My last living grandparent is my grandmother on my mother's side. She was born here in Spokane in July 1935 to my great-grandparents, Lorenzo Scalero and Ellen Menetti. I'm sure those names sound Italian, and of course they are. My grandmother grew up around a lot of Italians and has talked a lot about what it was like. She was born Patricia Scalero, but changed her last name to Paggett when she married my grandfather, Frank. I was named after him, as my middle name is Franklin, so it was just a coincidence that I was named after one of the presidents. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Before writing about my grandmother's life, it would be appropriate to explain what she told me about her parents Lorenzo and Ellen. Unfortunately, my Grandma Pat never learned much about her ancestors beyond her parents. As she told me, she didn't "pay much attention to this kind of thing," like many other young people. Lorenzo was born in 1897 somewhere in Italy and moved here when he was young: the exact dates of many of these facts are unknown. My great-grandmother Ellen was born to Italian parents here in Spokane. Both Ellen and Lorenzo spoke Italian fluently and English poorly. Lorenzo went with several other family members, from what Pat told me, to Ellis Island in New York. Some of them stayed in New York, others went to Montreal, but Lorenzo went to Spokane and no one knows why. My grandmother mentioned several times how amazing it was that he had managed to get to Spokane without being able to read or write Italian or even speaking English. But somehow he managed to get a job as a bus maintenance worker and buy a nice house for my grandmother and her two brothers. Ellen could speak English, and Lorenzo could in his later years, but my grandmother remembers how he always struggled to understand him. The fact is that my grandmother never learned to speak Italian. Even though she grew up in an entirely Italian neighborhood, she never realized it. Whenever her parents tried to speak to her in Italian she told them to speak to her in English. And this was the case for most of the other first-born Italian American children in the neighborhood: few learned English. But most adults in the neighborhood spoke only Italian. My grandmother remembered her mother Ellen, who had an eighth-grade education and helped many neighbors obtain citizenship. I assume they had to pass a citizenship test. Nearly every family in the neighborhood had at least one person who was not born in America. Although she didn't live with my grandmother, my great-great-grandmother lived in the neighborhood. This was a bit rare, my great-great grandmother didn't live with them. Most families had three generations living together. Patricia remembered her Compagno cousins ​​living with them as a very old woman who shouted quickly in Italian telling the kids to calm down; his friends, the Miacollos, also had four generations living together. But somehow all these immigrants could afford to live there. Most of the men in the neighborhood worked for the railroad, while their wives stayed home to take care of the children. Some houses didn't have electricity, or at least didn't have an electric heater. My grandmother didn't have an electric heater throughout her childhood, but she did get a telephone when she was about ten. Only one house in the neighborhood had a television. My great-grandmother Ellen told the children not to look through the Ferinos' porch window while they were watching it. In terms of American culture, when my grandmother was a child, none of that really affected her. She was born after the depression; however, he felt some of the effectsof the Second World War. She remembers women painting their legs because of nylon shortages, her family buying war bonds and rationing certain foods. I asked her about significant events of the time out of my general curiosity, but she didn't have much to say about them. From what I understand, my grandmother spent much of her youth having fun; she would only have access to newspapers and as a child she wasn't interested. Every Sunday he went downtown with the other children and watched a film. He didn't pay much attention to politics, but he remembers that adults in his childhood greatly appreciated FDR for his social programs. I believe that many of the older Italians in the neighborhood received social security, even though the families were primarily supported by the working father. Most families were too poor to afford a car, so almost everyone took the bus. It was common for a bus to be full, so you had to wait at the stop until another bus arrived. My grandmother often says that "it was better in those days". It was common for elementary school children to ride the bus downtown together, which my grandmother did every Sunday. Now that she is older, she criticizes the world for not being safe; it's hard to say whether this is true or not. However, in his childhood, and in my mother's, there was a strong sense of community that I don't think exists as much as it once did. They all supported their families and worked hard, even though most were immigrants. And they were all Catholic, so they “went to church every Sunday.” When my mother was little, my grandmother knew everyone in the neighborhood, as it was the early 1960s and almost every house had a stay-at-home mother with children. During their childhood, the neighborhood children were always outside playing with each other when they weren't at school. Going back to before my grandmother had kids, she worked as an usher while she was in high school. She went downtown to the cinema and was hired that day. He didn't give them a resume; all he did was ask for the job and give a short interview before they gave it to him. In high school, she told me she majored in typing and shorthand. I guess high schools had to have specializations in those days. He's still a stenographer and had to translate some notes he had for this interview for me. After she finished high school, a friend advised her to get a job as a stenographer at what I think was a telephone company, but my grandmother couldn't remember the name. As a stenographer, my grandmother typed all day and took shorthand notes. He told me he made $3.30 an hour when he stopped working there to raise my mother in 1961. While my grandmother worked as a stenographer, a woman in the office was talking on the phone and yelling “wop!” Immediately covering her mouth when she realized my grandmother was next to her. I thought it was funny, since I've never heard anyone use the word wop in my life; even my grandmother thought it was a funny event looking back. It's strange to me that there has ever been racist slang for Italians, if I dare call it racist. There was another time when she was in high school and she told her boyfriend that her parents' last names were Menetti and Scalero, and he said, “Menetti and Scalero? What a load of nonsense!” It wasn't meant to be offensive, but I repeat that it is strange that casual racism against Italians existed back then. Another event that happened while my grandmother was working as a stenographer was when she met my grandfather Frank Paggett after being introduced to him by one of her friends. Frank was twenty-two years old and had just graduated from DeVry in Chicago after returning from Korea a few years earlier. He joined the Air Force after that.