His sons could
work the produce and meat departments. He was getting on. Going to the Central Market at
05:00 to select produce was a burden. He was stunned, when his younger returned from France with a
war-bride. Even more non-plussed that she was "in a family way." After the birth of a
daughter and two year's of being treated like a serf (it turned out his wife was epileptic; an
affliction which their younger daughter inherited), the son and his family returned to Bordeaux, not
returning to the U.S. until 1938, as war clouds were once again gathering in Europe.
Unknown to my mother, her father had decided she was not going to marry. She
was to be trained as a nurse, to take care of her parents in their dotage. (A venerable Italian
custom: that or a convent.) When his older son decided he didn't want anything to do with the
grocery business and struck out on his own, my grandfather decided that his only course was to
get a much larger store and concession it out: a butcher, a green-grocer, and a staples man. He
would be the Padrone and collect a commission on sales, doing the bookkeeping. What
appeared to him to be an astonishing offer was submitted by a realtor in 1925: a handsome store
in South Central Los Angeles. The eldest daughter had been married off, so it was my
grandparents and the "second family," four girls, who moved in 1926.
Too bad he wasn't a Sicilian; he'd have qualified for membership in the Mafia.
The deal in South Central L.A. was too good to be true, because unknown to him, the
"Caucasians Only" covenant expired in 1928. After another aunt had been married with the pomp
and circumstance befitting a Signore, "Diversity" struck fifty years ahead of other locales.
The innundation was a first a trickle, then a deluge. The primary difference was that his older
clientele was punctual about paying their statements. The dusky new one was not infused with
bourgeoises values. As he was factoring, he had to absorb the losses. He put in cash registers and
cut 'way back on credit. Then he was stricken with diabetes. The Depression hit with all its fury:
those who in the past wouldn't pay, now couldn't pay. The women did all the physical
labor. In 1932, his wife (my grandmother) died from pneumonia, overwork - or both. My mother
graduated from high school. A year later, the Long Beach earthquake seriously damaged the
store. The large, framed portrait of il Duce didn't endear him to a number of customers.
He had a "respect" for Hitler - mainly because the German dictator openly acknowledged what a
great leader Benito was - but he couldn't forgive der Führer for insulting the
Habsburgs. (Unknown to him, the FBI began assembling files on those who expressed
admiration for the fascist leaders. When the U.S. entered WWII, he had to suffer the twin
indignities of registering as an "enemy alien" and having his radio, which could receive short-wave
broadcasts, seized by the government.) When the young bass-player began to pay court to my
mother, he became outraged: an Emigrant Petty-Bourgeois Lear. Her fiancé didn't ask for
her hand; she told her father she was getting married - preferably with his blessing - but with or
without it, she was getting married! Now only two girls remained. Within a year, both of them
were married. The one a year older than my mother, the last to leave, offered him shelter. He sold
the store for a quarter of what he'd paid for it a dozen years before. Just prior to Pearl Harbor, he
stepped on a piece of broken glass. Because of the diabetes, the wound would not heal. He had to
have a leg amputated. Then came the "alien" business. One day, he picked up the paper, to see
Benito and Clara, hanging like sides of beef from the rafters of a burned-out gas station. He never
looked at another paper.
He spent his last years in a dream-world, listening to old Caruso recordings, and mumbling
to me - a small child - about Fransisco-Giuseppi, l'ultimo Imperatore. (Although he
spoke perfect English, he preferred Italian when speaking from the heart.) When he died, they
should have covered his casket with the Double Eagle. They didn't. I was a freshman at Loyola
High, developing a friendship with a Jewish classmate, who was an excellent cellist. Funny, but
when I met his family, all his grandmother talked about was Kaiser Franz-Josef.
The Double Eagle still flies. I have given it to others, to tend and shelter. Someday, I hope they
come to realize what a magnificent talisman has been entrusted to their care.
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ECCE URSUS
Vale, nunc et semper!