Passage From Italy

Giovanni Sardella knew poverty, and he knew hard work from an early age. In his native Pontremoli, Italy, he attended school for just six months before being sent into the fields to work. His future wife, Maria Musseti, never attended school, but worked tending sheep from the age of 5 or 6, and later hauling marble from Carrara region quarries. After marrying in 1903, she worked in the fields alongside her husband.
“My mother told me that the women would take their children out in the fields,” Leona says. “One day a pig chewed a baby’s foot off, and my mother just refused to work in the fields anymore – she became a cook instead. From that day on, she wanted to come to America, because she wanted a better life for her children.”
Joe Sardella, Giovanni’s brother, came to the U.S. first, in 1908. Tuolumne County looked much like their native northern Italy, and the new immigrant found work breaking rock at the lime plant.
Giovanni followed in 1910, leaving his pregnant wife and young children – Dena, Rosemary and Ernest, whom everyone called Curly – behind. Later, Giovanni’s half-brother, Carlo, brought his family to Sonora.
Giovanni Sardella was 31 when he arrived at Ellis Island aboard the 1,362-passenger ship, La Provence, six years before the ship was sunk by a German U-boat. With $20 to his name, Sardella – whom his family called Papa– made his way to California, working first at a Livermore brick factory, then joining his brother in Sonora.
His family followed two years later, traveling in the cramped quarters of steerage aboard The Rochambeau, a 2,128-passenger steamship. Maria was 29 when they arrived in New York on an autumn day in 1912, and the four children were hungry and tired.
“She found a bakery, but didn’t know the denominations, so she just pointed to this loaf of bread with her $20 bill,” Leona says. “They gave her back change, and she thought she was a millionaire … However, there was an Italian man nearby who told her all the denominations, and from that moment on, she knew the currency of American money – she had no education, but she was very, very bright.”
When they met at a Stockton train station, Papa had his first look at son Miller, who was born soon after he had left Italy.
Giovanni was now working at the lime quarry with his brother. The family for several years lived on the Henry Sanguinetti Ranch (across the street from today’s Perko’s) until buying land just east of the lime plant. The future seemed bright with promise in this place that looked so much like the one they left behind.

A Growing Family

Over the next decade, five more children arrived: Reno, born in 1913 on the Sanguinetti Ranch; Albert (Red) in 1916; Mary in 1919; John in 1922; and Leona in 1926.
When their first home on the property burned, they moved into a larger house they were building for boarders. It accommodated the family and ranch workers throughout the 1930s and into the ’40s, and had the advantage of electric lights made possible by the lime plant’s proximity. Boarders paid $1 a day.
Maria Sardella, who couldn’t write and spoke limited English, used crayons and a simple color code to track accounts to the penny, Mary recalls. John says their mother could eyeball a cow on the hoof and gauge its weight within a pound or two even before the buyer confirmed it at the scales downtown.
He remembers other facets of the busy ranch life. “The basement was as big as the house, so big that you could drive a truck into it,” John recalls. “We used it as a wine cellar, and had a fruit pantry, and used to prepare all the salami there.”
Raising cattle, hogs, horses and chickens meant lots of work. And then there was the cooking, canning and cleaning, all fueled by wood heat, itself fueled by endless woodcutting. On the hillside above the house ran the vineyards where tons of grapes were carefully tended, then harvested by hand: zinfandel and California mission grapes for flavor, Alicantes for color.
“We’d pick the grapes, pack them down in 50-pound boxes, then stack them on the front porch. We had a trap door with a chute down into the basement, where we had two vats – we made a lot of wine,” he laughs.
After the crushed grapes fermented in redwood vats for a few weeks, that “first wine” was moved into oak barrels to age. These were originally whiskey barrels, charcoaled inside, until the Sardella boys were put to work with lye and a logging chain to remove every trace. “My dad would come by with a mirror and flashlight, and boy, that wood had to be sparkling clean,” John recalls. “If your barrel is bad, your wine goes bad. My dad took pride in his wine – he’d brag about it – but it sure was a lot of work.”
Wine was part of every meal, and part of the workday, as well. The ranch workers, some of whom boarded at Josephine Bisordi’s Italia Hotel (now the Gunn House) on Washington Street, carried not water but jugs of “second wine.” This was created from a second pressing of “the pummies,” residual waste from the first pressing, including leaves and stems.

Bartered Beef

Nothing went to waste, whether it was wine or the trimmings from a 600-pound hog butchered for a winter’s worth of salt pork, salami and sausage.
“We’d kill an 800-pound baby beef, it was too much for us to eat and with no refrigeration, no deep freeze, we’d barter it out, and Bisordi’s or Palace Meat Market downtown would take part of it,” John recalls. “We did a lot of that during the Depression.”
The livestock, and the family’s hard work, kept the worst economic hardship at bay during the Depression. “We didn’t have the beautiful clothes that some people did,” Leona recalls, “but we had plenty of warmth and food and everything else.”
A quarter-mile down the road, Dust Bowl immigrants were encamped along Sullivan Creek – a stone’s throw away from Moss’s swimming hole, the Sardella children’s favorite summer retreat. The family fed many of them, recall the siblings, who walked to school with children who spent nights sheltered only by cardboard and thin planks. Leona remembers the time charity workers arrived at the Sardella home with a Christmas basket.
“My mother said, Oh we don’t need any help, but take it down to the creek, there are people there who need it. Now, Johnny and I were looking at the candy – we were never allowed candy – but my mother wanted nothing to do with it.”

Household Chores

While the older boys worked at the lime plant and in the high country, the younger Sardellas helped at home. Mary recalls happy times with her mother: baking bread, making cheese, canning, curing meat, preparing meals in a house buzzing with people and activity, company and cousins.
She attended Sonora Elementary School’s dome campus. In the first grade, too young to walk home alone, she spent weeknights with her sister, Dena, at the Curtin Mansion, a palatial home on Columbia Way owned by Senator and Mrs. John Barry Curtin.
Dena became a companion to Mrs. Curtin after the senator’s death in 1925. “But I couldn’t wait to get home on Friday nights,” Mary says. “I liked all the excitement at the ranch, learning to cook, my mother’s stories – it was just a good feeling being there.”
Leona also loved the ranch life, in which her mother cared for the family, ranch and boarders, and her father worked at the lime plant, breaking rock and later, tending the kilns. On his days off, he tended the ranch and property. Leona remembers carrying his dinner to the plant. “I can remember the flames,” she recalls, “and him being so sweaty and tired.”
She also remembers trips downtown, a dime from her mother tucked in her pocket, and running into Joe Martin’s Palace Meat Market. “He would give me three hot dogs for a nickel. Then I’d run across the street to the Sonora Inn where there was a grocery store and get three bananas for a nickel, which I’d take to school to try to make friends.”
There was prejudice, the Sardellas knew, taunts and ethnic slurs that the children found hard to ignore. “But my folks loved people so much,” recalls Mary, whose parents were devout Catholics and a fixture at St. Patrick’s. “They just said, Don’t worry about it, God will take care of them.”
Like some of their friends, the Sardellas supplied vegetables to Mallard’s Grocery and Mundorf’s Mercantile in exchange for staples like flour and sugar, even nails and fencing. “Mrs. Mundorf would write down all the trades and at the end of the year they’d settle up,” John says. “She’d say, Mrs. Sardella, I don’t know how you do it, but we always end up owing you money.”

The Blue Truck

In the heart of the Depression, young John Sardella had his eye on a ton-and-a-half 1934 Chevrolet truck, a gorgeous blue rig calling to him from the window of Central Garage in Sonora, which spanned the site of today’s Coffil Park.
“The Lepape family owned the garage, and nobody was buying anything,” recalls John. “I kept pressuring my folks to buy that truck. Finally my dad told them he’d like to buy it but couldn’t pay till fall when the crop came in and we sold the cattle. They knew our family, knew our credit was good, so they said fine, take the truck.”
It was the first mechanized vehicle on the ranch. Until then, livestock, wood, hay or other supplies had to be brought in by sled or horse and wagon. “The day we got that truck was a big day,” John recalls.
The Sardellas bought adjoining land at the height of the Depression, ranching on the several-hundred-acre tract until the 1950s, when they sold to U.S. Lime.

Young Love

By 1937 when she was a junior at Sonora High School, Mary was in love with “the handsomest man in the world” – Red’s pal Ben Cassinetto. Even after Red graduated and left town, Ben kept visiting.
“His parents had died, and by that time he realized he liked me and decided he would wait for me,” says Mary, who ran the Sonora Motor Hotel on Stockton Road for many years. “He was the only one for me, and I guess he felt the same way.”
Ben Cassinetto built the hotel in 1937, and the couple married in 1938. The hotel still stands today, although remodeled in the decades since, as Sonora Gold Lodge.
Dena followed her husband, a Navy man, to the East Coast but later returned and served as county librarian for a number of years. Rose moved to San Francisco, worked in the shipyards during World War II, and married a wealthy businessman. Albert married a San Francisco girl and later returned to the county, working for a road paving company for years.
Curly worked for Hetch Hetchy and at the lime plant for years; in later life, he manned a bench outside the Safeway store with his little dog, chatting with passersby. Miller became a sheriff’s deputy and eventually, county sheriff (see separate story). Reno ran high-country pack stations, owned Kennedy Meadows Resort and Douglas Flat Lodge at one time, supplied livestock to movie companies filming here, and ranched cattle from his land in Stent.

War Years

When Leona graduated from Sonora High in 1944, the big fun in town was going to the movies. “You could not find a parking place in downtown Sonora on Saturday and Sunday nights,” she recalls.
The town had its share of less-innocent pursuits as well, including brothels and gambling rings well-known to law enforcement. But those were outside Leona’s world at the Sonora Theater (near the site of today’s Bank of America), where for six years she worked as an usherette. The theater was next to Brandi’s Soda Fountain, where a hamburger cost 25 cents.
“I earned 25 cents an hour, working from noon to midnight,” recalls Leona. “But I wanted out, wanted a better job, better life. I went to work at Cold Springs in 1945 and got $200 a month room and board, serving breakfast to PG&E workers, then cleaning rooms and serving dinner.”
She worked for six years as a buyer for Sanford’s Dress Shop in Sonora, and then worked at Save Mart for 23 years. (Not only did she love her job, but she fell in love with the manager, John Kisling, to whom she has been married for 28 years.)
During World War II, with Italy’s entry into the war, the Sardella family’s guns were seized briefly (“My father had a gun behind every door,” Leona recalls). Yet in short order, John Sardella would be fighting for both his country and his life on Iwo Jima.
He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1942 and after paratrooper training, shipped out to New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Assigned to clean toilets one day, he opened a can of lime to find it stamped, “Product of U.S. Lime, Sonora, California.”
His unit landed on Iwo Jima on the day before his 22nd birthday. They were first assigned to secure Mount Sarabachi, then ordered north to help the 23rd Marine Division. Twelve days in, he was hit by a sniper whose bullet ringed John’s helmet and then pierced his skull – where the bullet jacket remains today. He was one of few men in the company to survive.
Leona remembers hearing the news from Reno Sardella’s wife, who took the phone call. Leona ran all the way down to Sullivan Creek, where her parents were cutting trees. “To tell them he was alive, that he was going to come home … it was quite a celebration,” she says.
John worked for PG&E for 43 years, conducting high-country snow surveys and tending to business and residential customers in the Pinecrest area. He and his wife, Blanche, raised a daughter, Johnnie-Danne, who became a teacher. Blanche died in 2003 shortly before their 58th wedding anniversary.
“Any success I had I owe to Blanche,” says John, “and that’s the truth.”

Lasting Influence

For Mary, John and Leona, looking back on years gone by brings memories of a warm family life during turbulent times. They have raised their own families and welcomed many new generations of Sardella grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Behind it all, they feel their parents’ quiet influence – the focus on hard work and responsibility – these many decades later.
Leona puts it like this: “Our mother and father were remarkable people.”

© 2009, Friends and Neighbors Magazine