The History of the Raciti and Pusateri clan in America
( Grandpa Pusateri, Grandma, Grandfather Raciti, Mom)
GREAT GRANDPA PUSATERI
In the middle 1800s a strong and intelligent Sicilian farmer from a small town outside of Palermo called Termeni Immerese came to the United States to seek a better life. He was not poor and he took the trip a couple of times from Italy to America until he settled on a place to move his family. He brought his young wife to the countryside on the outskirts of Chicago, to an area called River Forest which was just west of Oak Park. His young wife had three children before she died. The youngest was named Maria and she was only a baby when she lost her mother. Grandpa Pusateri married again, this time to a frightened Sicilian peasant who was not known for her smarts. She was an okay mother and raised the children as best she could. Grandpa Pusateri lived well, owning his house and small farm and selling fruit at the markets in Chicago which he road to on a horse drawn cart. Most of his neighbors were German and he spoken fluent English, German and Italian. He lived to a ripe old age and died with every tooth in his mouth and not a single cavity.
Maria was born in Oak Park / River Forest in the 1890s. Her father loved her very much and took her on his fruit cart into the city to sell his produce. As a little girl Maria spoke fluent Italian, English and some German. But, being the daughter of an old school Sicilian farm family her fate was not her own. At 15 years old she was promised in marriage to an older man (late twenties), Calo (Charles) Raciti. Charles was well educated, well connected and rich. Even though Maria was the first girl in her family to attend school she was no match for Charles. But she was beautiful and tall with green eyes and red hair and he wanted her as his bride. Her family and friends called her "the German" because she came from a line of Sicilians who were descendants of the Norman rulers from hundreds of years earlier. Also there was a rumor of a German marrying into the family in the previous century. What ever the case, in a world of short dark Italians, Maria stood out like a rare beauty.
After her marriage to Charles, Maria found herself both pregnant and rich. She was showered with fur coats and she was given a car. She was one of the only woman in her circle to actually drive. Her first child was a son, Dominick (Don). Her second was a daughter, Mary. For his 15th birthday Don was given a car. And the family lived well. The third child was Josephine (Pepinia) and the fourth was Prudencia (Prudy). Many years later she had her last daughter, Leonarda (Lee or Patsy). Josephine recalls going into a local restaurant and her father knowing everyone and being treated like a king. He even went into the kitchen and helped cook. But Maria and Charles didn't get along. He loved to listen to opera and he wanted Josephine to be the first woman president. But Maria hated the music he played and she never understood his ambition to be rich. When the depression hit Charles lost everything. The family moved in with relatives and there were no more furs or cars. Maria was furious and wanted Charles to get a real job to support them. He turned to drink and was soon a raging and violent alcoholic. Eventually Maria threw him out of the house and she was glad to be rid of him. He died of a stroke in his early fifties. Maria did not even buy him a tombstone. And even as an old woman when she was left alone she would pace around the house screaming at him, reliving the many fights that were left unresolved. She lived with her daughter Mary until she died at a very old age in the early 1980s.
Rt to Lft. Josephine, Lee, Mary
Charles was the son of a successful engineer who help to build the train tunnels in southern Italy. The rumor is that Charles was of mixed Italian blood, both Sicilian and Tuscan. He came to America with money and purpose and set up shop in Chicago where he became rich. At his peak he own a house and a number of apartment buildings as well as the first dime store in Chicago, an ice cream parlor and a lamp shade factory. He was one of the founders of a musical machine which later became the Rockolla juke box. At one point he ran all of the movie theaters on the west side of Chicago. There are a number of photographs of him sitting at banquet tables in a tuxedo surrounded by thugs with big meaty necks. Although the family rumor is that he had nothing to do with the Sicilian mafia, but given the amount of money and power that he had in the 1920s in Chicago I can only imagine that he was in with Capone.
Josephine was 16 years old when she found his body, dead in bed in his apartment. It took a long time for her to forgive him and when she did she bought him a tombstone. RIP
Josephine was born in Oak Park, IL in the mid 1920s. She lived in wealth for only a few years before her father lost everything in the depression. She recalls climbing the greasy pole as a child, an Italian tradition at festivals. She also remembers eating Sicilian bread with olive oil pressed into it and lots of pasta with broccoli. She recalls that her mother cooked beef until it was brown and that she had her first bite of rare steak on a date with an Irish fellow named Bud Chappy. Josephine's first boyfriend killed on the beach at Iwa Jima. As a child she loved to put on plays in the yard. Soon she fell in love with Shakespeare. And it was her love of the bard that eventually lead her to her husband to be, a Swedish man named Rolf Forsberg. They went on the road together in a traveling theater troupe and had a daughter, Linnea at an early age. After a stormy marriage filled with passion and affairs they gave their union one last shot with the birth of a son, Eric. But by the time Eric was 6 they were divorced.
As Josephine's single life approached, she fell in with a group of people from a theater commune called Playwright's. They started a theater named The second City and Josephine fell in with one of the founder's, Viola Spolin. Viola had created a way to teach improvisation for the theater. She trained Jo in her methods and prompted left for Los Angeles. So Jo stayed at the Second City and trained all of their casts. She left for a short while to live in Colorado with a boyfriend but by 1970 she had returned and begun her improv school, Players Workshop of the Second City. This became the passion of her later life and it lasted from 1971 to 2005.
Jo with her student Kim and her nephew and protégé, Martin deMaat (Prudy's son)
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Last edited 01/14/2008