Winding the Mantel Clock: Angelo DeLio 1880-1944

In the late nineteenth century, mass migration from Italy accelerated. Chicago’s foreign-born Italian population grew from 16,008 in 1900 to a peak of 73,960 in 1930. Most of these newcomers were peasants—contadini—from the southern regions, especially Basilicata, Campania, and Sicily. Drawn by the demand for railroad workers, many were enrolled in work gangs by padrones and sent to construction sites across the country. Once men found steadier work in the city’s public works and industries, they sent for their wives and children. Women often took jobs in the sweatshops and factories of the garment trade.

This is the world my grandfather, Angelo DeLio, entered as a child.

Life in Italy

Angelo was born on March 13, 1880, in the village of Gesuiti, part of the municipality of San Vincenzo La Costa in the province of Cosenza, Calabria. Family lore claims the hamlet was so small that a person could yell from one end to the other and be heard clearly. Even today the population hovers around 370, so the story may not be much of an exaggeration.

His parents, Carmela Perri and Raffaele DeLio (Ralph, as he was later called), were farm laborers. Opportunities in such a place were scarce. Between 1880 and 1920—the height of Italian migration to the United States—roughly four million Italians, the majority from the South, arrived looking for work they could not find at home. After unification, factories and wealth concentrated in the North while the South remained largely agricultural. Many southern farms were owned by northern landlords who offered terms similar to those of post-Civil War sharecropping in America. High taxes, low wages, recurring drought, and scarce water made life even harder. Over the longer period from unification into the mid-twentieth century, an estimated 26–29 million Italians left the country (roughly a quarter of the population at the time of unification), with the heaviest waves occurring from the 1880s through the 1920s.

In the late 1800s a mysterious parasite destroyed most of the grapevines in southern Italy, pushing many farms into failure. Unemployment rose, skilled workers lost their livelihoods, and cholera and malaria swept through the region. Early in the twentieth century came a series of natural disasters—eruptions of Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius among them. Like so many others, Ralph went ahead to the United States to establish a foothold before sending for his wife and young son.

Arrival in America                                                  

1. SS Bolivia

On January 4, 1888, the SS Bolivia arrived in New York from Naples. Seven-year-old Angelo traveled with his mother, listed as Ma Carmella Perri. A notation on the passenger list records 777 Italian aliens in third-class steerage. Three weeks at sea in crowded conditions would have been difficult for any adult; for a small boy leaving behind everything he knew, and doing so around Christmastime, it is hard to imagine.

2. The Battery & Castle Garden Immigration Center - N.Y.

Whether they landed at Castle Garden or Ellis Island is not entirely clear from surviving documents. Castle Garden operated from 1855 until April 1890; Ellis Island opened in 1892. A fire on Ellis Island in 1897 destroyed many earlier records, including those from the Castle Garden era. Given the date of their arrival, Castle Garden is the more likely port of entry.

3. Chicago street map, 1890s  - University of Chicago

How the family made its way from New York to Chicago remains unknown. The 1890 federal census, which would have been the first to record them, was largely destroyed by fire in 1921, and the remaining damaged records were later disposed of by government order. What is certain is that the DeLios settled in Chicago’s Little Italy and stayed.

Little is known of Angelo’s childhood. The 1900 census notes that he could speak English but could not yet read or write. By 1910 he could do both. Whether he taught himself or received some formal schooling is an open question.

On January 2, 1892, Carmela gave birth to Emilia Maria—Millie to the family. There was a twelve-year gap between Angelo and his sister. Census records indicate that Carmela had four children, only two of whom survived. Millie was the youngest.

4. State Street North of Madison-Chicago - 1890s

The 1890s were a remarkable decade in Chicago. The World’s Columbian Exposition opened in 1893. Prairie School architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright were gaining recognition. Theodore Dreiser began work on Sister Carrie. On the darker side, H.H. Holmes (Herman Mudgett) was operating his "Murder Castle" near the fairgrounds, and just before the exposition closed, Mayor Carter Harrison Sr. was assassinated.

Two years after the fair closed, on March 16, 1895, Angelo became a naturalized citizen. The naturalization record lists him as a minor living at 140 Sherman Street.

 

Building a Family

5.  Angelo DeLio - ca 1900

In June 1900, twenty-year-old Angelo lived at 180 West Polk Street with his parents and sister and worked as a day laborer. 

6. Pg from 1905 marriage registry —
Holy Guardian Angel Chicago

              

 By 1905 marriage was approaching. As was common, a match was arranged between Angelo's parents and the neighboring Lufrano family. Fourteen-year-old Maria (Mary) Lufrano, daughter of Michele (Mike) and Saveria Lufrano, married Angelo on January 15, 1905, at Holy Guardian Angel Church. 

The young couple moved in with Angelo’s parents on Polk Street. Before the decade ended, Mary gave birth to two sons: Carmine Raffaele (Carl, or Carmie), born April 17, 1906, and Michael Joseph (Mike or Mikey), born July 3, 1909. Both were baptized at the same church.

7. Holy Guardian Angel Church-Chicago

In 1910 the extended family—Ralph, Carmela, Millie, Angelo, Mary, and the two boys—moved to a second-floor apartment at 640 S. Sangamon Street. Mary’s uncle Frank and his family occupied the first floor; two boarders lived in the basement. 

In 1912 Mary gave birth to a daughter, Giuseppa (Josephine, or Josie), on July 26. The family soon moved to 712 S. Morgan Street. Most of these buildings are gone now, cleared for highway construction, a university campus, and medical facilities.

8. Angelo and Mary DeLio's DeKalb Street Rowhouse

Francesca Carmela (Francie) arrived on December 30, 1914, while the family lived at 711 S. Loomis—a rowhouse that still stands. 

Sometime in 1916 they made their final move together, to a house Angelo could now afford as a freight handler for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad: 2129 W. DeKalb Street (later renamed Bowler Street). 

That rowhouse became the family homestead until around 1950. Inside its walls the two youngest children were born: Maria Saveria (Marilyn, or Mary within the family) on June 10, 1917, and Giovanni Angelo (John, or Johnny) on September 10, 1920.

The Later Years

                                                                                             9. DeKalb Street - Chicago

By the mid-to-late 1920s the older children were in school, bringing friends home, and beginning to date. My mother used to tell a story about those evenings. When it was time for the visitors—especially her sisters’ boyfriends—to leave, Grandpa would walk into the living room and begin winding the mantel clock. He never said a word. That single action was enough. The girls knew better than to argue; the young men said goodnight and went home. The sons were treated a little more leniently—though they were probably receiving the same silent signal at their girlfriends’ houses.

In June 1930 Carl married Catherine Citro. By the end of the decade all four of Angelo and Mary’s parents had died—Ralph DeLio and Michael Lufrano in 1928, Carmela DeLio and Saveria Lufrano in 1929. Then came the Great Depression. The lowest years, 1931–1933, brought high unemployment, poverty, and a general loss of confidence. Recovery would not truly arrive until around 1940.

Life continued as normally as it could until the later 1930s, when three more of the children married: Francie to Dominic Segreti in November 1936, Josie to Joe Lipari in September 1939, and Mike to Irene Urbaniak two months later.

War and Loss

Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, marked the beginning of World War II. The United States instituted the Selective Training and Service Act in September 1940. After Pearl Harbor, the draft expanded. On April 27, 1942, Angelo—then sixty-two, still working for the B&O Railroad—registered. His draft card describes him as five feet tall, 131 pounds, with a sallow complexion, gray eyes, and black hair.

Johnny served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1944 and saw action in and around Italy. During his service he married Lee Rodgers; the marriage ended about five years later. The last of the DeLio children to marry was my mother, Marilyn, who wed my father, Rocco Poppa, in July 1944. Angelo did not live to walk her down the aisle.

Shortly after registering for the draft, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He endured the illness for roughly two years and died on February 21, 1944, at the age of sixty-three.

I never knew my grandfather. From everything I have learned, he was a good man who left too soon. Researching his life has brought me closer to him. I wish I had uncovered more, but the clock has yet to run down, and until it does, my search continues.

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Photo credits

1. SS Bolivia (built 1873 by Robert Duncan & Company for the Anchor Line; transferred to the Glasgow–Naples–New York service in November 1887).
2. Battery and Castle Garden, New York City. Photograph by William Henry Jackson; published by Detroit Publishing Co., ca. 1890–1897.
3. Chicago street map, 1890s. University of Chicago Library.
4. State Street north of Madison, Chicago, 1890s. Historic photograph (Detroit Photographic Co.).
5. Angelo DeLio, ca. 1900. Author’s private collection.
6. Page from the 1905 marriage registry of Holy Guardian Angel Church.
7. Holy Guardian Angel Church, Arthington Street, Chicago. The Newberry Library.
8. Angelo and Mary DeLio’s DeKalb Street rowhouse, 2019. Author’s private collection.
9. DeKalb Street, Chicago, 2019. Author’s private collection.

Sources & further reading

• Chicago Italian community and migration background: Encyclopedia of Chicago (“Italians”).
• Broader Italian emigration statistics and southern Italian conditions: standard historical overviews of Italian Americans and Italian emigration (including figures commonly cited for the 1880–1920 peak to the United States and the longer 1861–mid-20th-century totals of roughly 26–29 million departures).
• Chicago in the 1890s (World’s Columbian Exposition, architecture, literature, and the H. H. Holmes case): Donald L. Miller, City of the Century (Simon & Schuster, 1996); Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City(Random House, 2003).
• Great Depression overview and World War II Selective Service details: commonly available historical summaries.

Family details, addresses, vital records, the mantel-clock anecdote, and personal reflections are drawn from census records, naturalization documents, church registers, draft cards, and family oral history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Never Looked Back: Carmela DeLio, née Perri (1845–1929)

Carmela DeLio about1905

Carmela Perri was born on August 28, 1845, in the small Calabrian village of Gesuiti, in what was then San Vincenzo La Costa. She entered a world that still belonged to the old order—an Italy of kingdoms, duchies, and Papal States, not yet a single nation. By the time she turned fifteen, the Risorgimento had begun to remake that world. In 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, the same year the United States tore itself apart in civil war. Carmela came of age while one country was being born and another was being broken.

On March 19, 1877, she married Raffaelo DeLio. They worked the land as farm laborers. In 1880 their son Angelo was born. Life in rural Calabria offered little enough for a growing family, and like so many others from the Mezzogiorno, Raffaelo eventually went ahead to America in search of work. Carmela stayed behind with their boy until the time came to follow.

In December 1887 she and eight-year-old Angelo boarded the steamship Bolivia in Naples. The winter crossing brought them into New York Harbor on January 4, 1888. They stepped ashore at Castle Garden, the immigrant station that preceded Ellis Island, and began the next leg of their journey. From New York the family made its way west to Chicago, settling among the growing Italian neighborhoods that would become known as Little Italy. Raffaelo found work as a trackman for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, laying the iron that was stitching the country together.

Carmela would give birth to four children in all. Two did not survive infancy. The eldest, a boy named Carmen or Carmine, died young. Another child—whose name and gender remain unknown—was also lost. Angelo, the boy who had crossed the ocean with her, lived. In 1891, in Chicago, she gave birth to a daughter, Emilia.

Carmela in the backyard on DeKalb St ca 1927 

She lived long enough to see the turn of the century, the Great War, and the restless years that followed. The world of her childhood—agrarian, pre-industrial, still half-medieval in its rhythms—gave way to streetcars, electric lights, automobiles, and radio. She had left a fragmented Italy and grown old in an America racing into modernity. On February 22, 1929, her long passage ended.So much of her daily life is lost to us now: the sound of her voice, the stories she told, the particular weight of the losses she carried. What remains are the outlines—a birth in a Calabrian village before Italy existed as a nation, a winter voyage on the Bolivia, a life built in Chicago’s Little Italy, and a death just months before the crash that would usher in the Great Depression. It is a life that stretches across nearly eighty-four years and two continents, from the final days of the old Italian order to the threshold of the modern American century. The approaching anniversary of her birth offers one small, concrete way to keep her place in the family’s longer story from fading.

A Father's Day Tribute aka Dad-isms...

A Father's Day Tribute...

There are so many sweet, classic dad moments that pop into my head every now and then. I don’t know what triggers them, but I thought it was time to write some of them down while they’re still fresh in my memory. 

For instance, I remember a time when my dad called me on the phone. He wasn’t used to answering machines, so when the machine picked up and the message was in my voice, he said, “This is Jeannie’s dad. Can you tell her to call me?”

I can just picture it—the slight confusion in his voice as he talked to the machine like it was a polite roommate or a secretary who might actually pass along the message. Answering machines were a whole era of technology that tripped up so many parents. I don’t think he ever really got the hang of it, but it’s the kind of small memory that makes me smile years later.

I also remember the time there was a really bad thunderstorm—the kind where the wind is howling and the power goes out. The whole city was under a tornado watch or warning (whichever is worse). Dad called me to check on whether my cat was okay. “She’s fine, dad. So am I,” I replied.

That’s peak dad energy right there—priorities straight to the cat in the middle of a tornado warning. Wind howling, power flickering or out, and him dialing me up specifically to make sure the furry one was handling it okay.

One of my favorite memories happened when I moved into my first apartment. I had furniture being delivered, but the store refused to do it on a Saturday. I couldn’t take the day off work, so I was stuck—until Dad stepped in.

He was working nights as a baker at the time, so he offered to come straight from his shift to my apartment and wait for the delivery. Not knowing how long he’d be there, I decided to bake him a batch of cookies the night before as a thank-you and a little something to keep him going.

When I got home from work that evening, the furniture was perfectly arranged exactly where I’d asked. On the counter sat a platter with my cookies—only one or two missing. I smiled and asked Dad what he thought of them.

“The biscuits were good,” he said.

I blinked. “What biscuits?”

He pointed to the platter.

In my defense, my “cookies” were nearly two inches thick and looked far more like biscuits than anything you’d find in a cookie jar. Dad, bless him, had eaten a couple anyway.

From that day forward, I happily retired from the baking side of the kitchen and left that particular skill to Mom and Dad.

I wish I would have saved some of these calls. It’s a tender kind of regret—the kind that sneaks up on you years later—those little quirks of his that made him so lovable. Even if the actual tape recording is gone, or in some cases, never existed, the moments I shared with him and the sound of his voice saying what I lovingly refer to as dad-isms is still crystal clear in my head. There are so many great memories that I could include in this tribute, and maybe one day I will. Some are funny, some poignant, and all of them pure—dad.