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her.
    Lucy was a serious young woman, and Carlo was the opposite. Funny, gregarious, and social, he played a mean tin bugle. Marco met his future son-in-law and, confident that his independent daughter Lucy had chosen a good man, returned to Schilpario, to his wife and family, to build the house on Via Scalina that the Spadas and their descendants still live in today.
    Lucy told her new husband that she would be happy to do any job except farm. In Italy, her family kept rabbits and chickens, but part of Lucy’s American dream was not to make a career of it.
    Carlo was a shoemaker, and with Lucy’s skills as a seamstress, they knew together they could make a living. They decided to partner with Carlo’s friend, another shoemaker, Giuseppe Bonanto. The men had heard that shoemakers were in short supply on the Iron Range in Minnesota, so the two couples decided to leave New Jersey for the Midwest.
    When they arrived in Buhl, Minnesota, it became clear, after a time, that there wasn’t enough work for two shoemakers in town. So the men flipped a coin to decide who would move on to the next town, Chisholm, where there was a need for a shoemaker. Carlo lost the toss, and he and Lucy departed for Chisholm.
    The Iron Range
    Chisholm, a prim small town in northern Minnesota, on the vast Iron Range, looks from a distance like low, rolling hills of cinnamon, where the earth has been stripped to dig for iron ore. As in most American mining towns, there was work at the ready, the mines were in operation twenty-four hours a day. Day shifts blended into hoot owl (night) shifts, so the industry attracted ambitious immigrants hoping to make a living, or men like my grandfather looking to supplement their trade with an extra paycheck.

    In 1956, Lucy wears her own creation. She stands with her son, Orlando.
    A colorful mix of Yugoslavians, Hungarians, Czechoslovakians, Italians, Polish, Russian, German, and Jewish families rounded out the community, built at first by those of Scandinavian descent. Lakes large and small surround the town, and there’s a beauty right off Main Street called Longyear Lake. I remember whitecaps on that lake, when the wind blew through during summer storms. The water was deep and clear and blue.
    In her lifetime, Lucy lived for the most part in two homes: the house in which she was born, in Schilpario, and at 5 West Lake Street in Chisholm. For the last seven years of her life, she lived in Leisure Hills, a rest home in nearby Hibbing. She suffered a stroke in 1985 that left the right side of her body paralyzed, but her mind was sharp until the day she died.
    Carlo died when he was thirty-nine years old, and Lucy was thirty-five. She never remarried, or even went out socially with men after that. She raised her family and put all three of her children through college on the money she earned sewing and selling factory-made shoes, including the popular Red Goose brand. She believed children needed the best shoes in the family, a structured leather lace-up boot to protect the growing bones and support the ankle.
    Lucy wouldn’t sell a pair of shoes that didn’t fit properly, and always encouraged parents to buy function and fit over style. She would rather lose a sale than fit a child’s foot improperly. My grandmother talked her customers out of buying shoes as much as she sold them.
    At the top of the hill, the first building you see when you make the turn onto the main street of Chisholm is the public library. With the flow of income from the mines, the community built beautiful public schools, parks, and the library. My grandmother went to the library weekly, and took her children along, which is where my mom’s addiction to books began; eventually she and her twin sister Irma became librarians.
    I spent a lot of time in the Chisholm library one long summer in the 1970s. The architecture of the library was inviting to children; it looked like a stately red brick house. Inside, the