Glimmer #34 Remembering Dad

April 3, 1927

Start of procession — Scollay Square, Boston, Mass., 28 August 1927. [August 27, 1927].

I wonder what life was like 97 years ago on this day? I know that it was a Sunday. I know that Cesar Chavez had been born three weeks earlier and that Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had held a three-day hearing on the “Black Sox” baseball scandal in January.

I know that Sacco and Vanzetti, victims of anti-Italian and anti-immigrant sentiment, were scheduled to be executed in April 1927, and only worldwide protests delayed their deaths until a few months later.

And I know that another Italian immigrant, Carmine Merullo, welcomed his twelfth child into the world on April 3, 1927. Carmine and his wife, Angelina, had come to Boston from the Provence of Avellino and settled in to raise their abundantly blessed family in the United States.

I have spent many hours in the home where baby Eduardo and most of his siblings were born. My Grandfather, my Papanonni, was Carmine Merullo, and he lived in that same small two-family home until his death. I know that he worked as a laborer, but I don’t know the details. I know that his wife was a homemaker who was there every day when her kids came home from school, both at lunchtime and at the end of the day.

Because my family has always loved to tell stories, I know that Mammanonni was a force to be reckoned with. I can see her pounding her big, meaty fist on the table to make a point because her children loved to describe her strong spirit. I know that she deeply loved, but did not coddle, her many children. I know that she grieved intensely over the losses of her children, one a son with a congenital illness whom she nursed until his death at 18, and one a daughter who was lost in childbirth with her second child.

I know that the birth of my father, Eduardo Merullo, on April 3, 1927, marked the end of her many years of fertility. As Dad loved to express it, “She kept having babies until she got the one she always wanted.”

I never knew my MammaNonni. She died when I was three months old, in June of 1956. I know that I was the last grandchild she held and that she knew she had little time left when she held me to her chest.