In October 1893 a teenaged boy, Calogero Sciara, arrived in New York city from Sicily. He found a room in a ‘Little Italy’ slum tenement and employment with the Department of Sanitation shoveling horse manure off the streets at a wage of 10 cents per hour. Like most Sicilians at that time, he was illiterate, although the church had free night classes in English as life was going to be even more difficult if people couldn’t speak the local lingo.
Calogero also went to classes to learn tailoring, probably the smartest thing he did in his life, and was (one presumes) amazed at the opportunities available to him in America. In 1898 an ‘event’ occurred at work and he was promptly sacked. The next day he boarded a train to Indianapolis and never looked back.
He opened a tailoring shop and was soon making suits for professional and business men throughout the Midwest. Customers loved the high quality of his work and his rather amusing Italian demeanor. He prospered, investing his money in shares and real estate, married and had a family. The streets of America really were paved with gold for Calogero.
One day in 1926 he was approached by the Northwestern Mutual insurance company who wanted to buy an office building Calogero owned. A meeting was set up with the president of the insurance company to complete the transaction. When Calogero was handed the sale agreement, he handed it to his lawyer; it was rather embarrassingly established that he was illiterate. The insurance company president shook his head and said, ‘That’s too bad. Imagine what you could have been if you could read and write.’ To which Calogero replied, ‘Oh I know the answer to that: if I could read and write I’d be shoveling horse manure off the streets of New York for 10 cents per hour.’
A true story: Calogero Sciara was my great-grandfather. Despite visiting Sicily many times on holiday and having numerous distant relatives there, it would be a bit of a stretch (laughably so!) were anybody to suggest I was in some way Sicilian.
Last night I was watching David Lomas Investigates on TV3. It seems that in order to get a handout from NZ On Air, poor old Mr Lomas has to indulge the scam of pretending New Zealand is a Maori ethno-state.
A Samoan woman had a one night stand with a Maori chap whilst in Sydney and a man (now aged 29) was the result. Didn’t know who the father was. Lomas tracked him down. The maternal side of the family was entirely Samoan; a DNA chart showed the paternal side was entirely white except for the grand total of one person – the mother of the father.
So naturally the show descended rather quickly into being entirely about his (ahem) ‘Maori-ness’ (*cough, splutter), his Far-Now and his F**k-a-Papa: the usual twaddle so the show can be sold to overseas audiences with an Oh look here’s more proof everybody in New Zealand is a Maori. In this case with a large dollop of See! The chap spent 29 years immersed in Samoan family and culture but 30 seconds after finding his Maori father he started mainlining Maori culture – everyone in New Zealand is like this! Pathetic, it really is. He is about as Maori as the Brooklyn Bridge, but in order to make any TV show with NZ On Air money, this is the scam you have to perpetuate.
