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The Mysterious Death of Massachusetts Movie Star Thelma Todd

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Eighty years ago Thelma Todd shot to fame. An actress from Massachusetts, she had conquered Hollywood by the time of her death at just 29 years old. Who killed her? No one knew then, and no one knows today.

Was it the ex-husband, a shady film producer and agent? Her gangster lover? Or was it her business partner?

Thelma Todd, 1933.

Was it Thelma Todd herself? The question has overshadowed her legacy as an actress, but it has also made her famous long after her death.

Thelma was born in 1906 in Lawrence. Her father was a superintendent of streets and an alderman. Schoolmates recalled a friendly, bright and determined young woman.

After high school, Thelma attended Lowell State Normal School – the school for training teachers, now part of Lowell University. Though Thelma went so far as to do her student teaching, she hoped for fame and a more glamorous career. So she entered beauty pageants and acting contests.

Thelma Todd: The Star

More details Buster Keaton, Thelma Todd and Jimmy Durante in Speak Easily (1932)


Buster Keaton, Thelma Todd and Jimmy Durante in Speak Easily (1932)

In 1925 she was crowned “Miss Massachusetts” at the state Elks convention in Swampscott. She also caught the eye of Hollywood talent scouts. They recommended her for the Paramount School for Junior Stars, run by the Paramount Movie Studio. There, her instructors praised her for her talent and warned her to watch her weight.

Movie producer Hal Roach – the director behind Laurel and Hardy – signed Thelma to a contract and began casting her in zany short comedies. Her roles would be familiar to viewers today. She belonged to a duo – one sensible woman, the other a clown. Together they would work their way in and out of comical situations.

Thelma Todd played the adorable working girl trying to retain her poise while being dragged into her friend’s shenanigans.

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Actresses ZaSu Pitts and Patsy Kelly co-starred with her in these films.  She established her comedy chops playing the straight women to the Marx Brothers in two of their films. Thelma, though, wanted more from her career. She wanted to try dramatic film.

Thelma Todd began dating director Roland West. Together they planned to launch her in a new direction in his dramatic film Corsair. (Watch it here.) At the time of their affair, West had a wife who was apparently not troubled by it.

To hammer home the point that her role marked a departure in her career, Thelma used the name Alison Lloyd in Corsair. She now had two professional outlets for her talent, starring in comedies with the likes of the Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby and in dramatic films playing off leading men such as John Barrymore and Ricardo Cortez.

thelma-todd-corsair

Thelma Todd in Corsair.

By now Thelma Todd was a bankable actress. Attractive, slim – one interviewer noted she had dropped 20 pounds since she left Massachusetts – and disciplined in her acting, Thelma was in demand.

In her personal life, Thelma had been linked with many Hollywood men. She had gotten married in an elopement in 1932 to Pasquale DiCicco, a movie producer/agent/small-time hood.

The marriage to DiCicco would last just two years. It was punctuated by frequent, loud arguments fueled by alcohol. But by 1933, Thelma was showing just how savvy she had become. She had traveled to London for work and returned to Massachusetts to visit family. Newspapers floated a rumor that the star was contemplating divorce.

Divorce

She addressed the rumors with a sly wink: “I’m afraid it would be silly to make a divorce announcement now. With so many being discussed in Hollywood I wouldn’t have a chance to get any sort of publicity.”

But the divorce did come through, in 1934. That same year Thelma decided to spread herself even thinner. She opened a restaurant and supper club in Pacific Palisades: Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe. The restaurant was a draw for tourists because it was popular with Thelma’s celebrity friends. Her partner in the club was Roland West, her former lover and director.

thelma-todd-sidewalk-cafe

Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe today

Thelma roared through 1935 on all cylinders. She knew the shelf life for a Hollywood starlet was not a long one. The supper club, she said, would be her financial stability when her career petered out. She didn’t worry about wrinkles or a few extra pounds because she would have the cafe.

As Christmas 1935 approached, her family back in Lawrence hoped that 29-year-old Thelma might visit for the holidays. But on Dec. 16, 1935 Thelma was found dead. The airbrushed version of her life would soon crumble.

Thelma Todd: The Scandals

Thelma Tood told a newspaper interviewer that for a Massachusetts girl, Hollywood took some getting used to.

“At first when I was making a picture and men hailed me as sweetheart or honey or came up and put an arm around me when they wanted to tell me something, I was insulted. We don’t take familiarities from men in New England,” she said, but she soon learned not to take offense.

“They were just being friendly,” she said. “Now I appreciate that fact.”

In the wake of Todd’s mysterious death, attention would immediately focus on two men.

Thelma Todd was found in a closed garage on the morning of Monday, Dec. 16. She sat at the wheel of her showy convertible Lincoln Phaeton. The garage sat on a hill high above her night club, and it was owned by Roland West.

The coroner quickly ruled that accidental carbon monoxide poisoning had killed Thelma Todd. But soon her friends began raising questions. Three broad areas of suspicion emerged.

Ex-husband

Pasquale DiCicco, Thelma’s ex-husband was out of her life, or so everyone assumed. But Saturday night before her death, DiCicco and Todd had a fight at a party. Todd had been invited and she was seated at a table where a chair was reserved for Di Cicco. But he showed up with another date and sat at another table. Thelma was furious.

Actress Ida Lupino arranged the party and she later said DiCicco had asked to be invited and seated next to Thelma. He explained that he was joking when he said it was because Thelma was so hostile to him. DiCicco wasn’t just a New York agent. He was also an associate of New York mobster Lucky Luciano. (And future husband of Gloria Vanderbilt.)

lucky-luciano

Lucky Luciano in Rome.

He had introduced Thelma to Luciano and the two had an affair. Luciano would have been a valued connection because he could obtain amphetamines that an actress would need to keep her weight down.

Luciano was in Los Angeles at the time off Todd’s death. Rumors also floated that Luciano had pressured Todd to let him use the third floor of her supper club for a casino and that he abused her.

Roland West

The second line of suspicion fell on Thelma’s one-time lover and restaurant partner Roland West. West’s career had cooled after the film he made with Thelma Todd, and the full nature of his relationship with her was unclear. The two had apartments next to each other above the restaurant, but he remained married.

Roland West

Thelma and West had discussed the future of their restaurant. Though wildly popular, it didn’t make money.  Some sources say that West told Thelma the reason the restaurant was losing money was they were pressured by Luciano to buy from mob-controlled suppliers at exorbitant prices.

Had Thelma planned to square off against the mob? And what exactly did Luciano have over her or West to be able to extort from them? Before Thelma departed for her Saturday night party, West had asked her to return before 2 a.m. True to his word, at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, West locked the doors to the supper club and went upstairs.

He went to sleep at 2:30. Thelma had not yet returned. The dog startled later in the morning, but West heard nothing. The coroner suggested that Thelma climbed the 270 steps to the garage at the top of the hill over the restaurant with the intention of sleeping in her car. Chilled by the night air, she started the motor for heat and was overcome by carbon monoxide fumes.

But there were problems with his theory.

Questions

The engine in the car in which Thelma Todd died was not running when it was found on Monday morning, yet there was still fuel in the tank.

Further, witnesses began coming forward to say that Thelma had not spent all day Sunday dead behind the wheel of her car, as the coroner proposed. She had spoken to one friend on the phone. And Jewel Carmen, Roland West’s wife, said she had seen Thelma Todd in her car with a man on Sunday.

Thelma herself had told friends that she had a new romantic interest, a man from San Francisco. This unidentified stranger could never be located.

An autopsy revealed that Thelma’s blood contained lethal levels of carbon monoxide and that she may have been drunk at the time of death. But it also found damage to her throat that someone might have caused by forcing a hose or other object into her mouth.

That finding would create an eerie echo of a story involving Luciano and Thelma. She had sworn off drinking at one point to control her weight, and he had forced a champagne bottle into her mouth to get her drunk.

Thelma Todd: Postscript

Still other theories floated around. Thelma’s father had died in 1926 and her mother had moved to California to live with her. She had told an acquaintance that she planned to build a large new mansion. How could she afford this?

Some suggested that Thelma was actually despairing at the poor performance of the restaurant and took her own life. But friends refuted that notion, describing her as lighthearted as ever.

In the end, a grand jury impaneled to investigate the case could reach no conclusion. It split between those who thought her death suspicious and those who thought it accidental, as the coroner first suggested.

Thelma’s mother Alice had a forthright opinion. Her daughter died accidentally, she said. She chalked up to the investigation to “cheap politicians trying to get jobs.”

Roland West continued to run the supper club after Thelma Todd died, though it lost much of its star appeal and he eventually renamed it. West’s artistic career largely ended when Todd got married, and some would say he made a death bed confession about knowing more about her death than he let on.

As for Thelma Todd herself, she made the journey back to Lawrence, Mass. Family had Thelma’s ashes buried with her mother when she died.

You may also enjoy this story about another mysterious death of a New Englander who went to Hollywood here. This story about Thelma Todd was updated in 2022.

Images: Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe By Foto: © JCS / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23777012

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When Pratt Met Whitney the Sparks Flew – Literally

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Amos Whitney came from American industrial royalty. His father was a locksmith, his grandfather a blacksmith and another wing of the family included Eli Whitney of cotton gin fame.  His friend Francis Pratt didn’t have his industrial pedigree, but showed an aptitude for mechanical things as a small boy.

pratt whitney

Amos Whitney (l) and Francis Pratt (r)

Together they would build an aerospace company that straddled the globe.

Amos Whitney and Francis Pratt

Born in Biddeford, Maine, in 1832, Whitney apprenticed at age 13 to the Essex Machine Company in Lawrence, Mass., which built locomotives, steam engines and textile machinery.

By 1850 both Amos and his father had moved to Hartford, Conn., where they worked for the Colt Manufacturing Company.

Francis Pratt was five years older. Originally from Woodstock, Vt., he and his family moved to Lowell, Mass.. when he was eight. He apprenticed to Lowell machinist Warren Aldrich. His career then took him to New Jersey and back to Hartford, where he joined Colt in 1852 for two years.

These two young men rode the wave of industrialization to the same factory and formed a friendship. Pratt would leave after two years to become superintendent of the Phoenix Iron Works, headquartered in Phoenixville, Pa. Pratt had invented something called the Lincoln miller – a milling machine that sped up the process of machining metals. It pushed the industry forward by leaps and bounds.

A Lincoln miller built by Pratt & Whitney

At Phoenix, Pratt served as a contractor to Colt. And when he proposed that Whitney, then making $8 a day at Colt, join him at Phoenix for $2 a day, one can imagine he needed a bit of salesmanship.

No Standards

But the two did reunite under the Phoenix roof with Pratt as foreman and Whitney as machinist. It’s difficult to imagine today the standards that these two machinists operated under. There was virtually no standardization of parts in metal working. Bolt threads and widths varied from one plant to the next. The industry couldn’t even agree on a standard for measuring how long a foot was, or an inch.

Pratt and Whitney became leaders in the push to standardize parts and measurements, and they made great strides funding a device that would create a comparator for parts so they could be universally standardized.

But before those great successes, the two had their hands full at Phoenix, deluged with contract work from Colt. The firearms company was arming the North in the Civil War.

Nevertheless, in 1860, the two men formed a small joint venture in a single room at the Phoenix Plant. There they built a thread winder for the Willimantic Linen Company.  Two years later, they brought in a financial partner. All three put up $1,200 to move more aggressively into supplying the arms manufacturing industry.

Pratt & Whitney Rise and Survival

In four years the company’s assets grew from that initial $3,600 to $75,000. In 1869 the Pratt & Whitney Company was formed with $350,000 in assets. By 1893 when it was again reorganized, it was worth $3 million.

Shown is a Pratt & Whitney R-2800-8 engine in a Goodyear FG-1 Corsair.

The company thrived by advancing standardization and by shrewd business practices. When the 1873 panic demolished most of the American economy, Pratt & Whitney survived because it had stretched its wings and gone abroad to Europe in search of contracts.

The company’s catalog filled hundreds of pages with parts, equipment and finished products ranging from sewing machines and guns to typewriters and bicycles. Mark Twain was an investor in one of the company’s typewriters.

Pratt travelled to Europe frequently and found outdated equipment still operating in the factories of Prussia and Germany. The $2 million worth of orders for machining equipment Pratt procured kept the company from collapse.

Whitney, meanwhile, was a workaholic and a fanatic for precision. He rarely took vacations (though he did travel for business). Whit, as the employees called him, would walk the floor of his facilities chatting with the workers and carrying a rasp, always on the lookout for a rough edge that needed smoothing.

Wasp Rotary Engine

Pratt & Whitney factory in East Hartford

Reorganized and merged many times over, the company would, in 1925, launch the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company. It built the Wasp rotary engine, the cornerstone of the company’s aircraft engine line that survives to this day. Many old Wasps are still flying.

By then, Pratt was long gone. He had died in 1902. Whitney had moved on. He retired from Pratt & Whitney in 1901 and moved back to Maine. But he remained active as treasurer in his son’s company and as an officer in the Gray Telephone Pay Station Company until he died in 1920.

William Gray, while working at Pratt & Whitney, had invented the first coin-operated telephone. Amos helped him commercialize the product.

This story was updated in 2023. Images: Pratt & Whitney factory by By DanielPenfield – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21841333. Wasp engine by By en:User:Cogset – English Wikipedia (former file name : Image:F4u-2005COCwaspFG1.jpg), CC BY 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1621042

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Henry Vincent Greene – The Soda Jerk Who Made the 20s Roar

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Henry Vincent Greene made a simple promise to the hard-working men and women who invested their savings with him. He would “put John Smith’s money to work alongside that of John D. Rockefeller’s for our common prosperity.”

And the idea made sense. Why put money in the bank to slowly grow when it could increase by leaps and bounds in the hands of the financier Henry Vincent Greene? But was he a boy wizard of Boston’s State Street financial district or was he more like Charles Ponzi, the great fraud of the age?

Henry Vincent Greene

Newspaper illustration of Henry Vincent Greene

Henry Vincent Greene

Greene was born in 1888 in Lawrence, Mass., to a relatively poor family. He received only a grade school education – not uncommon for the times. As an ambitious young man, he left home to move to Roxbury in Boston to take a job as a soda jerk for $12 a week. He jumped from that to the more lucrative profession of selling cosmetics and patent medicines for Armour and Company. The firm had made Dale Carnegie a household name when he turned his sales techniques into a best-selling book: How to Win Friends and Influence People.

And Greene was cut from the Carnegie mold, as well. What he lacked in education he made up for in personality and gumption. After one failed attempt to start a fence company, he rounded up investors to back his newest idea – a bank.

Greene tried to get a national banking charter, but was rejected. The states of Maine and New Hampshire shot down his requests to set up shop selling his securities. But he successfully opened his doors in Massachusetts as the Commercial Finance Company in 1916 at the age of 25.

The idea was sound enough. The business would sell shares to investors, and lend out their money to other businesses. Greene rapidly assembled a team of 2,000 salesmen to call on potential investors – many of them unsophisticated laborers.

Making People Happy

He boasted that many of his salesmen were pillars of their communities. He found them among the ranks of doctors and ministers who sold the shares with the promise of “bringing the better kind of financial opportunities within the range of the small investor.”

The salesmen would take a healthy commission, along with Greene, making everyone happy. He built his empire up to more than $30 million by 1920 and paid healthy dividends. The H.V. Greene Co. became a wonder of State Street, with Henry living in a luxurious home in Weston and a summer place by the shore.

But in 1921, the high flying days of the company came to a crashing halt with the failure of the Massachusetts Motor Co. The company sold cars and financed them for its customers. Americans had gone car crazy in the 20s, and business boomed.

Greene was the money behind the badly run company, but the first signs of trouble came when Massachusetts Motor didn’t pay for some of the cars it was buying as it sold them. A closer look at the books showed that the company’s loose credit policies had allowed it to sell cars to far too many people who couldn’t afford them. Greene pledged more money to prop up the enterprise, but he didn’t have deep enough pockets.

Trouble

The Massachusetts Motor Co. went into bankruptcy. Soon, the Boston Legal Aid Society and attorney general began receiving complaints from H.V. Greene investors who didn’t receive dividends.

Greene had been targeted by complaints in the past and had always silenced his detractors. They likened him to Charles Ponzi because he made good on any requests for refunds or repayment. This time was different. He couldn’t make good and was sued for more than $14 million. His company was forced into receivership to prevent Greene and his partners from looting it further.

Charles Ponzi

The state charged him with deliberate fraud, and the newspapers had a field day picking over the rise and fall of the soda jerk turned millionaire banker. As Greene’s empire worked through bankruptcy, the details were as depressing as they were familiar. He had used new investor money to pay dividends to old investors that weren’t supported by new business but were designed to spread the word that H.V. Greene was a booming investment.

Henry Vincent Greene, No Ponzi

When he couldn’t produce new investors, the money simply ran out. A special master concluded in 1924 that Greene personally did not defraud people. However, the company deliberately overstated its value, and it owed millions to its customers.

Greene vehemently denied the charges that he was another Charles Ponzi. But in 1926 he finally put the case to rest by pleading no contest to two fraud charges. He then paid a fine of $2,500. The rest of the charges against him were filed without finding.

The government gave up its case when its chief witness would not swear that Greene had personally reviewed the printed advertising materials used to dupe investors. All he could say was that the marketing materials were brought to Greene’s office for approval and returned to the printer. But he did not see Greene actually look at them.

This story last updated in 2022.

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How the Polish Immigrants Came to New England

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Before Polish immigrants arrived in New England they had already made it to the Jamestown colony in Virginia as craftsmen.

John Evanowski, Polish immigrant at the Fafnir Bearing Co. in New Britain. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

John Evanowski, Polish immigrant, at the Fafnir Bearing Co. in New Britain. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Over the centuries Polish immigrants came to New England in waves, the first from 1870 to 1914, the second after World War II and the third following Polish independence in 1989. By 1900, 9.3 percent of Polish immigrants in the United States lived in New England. That number increased to 10.9 percent in 1930. Only the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic states attracted more Polish immigrants.

Today, Massachusetts and Connecticut rank 10th and 11th in total population of people with Polish ancestry. Connecticut has the third densest population of Polish-Americans in the country, with 8.85 percent, behind Wisconsin and Michigan.

Poles have been soldiers and journalists, farmers and factory workers, priests and rabbis, entrepreneurs and entertainers. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski were heroes of the American Revolution. Igor Sikorsky, who had Russian and Polish parentage, built a helicopter factory in Connecticut. Martha Stewart, nee Kostyra, built a business empire.

Some of New England’s most prominent politicians have Polish ancestry: Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, the late U.S. Secretary of State Ed Muskie and U.S. senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.  Red Sox icon Carl Yasztremski grew up on a potato farm and spoke fluent Polish, while the New England Patriots’ former stars Stephen Gostowksi and Rob Gronkowski claim Polish ancestors.  Paul Newman was part Polish; so is Steven Tyler, Aerosmith vocalist.

The 1st Wave of Polish Immigrants

Philip Sowa. Photo couresty Library of Congress.

Philip Sowa. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Most Polish-Americans are descended from the first wave of immigrants, when an estimated 1.5 million fled poverty and starvation in Germany, Russia and Galicia. People called them the za chlebem, or ‘for bread’ immigrants, because most had neither money nor land. A large number were Jewish, escaping persecution.

They came to New England to work in the factories, primarily textile mills. They came in family groups and settled in neighborhoods with large Slavic populations. In Lawrence, Mass., for example, Polish immigrants arrived en masse at the turn of the 20th century.

Around 1912, Michael and Jadwiga Narkiewicz emigrated from Wilno, Poland, and settled in Westminster, Vt., where they ran a dairy farm. Then the paper mills came to Bellows Falls, and the Narkiewiczs followed.

Polish-American Club, Bellows Falls, Vt.

In 1903, 600 Polish immigrants lived in Lawrence, Mass. That number more than tripled in seven years, to 2,100. They  mostly worked in woolen and worsted goods manufacturing. Two years later, Polish women working at the Everett Mill shut down their looms and started the Bread and Roses strike.

The Mills

When strikes in New Bedford’s cotton mills in 1894 and 1898 caused many workers to leave, Polish workers replaced them, though not as strike breakers. By 1910 several thousand Poles worked in the New Bedford mills — and they were still arriving.

Polish immigrants had large families, and the children often went to work in factories at a young age. Social reformer Lewis Hine photographed 14-year-old Philip Sowa at the Shoe Mill in Fall River, Mass., where he had applied to be a doffer. “Liked to go to school,” Hine noted in a caption to the 1916 photograph.

Another crusading photographer, unknown, photographed the overcrowded home of cotton mill workers in the Olneyville section of Providence. “Eight persons live in these three small rooms, three of them are boarders,” noted the photographer. “Inner bed-rooms are 9 x 8 feet, the largest room 12 x 12 feet. 23 Chaffee Street, Polish People. Property owned by the mill.”

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Thousands of Poles came to Massachusetts to work in mills in Springfield, Chicopee and Holyoke. Many saved their earnings from factory work and bought cheap, abandoned farms in the Connecticut River Valley. They moved into old colonial homes and transformed the land viewed as useless into thriving onion and tobacco farms.

A Cold Welcome

They weren’t always welcome. A novel published in 1913, called The Invaders, described how people of English ancestry reacted to the newcomers. So did a 1933 article in New England Magazine titled The Pole In The Land Of The Puritan:

In the smiling country along the Connecticut river and included within Massachusetts, there was three decades ago possibly the most distinctive survival of early New England Puritan life. The first Poles came in the early eighties; many of them were attracted by glowing reports of returning Jews, who told of a land of boundless freedom and countless dollars. Soon the descendents of the Pynchons and the Chapins were marvelling at the expressionless Slavic faces, which looked as if flattened against a board at birth; at stunted figures that bespoke grinding toil; at the masculine forms of the women, that told of field-work beside brother and husband and domestic animal. To-day the Polish tide, swelled by continuous immigration and prolific births, is steadily rising in this old Yankee community. The Massachusetts section of the valley is the home of twelve to fifteen thousand of these aliens.

Catholics and Jews

Many of the Polish farmers were Jewish and settled on abandoned farms in Connecticut with the help of Jewish relief societies. Many Jewish families who fled persecution in Poland dreamed of owning a small farm. They ended up, though, in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side.

Those who made it out of the tenements tended to settle on Connecticut farms near other Jewish farmers, in Colchester, Norwich, East Haddam and Newtown.

poles came to new england feature

A Polish immigrant couple, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, on their tobacco farm near Windsor Locks, Conn.

Many other Polish immigrants belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1889, Fr. Franciszek Chalupka founded a Polish-American parish in Webster, Mass., the first in New England. The parishioners of St. Joseph Parish raised money to pay for his seminary tuition. He later founded St. Stanislaus Parish in Chicopee.

Poles and other immigrant groups suffered high unemployment after the 1893 financial panic. Father Chalupka visited wealthy people door-to-door asking for money to buy food and coal. He is remembered today for saving the Polish immigrants of Chicopee.

The 2nd Wave

World War II created the second wave of Polish immigrants who escaped ethnic cleansing by Germany and Russia. Many Poles died in German concentration camps or Russian massacres.  The Soviet government also deported millions of Poles to Siberia and other remote regions of the empire.

Between World War II and 1968, 140,000 Poles came to the United States. Poles escaping repression in Europe came from diverse backgrounds and social classes. Most, however, left their home for political rather than economic reasons. A good percentage belonged to the middle- and upper-middle-classes in Poland.

The bulk of the second wave of Polish immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1952. Some were former soldiers, some were relatives of Poles already living here and some arrived under the Displaced Persons Act.

When they arrived in the United States, they tended to seek white-collar and professional jobs.

Today there are 78 Polish-American parishes in New England, mostly in the Springfield-Hartford-Worcester area, but also in Boston, Fall River, and Manchester, N.H.  Three dozen Roman Catholic churches in New England offer Mass in Polish.

New Britain’s Little Poland

Many of New England’s Polish neighborhoods have disappeared as Poles assimilated quickly. Not so New Britain’s Little Poland, a thriving ethnic community in central Connecticut. The neighborhood retained its Polish character since it started in 1890. The third wave of immigrants came to New Britain after Polish independence in 1989.

Polish-Americans from nearby towns in Connecticut bolster Little Poland’s population of 30,000. They can spend a day doing business completely in Polish, shopping, buying an airline ticket, getting a home loan, taking dance or driving lessons and ordering dinner. On weekends, thousands attend Mass at Sacred Heart Church.

On the last Sunday in April, Little Poland is thronged with visitors to the Little Poland Festival on Broad Street. It features crafts vendors from around New England, food and a live stage with folk dancing and live bands.

This story about Polish immigrants was updated in 2023.

Image: Polish and American flag By Elevatorrailfan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41217488.

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In 1915, Independence Day Was Americanization Day

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“What is Americanization?” Future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis posed the question to a packed audience at Faneuil Hall in Boston marking the country’s first Americanization Day on July 4, 1915.

americanization dayNearly two decades of increasing immigration caused the attempt to crowd out Independence Day with Americanization Day starting in 1915. The influx of immigrants, largely from southern and eastern Europe, had been a sore spot for many Americans.

Laborers perceived that wages were being held down by the influx of non-Americans. Businesses feared immigrants might help increase acceptance of socialism, and they worried that factory production was suffering because immigrant workers were not fluent in English.

Americanization Day

This stew of issues and ideas was manifesting itself in a number of ways. In 1894, a group of Harvard graduates formed the Immigration Restriction League.  This group lobbied for restrictions on immigrants in terms of raw numbers, and in terms of who could enter the country. It wanted literacy tests as a condition of admission.

The Boston-based group blamed “Jews, Jesuits, and Steamships” for thwarting its efforts to slow immigration.

Later, the North American Civic League for Immigrants grew out of the Young Men’s Christian Association in 1907. It rapidly expanded outside New England to New York and other growing industrial cities.  The group morphed into the Committee for Immigrants in America, which found support from business leaders.

Rather than focusing on limiting immigration, the CIA focused its efforts on training and educating immigrants and assimilating them. In 1912, the issues of immigrant assimilation got a boost from the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Mass.

The Bread and Roses strike.

The textile mills reduced salaries, driving the largely immigrant workforce into the welcoming arms of the labor movement while highlighting the plight of immigrant workers.

Against this backdrop, the CIA in 1915 decided to establish a campaign to unify new and old Americans. So it chose the Fourth of July celebrations as a venue. Long a raucous celebration, the Americanization Day movement set about to reshape the day around themes of immigrants embracing American culture.

Across the country, immigrants and nonimmigrants gathered to sing patriotic songs, recite the Pledge of Allegiance and listen to speeches.

Brandeis

Louis Brandeis in 1915 was then well-known as a reformist lawyer and the son of immigrants. He delivered the keynote speech. on Americanization in Boston, explaining what Americanization Day meant. Immigrants, Brandeis insisted, needed more than just the freedom afforded Americans. They also needed access to education, good wages and leisure time.

louis-brandeis

Louis Brandeis

He also took the opportunity to argue for immigrants’ right to retain some of their cultural independence from their home countries. By saying so, he gave a nod to his personal affection and support for Zionism.

Americanization Day did not take hold, though the sponsoring organizations and industrialists carried on their work. In some places, it morphed into Loyalty Day, still celebrated in Rutland, Vt.

Efforts continued in other ways to Americanize immigrants, such as English and citizenship classes. The debate over immigration, meanwhile, took new shapes, both peaceful and not peaceful.

This story was updated in 2021.

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Yogi Berra Hits His Way Through New England (Under a Fake Name)

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Yogi Berra might never have starred for the New York Yankees had he not talked his way onto the Navy team based at the Groton submarine base in 1945.

Yogi Berra in his unflattering uniform

Yogi Berra in his unflattering uniform

He had to beg the manager to let him try out. He was a short, squat, awkward gunner’s mate who’d seen action on D-Day. Now, as World War II wound down, he’d returned to the States and longed to play baseball.

“If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’,” he said. “I didn’t like to work.”

Yogi Berra

The base’s ball club was run by James Gleeson, a former Major League outfielder nicknamed “Gee-Gee.” Gleeson didn’t think Berra looked anything like a ballplayer. “So I’m ugly,” Yogi later said. “I never saw anyone hit with his face.”

Gleeson didn’t believe Yogi was the property of the New York Yankees, either.

James “Gee-Gee” Gleeson

Yogi finally convinced him, and he went on to become a Hall of Famer and a beloved cultural figure. His unwittingly witty comments were known as Yogi-isms. “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded,” was one of his many classic lines. So was, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Yogi tried to distance himself from his Yogi-isms. “I never said most of the things I said,” he said.

Lawrence Peter Berra

Berra was born Lawrence Peter Berra on May 12, 1925 in St. Louis to a family of Italian immigrants. He dropped out of school after eighth grade because all he wanted to do was to play baseball.

“Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets,” he said.

After his best friend Joe Garagiola signed with the St. Louis Cardinals for a $500 bonus, Yogi Berra decided he had to have a $500 bonus too. The Yankees gave him one, along with $90 a month to play for their Norfolk, Va., minor league team, the Tars.

As a Tar in 1943, Yogi Berra hit seven home runs and 56 RBIs – including 23 in one double header. At the end of the season Berra enlisted in the Navy. He became a gunner’s mate and saw action on D-Day aboard a rocket boat, a 36-foot landing craft that sprayed rockets on the beach before the troops landed. Berra spent 10 days on the boat before he finally returned to his ship.

About the invasion, he said, ‘we were closer than the hitter is to the Green Monster at Fenway Park.’ At 18, he didn’t think anything could kill him.

I didn’t know enough to be scared. I had my head up over the side of the boat all the time, looking around like it was the Fourth of July in Forest Park and after the fireworks we were going to go over and get some hot dog and cokes.

New England Baseball (Not the Red Sox)

Before he was mustered out, Yogi Berra was stationed at the submarine base at Groton, Conn., where he finally convinced James Gleeson to let him play.

New England was a good place to hone one’s baseball skills as World War II wound down. Thousands of young men who played baseball, some in the Major Leagues, were stationed at military installations throughout the region. They could play for service teams like the Groton Raiders. Or they could play for for teams in the New England League like the Nashua Dodgers and the Pawtucket Slaters. They could even play for both. The League didn’t allow players signed with professional teams to play semi-pro games as ringers, and the military discouraged the practice. But on the semipro teams they could make $50 a game – half a month’s pay. So the professionals played under assumed names on their days off.

As a Yankee in 1953

Yogi Berra played under an assumed name for the Cranston Chiefs (later the Providence Grays) of the New England League.

His record is murky, as local sportswriters protected the identity of the players. “The New England is a league of aliases and fictitious names. No scribe desires to prevent any young man from earning a dollar by using his right name,” the Lynn Evening Item wrote.

Cusano?

The Italian-American Writer blog shared a memory of Yogi Berra as a Chiefs player:

At Cranston Stadium, for example, a guy named Cusano kept hitting home runs for the Cranston Chiefs and few people knew that his real name was Yogi Berra, a top Yankee prospect.
The city updated the field and raised the fence 30 ft because one day Berra… uhhh Cusano… hit a ball 500 feet off the roof of the Cranston Bible Chapel in centerfield.

The real Crash Davis (Kevin Costner played the fictional Crash Davis in Bull Durham)

Crash Davis had played professional ball for the Philadelphia Athletics before being drafted by the Navy. As the war wound down, he managed the Lawrence Millionaires of the New England League.

I remember one game when we were playing in Providence, Rhode Island, and all those players were using assumed names. Jimmy Gleeson, who had been with the Cubs and the Reds, was playing in the league and first base was open so I elected to walk him. I didn’t know that little guy that was hitting next but I knew Gleeson. That short little guy looked about 18 or 19 years old, and it turned out he hit a home run with the bases loaded. His real name was Lawrence ‘Yogi’ Berra.

The Legend of Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra in 1956

Yogi Berra in 1956

On June 25, 1945, the Yogi Berra legend was born. The New York Giants, returning from a series with the Boston Braves, played against the Groton team. Berra went 3-for-4. One of his hits came off a wild pitch. Giants manager Mel Ott decided he had to have the odd little catcher. He offered the Yankees $50,000 for Berra. Yankees general manager Larry MacPhail refused without knowing who Yogi Berra was – but decided to find out.

MacPhail summoned Berra to New York for an interview. Yogi walked in wearing the sailor’s outfit so unflattering to his short, squat physique. “You want to see me, Mister?” he said to MacPhail. MacPhail was stunned. He later recollected that Yogi   ‘looked like the bottom man on an unemployed acrobatic team.’

But Yogi managed to convince MacPhail he was a professional ball player — by asking who he should see about his expenses for the trip.

MacPhail promoted him to the Newark Bears, just one rung down from the New York Yankees, for the 1946 season.

The Yankees

On Sept. 22, 1946, Yogi Berra was called up to the Yankees. As a Yankee he would appear in 14 World Series and on 18 All Star teams, and he would win the American League’s Most Valuable Player honor three times. In 1972, he was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

On a night the Yankees chose to honor him, he expressed his appreciation: “I’m a lucky guy and I’m happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.”

James Gleeson in 1964 became Yankees’ manager Yogi Berra’s first base coach.

Yogi Berra died on Sept. 22, 2015, at the age of 90. His advice to mourners: “You should always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”


With thanks to The New England League: A Baseball History, 1885-1949 By Charlie Bevis and Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee By Allen Barra. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Newark Bears By buba69 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/buba69/1297630664/sizes/o/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31323851.

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