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ENLARGE
Lawrence “Buzz” Zancanella
What's the story?
Immigrant Stories is a project of the Community Integration Initiative. The initiative is gathering the recollections of immigrants and their families from Aspen to Parachute. These stories are based on interviews conducted by Walter Gallacher, originally broadcast on KDNK public radio. For more information go to www.communityintegration.net.
The Zancanella family has been in the Roaring Fork Valley for five generations. During that time they have helped the valley's communities grow and prosper. Together Lawrence “Buzz” Zancanella and his father “Bugo” Zancanella volunteered more than 80 years safeguarding the community as volunteer firemen. Bugo once spent six months recovering from burns he received fighting the Glenwood gas plant fire of 1948. Here Buzz describes the family's early years in Glenwood Springs.
Zancanella: My grandfather came to Glenwood from Italy in the late 1800s. He was 15. He came with his brother looking for work as a miner. They stopped in Leadville first but grandpa decided he didn't like the gold mines so they came on over to work in the Spring Gulch Mine. Grandpa worked there for a few years and started a family. It was a pretty hard life. The mine wasn't mechanized, it was all pick and shovel and donkey. My grandparents lost two daughters to the influenza. The girls are buried there at the Marion cemetery.
After the Spring Gulch mine played out they moved over to work in the Sunlight Mine. They lived there in a two-room log house with their 12 kids until 1907 when the family moved to Glenwood. In 1907 the mine was shutting down, and by 1910 it was closed.
Granddad opened a shoe shop called The Shoe Doctor down on Seventh Street in 1907. He had done a lot of shoe repair for extra money when he was working at the mine, and it was one thing he thought he might be able to make a living at. He ran the shop until he died of black lung disease. His death left the family without any means of support, so my dad, being one of the oldest sons, quit school and went to work to support the family.
He got a job working for Mr. Gamba at his grocery store on the corner of Eighth and Cooper. From there he went to work at Safeway and eventually to J.V. Rose Motor Co. (Ninth and Grand). When the garage closed and the bank moved in my dad went to work as the maintenance man for the bank. He worked there until he died. He gave a lot of his life to volunteer work.
Gallacher: He was a volunteer fireman.
Zancanella: Yes, he was. He believed in giving back to his community, and he did that all of his life. He was a volunteer fireman for nearly 50 years. It was a struggle to get on the fire department at the beginning. He tried for years to get on but back then the fire department was run like a club or a fraternal organization. When my dad first tried to get on they told him that because he was Catholic and Italian he would have to wait because they were only allowing a limited number of Catholics and Italians on.
So Dad waited and waited and eventually Mike Bosco got on and then a little later my dad was allowed on. Dad was persistent but one of the people who was just as persistent was a friend of my dad's who was on the fire department. He wasn't Catholic but he really encouraged my dad and worked behind the scenes to get him on.
Originally there were two fire departments in Glenwood. There was the Isaac Cooper Fire Department and the Hook and Ladder. There was quite a competition between these two fire departments. One of the departments even bought track shoes and built their fire house up at the top of Ninth and Minter so that they could run downhill pulling their hose cart and beat the other fire department to the fires. They were always competing to see who could serve the town better.
Gallacher: You followed in your father's footsteps as a firefighter.
Zancanella: Yeah, I was on the fire department for 40 years. I was the fire chief for 12 and a volunteer the rest of the time. We were proud to be volunteers. When that siren went off you dropped everything and ran for the fire station. My dad was burned real bad in the gas fire of '48. He was assistant fire chief when the Glenwood Hotel burned down. I can remember, as a kid, standing across the street watching the firemen hauling the bodies out in canvas bags.
Gallacher: Did you have a rough time growing up Italian?
Zancanella: No, by the time I came along Italians were pretty well accepted. But the early Italian immigrants had a harder time. Of course any immigrant coming into the United States faces hardships, but those early Italians had as rough a time as any immigrant coming in now.
I don't have any documentation but I've heard comments from family members about some organizations that had great political problems with Italians at that time, or any immigrants really. There were factions back then who thought that we were invading their country.
But the Italians stuck together and a lot of people reached out. They worked together and supported one another. I've got photos of my dad and my uncles and other Italians up on the Fryingpan River cutting the red sandstone for what is now the old Catholic church at 10th and Grand. They hauled the cut stone down from Basalt on old trucks. Ralph Earnest loaned them his flatbed truck. About 25 guys went up there on the weekends cut the rock and built the church themselves just to have a place to worship.
A memory I really cherish was during harvest season. As kids we used to get out of school for a week to go help pick potatoes. There were a lot of old Italian farms up and down the valley. All the farmers would get together during threshing season. Ben Darien had a big ol' threshing machine and he would start threshing up above Basalt and work his way from farm to farm all the way down the valley. Everybody worked together to do their threshing, put up their hay and dig potatoes. They shipped carloads of potatoes out of here by rail every year.
When we were harvesting grain there was sort-of-a contest going on between the farms to see who could put on the biggest feast for the work crews. The women would cook up all these Italian dishes. They would put on a spread that would take you two days to eat. But there would be 15-20 men from the different farms on the crew so it took a lot of food to keep them goin'. The hard part was to eat all that food and then go out and work until dark.
Immigrant Stories runs every Monday in the Post Independent.
Zancanella: My grandfather came to Glenwood from Italy in the late 1800s. He was 15. He came with his brother looking for work as a miner. They stopped in Leadville first but grandpa decided he didn't like the gold mines so they came on over to work in the Spring Gulch Mine. Grandpa worked there for a few years and started a family. It was a pretty hard life. The mine wasn't mechanized, it was all pick and shovel and donkey. My grandparents lost two daughters to the influenza. The girls are buried there at the Marion cemetery.
After the Spring Gulch mine played out they moved over to work in the Sunlight Mine. They lived there in a two-room log house with their 12 kids until 1907 when the family moved to Glenwood. In 1907 the mine was shutting down, and by 1910 it was closed.
Granddad opened a shoe shop called The Shoe Doctor down on Seventh Street in 1907. He had done a lot of shoe repair for extra money when he was working at the mine, and it was one thing he thought he might be able to make a living at. He ran the shop until he died of black lung disease. His death left the family without any means of support, so my dad, being one of the oldest sons, quit school and went to work to support the family.
He got a job working for Mr. Gamba at his grocery store on the corner of Eighth and Cooper. From there he went to work at Safeway and eventually to J.V. Rose Motor Co. (Ninth and Grand). When the garage closed and the bank moved in my dad went to work as the maintenance man for the bank. He worked there until he died. He gave a lot of his life to volunteer work.
Gallacher: He was a volunteer fireman.
Zancanella: Yes, he was. He believed in giving back to his community, and he did that all of his life. He was a volunteer fireman for nearly 50 years. It was a struggle to get on the fire department at the beginning. He tried for years to get on but back then the fire department was run like a club or a fraternal organization. When my dad first tried to get on they told him that because he was Catholic and Italian he would have to wait because they were only allowing a limited number of Catholics and Italians on.
So Dad waited and waited and eventually Mike Bosco got on and then a little later my dad was allowed on. Dad was persistent but one of the people who was just as persistent was a friend of my dad's who was on the fire department. He wasn't Catholic but he really encouraged my dad and worked behind the scenes to get him on.
Originally there were two fire departments in Glenwood. There was the Isaac Cooper Fire Department and the Hook and Ladder. There was quite a competition between these two fire departments. One of the departments even bought track shoes and built their fire house up at the top of Ninth and Minter so that they could run downhill pulling their hose cart and beat the other fire department to the fires. They were always competing to see who could serve the town better.
Gallacher: You followed in your father's footsteps as a firefighter.
Zancanella: Yeah, I was on the fire department for 40 years. I was the fire chief for 12 and a volunteer the rest of the time. We were proud to be volunteers. When that siren went off you dropped everything and ran for the fire station. My dad was burned real bad in the gas fire of '48. He was assistant fire chief when the Glenwood Hotel burned down. I can remember, as a kid, standing across the street watching the firemen hauling the bodies out in canvas bags.
Gallacher: Did you have a rough time growing up Italian?
Zancanella: No, by the time I came along Italians were pretty well accepted. But the early Italian immigrants had a harder time. Of course any immigrant coming into the United States faces hardships, but those early Italians had as rough a time as any immigrant coming in now.
I don't have any documentation but I've heard comments from family members about some organizations that had great political problems with Italians at that time, or any immigrants really. There were factions back then who thought that we were invading their country.
But the Italians stuck together and a lot of people reached out. They worked together and supported one another. I've got photos of my dad and my uncles and other Italians up on the Fryingpan River cutting the red sandstone for what is now the old Catholic church at 10th and Grand. They hauled the cut stone down from Basalt on old trucks. Ralph Earnest loaned them his flatbed truck. About 25 guys went up there on the weekends cut the rock and built the church themselves just to have a place to worship.
A memory I really cherish was during harvest season. As kids we used to get out of school for a week to go help pick potatoes. There were a lot of old Italian farms up and down the valley. All the farmers would get together during threshing season. Ben Darien had a big ol' threshing machine and he would start threshing up above Basalt and work his way from farm to farm all the way down the valley. Everybody worked together to do their threshing, put up their hay and dig potatoes. They shipped carloads of potatoes out of here by rail every year.
When we were harvesting grain there was sort-of-a contest going on between the farms to see who could put on the biggest feast for the work crews. The women would cook up all these Italian dishes. They would put on a spread that would take you two days to eat. But there would be 15-20 men from the different farms on the crew so it took a lot of food to keep them goin'. The hard part was to eat all that food and then go out and work until dark.
Immigrant Stories runs every Monday in the Post Independent.
