He had received a good education in the academic and technical schools of Messina, and in addition to being a first-class cabinet-maker is an excellent trombonist. He had served his term in the Guardia di Finanza, and had at one time been awarded a prize of 100 lire for bravery and efficiency in trapping some west-coast smugglers.
With Nunzio the case was different. Though big and strong, he had no technical training whatever, the five years of his life which he had spent in the Carabineers precluding all opportunities for that. He could be only an unskilled laborer.
The first thing to do was to find them living quarters, and this was done by their friends. Nicola got a room which he shared with four other men, and his board and washing, for $3.20 per week, and Nunzio got a tiny single room, in another house, with board, for $3.50 per week. A part of Nicola’s slender store went at once to buy him a cheap overcoat.
The very next day after being settled, they began the hunt for work, accompanied by Tommaso or Ferruchio. Wherever Nunzio went, bosses, superintendents, managers looked at his massive frame and seemed inclined to hire him until they found he could speak no English, and then they turned away, saying they had no time to bother in teaching him how to take orders. All of the contractors for gangs of Italians seemed to have all the men they wished, and as day after day went by, tramping the city, going to as many as forty places in one afternoon, and meeting with a refusal everywhere, Nunzio began to get very discouraged, and Ferruchio to protest that he could not afford the time from his own business to go about and interpret, and Nunzio tried to go alone one morning. It was late in the afternoon before he even found his way back home, and he was very badly frightened. In a little while his money was entirely gone, and he was on the verge of despair.
When things were the blackest, he heard that a number of Italians were being employed to clean out a big store in some place where the “L” trains ran by, and reported it to Ferruchio, who followed up this slender clew and found that Siegel & Cooper were taking on all Italians for their night porter’s staff, as they found them much better workmen than the mixed Germans, Irish, and negroes they had had. In brief, Nunzio secured a place in the big department store, going to work at seven in the evening and working until seven in the morning for $7.50 per week, and good pay for overtime. He had Italians all about him, and the work, though heavy, was not unbearable. I photographed him and his associates one night, and the pictures tell the story very well. The great disadvantage was that he could not hear any English spoken, and at the end of six weeks in this country could say nothing but “Good-morning” and a few bits of profanity. Meanwhile he was sleeping all day, working all night, and saving every cent he earned. His hands were growing calloused in the spots that had been sore the first few days, and he was much happier than he had been at any time. But misfortune came. He was detailed to work with a Calabrese who had charge of the day work in the room where the store’s waste paper is baled. There was $17 profit for the company on the saving and selling of each day’s waste paper. The Calabrese spoke English and took the orders from the superintendent, translating them to Nunzio and another “greenhorn.” Shortly after Nunzio had been promoted to day work and his pay raised a dollar, a cousin of the Calabrese arrived in New York, and the Calabrese wanted Nunzio’s place for the cousin, so he began systematically to undermine Nunzio. If the superintendent ordered one thing, the Calabrese told Nunzio it was another, and when the superintendent kicked because the work was improperly done, the Calabrese laid the blame on Nunzio. At last one night the superintendent asked all hands to work a part of the night, and the Calabrese informed him that Nunzio refused to do so, something which Nunzio had not the slightest idea of doing, and in ten more seconds Nunzio found himself being suddenly and inexplicably ushered outside.
Of course it was not difficult to reinstate him in a day or two, but after the holiday rush was over scores of people were discharged, and Nunzio went among the rest. Once again he began the task of finding a place, and tramped the streets in the bitter cold, going about asking every place where there was work going on, “You wan-sa man?”—and when it was found that that was about all the English he knew, the boss would always shake his head. For weeks he lived on the money which he had saved while working in the department store, and then one day he accosted Mr. Tolman, the superintendent in McCall’s Bazar establishment in Thirty-First Street, and, as it happened that a man was needed that very minute to handle the huge piles of printed matter in the shop, Nunzio was put to work at $1.25 per day. I saw him the evening of the second day, and he was unable to sit up straight from soreness caused by the heavy lifting and carrying he had to do, but he clung desperately to his employment, and now his reward has come. All about him are English-speaking people with the exception of a large group of Austrians, and so he is picking up the language rapidly, and he has been promoted to the running of one of the big machines in the plant and is averaging $10 a week. His face shines with his prosperity and he wants to get married.
There were many opportunities for work for a skilled cabinet-maker in October and November, but there were three huge obstacles in the way of Nicola’s embracing one of the many,—lack of English, lack of tools, lack of a union card.
Night-porter’s Staff at Siegel-Cooper Company’s (Nunzio Giunta in front of post)
The matter of the tools was not insurmountable, but the others seemed to be. After a week’s hunt for work in some small shop where he could have tools supplied him and a union card was not required, he seized a chance to go to work for the United States Biscuit Company, hustling boxes of biscuits, etc., and for his work received pay at the rate of $4 a week, which he calculated would pay his expenses while he was waiting an opportunity to engage in his trade. Four days of this work saw him exhausted physically, his hand mashed, and his wrist strained so that he was unfit for work of any kind. Before he was well again he was in debt so deeply that he was nearly distracted. Just at the time when his family was expecting he should be sending home some fine sums of money, he was unable to make even his own living, through lack not of capability but of opportunity.