Back in the summer, I was visiting my parents in Deep River, which is located about halfway between North Bay and Ottawa.
We were sitting in the gazebo on a sunny afternoon when a friend of my parents stopped in for a visit. Fausto Mancini is an old friend of my father’s. Both Italian immigrants who came to Canada from different parts of the Boot in the early 1950s, their families settled on the same street — Elsmere Avenue — in Windsor.
Allow me a digression. Elsmere is kind of in the heart of Windsor’s Italian community. The demographics of the neighourbood have changed, but when I was a kid, it was almost exclusively Italians.
Visiting there invariably meant being dragged by my parents (on Nonna’s insistence) to every zia and zio in a five-block radius. Much cheek-pinching, face-grabbing and exclamations of “bello!” (for me) and “bella!” (for my sister) would ensue as each aunt demanded their opportunity to do what any self-respecting zia does: showering every bambino with love and adoration.
It was heavenly (at least in my memory; at the time, I was probably equal parts annoyed and bored at spending entire afternoons repeating the same pattern from house to house).
Anyway, Fausto Mancini and my dad, Enrico, became friends at around age 13 and that friendship continues to this day (though there was a bit of a hiccup in their relationship related to Mancini’s bachelor party, a story he delights in telling now, but one my father probably wishes he’d forget; either way, the details of that event aren’t fit for public consumption, but it’s a doozy).
In fact, both of them moved to Deep River in the early 1960s to work at the Atomic Energy of Canada nuclear plant in Chalk River, where they would spend their careers. Heck, 70 years after they shared a street in Windsor, they still share a street today in Deep River. It’s charming.
But back to my original story. We’re sitting in the gazebo and Mancini stops in.
“Hey, you’re still a newspaper guy, eh?” Mancini asked me (or something to that effect).
I answered in the affirmative.
“I’ve got a story for you,” he said.
The story, it terms out, is the very definition of a longshot — trying to locate a person without knowing their name or even what they look like. I was intrigued.
Mancini is throwing a line in the water hoping to track down a person he met on the ship when his family came to Canada. He doesn’t remember much about him, other than the fact he was Italian and that his family was bound for Sudbury.
Not much to go on. Mancini does have some helpful details though, and he’s hoping that if I share those details on Sudbury.com someone might recognize some of them.
It would be fantastic if we could reunite these two men seven decades after they parted company.
So, if you are a member of Sudbury’s Italian community or you know someone who is, share this story with them, if you don’t mind. And, if any of these details ring a bell, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at [email protected]. You never know.
So, what does Mancini remember about his passage.
He said his family boarded a ship called the Homeland, which was operated by the Home Lines Mediterranean Lines Inc. company out of Panama. It sailed from Naples on Sept. 19, 1952, bound for Halifax. Mancini was 13 at the time.
The ship made two stops that Mancini recalls: in Barcelona, Spain, and the Canary Islands. The boy, whose name he wishes he could remember, spoke Italian and was travelling with his mother and his sister.
“What I remember about him is that he was friendly and loved to joke and have fun,” Mancini said.
He does remember one detail that might be helpful. He said the boy was fond of saying a little Italian rhyme, and repeated it often enough on the voyage that Mancini can recall the basics. If the man in question actually arrived in Sudbury and settled here, perhaps this little ditty is familiar to his loved ones.
“Mamma mia, senza pietanza porta sempre la panza a nanzi, ue ue ue, che vuoi dare la colpa a me?"
Mancini said although he doubts he will ever encounter the man again, now that he is in his 80s, he figured he would take a shot at finding him.
“For some reason, he always has been in the back of my mind,” Mancini told me. “I made a couple attempts to get in touch with him, but failed. It would be nice to meet again and reminisce.”
Do any of these details ring any bells for you? If so, please drop me a line and let me know. I would love to bring these two gentlemen back together if I can.
