Southern Iowa -- Part 1

MY UNCLE JOHN MALETTA DIED RECENTLY.  He was born in July of 1932 to his parents, Mike and Victoria Maletta, in Clarkdale, Iowa. Eighty-six when he died. He was Mike and Victoria's first child; Mike, my grandfather, would have been 23 or 24 years old when John entered the world. Mike and Victoria went on to have four more kids, all girls; Victoria died tragically and a few years later, Mike was remarried to the woman who would become my grandmother, Maxine Shephard. Maxine also had five kids from her first marriage--three boys and two girls--so when her and Mike had my mom, they made a grand total of eleven. (Sorry about the use of first names for elder relatives. I'm not trying to be disrespectful--it just makes it easier to keep everyone straight).

I don't think you can even find Clarkdale on a map these days, but when my grandpa Mike was a boy, it was a real live functioning town. The coal mine set up shop there and built some houses for their workers. Mike was born in 1908 and after fourth grade went into the mines with his male relatives to help put food on the table. (This, remember, is when America was great). Back then today's Latinos and Muslims were Italians and Slavs, and that's who followed the coal mines and did the dirty work: both Mike and Victoria's parents were Italian immigrants.

When the mines around Clarkdale ran out of coal and moved on some of the people decided that instead of following the mine, they would try their hand at farming or something else.  The coal company didn't care--they had extracted the labor they needed.  Mike's parents were one of those households. They eeked out an subsistence during the Depression years, when several of my aunts and uncles were born.  Their big meal was on Sunday evenings, when spaghetti feeds were ran out of Mike's parents' (my great-grandparents') house.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Mike was 33, just past draft age. Young workers flocked into the military and Mike and several of his brothers and cousins found good-paying jobs at the John Deere factory in Ottumwa about an hour away. They took turns driving, one every week for five weeks.

After Mike and my grandma Maxine got married, they moved into Centerville, the "big town" around which towns like Clarkdale were scattered. Back then, Centerville would have had maybe 8000 residents. My mom was born in 1951 and didn't know the poverty that her dad did (nor, I should point out, have I). Mike, for his part, took Maxine's kids as his own, refused government help, and churned them out, all of them, all high school graduates, some college graduates, all eventually becoming parents themselves. By the time my mom graduated from high school in 1969, she was the only one of Mike or Maxine's kids--the only one of eleven--left at home.