The following article is about some of my ancestors. Most notably, Joe Pisenti is my grandfather on my mother's side:

Pisenti Family Offers Us A Look At Our Century
Published on Sunday, December 6, 1998
Copyright © 1998 The Press Democrat
By Gaye LeBaron
Staff Writer

The children of immigrant parents growing up poor but proud in America is a familiar theme for writers and filmmakers. Which makes it surprising that no one has written a book or a Hallmark Hall of Fame about the Pisenti family of Santa Rosa.

There were 14 Pisenti children in all -- Ann (Beech Burow) and Joe and Walter and Alice (Tarpley) and Eva (Mane) and Mabel (Stefanoni) and Alfred and Bill and Ralph, known as "Dutch" and Welta, known as "Teeny" and Allen and Wally and Gene. Another girl, Amelia, died when she was four days old. Wally died at age seven of congenital heart disease.

Twelve grew to adulthood -- marrying, raising families, farming, running successful businesses, playing football and making music -- making a substantial impact on 20th century Sonoma County. There are 11 Pisentis still living. One, Alfred, died in 1985. Of the 11, nine still live in the county, eight in Santa Rosa.

They could be the "poster children" for a family values campaign.

They are the descendants of Guiseppe Pisenti, who left his wife, Anna Maria Piezzi, and their four children in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland in the 1870s to try his luck in California, harkening to the tales told by the people in his village who had come to California during the Gold Rush.

In Santa Rosa, he settled in the Todd District where most of the resident dairymen were immigrants from Ticino, including the family of Victor Piezzi who was probably related to Guiseppe's wife. In 1880, there was sad news from home. Anna Maria died in a fall from an apple tree.

Guiseppe, now an anglicized Joseph, sent for his children, three daughters and a son, James. They arrived in 1880. James, nine years old, went to Todd School. In 1887, on the advice of friends, they relocated their Stony Point Road dairying operation to Pacheco in Contra Costa County. Joseph always told his children it was a mistake, the worse thing he ever did, but he stayed in the East Bay until his death in the early 1900s.

His son James did not relish the idea of milking cows for the rest of his life. He took a job in the Hercules Powder Plant where he narrowly missed at least two deadly explosions.

One family story tells of the day he went out and bought himself a new suit, which he put in his locker at the plant because he didn't have time to take it to his boarding house before his shift began. He went home without it and next morning, when he was eating breakfast, an explosion shook the kitchen.

For the rest of his life, he complained about losing a whole suit of new clothes while his sons told him to "be glad you weren't in it."

It was love that saved James from the powder plant. They didn't employ married men. In 1904, he married Rose Panella, who had come to the United States from a village near Naples. She was 21, James was 33. They lived in Oakland, then Pleasanton.

Rose was an accomplished seamstress who worked for a dressmaker, but she was also a designer, who made all her own clothes. Her children remember that she could make anything. Walter still remembers how awed he was as a youngster when he watched his mother take an old overcoat and make a suit from it for one of his younger brothers.

James, who often told his children that "life was better in Santa Rosa," brought them back in 1922. Walter remembers the day they left Pleasanton. His father and two oldest sisters had come ahead to get the house ready. "Joe was driving and my mother was sitting in front with Teeny on her lap. We had piled all the furniture in back and we all climbed on and sat on top of the furniture. There were ten of us all together ... We stopped by the side of the road to have lunch and then passed Sonoma and El Verano, and stopped there where Mother bought cold drinks for all of us."

It was a nine-hour journey to Santa Rosa. Rose was expecting. Within two months, Allen was born. Gene was born in 1928. In 1934, James died of Hodgkins disease at the age of 62. Rose was 50. It would be her task to hold the family together. Even as they grew up and married, their lives revolved around her house on Fourth Street across from Talbot Avenue. The family remembers that she made ravioli every Saturday night and they came to help. The next day they came to eat them.

She worked at the shoe factory. She continued to work as a seamstress. Her son Bill remembers that she brought in extra money during the Depression years, sewing for people. He likes to laugh about the family with "big girls" for whom she made underwear. "We kids used to make fun," he says. "My brother and I could fit together in one leg."

Rose died of cancer in 1948. She was 65. Her son Gene remembered her as a gentle woman "who didn't know what it meant to quit. She was 44 when I was born and weighed 105 pounds. She was an old-fashioned Italian lady. The old-timers in Santa Rosa were really tough people," he said.

Gene, like his brothers, was a star athlete at Santa Rosa High. (He later coached football at Burney, where they named the football field in his honor when he retired.) He remembers saying to his mother: "'Mom, I've got to play football,' because she wasn't in favor of it, to which she replied, 'You go ahead, but I won't watch.' She never missed a game."

Several years ago the family instituted a golf tournament, which is the centerpiece of a yearly reunion. It is called, officially, "The Rose Pisenti Annual Golf Tournament."

Now James' and Rose's children are the older generation. Gene, the "baby," who lives in Redding, just celebrated his 70th birthday. Ann, the oldest, is 93.

I sat down with Ann, Joe, Walter and Bill last week to talk over old times. We talked about music. They had been to the opera together the night before.

They are all opera lovers. Bill's son, William Jr., sang with several West Coast opera companies in the 1970s. Alice's son, Don Tarpley, is a composer and arranger.

Bill, who couldn't guess at how many operas he's attended, calls himself "a classical listener" and is sure that his son was influenced by his collection of operatic recordings.

Joe and Walter share memories of the L'Indipendenza Band, organized in the 1920s by Professor Angelo Capelli, sponsored by L'Indipendenza, the Italian lodge.

Capelli enlisted band members first, then handed out instruments to his recruits and taught them to play. Father James played the bass drum; Alfred, the snare drum; Walter, trombone and Joe, trumpet and later saxophone, because, as he recalls, "I couldn't hit the high notes on the trumpet."

Mother Rose made the uniforms "on her old Singer pedal sewing machine," Bill says. "She made 40 or more navy blue uniforms with gold ornamentation"

It was a band for all occasions. Ann, who had married George Beech and become a farm wife on his family's dairy out on Route 3 (later Summerfield Road), remembers that they played concerts on the courthouse steps, while Walter recalls the time they were all loaded on a flatbed truck to tour the county on behalf of the presidential candidacy of Al Smith.

They all remember the day that they played for the birthday party for "Disguise," a famous stallion who had sired many winning race horses. "Disguise" lived at Wikiup Ranch, steamship mogul John Rosseter's country estate. In 1926, the horse was guest of honor at a highly social affair, attended by the San Francisco elite, honoring his 29th birthday.

The band played throughout the party. "While everyone ate, we played," Walter remembers. "Then finally, they let us stop and we got to eat, too." But they had to eat fast because they were rushed off to the railroad station to play for the arrival of the special train that brought California's Native Sons to Santa Rosa for a convention.

It was a busy town in those days, they all agree.

You can't mistake the love these elderly brothers and sisters share. Walter, who was a partner of his brother Joe in a body shop and auto repair shop on Fourth Street, brags to me about Joe's skill with automobiles. "He's the tinkerer," said Walter. "He's always had a way with engines. Even when he was little, maybe seven years old, he'd be hanging around cars, figuring how to start them, how to drive."

Ann has her own story about learning to drive, remembering the first time she "soloed" in the family car, driving down the lane from the ranch to the mail box where Sonoma Avenue joined Route 3. "I got the mail and then I couldn't remember how to put the car in reverse. I couldn't back up. I had to drive down Sonoma Avenue and all the way around to get home. I must have gone about four miles, just to get the mail. I never told my husband. He never knew."

Ann, who worked in the county clerk's office from Walter Nagle's tenure to Eugene Williams, chides Bill gently for the hours he spends "board watching." He's a familiar figure in his "regular seat" at the county supervisors' meetings. He has been for 32 years, finding time to protest on behalf of the taxpayer while running his Bennett Valley ranch. He gave up livestock a couple of years ago. "I've got a burro now," he says. "That's all."

Did he ever think about running, I ask him. He says he "thought about running against Ig Vella once but changed my mind."

"Thank God, " says Ann, laughing. She is remarkably young. Asked for the Pisenti secret in beating the actuarial tables, you can tell she's heard the question before. "We don't dissipate," she says.

They are proof that you don't have to "dissipate" to have fun. They tell of the Sunday picnics on the Salamina Ranch at Freestone where the men played the "Morra" game (rock, paper, scissors) with such enthusiasm that "the glasses would bounce on the table."

Ann's stories of coming of age are different than her brothers'. Bill talks about going to dances at the Russian River in the summertime, about Druids Park beyond Mirabel, where they had big bands to dance to and the young people sometimes literally danced the night away and the boys stayed to sleep on the floor.

For Ann, the Grange was her coming out. When she was first married, at age 20, she and George joined the Bennett Valley Grange. "I loved the Grange," she remembers. "I had never danced. My father wouldn't let the girls go to dances. And they had dances at the Grange Hall and I danced and danced. It was such a warm place, with so many friendly people."

They asked her to be secretary and her husband urged her to accept. "I thought I'd try it," she said. She held the office for 62 years, breaking all Grange records. For many of those years, brother Joe, who had worked as a young man on the Beech Ranch, as did Bill, was the Grange's treasurer.

They all get misty-eyed when they talk of their mother and father, who get all the credit, from all the family members, for their successful lives. "They were hard-working people, who taught us, from the time we were six, to work hard and be honest," says Bill.

"They taught us respect," says Ann, "Respect for ourselves and for one another."