In my last blog, I wrote about the passing of Mario Pasin, the 95-year-old son of Antonio Pasin. To my surprise, a few days later, Pasin was given a full-page obit in the Chicago Sun-Times, complete with color photos.

I say “surprise” as this sort of treatment is usually reserved for Outfit thugs, who are treated like celebrities instead of what they are: sociopaths.

Is a tide turning? Is the media, in this case newspapers, finally opening its doors to more positive treatments of Italian Americans and our history and culture? Maybe, maybe not. But this was the first time I could recall that a seminal figure in both local and national history—the son of the founder of Radio Flyer Red Wagon, a staple of American culture—was given the respect he or she deserved. I can guarantee you that the average American has no idea that an Italian American immigrant (to Chicago via Venice) was behind a children’s toy which practically every American parent owns. But now they do. They also learned that Pasin’s sons (Antonio’s grandsons) still run the company in the Windy City.

Even if the article hadn’t identified the Pasin family as Italian, people may still have never associated them as such. This is what I call the “cryptic Italian” syndrome. The word “cryptic” means obscured or not obvious. As they were from northern Italy, the Pasin family name ended not in a vowel but a consonant, thus subverting the usual perception that all Italian names end in vowels. (Same for another famous Italian American who found fame in Chicago: the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin.)

There is also the assimilation factor, that is, the thousands of Italian names which were changed upon arrival to these shores, either deliberately (to sound more American) or, via harried immigration officials, mistakenly (to keep the hordes of humanity floating along). 

Then there’s the case of married names. Our Institute did a two-part article “Funny, They Don’t Look Italian,” which noted how so many celebrities have Italian ancestry via their mothers, who obviously took their husbands’ names (ItalicWay-XXXVI) This was recently brought to light again when former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel was a guest on ABC’s “The View” and expressed astonishment that co-host Joy Behar was Italian American, not Jewish.

(Joy is 100% Italian American, btw, both parents. The PBS series “Finding Your Roots” traced her ancestry back to Calabria.)

In any event, a shout-out to my brother Geno for reminding me of another “cryptic Italian” recently highlighted at-length by the Sun-Times when she died a month ago: Angela Piazza Turley. Who? Well, if you follow politics, you might know her son, lawyer and author Jonathan Turley. He is a frequent talking head on many cable networks (both liberal and conservative) thanks to his expertise on constitutional law. He has even testified before Congress on numerous occasions. His pragmatism and eloquence are well-respected.

It turns out that Turley’s mother, Angela, was both his role model and a pillar of strength, a petite Sicilian American woman from Ohio who blazed a trail for civil rights in Chicago that picked up where Mother Cabrini left off. In his words at his mother’s funeral, Jonathan shared his mother’s numerous accomplishments:

“Growing up in a coal mining town in Ohio, my mother knew poverty and prejudice. She would never forget either. It created a solid core within her, harder and tougher than anthracite coal. Some nights, she would go to sleep looking at the burning crosses on the nearby hill, a message from the local Ku Klux Klan that she and the other Italians were not welcome in the valley.

     She was president of Jane Addams Hull House and the founder of an array of organizations that fought for better housing, education, and safety for the poorest of the city. She helped create one of the first shelters for abused women and a group to maintain support for our public schools. She ran for city council in the 46th Ward, and the Chicago Tribune described her as the ‘scrapper’ from Uptown seeking to transform the poorest areas into decent places to live.

     She was all that — fearless; the embodiment of pure will. I remember going into slums with her as she faced down violent landlords and pimps. On one occasion, she and other mothers literally chased pimps and gang bangers out of a playground and a low-income building.

     I can still see the face of one pimp as a mix of amazement and amusement at this tough Sicilian mother with two young children in tow, pushing him into the street. I looked at her with a ‘What do we do?’ look, but she did not flinch. She had that crazy Sicilian look that said, ‘I am ready to go all the way, are you?’

     My parents’ success (note: Turley’s Irish American father worked with famed architect Mies Van der Rohe) gave my mother the opportunity to have something she had dreamed of as a little girl growing up during the Depression: a beautiful home filled with family. They bought one of the oldest houses in Uptown near the lake, with a room for each of their five children. When she first walked through that house, she stopped in the backyard and smiled as she came face to face with a giant Ohio buckeye. It was love at first sight. She would later fill the house with a steady stream of people who were struggling or foreign students seeking opportunities in the U.S.

     That house was her projection of herself in this world: a loving and protected space, large and open to others. For her, the house echoed with the dreams of a little girl in the depression; it meant safety, family, and continuity.”

Incidentally, many readers are always shocked to find that the KKK harassed Italian Americans. Indeed, as Heather Hartley’s 2004 documentary Linciati: The Lynchings of Italian Americans demonstrates, they were targeted both for their dark looks and their Catholic faith. To date, there have been 50 or so recorded lynching of Italian Americans in the American South, ranging from the infamous 1891 incident in New Orleans to individual cases in Florida, Illinois, West Virginia, and Colorado. Though this pales in comparison to the 4,000 lynchings of African Americans, this horrific stat shows that, unlike the plight of other so-called “white ethnics” (Irish, Poles, Greeks, Jews, and Eastern Europeans), Italian Americans had a much more scarring immigrant experience via nativist American violence. And, of course, a variation of this occurred once again during WWII via “Una Storia Segreta” (A Secret Story), when 600,000 were declared “enemy aliens” by the FDR administration.

Mrs. Turley’s feistiness and humanity didn’t come out of the blue. I already mentioned Mother Cabrini. Don’t forget another Italian American woman from Chicago, Florence Scala, who took on no less than “Boss” Mayor Richard J Daley over his decimation of Taylor Street. Though she lost the case, and though the area today is largely dominated by Daley’s pet project–the University of Illinois-Chicago campus—Scala showed that hell hath no fury like an Italian woman scorned—or, at the very least, patronized. There’s a reason those pimps and abusers feared Mrs. Turley’s steely stare. What needs to be done, of course, is for the filmmakers in our community (the future ones, forget the Unholy Trio of Coppola/Scorsese/Chase) to make biopics of great people like Pasin and Turley. Can it happen? Time will tell.  -BDC