In My Own Words
by
Ugo Armand Paron
Transcribed and Edited by
his granddaughter
Gina Michelle Klackner
Growing Up
I was born on November 6, in a little town called Roveredo di Varmo, in the province of Udine, which was in the northeast corner of Italy, close to the Austrian border. At that time, the year 1912, there were skirmishes going on in Austria and the little countries of that area. My dad left when I was about two months old to come to America to make his fortune. I never knew my dad until I came to America when I was nine years old.
When the war broke out in Europe in 1914 and the archduke was killed, we were close enough to the Austrian border that the Italian soldiers thought we should move a little further away in case there was some bombing. We lived in my grandmother’s house at that time, and they took us about 50 miles or so away from our home. I don’t know where we stayed, but I’m sure it was somewhere within the army camps. The reason we had to leave for awhile was because they had spotted a couple of dirigibles flying in the area.
My dear mother was great at crocheting and knitting; she had a lot of little things she had made for herself. Before we left she had one of the soldiers dig a hole just outside grandma’s house; they put the knitted things in a box and buried it. It was the only thing that was left when we came back. The officers of the Austrian army used the downstairs of our house for their horses while the officers slept upstairs. You can imagine how much of a mess that was.
When I got older, my grandmother, grandfather, and family on my mother’s side moved from another little town and came to live around the corner from where my Grandmother Paron lived. So we got to know them a little, I never went over there very often–they never asked me, and I never went. I think I had only been in their house maybe twice.
From that point on, so many things happened before we came to America: I started school; I was about six or seven years old. The school was in a large building, there was a huge copper kettle–it was about 20 or 30 feet in diameter, and inside it was milk. Underneath the kettle they built a wood fire, and that was how they used to pasteurize milk. There were two men in white uniforms with paddles and they were mixing the milk as it was being heated.
Over on the right there was a steep set of stairs leading up to the big schoolroom. At the front of the room, there was a platform. In those days, the teacher or professor always stood above the students. She taught from over in the right hand corner, and we never said a word to the teacher except to say “good morning” when you went in, or “good afternoon” when you left.
On the left hand side there was a basket about 16 or 18 inches in diameter. In this basket was a lot of fine gravel. It made me think after a couple of days going to school and I wondered what the gravel was for. So I asked one of the boys and he said, “Oh, you don’t want to know anything about that.” That didn’t satisfy me. I finally got up the nerve to ask one of the girls, and she said, “Oh, that’s where most of the boys get put if they sass the teacher or talk out of turn.” I said, “What do you mean?” Well, in those days, when little boys went to school, they always wore dressed up short pants, not long pants like we have now. When the boys didn’t act properly, she’d just point to that little basket of gravel and you knelt in it for as long as she thought you would remember what little misdeeds you had done. I’ll never forget that as long as I live.
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At Christmas time, just after the first or second year I was in school there, there was a family living next door–a young couple who just got married. Along with everybody in the family giving gifts, they also gave gifts to the little kids in the area. We took the wooden shoes that my grandfather used to make, and put them on the doorstep. The wedding couple would come at nighttime, and put candy in the shoes to celebrate their wedding.
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One day my Grandfather Peresson, my mother’s dad, was going to get some tobacco in the little town next to where we used to live and he asked me to go with him. So I went with him in the horse and buggy, and we got to this little town, which was maybe four or five miles away and he got what he wanted. On the way back, he said he was tired and was going to fall asleep. He said to me, “Don’t worry, the horse can take care of itself. If you want to hold the reins, fine.” I got scared, and didn’t know what to do. Grandfather fell asleep, and that horse led us right to the front of the house. The horse knew more about it than I did.
A New Life in a
New Country
We came to America in 1920, in the latter part of the year. I was nine years old at the time. Grandma made a sailor suit with a white collar and short pants for my trip. We got on a boat in Naples, came down through the Mediterranean, through the Rock of Gibralter and stopped there while the ship loaded up with coal.
We left there and when we were about four or five days into the journey, there was a little trouble and they had to stop the ship. There was something wrong with the steering mechanism down in the engine room. It took about half a day to fix, and finally we landed in New York.
Ellis Island was where all the foreigners coming to America landed. We walked up into the building, and along both sides there were cubicles with chicken wire screen on them. The cubicles had no doors, just chicken wire. All the different nationalities would be led into these different areas to keep them separated from each other.
My mother and I were led up another set of stairs to a platform; there were doctors there with white coats on, and interpreters also. They asked my mother a few questions, and apparently, everything was fine. Then we were vaccinated again. I was vaccinated in Europe before I left, and then vaccinated after I came to America. We left Ellis Island and went to new York on a ferry, I think; I don’t remember what kind of boat it was though. Then we were on our way to meet my father.
Before we left, we were given six bags of groceries. There were apples, oranges, salami, bologna, bread–things we would probably need on a trip. There were no bedrooms on the train, so we sat up or laid down on the seats. It took nearly six days to get from New York to San Francisco. We didn’t come directly to San Francisco; we landed in Oakland. Because there were no bridges between the two cities at that time, we took a ferry and came to the San Francisco docks. I met my dad for the first time in my life at the ferry building. It was confusing to me; my mother was little confused too, but she saw Papa there, and they kissed. I frowned, as I can remember, and I wanted to kick him in the shins because I didn’t know who he was.
We stayed in San Francisco for three or four days, and then we moved to Auburn California. My dad rented a home right next door to the county courthouse. There was a lady who lived just below us who was the matron at the women’s part of the jail. Then I started school.
School Days &
Good Friends
When September came, I started school. The schoolhouse was only 500 yards away from our house, so I used to walk there. I was introduced to the first grade teacher. I was nine, and the rest of the kids were six or seven. She was a new teacher who had just graduated from college. She used to come to the house and help my mother and I learn basic words and phrases in English. I skipped second and fifth grade because the teachers thought I was smart enough even with the accent that I had. I ended up with the same number of years in school that the kids have to do today.
My two sisters were born in Auburn, and later my dad told us there was a home on the hill where the superintendent of the quarry was living, and his family would be moving in six months to the superintendent’s house. My dad was a foreman at the quarry at the time, and the superintendent offered the first house to us. This little house had two bedrooms and a bath in between, a fireplace in the living room and a bench under the window (where you could lift the hood of the bench and store things in there), a kitchen, and a pantry. My dad built and ice box, an “ice-a box-a” as he used to call it, out of wood. It was too bug after he built it, and he had to take the sides off to get it into the house and then put it back together again.
* * *
The superintendent’s family was English. They were a very nice family by the name of Ringwood. They had two daughters, and the oldest daughter was about the same age as me. The younger daughter was a couple of years younger. Their family took a liking to our family. Besides, my dad was doing a good job for him at the quarry. This little Ringwood fellow had a garage, which we could see from our porch. It was about 300 or 400 yards away from their house, and he kept his Packard inside. He always bought Packards. He’d take it out of the garage on Sundays and wash it.
Well, we became close with them (not so close that my mother was over there drinking their coffee or vice-versa); their daughters and I got to be pretty good friends. I’d been over there to eat some of their English “boiled” dinners, which I didn’t particularly care for–boiled carrots, boiled onions, and boiled beef. They used to invite me to go to the show (a silent movie) with them. We would drive to Sacramento from Auburn (about 36 miles) to the movie house. Afterwards, we’d go out to have ice cream or a soda.
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In grammar school, there were a couple of years when we couldn’t get from the quarries where we lived to Auburn because there had been a slide that came down over the road near the camp. So a fellow by the name of Crosby who lived across the street had this old Buick with side curtains–no glass–just curtains with a little slit in them where you could put your hand out and give the direction signals. That was in the days before they had sedans with the windows all the way around. All that was on the car was the weather-proof curtains. He would drive seven miles from Auburn to the camp, we’d get in the car, and he’d drive us all the way up to school.
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I graduated from grammar school, and on the night of the graduation, we gathered in an old theater in town, the Auburn Theater. We had practiced a play about a captain and his boat, and I was the captain. There was a little singing and acting, and the whole city turned out as they used to do in those days.
Summertime came, and I went to work for my dad up in the quarry. My job was to stand on a ledge and look down into the put where these men were working on blasting rocks apart. After the powder man had blasted the side of the mountain down, the men would take jack hammers, put holes in the rocks, put dynamite in the holes and explode them to make them smaller. There was a tunnel that ran through, with ore cars. The ore was dumped into these cars and taken to the plant. If the rocks were too big, they were put in the put that I watched over.
The company decided they were going to close up the Auburn quarry and just use the plant they had in Redwood City, California. They were looking to send my dad to Redwood City, but he said, “I can’t go there until I find somewhere for my family to live.” So he and my mother went to look for a place to live, and they found a little house behind the courthouse in Redwood City.
I eventually went to high school there in Redwood City. I was in plays and operettas and light operas with Brother Carrington, the music teacher. He always had it in his mind that I was going to be an opera star someday. I never got that far.
When I graduated, they asked me to be Valedictorian. The Valedictorian had to give the speech at the commencement ceremony. I was scared to death–I was always bashful. I asked the girl who was the Salutatorian if she would take the Valedictorian spot and I would take hers. We asked the teacher and vice-principal, and they said it was fine. So she did the one thing and I did the other.
Out Into the World
After I graduated, I went out into the world to look for a job. When I was in senior high school, one of the girls who was in my English class had two brothers who had just left and electrical contracting firm in Auburn. They were going to start a shop of their own. Their shop was just three doors down from where my future wife’s father had his business.
I went to work for
Coast Electric and I was there for about four or five years and that’s how I got to meet my wife. Her father sent one of his sons over one day. He came into the shop while the two brothers were out on the job and he asked if there was any possible way for me to come and find out what was wrong with one of their motors that wasn’t working. So I went in the back door of this shoe repair shop, and here was this young lady-–a little less than 5 feet tall--everything just clicked right away.
She was just a little over 16, so I thought I should talk to her father. I hadn’t met her mother yet either; I had only just met the one brother. I went to her father and asked him if I could take her to the show. He said, “Well, I don’t know, we’ll have to take it up with mother.” They lived only a quarter-mile from where my family lived. We lived on Cleveland and they lived on Jefferson. He said, “Why don’t you come over Saturday night for supper and we’ll introduce you to the rest of the family and go on from there.”
I walked over there that Saturday, and in the kitchen was this busy little English woman. She was an excellent cook. She never had the opportunity to go to school, so everything she knew she learned by rote. We got along beautifully. I met her second brother, Harry, who had some problems with his speech, and Frank, the oldest brother, who was married and had a daughter who was 6 months old. He and his wife lived just a few blocks away.
Well, after that, I went into the shoe shop a couple of times under the pretext of seeing if anything needed to be repaired. My dear Hilda was there, and we just got together. She was short, and I like short gals anyway. And finally, I asked her parents if I could take her to the show across the street and I’d bring her home as soon as it was over. But when it was over, we walked down El Camino to the soda fountain, and for fifteen cents, we could have a float or something. From that time on, we were practically inseparable.
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