The Only Picture I have of Virginia (Bossi) Di Scala
So as the world is dealing with this Pandemic I keep thinking back to the 1918 Spanish flu. The 1918 flu had an impact on my family’s trajectory. On my father’s mother’s side, my great grandfather Giorgio Di Scala and great grandmother Virginia Bossi both immigrated from the island of Ischia in Italy to Brooklyn, New York in the early 1900s. They had three kids born in Brooklyn with my grandmother being the youngest born in 1916 and she had an older brother and sister. These were tough times around the world as World War I was in progress from 1914 to late 1918. In 1918 Virginia was pregnant with her fourth child and at the same time, the Spanish flu was tearing through New York. The one thing that I learned was that the Spanish flu was more deadly and it was deadly to all ages. It was common at the time for complete families to get wiped out from the flu and there was no one around to handle the funeral arrangements. The Spanish Flu was estimated to have killed over 50 Million People in the World and 675,000 in the United States in comparison to today’s numbers, 297,000 deceased in the world, and 80,000 in the USA.
Unfortunately, my great grandmother Virginia came down with the Spanish flu around her 9th month of pregnancy. At the time the pandemic was peaking and of course, the medical technology of 102 years ago was much more primitive. The system was so overloaded that even a 31 yearold mother of three with a baby due could not get any medical attention. My great grandfather walked the streets begging people for help but the plague was so bad that everyone was afraid to help. My grandmother Yolanda Di Scala was only 2 years old so she had no real memory of this but her older siblings were traumatized from all of this forever. Her mother died in their apartment and the baby in her womb still was moving for a day or two after her death. The morgues were so overloaded that her body had to remain in their small apartment for another week.
After Virginia passed, her husband Giorgio didn’t know what to do with three kids. He couldn’t go back to Italy as the economy there was in ruins but he couldn’t work in the USA and raise three kids on his own. He hired a stranger who was going back to Italy and paid him to take his three kids back to Ischia to be raised by his sisters. It was a brutal ship ride across the Atlantic Ocean and a very traumatic trip for the three kids who just lost their mom and now gone from their dad and home. The kids arrived to Ischia for the first time and many years later during World War II my grandmother met my grandfather Vittorio Anastasio. They had 5 kids and after the war Italy was in ruins to the point that my grandmother returned to the United States for the first time. She discovered her dad was remarried and had a new family. My grandmother didn’t like New York but her brother was exploring California and he told her she should come out to San Francisco as he loved it and thought she would too. He was right as she loved the city and in 1953 she and her husband moved out to San Francisco and left their kids in Italy to be raised by family. By 1954 my grandfather opened a restaurant and then they started bringing their kids over to the US one at a time starting with the oldest who was my 14 year old dad. Because my grandmother was born in the United States she was a citizen so it was pretty easy for her and family to immigrate to the US. My grandfather was quite the entrepreneur as he learned from his father who was a hotel and restaurant owner in Italy. My grandfather ended up selling his restaurant in Italy and bought a pizza place in San Francisco which over time provided great opportunities for his family.
My life in San Francisco is all rooted in this 1918 flu that took a mother away from her kids at a very tough time but luckily through extended family support all three kids managed to turn out okay. It’s hard to imagine how my grandparents were born and raised during a world war and pandemic suffered through the great depression and got married and raised kids during World War II. World War II is a whole other story for a later post…