Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Bootleggers, Mine Massacres, and Brooklyn (with Linda Stasi) | Episode 123

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Bootleggers, Mine Massacres, and Brooklyn (with Linda Stasi) | Episode 123 · Stories That Live In Us

0:00
Crista Cowan: Did you know that long before mobster legends took over New York, Italian immigrants were riding in rodeos, working in coal mines, and surviving bloody range wars out in the American West?
0:12
Crista Cowan: What if the wildest family stories you were ever told turned out to be completely true?
0:20
Crista Cowan: Today, we are diving into an incredible tale of survival and rebellion and deep family roots.
0:26
Crista Cowan: We'll explore how a natural disaster in Sicily sent one family to the coal mines of Colorado through the harrowing events of the Ludlow Massacre, which I had never heard of before.
0:38
Crista Cowan: And then eventually sent them back to the streets of Brooklyn, along with a jaw-dropping coincidence that you really have to hear to believe.
0:46
Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with best-selling author, journalist, and master storyteller Linda Stasi.
0:51
Crista Cowan: Hi, I'm Crista Cowan, and this is the podcast where telling your family stories can help create a deeply connected family.
1:00
Crista Cowan: Welcome to Stories That Live In Us.
1:27
Linda Stasi: And it was very normal upbringing.
1:29
Linda Stasi: But I started, I started getting my first sense of um anti-Italian discrimination as a little girl.
1:38
Linda Stasi: When I remember one of my my friends, Suanne Goldman, and uh she said, it's two N's at the end, we're Dutch.
1:46
Linda Stasi: I don't know what that meant, but anyway, she's her um she would she would say, My mother allows me to play with you even though you're Italian.
1:54
Linda Stasi: So I'd go home and I'd say to my mother, I'm Italian.
1:58
Linda Stasi: She said, You're Italian, and listen to me, nobody's better than you.
2:02
Linda Stasi: Nobody.
2:03
Linda Stasi: And we put that on her grave.
2:05
Linda Stasi: Oh, that's what's engraved on her gravestone, on her tombstone.
2:08
Linda Stasi: Nobody's better than you, nobody.
2:11
Crista Cowan: Well, she's she sounds like a character.
2:13
Linda Stasi: Oh, yeah, she is.
2:14
Linda Stasi: She was.
2:15
Linda Stasi: Um, people say to us, people often say to me, but then she probably said, and you're not better than anybody, right?
2:21
Linda Stasi: And I said, No, she never said that.
2:24
Linda Stasi: Nobody's better than you.
2:27
Linda Stasi: Okay.
2:29
Crista Cowan: Um, did you grow up in a big was your was it a big Italian family or no?
2:34
Linda Stasi: Yes, very big Italian family.
2:36
Linda Stasi: I will send you a um this week I was very surprised to be honored with the um National Italian-American Foundation Excellence in Literature Award.
2:49
Linda Stasi: Congratulations.
2:50
Linda Stasi: Yeah, was 700 people in this gala, and I had to speak in front of 700 people, and my only hope, my only fear was that I was gonna fall on my face going up the stairs in my giant heels with my torn meniscus.
3:05
Linda Stasi: But I did it.
3:07
Linda Stasi: So we grew up in the suburbs, very normal, um, very Italian family, and um proudly so.
3:16
Linda Stasi: And every Sunday, you'd you know, a thousand people would crowd into our little Levit house to have Sunday dinner.
3:24
Linda Stasi: And I often say that when it in the book, um, my aunts and my mother were just rebels, and they despite having a brute of a father.
3:34
Linda Stasi: And um I would always say, you know, they married out of their religion, out of their race, out of their gender, out of their everything.
3:42
Linda Stasi: I won't I just always figured that was normal, but um apparently it was odd for the time.
3:49
Linda Stasi: Um, so it was uh it was a very mixed, wonderful family.
3:54
Linda Stasi: Um, and the ladies were just something else.
3:57
Linda Stasi: So I had started out wanting to write about the women in my family, and I ended up writing about the women in my family, but the larger picture, a lot of which I learned on actually on ancestry.
4:09
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
4:10
Crista Cowan: So when you were growing up, did you understand, like with that many people as a child, do you understand the relationships to everybody, or is everybody older just aunt monkel and everybody your age just a cousin?
4:23
Crista Cowan: Or like what is what did that look like?
4:25
Linda Stasi: I mean, I you know, I had an aunt who had a husband and a wife, and I just didn't think, I don't know, I just figured she had a husband and a wife.
4:35
Linda Stasi: And my other aunts were married out of their race, and um, it was very it was I yeah, I just thought they were aunt and uncle, and I didn't think anything of it.
4:47
Crista Cowan: And did you always were you always interested in family stories, or is that something that came later in life?
4:54
Linda Stasi: No, but you know, I uh as the the more I grew up and became a columnist, and I saw I call it um unconscious bigotry.
5:01
Linda Stasi: And what would people say things to people who are Italian American that they would never ever say as related to just other um ethnicities or races or whatever.
5:16
Linda Stasi: But I mean, I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and go, hey, Goomba! I was like, What?
5:21
Linda Stasi: And I I was I was I told this story in front of 700 people the other night.
5:26
Linda Stasi: Um, we had this, my my late husband had this crazy friend who was a doctor.
5:32
Linda Stasi: I mean, because it was completely insane, but he was a good doctor, but he's insane.
5:35
Linda Stasi: And every time I'd go there, he'd say to me, You're Italian, don't you know a good hitman to kill my cheating wife?
5:41
Linda Stasi: And I'd say, No, I don't know a hitman.
5:45
Linda Stasi: You know, it's but and it happened all the time.
5:47
Linda Stasi: I had an editor who called me into a meeting once when they were some mobster had been taken down or something, and they said, Stacy, come in here.
5:55
Linda Stasi: You're Italian, you must know some, you must be connected.
5:58
Linda Stasi: I said, Yeah, to the internet.
6:00
Linda Stasi: But you know, people people just so I thought I wanted to write a different narrative.
6:06
Linda Stasi: I wanted to write a story about the thousands of Italians who helped settle the West, and our story has been completely wiped out of history.
6:16
Linda Stasi: So um it's a story about strong women in the West.
6:22
Crista Cowan: And that idea though, like you're raised in New York on Long Island, right?
6:26
Crista Cowan: Your career was was in the city, I assume.
6:29
Linda Stasi: Yes.
6:30
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
6:30
Crista Cowan: So, like what was it about the story in the West that attracted you?
6:36
Linda Stasi: When I grew well, uh growing up, my mother and her sisters were always telling tales about growing up on a ranch.
6:43
Linda Stasi: And and when I would tell people that I grew my mother rode her horse to school, they say, But aren't you Italian?
6:49
Linda Stasi: And I would say, Yes, I am Italian.
6:51
Linda Stasi: And my mother did ride her horse to school.
6:53
Linda Stasi: So um there were a lot of stories that I was told, including that my mother had a wolf for a pet.
7:01
Linda Stasi: And I probably assumed it was a wolf dog, but she said it was a wolf, and her name was Blue.
7:08
Linda Stasi: And the stories about Blue in the book are for the most part true.
7:12
Linda Stasi: Um, Blue was like a protector from from for my mother from the time she was born from her horrible father, because she had very um rough father, and part of the reason is he didn't wasn't always like that, but he had been involved in what's called the Ludlow Massacre, and um he just became embittered.
7:34
Linda Stasi: He lost family and he became embittered.
7:36
Linda Stasi: So I wanted to put blue in the book as a big part of it.
7:41
Linda Stasi: And my my aunts and um my uncles had always told me stories about the West and how they rode in the rodeo, and how my my uncle used to say, Nobody talk like John Wayne, I'll tell you that.
7:52
Linda Stasi: Because there were 30 different languages spoken in the mines and on the on the trail rides in Colorado at that time, and so you see movies, and everybody's talking like, say, partner, nobody talk like that.
8:06
Crista Cowan: Yeah, because they came from all over the world.
8:08
Crista Cowan: They all had their own accents.
8:10
Linda Stasi: So I wanted to tell a different side of the settling of the West that involved the immigrants and the the terrible, um, terrible uh atrocities committed against them.
8:24
Linda Stasi: Um and the hatred of immigrants, even though they would the people who hated them were only one generation away from being immigrants, you know.
8:35
Linda Stasi: But I guess the more things changed, the more they'd stay the same.
8:38
Crista Cowan: So yeah.
8:40
Crista Cowan: By the time, by the time you got around to writing this story, um, was your mom or any of her sisters, anybody in that generation still living?
8:49
Crista Cowan: Or were you going into this with just the memories of the things they had told you?
8:54
Linda Stasi: Well, my Aunt Marie was still living, and she died just before the book was published, but she did read the book.
9:00
Linda Stasi: She loved the book, so that was good because I was like really afraid that she'd get mad, or you know, who knows?
9:06
Linda Stasi: And uh, I changed some of the names of the sisters because I didn't want my cousins to come after me and get mad at them.
9:14
Crista Cowan: So, so tell us tell us the story.
9:17
Crista Cowan: Like, if you could if you had to tell the story in just you know a few minutes, how would you encapsulate like where where this family came from, how they ended up in Colorado?
9:29
Crista Cowan: Um, like tell us a little bit about that.
9:32
Linda Stasi: So um my grandmother and grandfather were from Belvedere di Spinello in Sicily.
9:38
Linda Stasi: It was a small town, and at the turn of the century, around 1910, I think it was, the worst earthquake to hit Europe in history occurred in uh southern Italy.
9:53
Linda Stasi: And that was followed by two tsunamis in great succession, and um it wiped out 200,000 people and it basically wiped out the whole port of Messina and the towns around there, and so people that survived started going up to the mountains to try to survive, but those little towns had those mountain towns were facing drought, so it was a pretty bad situation naturally from um natural occurrences, and um people were starving and dying, and then these men called Padronis came, they were hired by Rockefeller, uh John D.
10:40
Linda Stasi: Jr.
10:41
Linda Stasi: to l or the second to look for strong young bucks to come to America to work in the mines, but that's not what he told people.
10:49
Linda Stasi: He told them that, oh, the president of America, he's crazy, he wants to give you land, he wants you to farm because he wants to settle the West.
10:56
Linda Stasi: And he, you know, after a year or so of farming, you know, you'll get your own land and and all our you know, your passage will be paid for, your family's passage later will be paid for.
11:07
Linda Stasi: None of that was true.
11:08
Linda Stasi: They got to America, Ellis Island for the most part, and um they were taken in cattle cars to the mountains of Colorado, to the coal mines.
11:20
Linda Stasi: They didn't speak the language.
11:22
Linda Stasi: They basically most of them could not read or write in any language, plus um, they were paid only in company script.
11:31
Crista Cowan: And they were mostly single, no spouses or children, so they don't have any close family connections.
11:38
Linda Stasi: No, what happened was their families all came a few weeks later.
11:42
Linda Stasi: Oh, but there was no way to tell them that this is hell on earth.
11:47
Linda Stasi: You can't come because they couldn't read and write.
11:51
Linda Stasi: And even if they could, and or even if they paid someone to do it, it would take weeks to get to.
11:57
Linda Stasi: So their families followed, and they also came in hellish conditions.
12:02
Linda Stasi: And it was not the land of milk and honey.
12:05
Linda Stasi: It was it was 18, 19 hour days being paid in company script, and you had to pay back your passage, which they lied about.
12:13
Linda Stasi: They even had to pay for their own pickaxes to go down into that hellhole.
12:17
Linda Stasi: And children as young as five years old were in there.
12:20
Linda Stasi: So in 1914, the United Mineworkers came in and they struck, and Rockefeller fired everyone who struck.
12:29
Linda Stasi: So the United Mineworkers set up a tent city in Ludlow, Colorado, which is close by Pueblo, where this occurred.
12:38
Linda Stasi: And so Rockefeller hired the National Guard to go in there and said, you know, just take care of this.
12:46
Linda Stasi: And they would go in with an armored car with a turret machine gun on the top, and they would just spray.
12:54
Linda Stasi: And so the miners uh built trenches under their tents for their women and children to hide when the bullets started flying.
13:04
Linda Stasi: And Rockefeller was so disgusted that people weren't didn't capitulate and go back to work.
13:10
Linda Stasi: He to said to the his goons, um, which were the National Guard, just do what you have to do.
13:18
Linda Stasi: So they went in and they poured oil on top of the tents and set them on fire and killed women and babies who were trapped underneath.
13:26
Linda Stasi: And it was called the Ludlow Massacre.
13:29
Linda Stasi: And a lady reporter, woman reporter, uh rare at the time, was able to get in and she counted 64 dead before she got tossed out.
13:39
Linda Stasi: So she counted 64.
13:41
Linda Stasi: The government rounded it off to 22.
13:44
Linda Stasi: So my father's brother and his family was killed in that.
13:49
Linda Stasi: And um, that turned my grandfather into a beast.
13:53
Crista Cowan: Was your grandfather there, or did he just know about this that it happened to his family?
13:58
Linda Stasi: He he was, um, from what I understand, he had become like uh some kind of boss in uh in the union.
14:07
Linda Stasi: So he was in Ludlow, he was actually in um at the union headquarters when it happened, but his brother and his wife and the children were in Ludlow.
14:20
Linda Stasi: So he came there after he heard about it.
14:24
Linda Stasi: That's when he found out.
14:25
Linda Stasi: So um the interesting thing is that in that was in 1914, and when uh Rockefeller was called before Congress, he said basically, um, and I'm paraphrasing, he said, I would they had no right to strike and I would do it again.
14:42
Linda Stasi: Wow.
14:43
Linda Stasi: And guess who went to jail?
14:45
Linda Stasi: The strikers.
14:46
Linda Stasi: Yeah, not any of his people.
14:49
Linda Stasi: But uh, and this is where the story uh takes off in that 1916, Colorado declared prohibition before the rest of the country.
15:00
Linda Stasi: So these guys who were living wild in the mountains with their families in shacks and trying to survive and killing animals without you know much ammunition and um whatever they could, and they're living in mountains.
15:15
Linda Stasi: Greenhorn Mountain was blizzards and everything in unbearable conditions.
15:21
Linda Stasi: So these guys said, Well, wait a minute, we know how to make booze, we know how to make wine, and so these guys had four years to perfect their craft, found a way to survive.
15:32
Crista Cowan: Yeah, you mentioned you've mentioned a couple of times your grandfather and the effect that that had on him, and then the ripple effect that that then had on his family.
15:42
Crista Cowan: Did was he already married?
15:43
Crista Cowan: Did he already have children at this point?
15:45
Linda Stasi: Or yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:46
Linda Stasi: My grandmother had had by by 1916, she had had she had had 16 births and and uh 10 live children.
15:58
Crista Cowan: Wow.
15:58
Crista Cowan: So they saw this change happen in their father.
16:02
Linda Stasi: Yeah, he wasn't always so young that they just thought he was always that way.
16:07
Linda Stasi: But apparently, my grandfather and the book starts out this way that my grandfather and grand grandmother had this big love affair.
16:15
Linda Stasi: She was just a teenager when he laid eyes on her and he just fell madly in love with her, and she shamelessly fell madly in love with him, and then you know, all of this happened, and he became a just a terrible man.
16:30
Crista Cowan: So, so where did they go from Colorado?
16:34
Linda Stasi: So there's there's several different versions of why they came to New York.
16:39
Linda Stasi: So, one version is that my one of my aunts got married and moved to New York and was having a baby, and my grandfather refused to let my grandmother go to New York by herself because then she would be a bhutana that traveled by herself, so he sold the ranch.
16:56
Linda Stasi: That was, I never believed that story for one minute.
17:00
Linda Stasi: The other story, and I know this to be true because my mother told me that Al Capone came to the ranch once in a big black limousine with his bodyguards and all that, and they had a big spread out on the of all the Italian food and the and the in the pasture, and somehow they had to leave Colorado after that visit.
17:24
Linda Stasi: Because there was a war between the families going on by that point because they were all um in the same bootlegging business.
17:32
Linda Stasi: And the other story my Aunt Marie told me, she said, Oh, that's all horse.
17:36
Linda Stasi: What do you mean?
17:38
Linda Stasi: She said, Your grandfather lost the whole thing on a bad poker hand.
17:42
Linda Stasi: What story do you believe?
17:45
Linda Stasi: Right.
17:46
Linda Stasi: Yeah.
17:46
Linda Stasi: So they ended up in New York, and um and that was another struggle for the women to um adapt to this because they were cowgirls, you know, and they had wolves and they had pets and they had cows, and all of a sudden they're in the main streets of Brooklyn, and it was a harsh, harsh environment for them, but managed to survive somehow.
18:11
Crista Cowan: And it's so interesting because when you think about the Italian-American story for so many of us, I think we have this image in our mind of immigrants directly from Italy off the boat at Ellis Island, populating New York, right?
18:26
Crista Cowan: Like Brooklyn and Little Italy and like like all those enclaves throughout New York and Long Island where those Italian populations flourished.
18:35
Crista Cowan: And so to have this family that kind of has this entire singularly different chapter of their lives, that's really unique.
18:44
Linda Stasi: But it's it's the the point is that it's not unique because there were thousands of them, but we've been written out of the narrative, as have the Greeks, as have the Irish.
18:57
Linda Stasi: They were all there in Colorado and in Pennsylvania in those mines, basically as in bondage.
19:04
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
19:04
Linda Stasi: And if the union hadn't come in, I get I don't know what would have happened.
19:08
Linda Stasi: Right.
19:09
Linda Stasi: But it changed the whole narrative, and I, you know, it changed the whole story.
19:13
Linda Stasi: But why no one knew about this is beyond me.
19:17
Linda Stasi: And the Ludlow massacre has been written about, but it's basically, I mean, it's it's it's been called the worst crime in the history of um the workers' protests, the worst crime ever.
19:33
Linda Stasi: And you know, money talks, nobody walks.
19:38
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
19:39
Linda Stasi: Do you think there were more than 64 people killed?
19:41
Linda Stasi: Well, that's all she counted.
19:43
Linda Stasi: Yeah.
19:43
Linda Stasi: But a guns gunfight ensued, and um the union had given the strikers guns to protect themselves once they came in with these machine guns.
19:53
Linda Stasi: A very long gunfight, and many and several people were killed.
19:58
Linda Stasi: Um, and then it became this that one of the newspapers wrote because all these guys were living wild in the mountains, and they they accumulated on the hills to fight the government, and it became um the Colorado Coal Field Wars, and they were there was a lot of people were killed.
20:20
Linda Stasi: A lot of people were killed.
20:21
Crista Cowan: So it wasn't just that singular massacre, it was ongoing.
20:25
Linda Stasi: Yeah, it was after the massacre that it that these people took to the hills, and and one newspaper wrote that the the uh hills looked like it was just populated with huge amounts of men with guns.
20:40
Linda Stasi: So, and you know, we never heard about this.
20:42
Linda Stasi: Yeah, and you know what else is interesting?
20:45
Linda Stasi: I and I and I found my long-lost cousin, and I just um had a book signing at his restaurant.
20:52
Linda Stasi: He's like the col he's like the barbecue king of San Jose, California.
20:56
Linda Stasi: And um so here's what's interesting.
21:01
Linda Stasi: His grandfather married my aunt.
21:08
Linda Stasi: His his grandfather's name was um, his great-grandfather's name was Vito Carlino.
21:18
Linda Stasi: Vito Carlino had three sons and one daughter.
21:23
Linda Stasi: What Charlie?
21:25
Linda Stasi: Charlie Carlino was the handsome debonair cowboy of the group and the favored son, and he married my aunt, Carrie.
21:37
Linda Stasi: And um one day during all the fights between the families, Charlie was driving uh forget this over a bridge, and the Dana family came the opposite direction or behind him, I'm not sure, and killed him.
21:56
Linda Stasi: Now, really
22:01
Crista Cowan: That sounds very familiar.
22:04
Linda Stasi: Vito, veto.
22:05
Linda Stasi: Three sons, one daughter, and the massacre on the bridge.
22:08
Linda Stasi: Yeah, interesting.
22:10
Linda Stasi: So when I finally connected with my long-lost cousin, uh Sam Carlino, I said, Don't you think this is based on your family?
22:20
Linda Stasi: He said, Think so.
22:21
Linda Stasi: I said, You don't think so?
22:23
Linda Stasi: You never thought of it?
22:24
Linda Stasi: I mean, it was so crazy.
22:27
Linda Stasi: And I I didn't know any of this till I started investigating.
22:31
Linda Stasi: And Sam had actually written a book called Um Mountain Mafia of Colorado about his family.
22:37
Linda Stasi: And um it's so I, you know, I'm not saying it was taken by Mario Puzo, but there were plenty of, there was a many, many newspaper stories way back in the day.
22:53
Crista Cowan: Have you looked into Mario Puzo's family to see if maybe his family was also connected in some way to that area?
23:00
Linda Stasi: You know, that's a good idea.
23:01
Linda Stasi: And it never occurred to me.
23:02
Crista Cowan: Yeah, like maybe he didn't read about it.
23:04
Crista Cowan: Maybe he has some tangential or even direct connection to it.
23:09
Linda Stasi: It was it seemed to me that that the Carleons were based on this Carlino family.
23:15
Linda Stasi: It just seems too coincidental.
23:18
Linda Stasi: Yeah, it absolutely does.
23:19
Linda Stasi: Charlie was the dandy of the family, and I have a photo of him.
23:25
Linda Stasi: Um, he's wearing giant chaps and a cowboy hat and a long gun.
23:30
Linda Stasi: You know, it's like maybe you're the missing link from the village people.
23:37
Crista Cowan: Well, so you have all of these Italian miners, these families that were there, this horrible tragedy that took place, and your family heads back to New York.
23:50
Crista Cowan: Right.
23:51
Crista Cowan: Like, what happens to the rest of the families there?
23:54
Crista Cowan: Did a lot of them go back to New York?
23:56
Crista Cowan: Do some of them head further west?
23:57
Crista Cowan: How many of them stay?
24:00
Linda Stasi: A lot of the well, the Carlino and end of the family went to California.
24:05
Linda Stasi: Um the stories are varied, but apparently few of my relatives were allowed to stay on the ranch as long as they had no connection to the bootlegging and that.
24:17
Linda Stasi: And then my mother and her um most of her siblings came to New York.
24:24
Linda Stasi: And um, my grandfather had my grandmother had actually taken over the bootlegging and the and the cattle ranching.
24:34
Linda Stasi: She was like the boss, even though he thought he was.
24:36
Linda Stasi: Um but um she had given there was plenty of money to buy a house, except when they got to New York, they found out that he had spent all the money on wine, women, and song.
24:51
Linda Stasi: And um, they were like 10 people in a two-room tenement in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
24:58
Linda Stasi: So this is about as far away from the hills and valleys and mountains of Colorado as you could get.
25:05
Linda Stasi: Can I tell you a very interesting, crazy story?
25:09
Linda Stasi: Yes, please.
25:10
Linda Stasi: When my daughter was um had just graduated from college, she got a job um on a movie that was being filmed in Red Hook in Brooklyn.
25:22
Linda Stasi: And she got the job because she had a license, a car, and she could speak Italian.
25:28
Linda Stasi: Because it was the the star of the movie was an Italian movie star who didn't speak very, very much English.
25:35
Linda Stasi: So um my daughter was also, she had to like it was a low-budget movie, like 50 cent movie, you know, so very low budget.
25:47
Linda Stasi: So um she also was in charge of getting the food every day for the crew.
25:52
Linda Stasi: So she found this little restaurant which she fell in love with, and she had said, Oh, we've got to take grandma here, we've got to take grandma here.
25:59
Linda Stasi: It's a Sicilian restaurant, it's been here forever.
26:01
Linda Stasi: And um, I said, Well, you know, maybe someday.
26:05
Linda Stasi: So um she got very friendly with the owner, and she he like give her discounts on food and he loved her and she loved him.
26:15
Linda Stasi: And she said, You know, when I get uh enough money, can I rent one of those apartments upstairs that you because he owned the building?
26:23
Linda Stasi: He said, I will, I will make, I will evict who's over there so you can move in there.
26:28
Linda Stasi: So it's very nice.
26:29
Linda Stasi: So we've eventually, after the movie wrapped and everything, we took my mom and she was sitting in there, and Frankie, the owner, came over and he said, Oh, let me bring you some um uh some uh Pennellies.
26:40
Linda Stasi: And she said, Oh, I haven't had that since I was a little girl.
26:43
Linda Stasi: So he said, Oh, it's our specialty.
26:45
Linda Stasi: She said, Wow.
26:47
Linda Stasi: And she said, you know, uh Ferdinando used to make it for us when we were little children.
26:52
Linda Stasi: And he said, Well, Ferdinando, that's my grandfather.
26:56
Linda Stasi: So she said, What do you mean?
26:58
Linda Stasi: She said, Isn't this Carol Gordon's?
27:01
Linda Stasi: He said, Well, he said, that's the fancy name.
27:03
Linda Stasi: It's Red Hook.
27:04
Linda Stasi: She said, What's the address?
27:06
Linda Stasi: He said, 153 Union Street.
27:08
Linda Stasi: And she started to cry.
27:09
Linda Stasi: She said, My mother died in this building.
27:12
Linda Stasi: And my daughter would have rented the apartment that her great-grandmother died in.
27:19
Linda Stasi: Oh my goodness.
27:20
Linda Stasi: Five billion apartments in New York City.
27:24
Linda Stasi: How do you like that?
27:25
Crista Cowan: Yeah, wow, that's amazing.
27:27
Crista Cowan: There are coincidences like that that happen all the time when people start leaning into family stories.
27:35
Crista Cowan: Right.
27:35
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
27:36
Crista Cowan: It's it's just a really beautiful thing, but you don't always, I think, connect the dots if you don't know the stories, or if you don't take the time to, you know, involve your mom in the family outing to the Italian restaurant.
27:49
Crista Cowan: Like, like that is where some of that those connections are made.
27:53
Crista Cowan: I think that's really good.
27:55
Linda Stasi: It was really something.
27:56
Linda Stasi: So you have a daughter.
27:57
Linda Stasi: Do you have other children?
27:58
Linda Stasi: No, I just have one daughter.
28:00
Linda Stasi: Any any grandchildren yet?
28:01
Linda Stasi: Yes, I have three grandchildren.
28:03
Linda Stasi: Okay.
28:04
Linda Stasi: Who are um much taller than me, or just well, my daughter, my daughter, I'm five foot one.
28:13
Linda Stasi: My daughter's five foot ten.
28:14
Linda Stasi: So when she was 10 years old, I would say, because I'm your mother, that's why.
28:19
Linda Stasi: And my grandsons are very tall.
28:21
Linda Stasi: My oldest grandson is uh 18, and he is in the Rhode Island School of Design, which is the greatest school on the country.
28:32
Linda Stasi: And um the others are in uh high school and middle school.
28:36
Linda Stasi: And um, but now they're now you know, when when they were small, we had they my daughter also lived in the same apartment building.
28:45
Linda Stasi: And um I used to say it's it's it's just uh it's an it's basically an urban Italian mother-daughter, except she lives 10 flights above me.
28:57
Linda Stasi: Um but now they live in Brooklyn and and interestingly enough, two blocks from where my mother grew up.
29:04
Linda Stasi: But it's it's now uh it's no longer just an Italian neighborhood the way it was back in the day.
29:11
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
29:12
Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's amazing in the city how often things shift uh as far as neighborhoods go.
29:18
Crista Cowan: But but I think there's still something maybe universal about um immigrant experiences and the fact that you've uncovered this story is so powerful.
29:28
Crista Cowan: As you think about your grandchildren, like are these stories they've grown up hearing from you or or do they have to read the book?
29:37
Linda Stasi: No, they have to read the book because they weren't the only stories they're interested in is when I've gotten in a fight in high school or you know, stuff like that.
29:45
Linda Stasi: They don't, you know, they couldn't care less.
29:47
Crista Cowan: Um, but you don't think a bootlegging great-grandfather would interest them?
29:52
Linda Stasi: I thought it would, but um they're just they're just they're very proud of me and they're happy they come to my events.
29:59
Linda Stasi: And um, my my middle grandson um is writing for the school newspaper, and so he might want to be a journalist.
30:08
Linda Stasi: And he's he's actually read one of my books, not this one, but he's read one of them.
30:13
Crista Cowan: I love that you've preserved that story for them in that format so that when they do finally decide that they are interested, it's there for them.
30:22
Linda Stasi: I always thought it would be really interesting to have a TV show called American Family and just have people tell their stories.
30:32
Linda Stasi: Because when I started telling my family's stories, I had the other side of the family, is actually even more interesting, but um their immigration story.
30:44
Linda Stasi: But um, when I started telling stories, and everybody people would say, Well, my my my grandparents were on the on the Cuban boat people crisis, and my grandmother escaped from the Holocaust, and it's everybody has a story, and it's so interesting, it's much more interesting than what you could make up.
31:06
Linda Stasi: What immigrants did and do to come here is extraordinary, and it's still extraordinary where they're walking hundreds of miles with their children to get here.
31:20
Linda Stasi: And, you know, I mean, my uh the other side of my family, my grandfather and his brother were orphaned when they were little tiny children, and they lived in a barn and they collected rocks for construction sites to make money.
31:35
Linda Stasi: And when they became teenagers and they were old enough, they walked across all of Calabria to the Reggio di Calabria and got on a boat and came to the United States.
31:45
Linda Stasi: And they didn't read and they didn't write and they didn't speak the language.
31:48
Linda Stasi: And my grandfather um ended up, my Stacy grandfather ended up teaching himself to make blueprints and helping to lay out the streets of Brooklyn.
31:58
Linda Stasi: And um when he was old enough, he called for the little girl in his town and in Calabria that he wasn't even allowed to talk to because he was a little orphan boy, but he had made good and he had a home and he had a you know a thriving business.
32:14
Linda Stasi: And so she came with her mother, and my grandfather rowed his boat alongside her steamship or whatever it was, um, as she came into Ellis Island.
32:27
Linda Stasi: I mean, I think that's beautiful.
32:30
Linda Stasi: This little rowboat of amazing stories, and I'm glad you're getting to tell them.
32:38
Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah.
32:39
Crista Cowan: Well, we've had so many wonderful guests on.
32:42
Crista Cowan: I mean, we're well over a hundred episodes into this podcast.
32:46
Crista Cowan: This is this is gonna be season three, and and it's but but you're right, like there are so many stories, and those stories, I think they connect us to our past, they connect us to each other.
33:00
Crista Cowan: Um, and you know, we find similarities in our experiences, right?
33:04
Crista Cowan: A love story of a little orphan boy from Calabria, or a little, you know, Jewish girl who escaped the Holocaust, or you know, or my six times great-grandfather who, you know, married the Dutch girl from next door.
33:19
Crista Cowan: Like if like there's universal themes in the human experience, but how those play out make for some really good drama.
33:27
Linda Stasi: Well, uh, well, in the book, I I have all the history, but it's very character-driven.
33:35
Linda Stasi: And each one of the siblings has their own part to play in the in the larger story, and as does my grandmother and my grandfather.
33:45
Linda Stasi: So um, I'm very proud of it.
33:48
Linda Stasi: I'm really very proud of it.
33:49
Linda Stasi: It's I think in my whole 567,000 years of writing, I think it's probably the best thing I've ever written.
33:57
Linda Stasi: And the thing I'm the most proud of.
34:00
Crista Cowan: Well, it sounds like other people are recognizing that as well.
34:03
Crista Cowan: So I'm excited to introduce it to my audience.
34:06
Linda Stasi: Oh, I hope they it's called The Descendant, and you can get it on Amazon or anywhere.
34:11
Linda Stasi: And um yeah, I'm very, I'm very pleased with it.
34:15
Linda Stasi: And I went with a publisher that was a non-traditional publisher, because um the editor, Gretchen Young, actually is Italian American, and she um so was this the the editor, a particular editor.
34:34
Linda Stasi: Um, she actually came from Italy, and the publisher is Italian, and I thought this might be a good home, even though it's a a non-traditional publisher.
34:43
Linda Stasi: I just thought that this would be a good home and that they would understand this better than some others.
34:50
Linda Stasi: You know, when I wrote my first book, my first novel, The Sixth Station, um I had female editors saying, Well, your protagonist is 40 years old.
35:03
Linda Stasi: 40-year-old women don't have adventures like that.
35:06
Linda Stasi: It's like, what?
35:07
Linda Stasi: What planet are you on?
35:09
Linda Stasi: And they were young women.
35:11
Linda Stasi: I mean, I was really shocked and appalled, so.
35:14
Crista Cowan: Yeah, well, well, Linda, before I let you go, if you had any advice to give to people who've been looking into their family history, who have found amazing stories, how, like, what advice would you give them for how they share those stories?
35:30
Linda Stasi: Well, you know, on social media, there are groups.
35:34
Linda Stasi: I mean, there's even a group in Colorado called Southern Italians, um, Colorado Southern Italians.
35:41
Linda Stasi: There are niche groups where you will not only find the stories of of your ethnicity, but you'll find people who you're connected with.
35:52
Linda Stasi: That's how I found people I was connected with.
35:55
Linda Stasi: And um sharing those stories is so important because I'm on the board of the Civil Rights Museum, and I want to collect all the stories.
36:06
Linda Stasi: It's not just about African Americans that were building this museum, it's every ethnicity that had a hard time coming to New York.
36:14
Linda Stasi: And um, I want to get those stories before they're lost, before they're all gone, before the posters are gone, before the little writings are gone.
36:24
Linda Stasi: It's it's so important.
36:25
Linda Stasi: That's really the fabric of this country is these stories.
36:30
Linda Stasi: And if it wasn't for my mother and her aunts, these stories would be gone too.
36:36
Crista Cowan: Well, and if it wasn't for you.
36:39
Linda Stasi: Yeah, thank you.
36:40
Linda Stasi: Thank you, Linda.
36:41
Linda Stasi: You're so adorable.
36:43
Linda Stasi: I love you.
36:43
Linda Stasi: Oh, thank you.
36:49
Crista Cowan: It's time for one word, one story.
36:52
Crista Cowan: I love that sound.
36:54
Crista Cowan: Today's word is shoes.
37:00
Crista Cowan: Um y'all probably want to know why I'm called the barefoot genealogist, don't you?
37:06
Crista Cowan: So uh I the very first time I went live on camera in an ancestry video.
37:14
Crista Cowan: I climbed up on a tall stool and my feet were dangling, and so I kicked off my flip-flops.
37:21
Crista Cowan: Because I wear flip-flops all year round.
37:25
Crista Cowan: Winter in Utah, I wear flip-flops.
37:27
Crista Cowan: And uh they're easy to just kick on and off because I don't love shoes.
37:32
Crista Cowan: And so I kicked them off my feet, and I was presenting that particular live video with Ann Mitchell, who's one of the product managers at Ancestry, and she was known at the time as Ancestry Anne because she wrote a column in the Ancestry newsletter.
37:48
Crista Cowan: And she turned to me just before we went live and she said, You don't have a nickname.
37:52
Crista Cowan: I've got a nickname, you need a nickname.
37:54
Crista Cowan: And I said, I don't need a nickname.
37:56
Crista Cowan: And she looked down at my bare feet and she said, We're gonna call you the barefoot genealogist.
38:02
Crista Cowan: And just then uh the social media manager that was producing the live said, and you're live in five, four, three.
38:11
Crista Cowan: And that is how Anne introduced me in that very first Ancestry live video back in 2011 because my shoes were sitting on the ground and I was sitting there in my bare feet.
38:25
Crista Cowan: So there you go.
38:26
Crista Cowan: There is my story about no shoes.
38:29
Crista Cowan: If you have a story that came to mind as you heard the word shoes, would you leave it in the comments if you're watching this on YouTube?
38:38
Crista Cowan: If you're listening to this on Apple or Spotify, just post a story about it on Facebook or Instagram and tag me, and I would love to read it.
38:50
Crista Cowan: Well, Linda, it was delightful to meet you and to meet start your story.
38:58
Crista Cowan: I'm I'm excited to have people read your book.
39:02
Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.