Remember Where You Come From:
A story about the beginnings of my family history from out of the Utica Daily Press.
By Mary Joan Martin Sunday Edition November 19th, 1933

Maybe the depression-Oh yes there still is one-will get Anthony Gentile, his wife and children. And maybe it won't. It's a gamble but they're putting up one grand scrape to beat it.

The Gentile's live in a chicken coop on an unoccupied farm owned by Senatro Paladino, Bleeker Street importer, near the rustic gardens on the Seneca Turnpike. You turn down a narrow cinder road and drive in about a quarter mile, and there you come upon the coop standing quite alone in a field, a ludicrous fortress against the snow and wind and cold.

For five years Mr. Gentile, rugged as the hills that shadow his boyhood home in Campobasso Italy, has been out of a job. A steady job that is. He would pick up a day's work here and there and for a time one or two days for the city. But for the past two years even that opportunity to keep afloat eluded him. Last spring after a winter of misery, his plight came to the attention of Mr. Paladino. Out of an interview with Tony Gentile and his wife, an Irish girl from the mountains of West Virginia, grew the henhouse proposition. It's the only structure on the farm not counting a tottering wraith of a barn. The house which stood there was leveled years ago by fire. With the henhouse went the opportunity to grow vegetables, not only for the use of the family, but to sell for as much profit as they would bring. Would Tony and his wife consider that worth while? Would they?

And so last May saw the family settled there. Tony Gentile in a frenzy of hope and ambition, collected from here, there and every where, odds and ends to make the place a little less like a hen coop, a little more like a home. A door, glass for windows, paper for the walls, bits of linoleum-there are six different kinds of linoleum on the floor of the coop. Tar Paper for the chinks in the walls. Chinks? Well, that's putting it a bit too poetically. On the wall near the stove they put up a picture of President Roosevelt. And ironically and sadly enough now, two colored pictures cut from magazines showing happy and well-to-do family groups seated at sumptious dinner tables.
Mr. Gentile built partitions dividing the place into three rooms. He put up shelves for his wife's few dishes. He even started to build a porch. But he put that off for a time to devote all his daylight hours to his garden.
That garden! Started so bravely...well you recall what last summer's drought, week after week of it, did to gardens. Where Tony would have had 200 bushels of beans he had 10 bushels. There were few potatoes. No corn. He carried water for hours night after night in pails from the well on the place, to keep things growing. But it was useless. The garden was a failure.
The hen house served splendidly as a shelter during the summer. But just how it will work out as a shelter this winter is a question. An old stove in which wood is burned, furnishes the only heat. There's a wood lot on the place. Mr. Gentile sits up most of the night, now that the winter has really arrived, to keep the fire going.

NOT ENOUGH BLANKETS
Mrs. Gentile says the thing that bothers her most is keeping the children warm at night. Shes gives them most of the blankets. The blanket question is a serious one. Mr. and Mrs. Gentile shake their heads over it when they look at the babies. "When winter really gets here I guess there won't be much sleep for Tony and me," Mrs. Gentile says.

For milking a cow which supplies the Paladino family with milk, Mr. Gentile is allowed a quart of milk a day for the babies. The welfare department is now providing $3 a week. Mrs. Gentile bakes all the bread her family eats. Butter? They've forgotten what it looks like.

All they ask is not to "sponge" on anyone. Mrs. Gentile says. She met her husband when he was foreman of a construction gang which worked for a time near her home in West Virginia. That was six years ago. Sorry?. No, not Mrs. Gentile, whose brother is a mountain preacher, whose father and mother are mountain farmers.

She looks out of a window on the bleak fields surrounding the chicken coop. The wind whirls the snow fiercely, threateningly. "My mother sort of guesses what we're up against, I think by her letters," Tony Gentile's wife says. "But I don't tell her much. I try to write real cheerful. She and Pa have their troubles too, now that farming doesn't pay so good any more. I don't want her to worry about me. Besides, next year things will be better. If we can only stick it out this winter we plan to raise a lot of garden truck next summer. Then we'll square up with Mr. Paladino. Tony and me don't want to sponge on anybody. All my man wants is a little luck."

(In the picture shown)
Caption reads:
HERE are Anthony Gentile, his wife and their children. Robert is 2 years and 4 months old, Gladys is 8 months old. Their home is a chicken coop on a farm off the Seneca Turnpike. Not because they like living in chicken coops but because they are courageous. End Of Article
Mrs. Gentile's name was Leona (My Irish Grandma) and I never met her until I was 16 and she was living at a nursing home in Arlington Virginia. She was in her 70's and couldn't recognize anyone in her family any longer. Grandpa Anthony ultimately fathered 6 kids with Grandma Leona. My dad was next to last. In the photo shown here my Aunt Phillis was residing within my Grandmothers womb at the time. Uncle Ray, my Dad, and Aunt Virginia came along later.
The old timers eventually split up (no idea why but I hear Grandpa was miserable to live with). Grandpa did his best to raise those 6 kids without a mother. I remember him as a rugged leather faced old dude. I liked him a lot. I used to follow him around everywhere he went. He chewed Havana Blossom tobacco so I'd have to tread cautiously because you might get accidently spit on. Grandpa did find work in the factories and mills and made his way in the world. He retired a snowbird to a bungalow in Florida. He was an avid gardener, and inventor, a carpenter, and all around tough dude. And from what this story shares, Grandma Leona was rugged as well. This is the stock I come from. I like to think I picked up my love and skill for growing things from them. And more importantly I picked up gumption from them. They had a truck load of that.