O Boat Si Ferma A Sargent’s: Italian-American Oral Histories

“We do nothing by ourselves, we do nothing alone. This is not my book, this book belongs to all of you. So our kids will look back to us and know who we are. How our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents came here, settled in the Annex, or Legion Avenue, the Hill, and Fair Haven, did their jobs, raised their families, and lived lives of unassuming honor.” So began the loving tribute of Anthony Riccio to the Italian communities of New Haven, which he presented on a recent night to a thronged and adoring audience.

The evening event at the Hagaman Memorial Library in East Haven was part of Riccio’s local tour marking the publication of his The Italian American Experience in New Haven: Images and Oral Histories (State University of New York Press). Nine years in the researching and writing, Riccio’s book was created in the Italian kitchens, gardens, and restaurants of New Haven, where he went to interview the city’s early Italian pioneer immigrants beginning with his own relatives in the Annex and expanding outward. ​“I had no formal plan for this book,” Riccio explained. ​“I had no definite strategy. I just ran out when my job permitted” —” Riccio is the longtime stacks manager at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library —” ​“and started asking people questions about the old neighborhood. I let them go, and they took me to amazing places.” In one representative interview, ​“John Nappi told me about his experiences in World War Two, how he had been wounded in the South Pacific and sent home.” Then, Riccio explained, ​“He talked about other things and happened to mention he also volunteered to be part of a malaria experiment designed to save the lives of other GIs: ​‘They took me to New Zealand and they injected me, and my temperature went to 107 degrees. I almost died.’ John said it in a kind of passing, and then on to other things.” Such stories, all captured in the handsome book, along with rare photographs, letters, and documents, include Rose Durso’s tale of how she wanted to be a commercial artist, but her father, the ruler in the patriarchal Italian family of the first half of the century, denied her; she had to work —” in the Ideal Shirt Factory, or Sargents, or A.C. Gilbert, or the New Haven Clock Company on St. John’s Street —” to help support the famiglia. Such was the fate of the hard-working Italian women and men, in flight from the poverty of their homeland, and scooped up, right off the docks, for work in New Haven’s gritty, labor-hungry factories. ​“O boat si ferme a Sargent’s” was one of the sayings recalled by many of Riccio’s interviewees (whom he calls his storytellers and elders) —” ​“The boat stops at Sargent’s,” meaning you haven’t arrived until the boat from Europe puts in at the port of New Haven (often via New York), is met there by your relatives or recruiters, and the new Americans walk immediately to work —” to polish, buff, lift, labor, or sew at the factories that then dotted what is now Long Wharf Drive. Another storyteller remembers the street cries of merchants and peddlers along Grand Avenue and the products of Salvatore ​“the Star Water Man” Russo, who invented a home-brew of a bleach to make especially white the uniforms of the girls of the St. Andrews Society. Eighty-one societies, based on towns of origin —” equivalent to Jewish immigrants’ landsmanschaften —” were active in the 1950s, while only five remain today. The Society of Santa Maria, on Wooster Street, near Perrotti’s, is the oldest, having been established in 1898; it is also one of the venues for Riccio’s reading tour, and members provided not only interviewees but a grant to help launch the author’s oral history research. Another of Riccio’s storytellers remembers the democratic and ethnic ​“heaven” of Legion Avenue; another incomprehensibly tries to understand the phrase ​“eminent domain” as she struggles to accept the reality of the loss of her home, her American dream, swept away, along with thousands of others, in the tragic urban redevelopment of the Mayor Richard Lee years. ​“What I found most consistently moving and even surprising,” Riccio said in response to a reporter’s question, ​“during the interviewing was how much these people went through, and with what an unassuming and natural eloquence they told their stories. How truly little they expected from anyone, how hard they worked, how much they accomplished, and with such modesty. Each time it was a surprise.” Some of the people Riccio interviewed were in the audience, such as Clementine Apuzzo, who worked with Riccio’s mother in the Brewster Shirt Factory in the Annex. At 90 years old, she was happy to see the book published. Many, such as her husband Pasquale, a New Haven fireman, who also furnished Riccio with stories, did not live long enough to see the book. Of course, that’s why he has written this important contribution to the history of the city of New Haven, written, as he points out, not by professional historians —” although Riccio’s contextualizing essays beginning each of the sections are excellent —” but by those who lived and created the history. To order the book and to hear Riccio speak at one of the many Italian social clubs, churches, bookstores, and other venues he’ll be appearing at during August and September, click here. ​“If I die,” Riccio’s father said several years before he passed away, ​“and if you don’t remember me, then I’m dead; if I die and you remember me, then I’m alive —” so don’t forget me.” Anthony Riccio has remembered, for all of us.