52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2025
January 5 -11, 2025
Week One 2025
To Aldo:
Here is the story of your heroism that needs to be retold and remembered. Thank you for leaving it my possession.
As I was considering the next topic for my blog post this week on 3 January 2025, I came upon an account of an accident my father-in-law had been involved in during the winter of 1940 when he was twenty-two years old. Aldo gave the written and typed account to me about twenty years ago for safekeeping. Having stashed it away with my other documents, I found it again this week while I was looking for documents and pictures that I want to scan into my computer using my new scanner that I received for Christmas from my daughter and her family.
The odd turn to this post is that I rediscovered this document on the same day that he passed away in 2011, January 3rd. To me, when I came upon this document, I felt that Aldo was prodding me to write about this incident in his life.
My father-in-law’s name was Aldo Joseph Morgantini, b. 15 April 1917, d. 3 January 2011. He was born in the small coal-mining town of West Wyoming in northeastern Pennsylvania to Artistotile Morgantini and Elvira Spinicci Morgantini, both immigrating to the United States in
1910 from the small medieval village of Montemerano, named one of the 27 Tuscan villages included in the official list of the “most beautiful in Italy” located in the province of Grosetto, Tuscany, Italy.
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In 1940 Aldo was a well-known, respected and esteemed sports star in his local community and as the grandson of Giuseppe, known as Joseph Morgantini, the name he went by after immigrating to the United States. The Morgantinis were the owners of the local grocery store and
meat market at the center of town in West Wyoming, Pennsylvania.
Without totally writing Aldo’s entire biography, I want to share this account: “A Tragic Accident,” written by M. Blair in 1985 that features him as a local hero.[1]
The following is a partially quoted account written about the incident that occurred in February 1940:
“It happened on Lincoln’s Birthday in 1940 that two very young people were scarred for the rest of their lives....
I stayed in the hospital for nine days; at which time I became friendly with three nurses' aides who took very good care of me and helped keep up my spirits. They told me they were elementary school teachers from West Wyoming, Pennsylvania and they had worked several summers in Richmond Memorial Hospital. The three of them were a far cry from their home as this was Staten Island. I especially became friendly with Toby, one of the aides, who gave me her address when I left the hospital and said she wanted me to visit her in Pennsylvania. I immediately knew I had made a good friend.
Jobs in 1938 were very scarce but finally in March of 1939 I started working in an insurance company on Nassau Street in downtown New York, which was close enough to the ferry to cost me very little in carfare, and I consequently could save some money. Eventually I had saved enough to be able to visit Toby on Labor Day weekend. The trip to West Wyoming was most enjoyable and I loved everyone in that little Italian community. In February 1940, she invited me to come again and this time to spend a week with her and her family.
Lincoln’s Birthday was a half-holiday for the schools in Pennsylvania and a group of us went sleigh-riding on a hill that was used to test cars in second gear. The snow was just right for the sleds. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was bright although it was very cold. The hill was about a mile long with two sharp turns: the last turn going over a cement bridge. Going down was great and very exciting, but it took us quite a while to walk back up the hill, therefore we did not get very many rides down as it started to get dusk about five (o’clock) in that mountain area. Aldo, who was on the sled with me, had on his basketball jacket. He was playing in a game that night.
Everyone else decided to quit when it became dark, but Aldo and I made up our minds to take one more trip down the hill, and Toby said they would pick us up at the bridge. We did not realize that because the temperature was falling, the snow was getting icy. Once we started down the hill, we knew it was a mistake. We picked up speed going over the ice and at times went so fast we were off the snow. Aldo tried to stop us with his galoshes and ripped the right one off his foot. We didn’t know whether to jump or not, so we just hung on. We passed the first turn okay, but we never made the second. We smashed into the bridge knocking me unconscious and ripping a gash about six inches long in Aldo’s side. All I can remember when I came to was seeing that gaping wound, with a piece of bone hanging out, just below his jacket.
The cars finally caught up with us and we got Aldo to the hospital. Needless to say, he did not play in the game that night and not for quite a while. No one, including myself, realized I had been hurt but to this day I have suffered headaches and a bad back as a result of that accident. In those days, no one paid much attention to an injury unless it showed.
I just knew this whole affair was my fault because it was I who wanted to take that last ride. When we saw Aldo in the hospital, I will never forget the look in his eyes, which I interpreted to mean that he was blaming me. I felt so helpless and horribly shaken. When we got back home, Toby’s father and mother were so upset that I was certain I had brought all this grief to everyone. For years I felt this guilt and even today I can see the look in Aldo’s eyes.
I hadn’t seen Toby for many years because I married and moved to Florida but last year when I visited my daughter in New York, I flew to Pennsylvania to see my dear friend and I also saw Aldo once again after 45 years. That look I remembered and perhaps imagined was not there but instead a smiling, delightful man reached out to hug me and give me a big kiss. His one leg is slightly shorter than the other as the result of the accident, but I’m sure now he never did hold me responsible. I would not have traded that visit for anything and at last I was free ---- free of that guilt.”
As it turned out, the injury Aldo sustained on that day in February of 1940 kept him from serving in a position of combat during WWII. Instead, his time in the military was spent in Texas in the Air Corps in the American Theatre where he was a butcher utilizing the skills that he learned from his father and grandfather in their family-owned grocery store and meat market in West Wyoming, Pennsylvania. And, as I found out just today (!), he was also a West Wyoming Patrolman.
As I fondly remember, Aldo certainly held true to the description that M. Blair conveyed in her short story about the accident. He always had a smile for everyone, helped many people, and formed many friendships in his hometown and elsewhere.
[1] Blair, M., A Tragic Accident, unpublished, typed and printed 1985, Florida, 3 pages, original, family collection of Aldo Morgantini.
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