Chapter 19
From Chicken Coops Comes Opportunity
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”
—Henry Ford
By 1949, Randy Parks was considered one of the largest and most highly regarded homebuilders in Northern California. His subdivisions were sprouting up everywhere, and he was churning out entry-level homes by the dozen throughout Sacramento; homes that are still esteemed for their design, quality and locations. One Randy Parks subdivision, approximately 40 acres, was being developed behind one freshly transplanted Italian family’s rental home on El Camino Avenue in Pennland Park, still revered as one of Parks’ most notable neighborhoods. Pennland Park was part of a greater surrounding area known as Cottage Park, which had been sold off in tracts that were originally part of a huge mid-19th Century Mexican land grant called Rancho Del Paso, which spanned most of modern-day Arden-Arcade.
While Benvenuti stared out the back window of his home on El Camino Avenue, surveying the mostly fallow grasslands, pondering his future and what he would do now to support his family, his gaze settled upon something curious, and he watched intently as construction workers busily set building blocks atop newly graded lots. The ever-inquisitive Benvenuti, eager to find out what was happening just beyond his doorstep, approached the workers. Instead of asking them what they were building, he asked them an unusual question. When he got no initial response, he continued down the line repeating the question until finally one worker, clearly annoyed by the interrogation, reacted in a hostile manner toward him, posturing as if he and his fellow workers were being insulted.
In the mid-20th century, builders did not use concrete blocks in the foundations of homes in the United States east of Kansas City. Homes in the East featured large cellars, and the foundations required larger spans and footings dug deeper in order to get below the frost line, in contrast to the concrete block and pier foundations that were the common method in the West. However, blocks were used in the East for the foundations of chicken coops to provide drier conditions for raising them. Sunday trips to a favorite destination required a route that skirted the more congested highways, beating a path right through a town that had made an indelible impression on Benvenuti. Passing through, the young man would marvel at the thousands of chicken coops dotting the landscape, especially the ones that were still in the process of being constructed to meet the demands of a booming population. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, New Jersey’s Ocean and Monmouth counties were the largest egg-producing region in the United States, and among their townships, Toms River was the single largest producer.
“Well I was lookin out the window on El Camino about two weeks after we moved there, and I see a bunch of guys droppin 2×4’s and little blocks,” recalled Benvenuti. “And I remembered those little blocks from New Jersey because we used to go down the shore on Sundays every weekend, down near Atlantic City and Asbury Park. And the highway was so jammed that we used to go on a shortcut through a little town called Toms River, and that town was full of chickens, see.”
Settled by Jewish farmers mostly transplanted from New York, Ocean County, New Jersey quickly became an egg-producing capital. In the early spring of 1910, Sam Kaufman, owner of the biggest bar in Brooklyn, was worried about his sick daughters. He knew he had to get them out of the stale New York City air. Perhaps he could buy a farm. But the Catskills, where he first looked, lacked schools and he had five daughters to educate. Then he learned of Toms River, near the sea in central New Jersey. It was only 75 miles south of where he lived in Brooklyn. Toms River had reasonably priced farmland, a small-town atmosphere and only 800 inhabitants. Most importantly, it had a good high school. Kaufman became the first Jewish farmer there, where he grew corn, wheat, potatoes, and peanuts and raised cows. But his chickens were his greatest contributions to Jewish farming. The first farmer in the area to raise poultry, Kaufman’s initiative began the egg sales that became a mainstay of Toms River’s Jewish farmers.
In 1922, the nutritional benefits of vitamin D were discovered and farmers learned that by adding it to chicken feed they could greatly increase egg production, thus sending the sale of eggs on a mercurial climb. Some Toms River farmers would raise over 7000 chickens.
“They had all kinds of chicken coops for miles,” he continued. “And I remembered them very well because we went there so many times and I seen those little blocks with the redwood on em so you could nail the stringers on em. So they would toenail beams, the 4×6 beams into the block to hold it down. And when I saw ‘em dumpin that I says to my wife ‘they’re gonna build chicken coops here.’ But I didn’t own the house, I was just rentin it anyway. I was just wonderin, it’s such a nice area that they wouldn’t be building chicken coops (would they?). So I went out there and asked the guys, they were layin out stringers, and settin up beams, puttin the little blocks, and I says to them ‘hey you guys building chicken coops here?’ They didn’t say nothin they just looked at me. I thought gee, they’re not friendly here at all. So I went down to the next guy, there was a whole row of ‘em, they were settin up a whole row of these beams and blocks and the guy says to me ‘if you don’t get outta here I’ll hit you over the head with a 2×4, get the hell outta here’ he says. I thought what’s wrong with these guys, what am I doin wrong, I’m only askin a question. They thought I was kiddin ‘em, that they were buildin cheap homes. I had no idea whatsoever!” Benvenuti probably knew more about construction than he let on, and one of the many characteristics he perfected during his lifetime was to reserve for himself the true depth of his knowledge and understanding of certain things; in other words he held his cards close to his proverbial vest. In fact, his cousin Peter Pardine was a master builder who had constructed the Reverend Angelo’s first house of worship, completed in 1947, under the watchful eye undoubtedly of the reverend’s son. Originally known as the Christian Apostolic Church, it serves Assemblies of God parishioners to this day in its original location at 605 Lackawanna Avenue in what is now Woodland Park, New Jersey (formerly West Paterson). It is now known as the Calvary Assembly.
“So a guy heard down the line he called me over and said ‘come here, you from the East?’” continued Benvenuti. “I says ‘yeah, why?’ He says ‘cuz well uh, you don’t know what they’re doin here’, I says ‘no, why are these guys mad?’ He says ‘no, these are homes.’ He says ‘they don’t make cellars here, they use these blocks for the beams.’ I said ‘well in New Jersey they use ‘em for chicken coops’. So I says oh my god, no wonder why they’re mad at me. So I went back and told ‘em, I says ‘I’m sorry I come from the East and I never saw this in my life except for chicken coops’. So they got friendly and we got to talkin and I got interested and I says ‘my god, I says what are these gonna sell for?’ He says ‘sixty-seven’ and I says ‘thousand?’ He says ‘no, sixty-seven hundred dollars’.” Benvenuti’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “So I didn’t say it to them but I said to myself my god these must be chicken coops, what are you gonna get for seven thousand dollars?” he chuckled.
At the time, a home in New Jersey fetched as much as $30,000 or more. He then made a casual request that would unwittingly provide him the answer to his own question of what he would do for a living and dramatically change the course of his life. “So I looked at the plan and you know I didn’t know nothin about plans but I could tell the home looked real nice,” he recalled. “And I says to the guy ‘can I have one of these plans?’ He said ‘take it’.” You didn’t have to tell Benvenuti twice, and with the plans under his arm he slipped out of sight with the same sense of delight as a kid who was just snuck a piece of candy by his aunt behind his parents’ back; except this was no candy to be savored in the moment, but rather a treasure map that would lead him to an endless supply of it. He wasted no time setting about deciphering it, but he knew he couldn’t do that alone.
Richard L. Spore and Milton F. White were a couple of Sacramento draftsmen working out of the garage of their home near downtown Sacramento in 1949 and were presently churning out plans for local homebuilders like E. W. Corum. The two would eventually evolve into the architectural firm of Spore, White and Van Doren and were the designers of many Sacramento Valley subdivisions over the subsequent decades. When an unfamiliar yet outgoing Italian immigrant still fresh off of a transcontinental migration from New Jersey came walking into their garage holding a set of plans, they must have been somewhat startled to say the least. His choice to seek out a draftsman to undertake the task was presumably to avoid too much scrutiny and the higher cost associated with engaging the services of well-known architects like Joseph Eichler.
Eichler designed homes for many highly regarded and well-established builders like Streng Brothers, who like Parks, were also painting the suburban canvas of California with their tracts. These were rambling, ranch-style homes, the style of which was first introduced in San Diego. Clifford May, a self-taught architect there, is considered the father of Ranch houses, as many architectural historians trace the birth of the style to a house he designed and built in 1931. May told The New York Times in the 1980s: “I rebelled against the boxy houses being built then. The ranch house was everything a California house should be—it had cross-ventilation, the floor was level with the ground, and with its courtyard and the exterior corridor, it was about sunshine and informal outdoor living.”
As early as 1944, Sunset featured May in several articles about the ranch house, and in 1946 the magazine published a collaboration issue with May, called “Sunset Western Ranch Houses.” May played a dominant role in 17 of the 43 designs featured in the book. Four printings and 50,000 copies later, the book could be considered a success and May’s national stature rose as a result. As famed California historian Kevin Starr noted, “No single Sunset book before or since has had such a profound effect on the architectural environment of the Far West as it was being so rapidly actualized.” House Beautiful, another prominent magazine, also celebrated May’s vision. A twenty-six-page article in 1946 helped, but in 1948 the magazine actually built one of May’s ranch homes. Titling it the “Pace Setter House,” it devoted an entire issue to the May-inspired home.
In the wake of such fawning praise, May secured twenty commissions to build the design all over the nation. Sunset appreciated May’s craft so much that in 1951 they commissioned him to design their new Menlo Park corporate headquarters. The 30,000 foot “suburban Western home” stood as a physical monument to Sunset’s admiration for May; daily tours of the building only reinforced May’s place among 1950s architects. Sunset’s 1958 work, an updated version of the 1946 book, “Western Ranch Houses by Cliff May,” consisted of only May’s creations, an accomplishment, Balgooy notes, experienced by very few architects. When movie stars like Gregory Peck and Olivia de Havilland took up residence in ranch homes, this too raised both public awareness and admiration of the style. Ranch housing, opined historian Thomas Hine, “conjured up powerful dreams of informal living, ideal weather, and movie-star glamour.” While the support of publications like House Beautiful and Sunset no doubt greatly boosted May’s profile, his 1952 collaboration with his associate architect Chris Choate resulted in the design of suburban tract housing within reach of middle class families. In order to sell their designs to California developers, May and Choate formed the Ranch House Supply Corporation, and within a year had sold designs to 30 different builders.
“I went down to a planner, they had planners in them days, they had architects too but these were done by planners and the architects did the big buildings, you know like commercial buildings,” he recalled. “So I went down there and they were three guys, workin in their garage. So, I says to him, ‘could you make me this plan?’ He said ‘no, that’s Randy Parks, that’s a registered plan. He’s one of the biggest builders in California’. I said ‘well can’t you change it a little bit?’ I didn’t know nothin about a plan. He says ‘yeah, we can change it’. I said ‘why don’t you make it a two-car garage, this plan is a one car garage.’ And I was thinkin about my provolone,” he recalled, followed by his signature bellowing laugh. “I needed a bigger garage! So anyway, ‘he says yeah we could do that’ and I says ‘and put a little fancy top on top of the garage,’ cuz I seen some of the houses had bird houses you know (in reference to the signature bird boxes under the eaves of the roof over the garage that were one of the defining characteristics of Parks’ designs). So I said ‘put something up there to make it look different.’ He says ‘yeah we could do that. Let me work on it and I’ll call you’. So he calls me a couple days later and says ‘come on down I’ll show you.’ So it was almost the same plan except for the little changes like the two-car garage, and I said ‘that way I can put the appliances, you know the washer & dryer, in the garage instead of the kitchen like they were on the Parks plan;’ so the bigger garage had got me thinkin, you know? I didn’t know the first thing about it, but I thought the garage would be a better place for the appliances than the kitchen. He made a nice plan.”
Partly because of his love for Provolone cheese, Joe Benvenuti had just created his own version of the California Ranch House. Now, it’s uncertain, at least not well documented, if Benvenuti was the first homebuilder to use a set of knockoff plans to get his start. He definitely wasn’t the last. Serial entrepreneur George Rosenthal, famous for his legendary Sunset Marquis Hotel, emulated houses he observed being built in the San Fernando Valley when he founded Raleigh Enterprises in 1953 to do that very same thing. More than emulated, he proudly boasted of stealing and modifying another builder’s plans–noting that his modifications did not succeed in hiding the fact they weren’t his design.
Chapter 4
Chapter Four: The Flight to Salvation
Pastor Who Would Not Bear Arms Wants Citizenship
Special to the New York Times
LITTLE FALLS, N.J., Sept. 2.—
The Rev. Angelo Benvenuti, pastor of the Christian Pentecostal Church of this township, has appealed to President Roosevelt to give him citizenship papers denied in naturalization court because the minister said he would not bear arms in case of war.
In a letter to the White House, the pastor reiterated his views as expressed in naturalization court in Paterson several weeks ago, saying he would risk his life in the trenches to administer aid and spiritual help to the wounded and dying. But he would not take another life.
“This (the United States) is the place I love best next to heaven,” he wrote to the President.
From the New York Times, Saturday, September 3, 1938
As was the common practice among immigrants arriving in a new country, having found that their name was difficult for others to spell or pronounce and to better fit in and relate it more closely to the language and pronunciations of their new country, young Giuseppe became Joseph in his newly adopted environs. Angelo’s following was increasing. Although New Jersey, like the rest of America in the 1920s, was flush with money, giddy with military success, enthralled by jazz, automobiles and the movies, where the last thing people wanted to do was restrain themselves–everything was closed on Sundays but church. And in the middle of Prohibition, there was great demand for preachers to help drinkers and gamblers resist temptation. Joseph continued shining shoes and picked up more newspaper routes in order to help put food on the table, as economic conditions for the Benvenutis would worsen substantially before getting better in their new home.
Thirteen days after young Joseph’s 9th birthday, Wall Street investors traded a staggering 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars vanished in thin air, wiping out thousands of investors. In the aftermath of that event, dubbed “Black Tuesday,” America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression, the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world up to that time. The Roaring 20’s and the Jazz Age that had ushered in the likes of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, The Phantom of the Opera, flagpole sitting, The Great Gatsby, the Charleston and the assault on Darwinism had suddenly swung to a halt. The nation and the townships of New Jersey plunged into a tailspin that for many was unrecoverable. By 1933, nearly half of America’s banks had failed, and unemployment was approaching 15 million people, or 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. In Little Falls, the unemployment rate topped 25% and many companies shut down, including one of its earliest woolen mills that employed over 100 people. The Dow Jones Industrial Average would not return to its pre-1929 heights until November of 1954, about 25 years later.1 One-tenth of the population were dependent upon FDR’s New Deal. New Jersey issued begging licenses to the poor and unemployed people because the New Jersey government funds were growing low and were being exhausted. The Works Progress Administration, part of FDR’s Second New Deal, created many new jobs in order to support the poor and unemployed. These projects included the expansion of Fort Dix (which would later play a significant role in Benvenuti’s life), Roosevelt Park in Edison, and Rutgers Stadium in Piscataway. In Jersey City, political boss Frank Hague secured the construction of the Medical Center, the Armory, and Roosevelt Stadium.
At its depth, the jobless in New Jersey ranged between a quarter to a third of its workforce, with per capita income falling from $839 in 1929 to $433 in 1933. Some 140 banks closed.2 The Depression was equally hard on preachers, who relied on their congregations for financial support. Joseph often found himself spinning his wheels as his shoeshine business was all but dried up and new routes were hard to come by for newspapers. As the United States industrialized, factory owners hired young workers for a variety of tasks, Benvenuti and his older sisters being no exception. In many cases, there were no protections against verbal and physical abuse. Child labor laws would not take a foothold until at least 1938 with passage by FDR of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and children were easier to control with threats and abuse that scared them into doing what a supervisor required.3
Industries like Paterson’s famed Patent Arms Manufacturing Company, begun by Samuel Colt, which occupied a magnificent four-story brownstone building built on an area directly below the waterfalls, would give way to the silk and textile industries that would define New Jersey in the 1930s. It was there that Colt first manufactured his newly patented repeating firearm, the revolver, with mother of pearl handles, which were essential in securing the American frontier.
The sisters worked under the hardfisted “slave drivers” at the Little Falls Laundry Plant, which was one of the largest in the United States at the time. “All the foremen were mean”, recalled Joseph, a tinge of sadness in his voice. “And they had no unions in them days, but they were getting em in 1936.” The plant was founded in the early 1900s by an immigrant from the Netherlands named George Vander May along with his son Nicholas. Nicholas and his brothers, ironically, were also in the business of “huckstering” fruits and vegetables in the same neighborhoods where young Joseph would begin and cultivate J. Benvenuti Wholesale Groceries. Hucksters, a term often given the negative albeit incorrect association with “hustlers”, were a product of the depression and for many years brought foods and goods to consumers confined mostly to their area of the city. They were as constant as the North Star in their movements to provide a service to the average American family trapped in the inner city during that era.4
Before launching a delivery enterprise of his own, Joseph at age 12 would add plastics factory worker to his growing portfolio of jobs, so determined was he to help put food on the family table. At the time of his entry into the workforce, the economy continued to deteriorate, and unemployment increased further to 24.1%. There were few jobs, and many ordinary Americans resorted to living in the streets or in old cars, setting up shantytowns that became popularly known as “Hoovervilles” after the president Americans widely blamed for allowing the economic conditions to persist. Towards the end of 1932 the American voter used the power of Democracy to show Herbert Hoover what they thought of his term of presidency during these bad times and voted strongly in favor of Franklin D. Roosevelt by 472 electoral votes to 59. Around the world, changes also occurred when the British jailed the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi. Also in Britain, the first ever splitting of the Atom occurred, and in Russia major problems with the agricultural policy caused mass starvation and death.5
As Roosevelt’s New Deal had not fully taken the shape of the job creation that would come out of the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration, it was the harsh working conditions under which Joseph and his sisters were indentured that would forge a steely resolve in the young man. He was determined to find a way to never have to work for another man again, so help him God. “In Canada, I was shining shoes at age 6 and also selling newspapers,” recalled Joseph. “And then when we went to New Jersey I did the same thing, distributing papers to the homes on my bicycle. When I was about 12, I went to work in the plastics factory where they made glasses, combs and toys; they put the Monsanto chemicals in a big dye and the dye would close and form whatever you were making,” he continued with the look of someone who had just accidentally inhaled hair spray. “I used to have what they called the deadman’s shift, 12 to 8. I was 13 or 14 when I graduated the 8th grade, and I didn’t go to high school. I was supportin the family and we were 15 kids. Mary worked and Rosie worked and I worked. The rest were all kids.” Raising his arms and eyes toward the sky, he continued: “But anyway, I prayed that I would get out of the work business and get into some kind of business, any kind of business where I wouldn’t have to work for anybody.” In one of many decisions throughout his lifetime that would come to symbolize his self-reliance, he swiftly showed a girlfriend the door when she proclaimed her father, a factory owner, would set him up with a good job so he could have the same status as the other young men. It would be over his own dead body he would ever work for another man, not the least the owner of a reviled factory.
Like the Vander May brothers before him, Joseph began his business while working his other jobs; and his enterprising spirit would guide him to success not only in the grocery business, but later to the building blocks of his greatest achievements. And while doing all of this, the young immigrant with so many decks stacked against him somehow managed to finish middle school. On June 25th, 1935 at the age of 14, Benvenuti was one of 16 kids to receive diplomas from the Great Notch School No. 2 in an evening ceremony held, ironically, in the auditorium of the Little Falls Laundry. Twelve days earlier, a washed up “tomato can” boxer named James J. Braddock, fresh from the relief rolls, had climbed through the ropes at the Madison Square Garden Bowl to fight Max Baer. At odds of ten to one and higher, Braddock was the biggest underdog in heavyweight championship history. But when the ring announcer, Al Frazin, introduced him—“The challenger, from Jersey City, New Jersey, weighing in at one hundred ninety-one and three-quarters pounds, James J. Braddock!”—Braddock was engulfed in applause. Millions of Americans cheered for him that night, not because he was the betting underdog, not because the champion was unpopular, and not because Braddock was particularly exciting to watch, but because he personified their own struggles. Like so many of them, he had been humbled by forces beyond his control. Like so many of them, he had been devastated by a system that he assumed was stable. Like so many of them, he had been forced to ask for help. The decline in Braddock’s personal fortunes mirrored the national collapse, perhaps more than that of any other American. Just before the crash, he had been one of the best young fighters in the world—everything was within his grasp. And then, when it hit, he tumbled from contender to tomato can to longshoreman to welfare recipient. “His time was the Great Depression and he was a man of his time,” Red Smith wrote.”6
The “Bulldog of Bergen”, Braddock was born in Hell’s Kitchen in Brooklyn and raised in North Bergen, New Jersey near the Hoboken and Weehawken docks. It was at these docks that he fought for his life loading railroad ties to keep in shape and literally keep lights on and heat in his family’s basement apartment before his miraculous last shot at the title and his remarkable triumph over the ruthless Baer and return to glory. It was during these same years and on these same docks that young Joseph Benvenuti was learning too about defeat and sacrifice as he set about building the foundations of his entrepreneurial future. He was well aware that the men laboring under these conditions weren’t just washed-up fighters, but also bankers, lawyers and stockbrokers, and if they were scraping out whatever they could down here to survive, then he better hustle! Throughout his life, Benvenuti routinely said (and had experiences to back it up) that if he wasn’t making it or if he lost everything, he’d have no shame in going to work bagging groceries or doing whatever it would take; that, much like Braddock, he wasn’t too good for any kind of work. His own sacrifices along the way included a high school and college education, but the “school of hard knocks” and his unwavering determination would pave a much less traveled and astronomically more rewarding road.
1 Excerpted from the Article Stock Market Crash of 1929, by History.com Editors https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/1929-stock-market-crash PublisherA&E Television Networks Last Updated November 16, 2023 Original Published Date May 10, 2010
2 https://www.newjerseyalmanac.com/great-depression-and-1930s.html
3 https://www.eiu.edu/eiutps/newsletter_childlabor.php
4 http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-texts/camdennj-tombergbauer.htm#Hucksters
5 https://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1932.html
6 Excerpt From Cinderella Man by Jeremy Schaap https://books.apple.com/us/book/cinderella-man/id1392879798
Chapter 6
Chapter Six: The Son of a Preacher Man
People don’t realize how easy they have it these days. Most kids have never known what it’s like to go without anything. They want something, they get it. If there isn’t enough money, they charge it. We never wanted anything because we never realized we could have anything. We never missed what we never had. Things were much simpler back then, and we were stronger for it. We worked together to keep the house in order, to put food on the table. We kept things going.
― Clara Cannucciari, Clara’s Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression[i]
The grocery business didn’t afford young Joe much time for sports or hobbies. Fortunately for him, there was a closely knit fabric of Pentecostal churches throughout Passaic and Bergen counties, the townships of Little Falls, Carlstadt, Clifton, Paterson, the Oranges, East Rutherford and Passaic, to name a few. These sanctuaries were the ideal place for a young man of his values to meet friends and to escape the gloom of the Depression and the threat of war. Thanks to the early pioneers like his father, Pentecostal churches were now plentiful in working-class neighborhoods, providing a sense of community and belonging for teenagers, many of whom were Italian, who often felt isolated during those years. They offered opportunities to take part in food drives and soup kitchens, helping them to develop a sense of empathy and compassion for others. They also helped them develop a firm foundation of faith to navigate uncertainty and guide them throughout their lives. Each church would hold its services on different nights, at some of which the Reverend Angelo was Pastor. It was at one of these churches along the “route” where Benvenuti met Nancy Capizzano, who would become his lifelong love and partner in marriage for almost 70 years. Also the daughter of southern Italian immigrants, Nancy’s parents lived in Cosenza, Calabria as well, and emigrated at about the same time and during the same wave of immigrants as the Benvenutis. It was common in the U.S. that Italian immigrants settled not only among their paesani but often among those from the same provinces, down to the village from where they lived. Her father, Angelo, and her mother, Concette Vetere, both lived in the commune of Torano Castello at the time of their emigration to New York, where they first took residence in Brooklyn. By the time Benvenuti turned 16, both his and the Capizzano families were struggling through the aftershocks of the Depression, and even though unemployment fell from 16.9% to 14.3% from 1936 to 1937, those were modest gains that did little to ease the collective psyche.
The first film ever screened at a drive-in movie theater was British. On June 6, 1933, just outside Camden, New Jersey drivers paid 25 cents per car, plus an additional 25 cents per person to watch the English comedy Wives Beware at this quintessentially American institution in the open air. The local Courier-Post newspaper had touted the setting as “the first automobile movie theater in the world.” Parked in their Ford Model Bs and Buick Series 40s that Tuesday night, the attendees knew they were the Sample in a novel experiment—but they could not have known the extent to which the phenomenon they experienced would spread throughout the country in the next few decades.[ii] The Benvenutis were undoubtedly absent from this and most screenings, given that their adopted faith discouraged such entertainment pursuits. Benvenuti’s teenage years consequently comprised far more work than play. This was not uncommon for many of his peers, who also came of age during the Great Depression. For them, life was a stark contrast to the carefree adolescence we often imagine today. It was a time marked by hardship, uncertainty, and the constant struggle for survival, but also resilience, resourcefulness, and a unique sense of community. And no teenager exemplified this more than Benvenuti. Having overcome incredible challenges at a young age, he carried over a sense of grit and determination, keeping his head down and developing a work ethic that would be unrivaled in his most productive years.
Although still far from feeling like they were out of the woods, for young people in America, life went on and they continued to do the only things they knew to pass the time and prepare themselves for their futures. “I met Nancy on the route,” recalled Benvenuti with a gleam in his eye. “I was 16. You see in New Jersey, the towns are so close together and in them days we went to the Italian churches, where Italian was spoken. There were 16 towns with 16 to 18 churches, all within 20 miles. We used to go and sing in the choir, and they had bands, with instruments. So, we were friendly with all the girls and guys in the choirs of the other churches we would visit. The first time I ever met her was in her church, in Carlstadt which was about 10 miles from Little Falls where we grew up. We were there this particular time to see the Baptism; we liked to go to the church that was having a baptism. There was a stairway coming down from the church to the cellar where they had the baptism bay, like a pool. I was standing at the bottom doorway, and she was coming down the steps. I looked at her and she looked at me, and I could just feel that that was it, and she was really pretty! We had a lot of fun together. I remember she had a lot of boys that wanted her, and we used to go to a park right across from New York City on the edge of New Jersey where they had the loop de loop, what do you call it—the rollercoaster.”
Palisades Park, originally known as “The Park on the Palisades,” was not very far from Carlstadt where Nancy lived, and it would eventually grow to rival Coney Island for its amusements and rides. First opened in 1898 overlooking the Hudson River on the border of what is now Cliffside Park and Fort Lee across from upper Manhattan, the park was first built by the Bergen County Traction Company as a trolley park to attract evening and weekend riders. Soon after its opening, it was sold to private investors who expanded it by installing a variety of attractions. In 1908, its owners rebranded it the Palisades Amusement Park, and until it closed in 1971 it was one of the nation’s best-known parks. At its peak it featured roller coasters, a Ferris wheel, and one of the world’s largest collections of rides and games.[iii]
“A lot of guys wanted to take her on it and she would never ever go, and she wouldn’t go with me either,” recalled Benvenuti. “So we went there one day after Sunday School and I says to her ‘you want to take a ride on the rollercoaster with me?’ I’d like to’ I says to her. She said ‘I don’t like to but I’ll go with you’ (heh heh), so she went on it with me and she squeezed me to death. She was so scared, she broke her glasses. But we had a lot of picnics, you know, and we would always go out with the Sunday School class.” It was during his courtship of Nancy that Benvenuti’s business model began to evolve, sparing households an impromptu midnight sermon. Like the churches, Italian stores were abundant. “Well, then I was in the grocery business, goin house to house, see, and then I was buyin direct, sellin bigger amounts,” he explained. “I would buy maybe a half a case or a case of tomatoes, whole pieces of cheese, you know, whole balls of provolone, and you know I was doing a pretty good business. Then, along with that, I started selling to little stores. You know, just like they had little Italian churches they had little Italian stores on every block, and I could sell to them because I was buying direct and I could compete with all the wholesalers. I was gettin away from the homes and more involved with the stores.” Everything was going Benvenuti’s way it seemed, when another tragedy would befall the family, testing both his faith and his mettle.
On February 24, 1937, the family lost Joe’s older brother Santo, the oldest of Angelo’s children with Bertha, to Typhoid Fever at the young age of 22. It was a devastating blow, another reminder of God’s ability to take each and every one of his children home, at any given time. Benvenuti had his faith to lean on and a rapidly growing business to tend to, while his romance with Nancy blossomed. His business of selling wholesale groceries was setting sail. Although not much of a sports enthusiast or athlete, Benvenuti did have an allegiance to the New York Yankees, who, during the same period, would win four World Series titles in a row. They would add two more in 1941 and 1943 behind legends like Joe DiMaggio and Phil Rizutto, who starred in all but the 1943 series when they served in World War II.
These years marked a period of much happiness and hope for the future for the two, culminating in their wedding vows to one another on February 1, 1942. But the gusts of wind from the war that had been howling for several years on the continent of his forefathers were about to blow Benvenuti off course, shaking the building blocks of the fortress shielding him from the factory work and odd jobs he had left in his dust. The Axis powers, led by the genocidal maniac Adolph Hitler, were preparing for what no one born in 1920 could ever have fathomed would be aggression so fierce and destructive that it threatened not just America but the very future of the planet.[iv] The course of history for the world and for Benvenuti was about to change dramatically.
[i] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/7113455-clara-s-kitchen-wisdom-memories-and-recipes-from-the-great-depression
[ii]Excerpted from Looking Back at the Original Drive-In Movie Theater, by Kristin Butler July 2, 2021 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/looking-back-original-drive-in-movie-theater/
[iii] Amusement Parks – Origins & History https://www.newjerseyalmanac.com/amusement-parks.html
[iv] Excerpt(s) from THE GREATEST GENERATION by Tom Brokaw, copyright © 1998, 2004 byTom Brokaw. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.