A Nov. 10 Style article about Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) incorrectly identified Gilbert Sandler, a Baltimore author and historian, as Gilbert Sanders.
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Pride of Baltimore
(By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)
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That is one reason for the degree of pride that folks there express for Pelosi's success -- her family stayed rooted right with the rest of them.
"She wasn't born with a silver spoon, growing up around here," says Marion "Mugs" Mugavero, 84, who ran his confectionery for 59 years. "She grew up like the rest of us."
Except that her father became the go-to guy for Baltimore politics, a man with visitors from high places.
"He was good friends with Harry Truman," recalls Dominic "Fuzzy" Leonardi, 80. "When Truman was running for president, [Big Tommy] went and picked him up and brought him to his house" in a 1936 Plymouth.
"We had a lot of politicians coming down here," Leonardi said, seated on a bench along High Street yesterday as he is most days with his pal, Michael Trombetta, also 80. They listed Spiro Agnew, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan as the pols they remember making a pilgrimage to see Big Tommy.
"They all came down to see him," Trombetta says.
Little Italy, where Pelosi grew up, occupies about a dozen square blocks near Baltimore's Inner Harbor, and was, in its day, the prototypical ethnic enclave in a city that was a patchwork -- and remains so, to an extent -- of Italian, German, Jewish, African American and Irish.
More than a civic duty, politics during her parents' day was about survival for the sons and daughters of Italian immigrants forging their way in a big city. It was about jobs. It was about favors of the political ward bosses. It was about patronage in a society in which the sons and daughters of immigrants often could depend only on themselves.
"There weren't a lot of vertical lines open to those kids, and the ward was where you got jobs. They would get you jobs," says Gilbert Sanders, a Baltimore historian and author of "The Neighborhood: The Story of Baltimore's Little Italy."
"And whole political machines were born out of these jobs. A job driving a car for city hall. A job picking up trash. Jobs were everything."
And Big Tommy "was the king of it," Sanders says. "It's just the way things were. It's not pejorative at all. These kids, you don't think they went off to Yale, do ya?"
John Pente, 96 and a lifelong Little Italy resident, remembers being destitute and with no prospects in 1930.
