Half the population of Schreiber, Ont., has roots in the hills of Calabria
By Charles Wilkins
THE AFTERNOON SKY is a dense mass of gunmetal clouds, and an unfriendly breeze sweeps up from Lake Superior, swirling through the streets of Schreiber, Ont. It is late July, and in contrast to the weather outside, the wedding at Holy Angels Church glows all the brighter. It is a radiant affair, a showpiece: three flower girls (one of whom distributes a flower to every female guest), two ring bearers, six bridesmaids, six ushers. The altar is laden with gladiolas and mums, and a clump of baby's breath marks every pew.
As the glittering procession inches up the aisle, as the video cameras whir (there are four of them in operation), a soprano voice soars from the balcony behind:
We're on our way to say "I do."
Our secret dreams have all
come true.
Finally comes the bride, the hometown beauty, solemn and luminous, festooned for the day in silk and jewellery. Raise high the roofbeams; seldom has a wedding shone with more lustre.
As the new Mr. and Mrs. Gisella and Giullio Lalli emerge from the church, the crowd of guests spills out onto the lawn. They weep and kiss and hug. Without exception, they are dark-eyed and dark- complexioned. A few of the elder guests might have stepped directly from the hills of their ancestral homeland in the Calabria region of Italy.
Eventually, the celebrants pile into decorated cars and parade through town, honking and hamming. To get added mileage out of the revels (there are only 10 kilometres of road in Schreiber) they are obliged to make two or three passes along the main street. "Here they come again!" squeals a delighted youngster.
At the reception that night, there are perhaps 350 in attendance, many more than at the ceremony. The dinner is a textbook of Italian cuisine: antipasto, prosciutto, manicotti, penne, scampi, veal parmigiana, and, of course, barrels of red and white vino, most of the bottles carefully stripped of their labels and reincarnated as vintage "Gisella & Giullio."
With dinner done, the party begins in earnest: jiving, waltzing, Italian folk dancing, and, at the high point of the evening, the Italian Tarantella dance, a frenetic outpouring of emotion and energy which threatens, literally, to tear limb from torso. As the party ebbs and flows, family members are rounded up in groups and shunted off for photo sessions. "Say formaggio!" cries the photographer, and the gang hollers out the word.
More wine, more food, more dancing. The whole dazzling, tearful celebration suggests that there is a vital pocket of Italian culture incongruously thriving amid the boreal forest of Northern Ontario.
On the face of things, there is nothing exceptional about this town of 2,000 on the north shore of Lake Superior. Schreiber's economy runs on railroading, mining, forest products, and on serving the endless stream of truckers and tourists who motor through on the Trans-Canada Highway. The town supports four churches, several stores and restaurants, two schools, a handful of motels and garages, a train station and, that fixture of small-town life in Canada, a hockey arena.
A glance at the phone book reveals a dearth of Joneses and Wilsons and a remarkable abundance of tongue-tripping Italian surnames: 13 Figliomenis, 13 Commissos, 12 Speziales, 13 Costas, and a host of Caccamos, Cebrarios, Pellegrinos, Spadonis and so on down to the Valentinos, Venezianos and Verdones.
The town might better have been named for an Italian patriarch or poet than for the 19th-century English engineer and CPR builder, Sir Collingwood Schreiber: half of its population is of Italian descent. Moreover, almost all the town's Italian inhabitants are related. "It didn't start out that way," laughs Schreiber resident Cosimo Filane. "But over the years, somebody from one family would marry somebody from another, and so on, to the point where almost everyone was connected to almost everyone else -- at least by marriage." So extensive are the family connections - and the resulting duplication of names -- that many of the men in Schreiber's Italian community are more commonly identified by the names of their businesses than by their birth names. Cousins Peter and Peter Speziale are known best as Western Pete and Spadoni Pete (for their respective management of the local Western Tire store and of Spadoni's Department Store). Jimmy Speziale owns the Shell station -- hence Jimmy Shell. Garage owners Joe Figliomeni and Cosimo Figliomeni are better known as Texaco Joe and Texaco Coe.
Some of the town's Italians work on the railroad or in the Kimberly-Clark of Canada Ltd. pulp mill at nearby Terrace Bay, but the largest portion by far works in local commerce. Italian names predominate in Schreiber's business community: Costa's Supermarket, Cebrario's Hardware & Lumber, the Spadoni Bros. General Motors dealership, Figliomeni's Trailer Park, the Cosiana Inn, the Villa Bianca Inn & Restaurant, Filane's Fallen Rock Motel, Speziale's Sunset Motel.
Sisters Rosa Diano and Giuseppina (Josie) Commisso operate Rosie and Josie's Restaurant, where twice a week the siblings cook up 270-litre lots of tomato sauce and prepare 100-kilogram batches of fresh pasta for the delectation of travellers and truckers. "When I'm heading east," says Vancouver transport driver Martin Crew, who drives a regular trans-Canada route, "I'm often pretty hungry when I get to Thunder Bay, but I'll generally hang on for the extra 200 kilometres to get here and load up on gnocchi or spaghetti."
On one wall at Rosie and Josie's there is a framed colour photo of a pair of ice-laden Via Rail diesels sitting nose to nose in the station at Schreiber on a day cold enough to paralyse man and machine. "Frozen up, Feb. 8, 1989," reads a small metal plate attached to the frame. On an adjacent wall hangs an aerial photo of the picturesque city of Siderno Marina, spread out between the arid mountains and the wide brown beaches of the Ionian Sea in southern Italy. The only visible link between the photos is that, in each, a range of ancient mountains nestles up to the edges of civilization. But there is a deeper connection that informs and nourishes the genealogy of nearly half the families in Schreiber: 90 percent of the town's Italian population have their roots in the tidy red-roofed city depicted in the photo.
"It's a phenomenon!" exclaims one Schreiber resident. "It's as if a few hardy seeds from Siderno had been brought here, planted, and had flourished in this little northern garden. You'd think no one from a sweltering southern climate could even survive here, let alone prosper."
The first of Siderno's male expatriates arrived in the Schreiber area, without their families, during the late 1800s. They had been lured by the promise of jobs in the forests or in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In contrast to Siderno, where most men and women worked the hillside gardens and orchards for wealthy padrones, Canada offered not just a chance to make a living wage, but the rarer possibility of land ownership.
"My grandfather came over and worked on the railway, while my grandmother raised the family back home," says Peter Speziale, his English inflected by a melodious Italian lilt. "Grandpa made a bit of a stake, and when my daddy was old enough, he came to Schreiber because his father was here," Peter himself arrived as a teenager in 1939 to join his father and a growing aggregation of Figliomenis, Costas, Commissos and Spadonis, all of whom had long since accepted cultural uprooting and fierce northern winters as the price of opportunity. Even those who did not prosper immediately were no worse off than they had been in Calabria, one of the poorest and least fertile regions of Italy.
While Italian settlement in the Schreiber area proceeded smoothly through the early decades of the century, the late 1930s and early 1940s were not banner years for Italian immigrants. Because Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini supported Adolf Hitler, Italians in Canada were suspected of being potential collaborators with the fascists, or potential saboteurs of the Canadian war effort. Some immigrants were rounded up and placed in internment camps, while others, such as Peter Speziale, were obliged to report regularly to the authorities on their whereabouts and activities. Speziale believes that most of the Italians in the Schreiber area -- and, indeed, throughout the country -- had little interest in the fascists and that those who had were almost certainly as contemptuous of them as were most Canadians. "Of course, as the war passed," he says, "things gradually returned to normal, and everything was forgotten and forgiven."
Originally Ojibway territory, the Schreiber area was first settled by Europeans in 1870, when Col. James Isbester and his troops came ashore at present-day Schreiber Beach on their way to put down the Riel Rebellion in Western Canada. The colonel dubbed the spot Isbester's Landing, a name that lasted until the early 1880s, when railway construction became the major local industry and the settlement was renamed Schreiber, in honour of the CPR's chief engineer at the time.
With the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1886, the community became an important CPR divisional point, with engine repair shops, car barns and maintenance equipment. At about the same time, gold and zinc mining began in the area, fluctuating vastly in profitability through much of the 20th century. Today, the local mining industry is represented by just one company, Minnova inc., which extracts zinc, lead and copper ore from a site some 15 kilometres northwest of town. Railway activity has significantly diminished in Schreiber over the past few years, but the railway is still the town's major employer, followed by the Kimberly-Clark plant at Terrace Bay and the Minnova mine.
For most of the town's Italians, life has been prosperous in recent years, thanks largely to the community's assiduous work habits. "If Italians had been afraid of hard work, they'd never have survived in this country in the first place," says Carlo Falcioni, a recent visitor to Schreiber from Sudbury. "When the immigrants came to Montreal at the turn of the century, there would be railway agents with interpreters at the train station to recruit them for jobs, because they knew that you couldn't go wrong with an Italian."
The scions of those early immigrants are still known to put in exhaustingly long work days in their various businesses along the main streets of Schreiber. Josie Commisso often begins work at Rosie and Josie's as early as 6 a.m. and does not finish until well after nightfall. Peter Speziale works long hours at Spadoni's Department Store and operates the family motel with his wife, Tina, and son, Dennis, who holds a full-time job with the railway.
One of the town's best known citizens, Cosimo Filane, owns two motels, a variety store and a gas station -- a small empire which would be impossible to maintain without extensive help from his wife, Diana, and family. Over the years, Filane has also found time to develop a singing career and to cut four record albums, as well as coaching local hockey and writing a novel about the community of "Fallen Rock," a fictional town with an uncanny resemblance to Schreiber. The talented entrepreneur (whose name combines the first two letters of his baptismal name Figliomeni with the surname of Frankie Lane, one of his early singing idols) has had the pleasure of seeing his own ambition reborn in his children, two of whom have found fame in one of the most physically punishing of all sports, boxing. Son Dominic, a member of Canada's national boxing team and a student at Seneca College in Toronto, is the Canadian amateur light flyweight champion (to 48 kg). Son Gerry, who graduated recently from Seneca College, is the Ontario amateur lightweight champion (56-60 kg). During visits home, the brothers train three hours a day in a make-shift gym above the family's variety store, as traffic speeds by just metres away on the Trans-Canada Highway. While Dominic prepares for the Pan-American Games in Cuba and, ultimately, for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, Gerry is tuning up for a run at the Canadian amateur lightweight championship. "My coach tells me we have great bloodlines for the sport," smiles the amiable 21-year-old Dominic, "an Irish mother, an Italian father."
Like the rest of Schreiber's Italians, the Filanes, Speziales and Commissos have happily integrated themselves into the mainstream of Canadian life. But they have done so without relinquishing the distinctive traditions and touchstones that tie them to the old country and sustain their cultural identity. Many of those traditions centre around the family dining table. "At our house, we eat spaghetti every Thursday and every Sunday," says Cosimo Filane. "Almost everybody in Schreiber does. That's the way our parents did it and their parents, too."
Schreiber gardens tend to feature Italian staples such as tomatoes, beans and herbs, and dozens of the town's Italian families make an annual event of winemaking or of the preparation of Italian sausage. "When my husband Rollie was building our house," says town librarian Teresa Stortini, "the wine cellar was the first room he finished." Every autumn, the Stortinis (one of few Schreiber families with roots in central and northern Italy) get together with friends to crush 60 to 70 cases of grapes, which yield as much as 700 litres of wine. "We put our share in big open vats in the basement to ferment, then open the windows to let the fumes out," says Teresa. "With everybody in town making their wine at about the same time, you can get quite a fragrance out in the streets."
Once a year, on a Saturday in early November, a group of the most committed winemakers in town gets together and goes house-to-house tasting one another's product. On the same night, at an anonymous tasting, they choose the best wine of the year and celebrate the vintage with a feast that has taken as long as two days to prepare.
Of all the community's traditions, it is perhaps the local weddings, with their lavish trappings and almost codified rites and rituals, that best represent ancestral links with the old country. "In rare cases you'll still even get an arranged marriage in Schreiber," says Teresa Stortini. "Beyond that, there's certainly still a fair bit of parental pressure as to who a kid should marry. It's one way of keeping the Italian community strong." Suddenly, Teresa is laughing: "I can't say I'd want to try to tell my own kids who they should or shouldn't marry."
Like weddings back home, those in Schreiber can bring together as many as 500 guests, most of them related. They come from across the continent and, of course, from Italy. If the numbers necessitate it, wedding receptions are held not in the local recreation hall but on the floor of the Schreiber arena. The community's commitment to those sybaritic rites is sufficiently strong that parents cheerfully accept the spending of thousands of dollars -- in some cases $20,000 or more -- to stage such events. "In this town, it's a tradition you just don't violate," says Cosimo Filane. Although Cosimo and Diana were married in Thunder Bay, they spent their honeymoon in Siderno, in homage to Cosimo's roots.
Considering the depth of local traditions, and the relative size of Schreiber's Italian community, it is surprising that there is no emphasis in the local schools on Italian culture or on the history of Italian settlement in Canada. Nor does the curriculum offer any courses in the language. "The Italians aren't at all pushy about their way of life," says one local teacher who requested anonymity. "Probably if they demanded some input into the curriculum, they'd get it -- particularly in the separate school, which is crowded with their kids. Then again, there might be resistance from the non-Italian parents."
As it is, Italian is widely spoken in Schreiber homes, although seldom in public. According to Teresa Stortini people feel that "because they're here in Canada, they'll speak the prevailing language."
"The unfortunate thing," says Cosimo Filane, "is that the younger generation doesn't bother with the language at all. I sing a couple of Italian numbers, but I don't speak it much since my father died." Filane believes, nevertheless, that as long as there are Italians in Schreiber, aspects of the culture will survive. "You lose a little in every generation, but in a small town, it's easier to keep it going than it is in a city. You don't have so many influences and distractions to draw people away from it."
Dominic Filane endorses his father's views, while allowing that, for most of the community's young people, the future lies not in Schreiber but elsewhere. "I'm not saying that I wouldn't come back here to live some day. I might. When you're raised here, you've got the forest and lake in your blood, just as you've got the Italian traditions. It's not an easy place to walk away from."
Dominic admits that when he is away from town for a while, he finds himself longing to get back to friends, family and familiar surroundings. "Then when I'm in Schreiber for a while, I'll be telling myself, 'I've gotta go. I've gotta go.' There just aren't the opportunities here."
A hundred years ago, Dominic's forefathers left Siderno for exactly the same reason: opportunity. They came to Schreiber, made a home of the place, and re-established the traditions they had left behind.
"If we've done a good job as parents," says a rather wistful Peter Speziale, "our own young people will do the same thing when they go."
In the meantime, enough Italian young people are staying put that Schreiber is in no immediate danger of losing its present complexion.
"It's home," says Dominic Filane. "As far as most of us are concerned, it'll always be home."
Charles Wilkins is a frequent contributor to this magazine. He lives in Dundas, Ont.
One immigrant's tale
AT AGE 68, Peter Speziale is a kind of patriarch among the thousand or so Italian Canadians who live in Schreiber, Ont. He is soft-spoken, honest and well respected as the manager of Spadoni's Department Store and as owner of the Sunset Motel.
He was 17 when, in August 1939, he left home in Siderno, Italy, and sailed to America. From New York, he took the train to Montreal, then on to Schreiber to meet his father who, years earlier, had immigrated to the town to work for the CPR.
"I was barely unpacked," he recalls, "when Germany invaded Poland and war broke out in Europe. Italy and Germany were allies, and because I was Italian, the RCMP thought I might be a threat to security here. So they took me to the police station and registered and fingerprinted me."
Had it not been for his father's peaceable reputation in the town and the willingness of the local postmistress to take Peter under her wing, he believes he would have been jailed, as were thousands of Italian immigrants. As a minimal measure, police prohibited him from leaving Schreiber without their permission and ordered him to register weekly at the post office.
He landed a temporary job unloading bricks for Gino Spadoni, a local merchant. Within days, he landed a bettor job as water boy for a CPR crew that was replacing rails.
"We reached White River on a Friday," he says, "and I met I an old Italian gentleman -- I only knew a few words of English so there weren't many people I could talk to. He asked me if I was going out for the evening, and when I said 'yes', he asked if I'd get him some cigars at Spadoni's store in White River -- the same family owned stores in Schreiber and White River.
"As I was buying the cigars, Mrs. Spadoni (a sister in-law of Gino in Schreiber) started asking questions: Where was I from? What was I doing here? When I told her, she said, 'You're not old enough for crew work! You go back to Schreiber and tell Gino I said to give you a full- time job in the store, right now!"'
Gino obliged, and Peter's second stint as an employee at Spadoni's lasted three weeks, until a well- paying job became available in the CPR shop. "My daddy said I should take it, so I did."
A week later, the shop foreman informed Peter's father that he was going to have to fire the boy because a number of workers had gone to the local superintendent complaining that an Italian had been hired when their own boys needed jobs. "I was given a couple of days work outdoors cleaning up after a snowstorm," says Peter, "but I couldn't take the cold. Thirty below. It was awful."
For the third time, he went to Gino Spadoni, seeking work. "Gino said, 'What's the matter with your face?' It was all red. I said, 'It's the cold,' and he said, 'Aren't you in the shop?' When I told him I'd been fired, he said, 'I'm going to give you your job back, Peter.' I was so grateful, I said, 'If you hire me now, Mr. Spadoni, I'll never quit for as long as I live.'"
Sixteen years later, in 1955, Peter travelled to Italy on vacation and met his future wife, Tina, in Naples. She moved to Canada in 1957, and the two were married in 1959. They have raised a son, who lives in Schreiber and works on the railroad, and three daughters, one of whom owns the movie theatre in nearby Terrace Bay.
Gino Spadoni is long dead. But Peter has never forgotten the promise he made to his benefactor in 1939. Last year, he celebrated his 51st anniversary as an employee of the department store.
