OP-ED: The love of a family
He never made any more than minimum wage, but one of his perks was a house that he rented from his bosses. He had come from dire poverty, the second of three sons born to sharecroppers beholden to a duke in a little village in central Italy. Consequently, poverty was not a new way of life for him. With his garden, access to milk cows, and some chickens, ducks, and rabbits, he had carved out a decent life for himself and his family as a new citizen in the United States.
Even though he had no formal education, his income was meager, and he lived humbly, he was filled with personal pride for his work. His never-ending, backbreaking job was to create and maintain huge formal gardens for his employers.
In the spring and summer, people from the region drove from miles away to see the magnificent outcome of his hard work. The gardens that he had planted, nurtured, and cared for were a thing of elegance and beauty.
After a long day in the hot sun, he would savor a cold bottle of Iron City beer and puff on his corncob pipe filled with Prince Albert tobacco. He did this on the porch step or in the front yard in one of his hand-built Adirondack chairs.
When I was a young boy, I would often be perched on his lap listening to his exciting stories about the old country where he would describe the challenges of volcanoes, wolves, earthquakes, and the thousands of stones he had to pick up every spring so that his father could plow the duke’s fields with their single oxen pulling his shoulder-mounted plow.
My grandfather, Patsy, an immigrant from the old country, was a decent, good guy, a hard-working husband and father to his three children, and a proud American.
After having worked at the same estate for 50 years, he died unexpectedly one morning from a blood clot. Immediately after that, my grandmother was given her eviction notice. She had six months to find a place to live.
Her youngest son, my Uncle Bert, was in his 40s and single. Despite making only a modest income as a house painter, he was determined to find a way to build a house for my grandmother. His solution was both resourceful and ambitious: He would recycle an entire house.
I was 15 when I watched Uncle Bert and his friend Domenic, whose nickname was “Trap,” begin this unusual project. Bert had purchased an old house near where my friend Terry lived for just a few thousand dollars. The house had recently been vacated when Charlotte, a classmate of mine, moved away with her family.
Over two months, Bert and Trap methodically dismantled the house board by board, carefully salvaging every usable piece. Once they had completely deconstructed the structure, they transported all the materials to an acre of wooded land several miles away from Grandma’s original house, where they would build her new home.
I remember seeing my uncle go from a strapping 170 pounds to about 140 from working day and night over the next few months. He and Trap laid the foundation, put in the cross beams, framed out the two-bedroom bungalow, and completed that house before Grandma’s time was up at the rental property. It was a lovely home with plenty of room for a garden, chickens, and even a garage. He restored the salvaged hardwood floors, and, of course, the paint job inside and out was perfect.
When she passed, he sold that house for $35,000, and 15 years later, when he died, his widow made sure that my brother and I each received that money. My brother, Charlie, used his share for a trip to Italy, where he found and reunited us with our Italian relatives.
Thanks, Uncle Bert. And God bless our legal immigrants. They have made America great.
Nick Jacobs lives in Windber.