Our Story

An Ode to Gramp

BY JOSEPH SORRENTINO

When I picked up the phone and heard my father’s voice, I knew it was bad news. My father never called anyone. It just wasn’t his style. He never answered the phone, either.

And his call did deliver bad news. Gramp had died. I dropped the receiver and sobbed as I hadn’t since I was a child.

Gramp—my maternal grandfather—was a natural storyteller. His stories were always entertaining and told in that wonderful mix of Italian and accented English. He butchered both languages to get a laugh or an eye roll out of his grandkids. Gramp always tossed in a few words none of us knew existed before, probably because he made them up on the spot.

He especially liked telling stories about winters when he was in the Alpine Army during World War I. He somehow remembered the days—and how much—it snowed, often correcting his memory as he’d go. Gramp strove for accuracy in his stories. “There was’a six’a inch’a snow on’a the first’a June … no, the second’a June,” he’d say in that accent I always loved. “An’ it was’a eight inch.”

We never believed he actually remembered such details, but we didn’t care. He’d follow up this weather report by telling us how hungry those soldiers were, all of them losing weight high up there in the Alps. “The belt, it goes’a two times around’a the waist.”

But his favorite story was how he’d captured a German soldier.

“I tol’ him, ‘Putta you hands up or I’m a’gonna shoot you,’” he’d recall as he pointed an imaginary rifle. The German wisely surrendered.

That story always struck me as a little off. Why was the German behind Italian lines? And what was Gramp, who had been in a medical division, doing with a rifle? But we never questioned him. We didn’t really care about facts. He was telling a story and he was well known for embellishing them.

At the end of a story, he’d always look at us and ask, “Whaddya dinga ‘bout that, huh?”

Whenever I visited home, I’d stop by to see Gramp and Grandma first. Being Italians, we hugged without reservation. Gramp smoked cigarettes for many years, only quitting cold turkey when a doctor ordered him to. When we hugged, I could smell the mix of wine—which he made in his basement—and cigarettes that enveloped him. I miss that smell to this day. After hugging, we’d sit down for a glass of wine and whatever Grandma had whipped up in the kitchen.

I mourned his passing for days until my mother told me something that made his death easier to accept.

In their final years, Gramp and Grandma had hired a woman to help. On the morning of his last day, the woman entered the bedroom to ask Gramp what he wanted for breakfast and found him going through his clothes closet.

“Mr. Martori, what are you doing?”

“I’m a’lookin’ for my suit,” he replied.

“Why do you want your suit?”

“I’m a’gonna see my father today.”

Although I’m sure this struck her as odd, she let it slide and asked him what he wanted for breakfast. “I wanna spaghetti,” he said.

She probably figured, he’s 85 years old; if he wants spaghetti for breakfast, he gets spaghetti for breakfast.

He entered the kitchen dressed in his suit and sat down to the plate of spaghetti that was set out for him. He ate, stood up, and had a massive heart attack. Dead before he hit the floor, I was told. Somehow, he knew what was coming. He wanted his suit because he was going to see his father—whether he meant his real father or God, who knows?—and if he was going to die, he was going to die with his favorite meal in his belly. Joseph Sorrentino is a writer, photographer, and playwright. His book, Stinky Island Tales: Some Stories From An Italian-American Childhood, is available on Amazon. It contains four stories and 26 drawings and is in English and Spanish.

Antonio Martori—or Gramp— with his family in one of his finest suits. The author’s mother, Antoinette, is on the far left.

Pennies for the Peddler

HOW THE WHITE LILY WASHED AWAY THE FAMILY’S DEBT

BY CAROL ANN LINDER

By the 1930s, the Riccio family found themselves spiraling deeper into debt. They owed so much to so many in the small town of Rye, New York, including a good deal to the peddler who would push his cart up Maple Avenue selling fruits, vegetables, and various household items. Grace and her husband, Antonio, worried about their obligations day and night. The Great Depression had affected most of the country, causing Antonio’s work as a carpenter to slow significantly. Grace felt she needed to do something to make up for the loss of income. She did not have a formal education, but Grace was a practical woman. As the mother of seven, she often had to rely on her ingenuity. Indeed, she knew a great deal about housekeeping, some of which she brought from the old country. She was also very enterprising. She knew how to make a solution called “Javelle Water” by taking a small amount of sodium hypochlorite and mixing it with water. She used this recipe to make her own bleach. Hanging on her clothesline were the whitest shirts in the neighborhood.

While doing the wash one day, she was inspired by a perfectly brilliant idea. She decided to negotiate an arrangement with the peddler. She would make up a batch of Javelle Water and bottle it. She convinced the peddler to sell it from his wagon. They would split the proceeds, and thus, as the bottles sold, she could whittle down the amount her family owed to the peddler. For each bottle sold, some pennies went to the peddler while a few went back to Grace to buy more ingredients.

Arnold driving The White Lily bleach truck.

Javelle Water, it turned out, was just what folks in Rye needed to bleach their towels and undergarments. Grace was marveling at how well Javelle Water worked because her sheets came out of the wash “looking as white as a lily,” as she once told a neighbor. And there it was, a name for her business. Grace called her concoction “The White Lily.”

The formula had many practical uses. Not only did it bleach laundry, but it was also a great disinfectant for kitchens and baths. And because it contained chlorine, it was an ideal purifier for swimming pools as well.

Antonio knew which homes on the more affluent side of town had pools in their backyards. The pools needed not just quarts of chlorine, but gallons of it. And so, Grace’s business began to grow and prosper. Instead of just quart bottles, they were selling it by the gallon. The price was 25 cents per gallon (22 cents, plus a three-cent bottle deposit), so the crate of four gallons sold for $1.00.

Soon, they had enough money to buy a truck. Prior to that, the Riccios never even owned an automobile. The first thing they did was to paint the name in gold lettering on the side of the black delivery truck: “The White Lily - The Ideal Washing Fluid,” advertising the name and address of the business.

It soon became a family enterprise, and everyone pitched in. It involved buying the chemicals, mixing the ingredients in large tanks, repurposing the wooden barrels that Antonio used for making wine, fitting the barrels with liners, tapping them from a spout near the bottom, filling the glass jugs, and pasting “The White Lily” labels on the jugs.

The operation was conducted entirely from the basement of their home. They arranged the bottles in wooden crates, hoisted the crates through the basement window, and drove the loaded truck around Rye, delivering the orders. Now, it was much larger than the peddler selling the product off his wagon. Eventually, Grace’s entrepreneurial idea got the family out of debt and into a successful business venture that would thrive for the next 30 years.

This was an incredible step up from her roots. Grace, as well as Antonio, had both come from the town of Castelfranco in Miscano, located in the mountainous region of Campania. Grace was born Maria Grazia Riccio … Riccio being her maiden name as well as that of her husband.

In 1905, she awaited the birth of her first child while also anxiously anticipating a letter from Antonio telling her to come to America. A year later, Grazia and her baby daughter sailed across the Atlantic to join Antonio.

Grazia, who became known as Grace in America, was short in stature, ample in girth, and abundant in heart. She had a love that extended beyond her family to all her neighbors. Their front door was always unlocked “in case someone needs help in the middle of the night,” she’d say. During an epidemic, she wet-nursed the tiny baby of a neighboring family when its mother was stricken with the flu. And it was her ingenuity that got the family out of debt when it mattered most.

Like many Italian immigrants, the Riccios worked hard to make a good life for their children. In addition to being an expert carpenter, Antonio learned to cut hair and opened a barber shop in the house he’d built with his own hands. Grace planted a garden and grew a variety of vegetables to keep her family nourished and healthy. Money was always tight, but they were able to make ends meet.

The 1920s had been a relatively stable time—until suddenly, it wasn’t. By the end of the decade, the Great Depression had changed their lives. Their eldest son, Leonard, graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont in June 1929 just before the American economy plunged into financial ruin. And yet, for 13 years—from 1925 to 1938—the family had one or more of their four sons attending Middlebury. Their intention was to send all of their sons to college.

The bleach venture provided the perfect summer jobs for all the boys, and they took turns driving the truck and making deliveries. Sons Victor and Albert pitched in to help with the management of the business. The youngest daughter, Ida, drove the truck, too, but had to lay a pillow behind her to help her reach the foot pedals. Atop the pillow is where Panda, the family dog, rode along ready to deter any thief who might try to steal the truck or its contents.

Gradually, Grace let the rest of the family run The White Lily. Antonio took over the business operations. Victor’s name was added to the letterhead stationery as “Sales Manager.” Albert joined the business full time after graduation. Antonio appropriated ownership, adding “and son” to the logo, so that by 1940, the label read: “The White Lily” Manufactured by A. Riccio and Son, Rye, N.Y.

While it was Grace’s business, Antonio took the credit because it wasn’t seemly at that time for a woman to run a company. Yet it was Grace’s resourcefulness that kept the family afloat during the worst of times.

The White Lily continued to grow and eventually became the family’s primary source of income. It had been successful enough to make them financially stable. They were resting easy for a while … a very short while. Their contentment lasted less than a decade. Soon their son, grandson, and nephews were enlisting to fight in World War II.

Then, in the summer of 1945, just as the war was about to end and peace put the world right again, the Riccios’ good fortune was about to draw to a close. Their “boys” would soon be returning home, safe and sound, but the prognosis on the home front was not as good. Grace knew that all was not well with her health.

The pain in her abdomen was so unbearable that she could no longer endure the suffering. She entered the hospital for surgery, and a week later she was gone. On August 6, 1945, Grace Riccio succumbed to the cancer that had been surreptitiously ravaging her body.

The loss dealt a devastating blow to the family’s little corner of the world, so much so that they barely noticed that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima that same day. The heart and soul of the Riccio family was gone, and they mourned the loss of their beloved mom.

The business endured, but Antonio’s heart was no longer in it. Twenty years passed, and the mighty little

A bird’s eye view of the bleach operations in back of the house. Ida with Panda the family dog. Her father, Antonio, is in the White Lily truck.

family enterprise couldn’t keep pace with the modern competition of the postwar boom.

But that didn’t change what Grace had managed to accomplish, getting the family out of debt and onto solid financial footing. And in the end, her family continued to gather at the “old homestead” to tell wonderful, animated stories about her—about her goodness, about her humor, about her compassion. And especially about her ingenuity that saved the family. Carol Ann (Riccio) Linder (ca.linder22@gmail.com) is the granddaughter of Grace and Antonio Riccio. She has been compiling stories of her family’s history—their emigration from Italy and their lives in America. She lives with her husband Ken in Arlington, Virginia.