Family Tree – Father's Line

My father's father was Clement Gardiol.  He was born in Prarostino circa 1887.  Prarostino (current population 1,268) is in northern Italy in the Piedmont region 25 miles southwest of Torino (Turin) and 25 miles east of the French Border.  Gardiol is a French name and one of a few hundred families that fled from France to Italy around 800 years ago and are known collectively as the Waldensians.  These families sought to escape religious persecution and took refuge in the alps.  The Roman Catholic Church and several European armies spent 700 years trying to eradicate the Waldensians.  There are many accounts on the Internet.  My favorite is a 30 pager covering 700 years in detail.  These families evolved into some of the most formidable mountain guerrillas in history who roamed the Alps between France and Italy and survived  centuries of military campaigns to eliminate them. 

In 1848, prior to the Unification of Italy, the northern city state of Piedmont-Sardinia found itself open to attack from both city states from the south as well as from France in the North.  In a desperate attempt to reduce its exposure, Piedmont-Sardinia granted the Waldensians civil rights so as to enlist them as a line of defense against the French in the north.  The thought being - let the French have to deal with the crazy bastards.  The number of surviving Waldensians at the time was unknown but the night after the announcement of civil rights, victorious bonfires from the Waldensian hideouts stretched across the Alps like a blanket of stars in the evening sky.

During WWII the German Army deployed small patrols into the villages located in the mountain areas of Piedmont to look for Jews who were being hidden in the homes of the villagers.  The German army was mystified by the fact that a great many of these patrols simply disappeared, never returned, never reported back and were nowhere to be found despite follow up efforts to locate them.

The villagers with the Waldensian heritage were part of the resistance effort (despite the fact that Italy was allied with Germany in the war).  When a German patrol would arrive at a village, an elderly woman dressed in black head-to-toe and using a cane to walk would agree to lead the patrol to a cottage where she claimed some one was hiding.  The woman would take them on rugged foot trails up into the mountains and eventually into a very narrow canyon where she would inform the patrol that she needed to relieve herself.  She was allowed to walk ahead to a point where there was some privacy.  The guerrillas were at a disadvantage having no weapons to match those of the German army but were perched high above the canyon where they had loaded boulders behind barricades.  When the woman reached her pre-designated safety position, the boulders were unleashed creating a massive landslide burying the patrol forever.

My grandfather and his brother (my great uncle Mike) arrived at Ellis Island in 1910 and made their way to the west coast where they worked as laborers.  They both eventually became cooks.  Uncle Mike worked at a mom & pop diner in Lincoln Heights and my grandfather worked at Perino's for many years.

Shortly after I first saw pictures of Italy when I was 8 or 9 years old, I asked my grandfather why he left Italy, would he want to go back to visit, and why he and my grandmother were the only family members who spoke Italian.  He told me life there was very hard, people were poor, uneducated, worn out and desperate. You couldn't get him to go back if you held a gun to his head.  The only time he ever had meat to eat was when cows or horses fell from the mountain trails.  They would tromp up and down on the carcass to bleed it, butcher it on the spot and divvy up the goods.  He also said that he and my grandmother spoke a dialect that was a mashing together of French and Italian and was totally impractical to pass on to anyone else.  When he would travel a short distance from Prarostino he would have difficulty communicating with people from other towns. 

Some of my first memories are of walking around the half acre behind his home in La Canada (long since taken away by the Foothill freeway).  It seemed he knew how to do every thing – he had terraced the property with mortar-less retaining walls made with stones unearthed from the lot, he had built a rental unit on the property from scratch, he had a vineyard and made his own wine, he raised chickens, vegetables and grafted trees to bear multiple fruits.  He was a carpenter, a mason, a mechanic, a plumber, a landscaper, a cook, a vintner and a farmer.  I was born and raised in Los Angeles so this all seemed other-worldly to me. 

The Waldensian DNA surely has a lot to do with the fact that my grandfather was a beast. His brother, Mike, once told me that when the two of them got to Los Angeles, they were downtown taking in the sights which included various services that were hawked, sold and performed on public streets.  One such barker was offering to demonstrate how he was able to remove teeth painlessly.  My uncle said that this was one of many scams back in the day carried out by con men to fleece the unsuspecting yokels.  There was always a plant in the crowd who would come forward after sufficient tension had built up to be the first to have a tooth pulled.  The plant would act as though he was in serious pain until the tooth was pulled (complete fakery) and then proclaim for all to hear that he never felt a thing and was finally free of pain.  According to my uncle, my grandfather had a tooth that was bothering him and stepped up to have it pulled before the plant ever made a move.  My great uncle Mike said my grandfather handed the barker his fee and the barker used a pair of dental pliers to pull out his bad tooth.  My grandfather didn't even flinch, the tooth came out with not much of a struggle.  My grandfather shook the barker's hand, said thank you in his Prarostino dialect, and said to his brother, "Lets go eat". 

My grandfather's health regimen included standing on his head for ten minutes each day to stimulate circulation and a morning shot of whiskey with a raw egg.  One day when I was 4 years old, I was playing in the vineyard with my cousin.  Throughout the vineyard my grandfather had sunk glass jars flush with the level of the ground to trap ants who would fall into the jars and be prevented from going after the grapes.  I was bitten by one of the red ants and started to cry.  My grandfather walked up to me and my cousin and asked, "What's the matter?"  I explained about the ant bite.  He bent down and with one hand reached into one of the submerged glass jars, scooped up a handful of ants, shoved them into his mouth, chewed and swallowed.  Then he turned around and went back into the house.  The message was clear – in this family, we don't complain.  After that day, I never did.

My grandfather passed away when he was in his mid 90s.  A few months before he died he told my dad that he would like to take a look at one of the first jobs he landed after arriving in Los Angeles in 1910.  He was hired by a woman who owned a resort hotel in Big Sur.  She needed a retaining wall constructed to  protect the structure from a small creek that would swell up each winter.  She hired my grandfather who began the project by taking a horse-drawn wagon full of cement sacks from Los Angeles to the Hotel where there was ample sand and rock.  So my dad drove my grandfather up the coast (around 1980) to a dirt road that lead inland from the coast highway somewhere in Big Sur.  My dad said the road was almost too much for his car and they were forced to creeping along at 5-8 miles per hour,  He figured there must have been a different route back in the day or it would have been nearly impossible to get a horse drawn wagon up the road.  My grandfather claimed to recognize the road and after almost two hours they made it onto a plateau where my grandfather said they could walk to the hotel and creek.  The path was blocked by a tall fence that appeared to enclose some sort of religious compound.  They went up to the main gate and rang a bell.  Soon a couple of "weirdos wearing togas" (my dad's description) came to the gate and explained that this was private property inhabited by some new age philosophical order with a policy of no visitors.  My dad told them that they had come to see if any of the masonry work done by my grandfather in 1910 remained.  My dad said the two "weirdos" did a 180 and began bowing and scraping in front of my grandfather, overwhelmed that here was the man that had made "The Wall".  When my dad and grandfather were escorted into the compound they discovered that there was no sign of there ever having been a hotel or structure of any kind.  "The Wall", however, looked unfazed by the elements.  My dad said it ran about 120 feet in length, was 8 feet high and 6 feet wide, and was constructed with rocks that averaged the size of a clothes dryer.  My grandfather looked it over for about 15 minutes and was ready to go back home.  The toga people were having none of this since according to my dad they had incorporated "The Wall", at least symbolically, into their doctrine and insisted that my dad and grandfather were their guests of honor and were to stay for a celebratory meal and general mayhem.