Romeo DiCicco: I was born on March 9, 1910 here in Concord. I grew up in the "back of the depot". The Italians and Irish were grouped together there. We occasionally would have run-ins but we mostly got along together.
When I was growing up, the town was divided into sections, "back of the depot", Hubbardville, East Quarter, Sleepy Hollow. We got sporting teams together - baseball, football, and we would play one another and some of those battles were kind of rough, but we all survived.
We had in Concord the fairgrounds where a lot of us would congregate in the evenings. Many of the older men would have horseshoe matches there, and we would be up there sometimes causing trouble with them.
I went through the Concord schools and graduated in 1928. I got a summer job on various estates around here and finally got a job to learn the cotton business and have been in it ever since.
Mrs. Sophie DiCicco: I was born in a small town in New Hampshire, West Swansea in 1914. My sister and brother and I were made orphans when we were very young and became wards of the state. And that meant living in orphanages or with families that would take the three of us. We finally ended up living in Lincoln and we could start school in Lincoln. I then came to Concord High School and graduated. It was during the depression then and the times were hard. I had planned to become a nurse but that never materialized because I didn't have any help. I got a job to earn some money to start nurses training but then met Romey and got married and have lived in Concord ever since.
Elaine DiCicco: I was born in 1941, and I've been in Concord my whole life except for three years when I was away teaching school in the middle sixties. I can remember growing up at a time when Rose Hawthorne School and Xavier School were being built here. What I remember more than ethnic groups and any difficulties among or between them was the religion question that was here in town. I can remember hearing my parents and their friends talking about how difficult it was to build a Catholic school in Concord.
The church taught us that we shouldn't associate with Protestants, and at the same time tried to establish a Catholic school here. I think there was a great deal of feeling in town at that time about that. It was interesting though that shortly after the school materialized, and I did go there for high school after going through the Concord public schools until high school that when I chose to go to the Catholic school, there was a sense on other people's part of abandonment of the public school system. Once I had graduated from the high school, it seemed the atmosphere in the town had changed a great deal, and the feelings that existed before the school was actually built had changed. I don't see that anymore, but I think the Catholics in town struggled, maybe in the same way the Italians and the Irish had at one point struggled, and perhaps in a similar way that the blacks feel they are struggling now.
In the fifties when I was in high school, there was a big dilemma with the young as to why we, as Catholics, were taught not to associate with Protestants, that we were not to date them and we questioned why because we couldn't see any evil in having them as friends. It was taught that it was almost seen as a sin to associate with them. But we weren't yet of the generation that would dare to revolt, and that didn't come until the sixties.
...Do you remember the town meeting where the vote was taken whether to sell the land for the building of Rose Hawthorne School and how Catholics came out in great numbers to the meeting just for that particular vote and left after the vote was taken?
Romeo DiCicco: There were very strong feelings at that time and those that wanted the school got as many Catholics as possible to attend that meeting and vote for the school. They had to get a permit to rezone that area. The big question was whether it would interfere with traffic in the center of town by putting a big school there. This would have been in the early fifties.
I don't think there ever was anybody like Cardinal Cushing that could get things done the way he did. He could get money from people that others couldn't touch. If he wanted to put up a building, he got the money to do it. And not necessarily from the Catholics, some of his biggest supporters were Jews.
Elaine DiCicco: The interesting thing at that time was that St. Bernard's had a pastor, Monsignor York, and he reminded me a great deal of what Cardinal Cushing was like in terms of getting along with people and being respected by everybody and being able to communicate and associate with everybody. I think he did a lot to cement the relationships and to build relationships with other groups in town. After Monsignor York, the whole gulf that seemed to exist was gone.
...I had a conversation with Sam Arkin, who is a member of one of the long-standing Jewish families of Concord along with the Jacobs family, and he mentioned being friends with the priest at St. Bernard's and attending dances there, so he must have been referring to Monsignor York.
Elaine DiCicco: We didn't think of those families as just Jewish, but we knew who the Protestants were. I don't think anybody ever even used the word Jewish to refer to them, and definitely not in a derogatory tone. But I can remember people saying about someone "Well, they're Protestant!" Maybe it was because there were so few Jews.
Romeo DiCicco: don't know the exact year my family came from Italy but I would guess around 1900. My father, Guiseppe, first came over here and settled in Concord right away. In fact I thought Mr. Venti and two of my uncles came with him at the time. My father didn't want to stay in Boston, he didn't like the city. He came from the country and he wanted to stay in the country away from a city. He came from Atola Domasce which is about an hour or two northwest of Rome. It was very mountainous with very little land that they could work. He told me they would have to travel to another town maybe five or six miles from where they lived to be able to do any farming at all. They decided they wanted to come over here.
When he came to Concord, he got a job working for the road department working on the roads and eventually became foreman of the Concord Public Works. He worked there until he retired.
My mother came over here a little later, I don't know what year. Her name was Felicia Conti. My oldest brother was born in Italy and he came with her. They were here for a few years and then my parents went back to Italy. I don't know how long they stayed in Italy but I had a sister born there too. But they came back here to Concord and the rest of the family was born here. Two brothers, my sister and I were all born here, so the family consisted of four boys and two girls. Most of us settled in Concord also except one is in Lexington and one in Weston.
My father told me the trip over when he came alone was horrible. It took them 30 days on those slow boats at that time. He never mentioned having any difficulty when he first came here such as not knowing English.
We had a bully in this town who thought he was the king of the area. Of course, he was bigger than the rest of us so he could control us. If he didn't like something, he took it away from you and would say "it's mine." We were just controlled by this guy and then a cousin of mine came over. He was just about the same size as this bully, and we had taken just about as much as we wanted from this kid. So I told my cousin this was the kid he had to take care of. My cousin didn't speak English and even though he had been through the equivalent of our eighth grade in Italy, he was put into the second or third grade here to learn some English. He was about 15 or 16 years old and strong as an ox.
One day up at the cattle grounds there was a ballgame going on. This kid that was the king was shouting orders and wanted to take over the whole thing, so my cousin said he couldn't do that. They had a scrap right there and the other kid starting running away from my cousin. Then this kid let go with a bat and practically broke my cousin's back. There was an off-duty policeman, who was a neighbor, there and he saw the whole thing. He asked if we wanted to press charges and we said we didn't. After that incident, that kid became one of the most cooperative kids in the neighborhood.