I'm John Baxter.

This is the new John Baxter show.

Russell Stortos here to help me tell a story that solves much of where America comes from.

The ambitions of young men and women who travel to America

for work and establish families and marry and have children. In this particular case,

it's the very famous Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the steel mills of Johnstown that becomes the

arsenal of democracy of Johnstown some decades later. However, we leave this threatened

family of nine children and Anna Maria, who is called Maria, Russell's great-grandmother,

she must make do with no income. There's no welfare going on. We seize on one of her children to

follow for the rest of this story. Rosario, who is called Russell, your namesake. He's born in 1914.

What is, what did he remember of his father's death, of being told of his father's death. Is there a family story about that, Russell?

Well, the family stories are, that's really what I have to go on,

and that he was beaten up and murdered because of the bankroll,

the money that he had on him.

And so from that moment, he was six years old when his father died, and he was the oldest boy, and he becomes, as it were, the man of the family.

And that coincides very neatly with the beginning of prohibition in America.

And that then becomes an income stream for his mother, for his family, and for millions of other people in the country,

because suddenly you have a product everybody in the country seems to want,

and the businesses that had been set up to provide it suddenly are out of business.

So like many others, Mary sets up a still in her house, and there was a local man, kind of a

neighborhood protector boss, Italian man, who apparently urged her and told her how to do it,

and did likewise for others in the neighborhood.

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