Norma Del Santo Padovan

My Dad came from Italy when he was a young man in 1910. He was sent here for health reasons; he had tuberculosis. The doctor gave him three months to live. My Dad was a carpenter. We went into the chicken business since my Dad still had tuberculosis. He got on with PD (Phelps Dodge) to build that concentrator. I guess they didn't have physicals in those days 'cause he couldn't have gotten hired. He met my mother, they were from the same town in Italy - and he came over first and she did and eventually they started going together and they married.

My mother was the oldest in a family of eight. She happily went to work in a factory when she was twelve. She helped the family, she couldn't speak English at that time, and she cleaned a bar and washed.

I was born in Bakerville. We moved to Don Luis when I was four.

My mother had a hard life. It was rough to come to Bisbee from a place like Chicago where no one spoke Italian. You can imagine how Bisbee looked in 1910. It looked like a dump after all the trees and green in Chicago. Living in Don Luis was remote for that time.

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