I'm John Bachelors, this is the new John Bachelors 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 in Mary and have children.

In this particular case, it's the very famous Johnstown Pennsylvania, the steel mills of Johnstown that becomes the war, 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 name say, 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 in that, 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, 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, the, the businesses that had been set up to provide it suddenly are out of business. So like many others, Mary sets up a stool in her, 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, and did likewise for others in the neighborhood.

And so there she is cooking up moonshine and her boy is out on the streets with Coke bottles full of it selling it. And that's how he learns the ropes.

In other words, enterprise. I also was charmed by the fact that they keep a pig under the porch and it gets so big they have to take the porch apart to get that.

That was, that was one of those stories that everybody passed down. Yeah, I think that would have been a memorable incident, especially with your child.

The, the young, the girls are named Anna, Perina, Anna, Perina, Angelina, Sarah, Carmella, Catherine and Nancy. And the two boys are Rosario called Russell and Antony, Antony called Tonya can imagine. However, we're going to follow Russell born 1914 and Carmella, now called Millie.

She's an important factor here because later she will marry Joe Regina, the man we started with. This is one great big family. It takes care of itself through the, what you'd have to say, turbulence of American history. Now it is the 1920s.

Mary, Mary's one of her borders, I believe, and is a survivor. And her family is learning to survive as well. Rosario, Russell is growing up without a father. You make it very clear that he finds a father figure to give him guidance. I believe his name is Verone.

Who is he?

He was a local, you know, this was a parent. He was apparently a black hand leader in black hand. It's a little, that term is murky the way, if you, if you look up the black hand in what it was, it was kind of an extortion pre mafia extortion group.

A lot of the old guys I talked to in town. They kind of looked at differently. It was a little bit more like these guys are looking out for us.

And so he was this, as I think, kind of a neighborhood leader. And they were, you know, so this is a time when prohibition. So alcohol is kind of the income stream.

And at the same time gambling is huge in America. And it's, you know, gambling is what is going to become the next income stream. And it's hard to wrap your head around it because everything then that they were doing.

That Russ was going to be doing involved gambling. And it's all legal today. You know, I mean, the, the states control it.

But then it was so, it was such a vice, such an immoral activity that it had to be done kind of in the back streets. And Philip Verone then teaches Russ as a kid takes him under his wing.

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