Listen to the everyday banter amongst members of the Italian Workmen’s Club.
Transcript of Audio
Zehra: Residents of the old Greenbush neighborhood have found a way to keep childhood memories alive.
Zehra: Every Monday and Friday morning, members of the Italian Workmen’s Club gather at the Park Street Shoe Repair Shop. Once a bustling business owned by George Fabian, the shop now serves as a social center for members of the old Greenbush community.
Zehra: I sat down with George Fabian, John Caliva, Nick Baldarotto, Mike Schiro, and others on a warm March morning to learn more about life in the old ‘Bush. Everyone had something to say.
Group: “You had to be there. It’s like inside humor. Everybody got along. And you knew everybody. You knew everybody”
Zehra: Nick Baldarotto describes the neighborhood house, one of the many destinations the young Italian boys frequented.
Nick Baldarotto: “We’d go to the neighborhood house and we played basketball there and they had like other woodworking places, learn how to use tools and stuff like that”
Zehra: Their childhood was quite typical, as John Caliva describes.
John Caliva: “The day of a typical Italian kid? You got up. made your bed, had your morning breakfast. It could be Italian wheaties which is stale bread and milk or coffee”
Zehra: Others chimed in to recount their day-to-day activities
Caliva & Group: “We used to go down Lizzie waters. That Hill. And then ski jump the ski ski jump over there. Yeah ski jumping and you’d land and you’d go out on Lake Mendota”
Zehra: Despite the decades that had passed, the friendships between these men have persisted. John Caliva describes this comradery.
John Caliva: If he had a nickel, he shared that we get two and a half cents. That’s how we were.
Zehra: As my time at the shoe shop came to a close, Fabian and the others added a final thought.
Group: “Yeah, you know in spite of it we had a good childhood. Yeah. Yes we did. No. I wouldn’t trade my childhood. I’d go back in a minute. No questions asked”
Zehra: A heartwarming sentiment. This is Zehra Topbas. The University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Italians in Madison 