As a family, we also more or less went to see drive-in movies. Father parked the family green Plymouth off the shoulder of the road that was perpendicular to the movie screen. The three of us were huddled in the backseat with little room to spare. We would squint our eyes and did our best to peer at the distant screen. Drive-in theater owners of the time did not see a need to build tall walls to conceal the screen from view. We watched the movie in silence, as for some inexplicable reason theater owners also did not see the need to run speakers beyond the drive-in’s fenced boundaries. We followed the movie dialogue as best we could, which left much to our emerging imaginations. If nothing else, the three of us became visual learners and developed the art of lip reading at a very early age. This will serve us well in our old age as our hearing declines. Best of all, our trips to—well, near the drive-in— always included the iniquitous sharing of one nickel ice cream cone from a local and original Dairy Queen, and one bag of popcorn recently homemade by our mother, who stood by the stove and shook the kernels in a pan until their tiny bits of water exploded into popcorn. Family togetherness has never been the same!
During our downtown trips, we sometimes consumed lunch at this particular department store that had a restaurant-like dining area for paying customers on the second floor. A balcony and railing provided an engaging view of the main floor below. The decor was excessively white: white tables, white chairs, a white floor and a white railing. As our mother sat at the table, we were often kneeling on the floor peering through the white railing. The railing kept us from falling on unsuspected shoppers below, although not necessarily our food. We often amused ourselves by making less than flattering remarks about people who innocently milled below us. Bald men and balding men in particular were vulnerable targets of our unflattering critiques and giggles. We were young children after all and easily amused… and it was free!
Time passed and depending on how much effort in parenting we three young-uns forced out of our mother, we either went home earlier than planned via the public transportation system (bus) or we waited until early evening for our father to pick up his then tired and cranky family for the return trip home to suburbia.
Growing up second-generation Italian in America was often a challenge. We were all part of the great “melting pot” at mid-century except somebody forgot to tell those of us who were not the main ingredients that assimilation had its price. There were choices to be made as American and Italian cultures often clashed and clashed unrepentantly. Such differences in cultural experiences created mild discord between parents and children. Mom and dad strived to maintain what they knew: TRA-DI-TION! (Kind of feel a musical coming on...) We children on the other hand wanted to be like our contemporary peers in dress, speech and behavior. In essence, we were faced with two-generation gaps—a cultural one and the time-honored parent/child gap. Such was the predictable friction that stewed in our home as part of the “melting pot” of the 1950s.
Assimilation aside, things were not futile back then. We experienced customs curious and unique to our family and Italian heritage. There were a host of superstitions that impacted on my parents and intruded indiscriminately on our family life. What dictated our parents’ behavior dictated ours, as families were bonded units in the 1950s. The list of superstitions that concerned our parents seemed endless and unforgiving. We were forever admonished if we did not heed them for they would bring “bad luck” not only to us, but also to all family members, and perhaps to an entire generation of Italians. Family guilt was inherent and instilled early in our lives. Although we never really understood what all the fuss was about, we perceptively learned collective guilt.
You and your parents may have shared in some of the superstitions that consumed much of my parents’ waking hours and invaded ours:
• Never travel or visit a friend on a Friday
• Never visit a new place you have never been to before on a Friday
• Never place a hat or purse on the bed
• Never break a mirror unless 7 years of bad luck appeals to you
• Never open an umbrella in the house
• Never walk under a ladder
• Never let a jet-black cat cross your path
• Be careful about what you do on calendar days of the “13th”
• Be careful of places and events with the number “13” in them (do not live in a house with an address like 1310; if you have 13 people at a dinner party, set a 14th chair anyway at the table; if you were born on the 13th, dig your grave early)
• Never put on clothing backwards
• Never visit someone’s house after visiting a mortuary or attending a funeral for that brings bad luck to the person you visit
• Never send a card or gift to someone that bears crosses or birds—the cross thing was a tough one given our Catholic affiliation. For the birds, do you realize how few greeting cards exist without these feathered friends?
If superfluous superstitions were not sufficient, our parents were consumed with other events that were said to bring us bad luck:
• Spilling salt, milk, rice and especially olive oil brought sickness to the family
• Seeing a lady with a hump back (rather amusing and discriminatory since viewing a man with a hump back was said to bring you good luck)
• Seeing bound straw in a field or a flatbed truck carrying straw meant that news was heading your way, presumably awful news
• For the paranoid among you, people were said to be talking about you if you have two eggs in your hand and they break—break a dozen eggs and you experienced delusions of paranoia!
To be fair-minded, there were a few things, albeit a very few things, that supposedly brought you and your family good fortune:
• Seeing a man with a hump back (people who saw the Disney movie, Hunchback of Notre Dame, undoubtedly were infinitely blessed)
• Seeing a white horse, which was not often seen in the suburbs
• Seeing a man first on the first day of the year is said to bring you good luck all year round—don’t even want to think how to accomplish that feat
The Italian tellers of fortunes were apparently male dominated. Other good fortune came from a medal that was very popular in Italy as a good luck charm. It actually was two distinct medals made out of gold. The number 13 made up one of the medals and a small horn made up the other. Wearing these two medals together was presumed to bring you good luck all your life. I guess the horn cancelled out the ill luck of the number 13. A small price indeed to pay for eternal prosperity!
Is there more? Yes. There were a myriad of proverbs and sayings that were suppose to influence how Italians lived. These adages, in my mother’s tongue and dialect, included:
• Non puoi avere porcho e St. Antonio (You cannot have pork and St. Anthony—something similar to you cannot have your cake and eat it too)
• Ne di nartede, ne di venerdi, non si taglia e non si porte (Not on Tuesday and not on Friday, you can cut and you can travel)
• Paese voi usanza trovi (The town you go, the way you do it—whatever town you go to, you do things the way the people do them in that town)
• Sono gentile e son cortese
