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Retirement Reflections
Sharing resident stories from Canterfield
Hosted by: Lee Martin & Carol Giusty (Juice-tea)
Produced by: Patric E.K. Bundrum
Music by: Parkcore
Retirement Reflections
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Lee and Carol talk with Orlando Castano about growing up with immigrant parents and the subsequent consequences of Italian family culture.
Welcome to Retirement Reflections. My name is Lee Martin. I'll be your co-host along with Carol Juicy. Miss Carol, how are you today? Well, Mr. Lee, I'm just fine. Do you know that we are in episode three? That means we are seasoned veterans.
SPEAKER_01Well, you are a seasoned veteran.
SPEAKER_03Well, seasoned means an old salt.
SPEAKER_01I just mean I'm an old woman that is trying to do a podcast.
SPEAKER_03I've had fun doing this, you know, and we've just begun. I looked at the list of potential interviewers that we will have throughout uh our career. All of it looks very exciting. Today we have Orlando Castano. Orlando is one of our residents here. He's 84 years old. Oh, I'm sorry. He's 48 years old if you're dyslexic. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Orlando is sitting next to me and he's kind of wondering why he's here. So if you can give him a clue, Lee, that would be helpful.
SPEAKER_03The clue is today we want to talk about all things Italian.
SPEAKER_02Oh.
SPEAKER_03And it could be family, it could be food, it could be stories about Elliot Ness and the Untouchables. Elliot Ness, by the way, wasn't Italian. He was no Norwegian. But all the guys that he went after, you know, the Capone and all that bunch, you know, were either Italian or Sicilian. I guess it's like almost the same, but just don't tell an Italian that. Exactly right. Totally different.
SPEAKER_02You brought up something very interesting already. You happened to mention Elianess, who most people remember him as a television. Okay, name a real person. That's correct. Elliot Ness was in a little store, if you will, across from my father's shoe shop in a place called Cowder Sport, Pennsylvania. And Elliot Ness passed away as a citizen of Cowdersport, Pennsylvania.
SPEAKER_03I looked up to see where the most Italians were from. And I would have thought New York, but in by the latest census, most of them are from Connecticut and New Jersey. New York has 79% of the Italians registered are from New York State, but there's more from Connecticut and New Jersey. There's even some in New Mexico and Colorado.
SPEAKER_02Orlando, what do you think of that? The New Mexico and Colorado surprises me because a lot of Italians, if not all the Italians that I've personally know, came through Ellis Island. And because they came through Ellis Island, that gives you a real good perspective of why New York, for example, New Jersey. New England states, okay, anything in Central Atlantic. Most of the Italians came into this country as immigrants, okay, my parents included. And when they came through, their natural tendency was they would go to quote unquote their own kind. For example, there are large contingents of Italians in New York. My particular father and his father went to Buffalo, New York, because of a large contingent of Italians in Buffalo. And all major cities today are not quite as they used to be, but there are a lot of sections that remain, for example, Italian, German, Hungarian, Polish. And they came through where they were, quote, Americanized by their friends, people that came over before them. And then they would look for areas in the United States that their friends would be familiar with that didn't have a particular occupation that immigrants would be able to provide. And so my father ended up going with his father to northern Pennsylvania because their profession was a shoe repair. And there weren't any in the local area, so it was a lack of competition. You move in, you start to set up your business, and that's what they did.
SPEAKER_01Well, my experience, I grew up in Minnesota. We had no Italians up there. It was too cold, and there really wasn't anything much for Italians to do. A lot of Swedish. But when I met my husband, and he brought me in to meet his family in Chicago, and there were a lot of Chicago Italians. Correct. And they lived in the neighborhood. Correct. It was a neighborhood. And I wasn't used to that. And it was quite an experience to meet Italian families, very different than uh the Irish community. And I was from more or less a scotch Irish community in Minnesota.
SPEAKER_03One of the things that I noticed that factory workers was a big place for them to work. So I'm sure that they migrated to major cities like correct, Chicago and Detroit and those areas. You know, your background growing up, you said where did you grow up again?
SPEAKER_02Northern Pennsylvania, a place called Potter County. It's actually dead south of Buffalo, all the way in across New York into the Pennsylvania border.
SPEAKER_03Was there a family business?
SPEAKER_02There was, you mentioned, for example, an industry. There was a toy factory in the town at that time, and there was also a place called a tanner. Now, tannery, as you can imagine, was not exactly a glamorous occupation, and it was heavily Italian and Polish. And there were a lot of Italians that lived in the tannery.
SPEAKER_03Tannery where they would tan hives of uh animals.
SPEAKER_02And so what happens is my father's father set up a shoe repair business. And over the years they eventually ended up in a building. And at the age of 29, my father and his father, his father went back to retire, and my father went back to get married. Was he a cobbler? That's correct. That was the terminology. That was the terminology in those days. The other thing that also applies, for example, is that in the agricultural business, the lumbering businesses, the woods, outdoor type businesses, the men, a lot of them wore heavy boots. And heavy boots, unfortunately, are not cheap, and therefore people would bring them in to be repaired. So it was an item that a lot of people don't even think about because today a pair of shoes go bad, what do you do? You check them out and go get another pair. But in those days, the more expensive shoes you take in, they get repaired, and that's how they set up their business. Did you become an apprentice to your father? I didn't, but as youngsters in an Italian family, you learn to adapt very quickly. For example, all of his sons, all four of his sons, started at the age of about seven to eight. They started learning to shine shoes. There was a shoe shine stand in my mother and father's home. The shop was in front. We ate in the back of the shop, and upstairs was the, I looked at it years later and realized it was an apartment, but I thought of it as our home, and that's where we all live.
SPEAKER_03I remember you we were talking at the table or somewhere once before, and you had told us that as a young child or even teenager or whatever, if you had a job, that money wasn't yours. That's correct. That money came home. And tell us about that.
SPEAKER_02In the culture that my father was raised, okay, the adult male, his power in essence was pretty supreme, wasn't it? Like today, where there's compromise and so forth. This was a little dictatorial. And raised in that home, my father explained how things work. And one of them was that in his shop, he had a little desk, and he would, as he paid bills, for example, water bill, okay, let's say $15. Well, he would mark that in the book for that month. And as you, as a young son, would bring $2.50 in because you happened to mow six lawns that week, you would give the $2.50 to your father, and he in turn would then tell you, okay, of the $2.50, $50 of it went to the water bill, and six cents of it went to the electrical. Oh, really? And so forth. Now that was the impression you got as a child.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02As I later learned as my brother really got to be 18 and better, we realized that all of a sudden he was going to college. My father is a shoe repairman. It was not exactly a multi-million dollar operation. And so consequently, we realized very quickly that the way that school was paid for was the money that my father had taken from my older brother and was returned to him so he could buy a car and go to school. Were families historically large families? There was my father, my mother, and four sons. And that was a pretty typical size. Again, if I go back to quote the tannery days and look and say you'd see about three or four kids at least.
SPEAKER_01I know, and my husband's family, they too had to work at a very early age. He was a paper boy. And he was very lucky to be a paper boy.
SPEAKER_00That's correct.
SPEAKER_01And his sister worked in the neighborhood bakery. And I don't know, did you have a neighborhood bakery in your Yes, we did.
SPEAKER_02We had a uh bakery two doors away from my father's business. There was a grocery store next door, and the bakery was on the other side.
SPEAKER_01Have you ever had bread as good as that bakery?
SPEAKER_02Unfortunately, uh, yes and no. The uh the business went through several different changes and regimes, so I've had great bread out of there. I've also had some bread that didn't last long. The businesses kind of went and came in those days.
SPEAKER_03We kind of set up unknowingly a theme last time we met about the three stages of life. One was youth, one was median adult, and then one was senior adult. And the idea was that the young adult was for play, the median adult was work, and then the senior adult was forgot what it was now, for learning, I guess.
SPEAKER_01With well, with wisdom or in our culture, it's retirement.
SPEAKER_03Retirement. I guess I'm kind of curious. Obviously, you've been through two of those and right in the midst of the other. What kind of transition were you able to make from being a young adult at home, especially? I'm I go back to this idea about the money being yours, you know, to the young age where the money belonged to the family and father was the one that uh took care of that, which rightfully should, to then being a median adult, you know, now you're out on your own. What kind of transition was it? Was that a good trans? Were you finally saying, okay, now I've got my own money, or just take us down that journey somewhere.
SPEAKER_02First of all, the the difference as you're growing up, understand? And it's in those days, and I refer to those days as years and years ago, when we grew up, like it or not, people refer to prejudices in this country.
SPEAKER_01Yes, right.
SPEAKER_02The tragedy for us was that prejudices most people think of white and black. And that wasn't the case because there were no black people in Potter County. And if there were, those two people generally were come in for migrant picking, and that's it. So consequently, Italians were looked at as a little less than the English, Irish, German, whichever happened to be established in that town at the time. One of the examples is my father didn't do any real banking in town because he didn't trust me. You referred to the mafia, it's a criminal organization, it's right, it's disgusting, it's so forth and so on. To a little Italian growing up, someone were to offend you in a serious, serious manner, you didn't go to the police that were prejudiced against Italians to begin with, so you would go to your own kind.
SPEAKER_03I interrupt you here when we were at another uh retirement community here in uh the Atlanta area. I was talking to some guys one day, and I know one of them went by Lala. I don't remember what the other guy's name was, but they were both Italians, and I said something kind of, you know, smart alecly, which I like to do. They looked at each other and he said, Should we tell him? He said, Yeah, I think we should. And he looked at me and he said, Hey, we got people. What do you mean you got people? He said, You know, I'm not gonna do anything, but hey, we got people, you know, so it was kind of like you're gonna get it one way or the other, either us or somebody that you don't know about down the road somewhere.
SPEAKER_02As a lesson from your father, you learn that there are people that take care of that. Yeah, you have to think about it, you have to realize the serious you're thinking about, just how far you want to take it. And that's when you learn that the reason would come in and say, hey, okay, it's something you just let go.
SPEAKER_03So when you got to making money on your own, yes, I mean, uh, that must have been liberating to know that now you've got your money and you have to decide what to do with it.
SPEAKER_02It was, in some respects, money of our own. However, it it was different. The difference basically is you grew up with very little. Okay. As you started to earn your money when we were even married, I think we had a total net worth house, cars, and everything of about 800 bucks. So it wasn't exactly uh blooming years, and it wasn't exactly going to move into the big luxurious homes and so forth. So you had more than that. You had the realization of, okay, I have to start over like my father did. They came in with nothing and built, and you're gonna start with nothing and built. And as silly as this sounds, you you didn't worry about bringing somebody else into it with you. So you in turn take marriage, family, okay, because this is what you know, this is what you understand. So you get married, you do it young, okay, maybe foolish, and you kind of move on and say, okay, these are the things we're gonna do. We're going to establish a family, we're gonna establish, if you will, our own wealth. And with us, everything started with college, because my father, because he had a sixth-grade education, and my mother had little to no education, it was something that was important to him. Not that he was gonna pay for it, but that you had to go.
SPEAKER_01Well, that was my husband's family too. He was the first to go to college. And they were so proud that they had a son that was going to go to college. College, absolutely. What's interesting though, in this Chicago, his neighborhood, the politicians played a very big part. Of course, Mayor Daly was the man, and underneath Mayor Daly, he had other people, and my father-in-law was part of that political group. They weren't called the mafia, and they weren't mafia, but they were very strong politicians. And when my father-in-law lost his job where he was working, the politician said, Bernie, you're gonna work at Lincoln Park Zoo. And so he went to Lincoln Park Zoo. He had no problem getting in there. Now you would have to have nine degrees to get in to do what he did at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. But it was the politicians that were really running an awful lot, and who knows who they were all connected with. But were the politicians very active in your community?
SPEAKER_02Be honest with you, because the community was so small, and because, quote, Italians, Polish, like because we were from the lower side of town, no. They uh we tend to stay within the boundaries. We didn't get into any of the politics, and if anything, keep a low profile is what we basically were taught. And when you look at it as we got our degrees, you were absolutely right. The parents just, this is what they look forward to. This is our son. This is you know, look at they're all graduates and so forth. Unfortunately, one of the other things that happened, at least in our culture of Italian, from my father, was that whatever the first son did and accomplished and so forth, the second son would be obligated to beat. Oh, really? Okay, and well, and you got to the third son, which I was, okay. The odds of you being able to do it got a lot tougher. Well, along comes my brother, who all he wanted to be was a basketball coach. And the idea of going to college to become a phys ed teacher was absolutely out of the question with my father. Really? So my brother Joe, the oldest, graduated from Who's Who's in American University and Colleges. Is that right? And again, immigrant parents were graduated with that honor. My brother John, realizing what my brother Joe went through, went to Villanova University, was in the naval ROTC, and as the naval ROTC, he eventually spending a complete career in the military. He was a captain on his own ship. He also was the governor of Goldport Military Reserve in Gulfport, Mississippi. Well, along comes the third son. Well, what are you gonna do? One's a well-known in accounting and so forth as a master. The other one's gonna have a career in the Navy, and he's getting all these acclamations coming from everybody. So you pick something that they couldn't possibly do, and that was chemical engineering. Wow. Did I really want to be a chemical engineer? No. Did you know what it was? No. Okay, had I ever met a chemical engineer? No. But they gave me testing that said, one, Orlando, you really don't have any aptitude for engineering, so stay away from that. And especially the sciences. Well, if anything knows anything about Italian competitiveness, is if you tell me I can't do something, oh, that's right. I will do everything within my power to prove you wrong. And I did. And I graduated in chemical engineering, University of Detroit. And I did not ever spend one day after graduation in chemical engineering. I went to, I was co-oping at the time with Chrysler. While I was at Chrysler, my father had taught us that the way to succeed in any business is to work harder than anyone else or any two or three people that you can see. And the reason why is then people will come back to you for the answers. And the more they come back to you, the more successful you'll become.
SPEAKER_01That was really the mantra of my husband's family.
SPEAKER_03I'm not surprised.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Very hard, hardworking man. That's correct. And good man, solid person. That was what the older generation did. They when you said competitive, let me tell you, they are competitive. And I didn't realize how competitive until the two of us started competing with each other. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03You know, one of the things that I've I've heard you mention a few times about success and competitive and making becoming what I am today. What a lot of people aren't aware of, whether you be Italian or Irish or whatever, one of the things that really makes us successful is our partner. And we have sitting in this room your lovely wife, Melinda. I want you to tell us about how you met. She's listening, so if you're not telling the truth, we'll find out later. But how did you guys meet?
SPEAKER_02First of all, as we've gotten older and we look over your shoulder, you get to that part of your life where you really start to understand what life is all about. You also realize and understand the things that you thought you did were merely gates that the good Lord opened for you. Yeah. And you tried the opportunities. I mentioned that my parents settled in a very rural area. We were a county seat at 2,400 people. In that town, as I was growing up, I was 15 years old. There was another young lady in that town, absolutely the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. Fell in love and started dating. In those days, in my generation, can remember when we used to have uh friendship breaks. This is how you let one girl know or one boy know that no kidding, they were special. You gave her a friendship break because you were so young that no one else took you serious, but you took each other serious. She was 14, I was 15, and we started to go together. And that was back in the early 1957s in that range. And we grew up together. I mean, it was a small community. It wasn't like she had a great selection of men and death. And as you both started in the same type of community with the same her father worked on a farm. Her mother was beyond her time. She actually had a full-time job at that in those days, which is rare for the women. And she raised five children. So consequently, her daughter that I would fell in love with was well-versed in taking care of children, her brothers and sisters. And she went to Rochester, New York after high school and became a dental assistant. I went on to the University of Pittsburgh and got thrown out and ended up going to St. Bonaventure University for my first two years and then finished at the University of Detroit. About one trip or two trips from Detroit all the way across Canada into Rochester. We didn't take us long to realize, well, we can't keep doing this every weekend. This is not going to work. So we decided to get married while I was still in school. And she was going to help put me through school. It was a wonderful idea, unfortunately. Didn't quite work out that way. Like I say, we dated a long, long time, and all of a sudden we were married. Yeah. Well, you can imagine two months later, okay, guess what? I'm not feeling well. We better go to the doc. Well, guess yeah, you're right. All of a sudden we had a son coming along and it's totally different. It was okay, let's buckle down. Because here we go. And as it turns out, we worked hard, got through school. Again, one of those hindsights that you have when you get older. You start working very hard, like I explained earlier. And as you're working harder and harder, you're spending a lot of time there, and I've got to earn this and earn that. We've got to pay for this and pay for that, and so forth and so on. As we were doing that, again, the hindsight you looked at, and you realized I'm much older now, the kids are gone, the kids have families, that dot that. And all of a sudden you look around the lady that you married, and you realize the first five, six years of marriage, she never bought anything. Not a dress, not a dress. Not a pair of socks. Nothing. And you realize that all that sacrifice came because she was a gift.
SPEAKER_03Very good.
SPEAKER_02She really was. And I didn't see that at the time, okay, because she was so attractive. It was no man in his right mind that wouldn't want to see that lady. And as she took care with the kids and so forth, and all my career progressed, I found that I was quote unquote in demand and fairly successful. Again, believing in those days that all this hard work I was doing and these good things I was doing, not realizing that the abilities, the talent, the little tricks that I'd learned, and so forth and so on, I just looked back over and said, no, no, that's that's more than just something you learned. It's almost God given.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02And as we looked over that, again, the hindsight I turned back and realized all the things she had done. That's what was humbling. It is humbling. I've told her many times, Carolyn, believe me, I mean it to the bottom of my heart. I started telling her, especially as we got older, honey, don't thank me. I owe you. And it took her years to realize what I was trying to say because she'd done those things so normally. My responsibility to kids. I get them into school, get them out of school, get them in the car, drive down there, take them to the ballgate. That was her job, job. Okay. My my negative was that as I look back, I wasn't quite the father I thought I was. For example, boy, you ought to see me as a grandfather.
unknownYes.
SPEAKER_02Well, too bad my kids didn't see the same father visit. The grandfather became and those be careful, they're listening to this. I'm just saying, those are the things that started to open your eyes as you got older.
SPEAKER_01Well, you mentioned opening your eyes at some point to know what your wife did in your life. Oh. And I it was one of the most I would say the tears just came to my eyes because after my husband passed away, I was going through a lot of the things that he had. And he had written, he was keeping a mild journal. And I was surprised because I did not know that he was doing this. And I looked at one page, he said, What would I have done without Carol? I will remember that the rest of my life. Because, well, you know, Italians aren't the most verbal about expressing their feelings or thoughts. And when he I saw what he had written, it just touched my heart. So thank you, Ronald, wherever you are.
SPEAKER_03As we come close to the end of our time today, if you could go back, Orlando, to a younger Orlando, knowing what you know now, what would you tell him?
SPEAKER_02I think if I were to look back now. See, I knew what I had defined as success were the things that quote unquote other people had. The cars, the houses, the money in the bank, the clothes, all the things. And as we got the kids were leaving and so forth and getting lives of their own. Well, I want them to have a better shot than I had. You realize you put so much into the material things necessary to measure my success, not realizing the if the amount of time that I had done that, I spent that into the family. Two things I think would have happened. One, the kids would have been eager deeper with their affection for me. For example, they absolutely love their mother. Well, why? Because that's who raised them. Okay, their father was, quote, the father figure. And I kind of regret that. I kind of selfishly look back and say, Orlando, you should have taken your place.
SPEAKER_03I think we all have those times when mothers would say, uh, just wait till your father gets home. Yeah. That was kind of a role. Hey, listen, I'm gonna have to go here pretty soon. We'll close this down. I'm gonna have to go because my grandson, 20-something years old, who lives in Nashville, sent me a text and he said, I'm gonna call this afternoon and I'm gonna talk with you about your podcast and bring a notebook. So he's gonna have some idea. He's gonna have some ideas and some things that he wants to listen to. Orlando, we thank you for being here. Let your family know that this podcast is available. Carol, unless you have another word to say.
SPEAKER_01No, I could talk to Orlando forever. We both we have a lot of things in common.
SPEAKER_03Orlando, thank you for being here on behalf of our producer, Patrick and Carol. We want to thank you. And Carol, bye. I'll see you later. See you later, Lee. Thank you. Thank you both.
SPEAKER_00Hi, Patrick Bundram here. Retirement Reflections is a small startup podcast that we hope will share our community stories with family, friends, and anyone else who wants to listen. Despite being produced at Canterfield of Kennesaw, the opinions of our hosts and guests do not reflect the company's official policies and procedures. We hope you'll stick around to see what stories we have to share. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you next week.