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Page 404: Fond Memories, Hard Facts…and Love by Alfred Achilles Abbott
(Al Abbott was born in Castelmezzano, a little town in the mountains of Southern Italy. He came to the US with his family at the age of 10, at 18 he enlisted in US Army as a private, was retired as Lt. Colonel 28 years later. He is also a retired teacher now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was in the 1979 United Nations Day Chairman for the State of New Mexico, has written fondly of his native Castelmezzano in previous articles published in L’Italo-Americano.)
Life in Castelmezzano, Years Ago, Native Place of Men of Value
I said at the beginning that Castelmezzano, because of its size, about 800 souls, and its remoteness, hidden away in the Dolomite Lucane mountains and at the end of a narrow, winding stretch of road leading up to it for about five miles from the small railroad station of Campomaggiore – that Castelmezzano was not on many maps. But two groups of native sons, Paternos and Campagna, have put this little town “on the map” in a large way, greater than the imagination of the leader of this illustrious combination could have dreamed. This leader was Giovanni Paterno, who migrated to American in the 1880’s. (In Italian, Paternò has an accent on the “o,” with the name pronounced Paternoh, sort of.)
Seeing that life in Castelmezzano for his family of five children had its limitation, that is the harsh labor of tilling a land not always productive enough to sustain its family members – Giovanni Paterno was one of the earliest pioneers bold enough to embark for that land across the ocean, where, in the folklore that is still not totally absent in poor countries “the streets were paved with gold.” I doubt that one of Giovanni Paterno’s practicality and good sense, or giudizio as it is called in Italian, actually believed this myth. But, believe me, in a time when few people could read and write, and in the absence of communications within a national itself let alone between far off continents, the myth of America having streets paved with gold flourished unabated for years and years – myths die hard, even today.
Giovanni and family, having joined the vanguard of what was to become a flood of immigrants from Southern Italy, found himself in the large and bewildering city of New York of the 1880’s , with its horse-drawn trolleys, gas-lit street lamps, dingy cold water flats, and for an illiterate immigrant, the only job open to him, that of a laborer, that master of the pick and shovel, one of an army of immigrants who helped build the great city of New York, its skyscraper, its subways, its sewers, its pavement, its great residential areas. The Paternos lived around 110th Street in Manhattan. Wife Carolina Trivigno Paterno (a sister of my paternal grandmother, Rose Trivigno Abbate) worked and scrimped, taking in boarders to supplement husband Giovanni’s meager wages. Three dollars for a long work week was the usual compensation for an unskilled laborer. But Giovanni was possessed of that intelligence, that enterprising nature that not many illiterate laborers of the day were endowed with, that ability to see beyond the immediate day’s events, call it imagination, entrepreneurship if you will.
It wasn’t long before, strongly aided by thrifty wife Carolina at home, the Paternos had saved a tidy sum of money. This, coupled with the good fortune of running into a good friend and fellow worker, a Scottish stone mason named McIntosh.Giovanni and Mr. McIntosh went into partnership building stone houses on a small, but sound, scale in Manhattan. Build a good house yourself, sell it at a profit, build another one, become known as the producer of a good product, and you’re bound to make it, Giovanni reasoned. He was fortunate to have the encouragement of people around him, besides Mr. McIntosh, people of discernment who could sense that this fellow, this fellow, this laborer Giovanni Paterno, was capable of more than just being a common laborer. and so it began, in the 1880’s and 1890’s, in humble circumstances, the vast New York Paterno construction works that embellished the growing city in the best locations.
the Paterno-McIntosh partnership continued in the 1890’s, when Mr. McIntosh amicably informed Mr. Paterno that he wanted to terminate his joint building activity and enter into the banking field. From this emerged the Colonial Bank which thrived in New York for three decades. (continued below)
Page 405: Old Man Dies, but Sons Continue His Work
Just when the Paterno family future started to take on a favorable hue, son Canio, or Charles, having entered the medical school at Cornell University and making good progress toward his doctor’s degree, fate dealt father Giovanni a cruel blow. He was stricken with a deadly cancer, which sadly enough, killed him in 1898, at the threshold of his career, at 48 years of age. Wanting to die in his native Castelmezzano and fully aware of the deadly nature of his sickness, Giovanni had his oldest son, Saverio, take him back there, back in those rugged hills from whence this very unusual man had originated. Not a little of that ruggedness, that durability in facing the difficulties of trying to establish himself in a new and strange speaking land, not a little, out of a great deal of ruggedness, toughness had rubbed off on Giovanni Paterno of Castelmezzano. But fate dictated that his ingenuity, his productivity would be cut short at only 48 years of age. Giovanni Paterno’s gravesite occupies a prominent, well-kept place in the little hillside cemetery that nestles below the town, surrounded by tall cypress trees, and lying not far from the graves of my own grandparents, and even a brother of mine who died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918.
But the Paterno family building tradition, given its initial and humble initiative in the 1880’s by a laborer and a stone mason, was to flourish, on a great scale up to the 20th century, ably pursued by Giovanni’s two oldest sons, Dr. Charles and Joseph. These two older brothers, Charles fresh out of medical school and raring to go, Joseph, although only sixteen at the time of his father’s death, full of energy and ambition, formed the great building firm of “Paterno Brothers,” which flourished for decades and constructed high quality apartment houses along New York’s fashionable Park Avenue, Riverside Drive and other West and East side choice locations. Nephew John A. Paterno, now 79 and living in Bronxville, New York, calls his uncles Dr. Charles and Joseph “The Giants” of the family, and from what I remember of my boyhood days about the Paternos, I heartily agree.
N.Y.’s Casa Italiana
There were other Paternos, for Giovanni and Carolina had ten children, five boys and five girls, who, with their spouses Cerabone, Campagna, Faiella, Ciluzzi, further helped to etch indelibly the Paterno name into the New York City’s building history.
Yes, Giovanni Paterno would be most proud of them all, and all of us of the Paterno-Trivigno heritage emanating in Castelmezzano long ago, are most proud of Giovanni and Carolina Paterno, they who braved the New World in another day and left us with a heritage so much to be proud of today.
Dr. Charles Paterno and his brother, along with the Campagna brother, were the prime movers in the erection of the five-story “Casa Italiana” on the campus of Columbia University in New York in the 1920’s. The 50,000 volume library is named “The Paterno Library” in honor of Dr. Paterno, the son of Giovanni Paterno.
Giovanni Paterno ands equally sturdy wife Carolina would be very proud of that. And so are all of us whose roots go back to those rugged Castelmezzano hills.
[Note: This excerpt from an article by Al Abbott was published in L’Italo-Americao in the 1970’s and was reprinted with the author’s permission. The original newspaper article was illegible when scanned, so a portion of it was retyped. According to cemetery records in New York City and Castelmezzano, Giovanni died in 1899. Since the records and Al both acknowledge that he died at the age of 48, the year 1898 in the article may have been a typographical error.]
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