Advertisement “What a shock!” said Jodis, who came to the area about 24 years ago with her husband, Steve. It’s those kinds of culture shocks that she supposes her grandparents experienced in their immigration to the U.S. from Italy in the late 1890s.
She will share the cultural changes of her Italian family to members of the Holmen Area Historical Society at the organization’s Feb. 3 meeting.
Both of Jodis’ paternal grandparents, Ambrose and Rosa Marinelli, were born in Bari, on the southeast coast of Italy. Ambrose came over first and pounded stakes to help build the American railroad system.
Jodis has researched her grandfather’s arrival at Ellis Island. “Grandpa hopped on a ship,” Jodis said. “There were quite a few Bari natives on it. Everyone wanted to go to America then. America was the promised land.”
After about a year, he sent for his bride, Rosa, and they moved to Waterbury, Conn., where Ambrose built the house that is still standing.
“Grandpa and Grandma were so proud to be Americans,” Jodis recalled. So were their nine children who taught their parents how to speak English while they were learning it in the American schools.
Also proud to be an American is their middle child, Victor Vito Marinelli, Jodis’ father.
Grandma Rosa taught Vito all her cooking and household skills. “Grandma was a wonderful cook, she made all her food from scratch, including homemade wine,” Jodis recalled.
But Grandma had something in mind for Vito. “She had a premonition of sorts,” Jodis said. “She always told him that when he finds a woman and gets married, she might be ill. So she taught him, and only him, out of all the nine children, how to run a household.”
Grandma also had premonitions about another son, who everyone thought was the pillar of health because he was a body builder. “She always said he was ill,” Jodis said. “He died when he was 27.”
Vito met the woman he would marry while on leave from the Navy in Milwaukee.
“He has a Purple Heart,” Jodis said of her father. “He was on the U.S.S. Wasp when it was sunk in World War II. He wound up in the water and waited for days to be rescued. He had shrapnel in his arm.”
Jodis’ mother, Ione Enright Marinelli, was constantly ill with kidney problems. In those days there was little they could do for kidney problems except put her in the hospital, perform numerous kidney stone operations and give her painkillers. Vito was the mom, the cook, the diaper changer as well as the owner of a restaurant he started in 1952 in Chicago.
“We had celebrities,” Jodis said of patrons of her father’s restaurant, Vick’s Snack Shack on Pulaski Road on the south side of Chicago. “Kim Novak, Eddie Fisher, Vic Damone, they all came in to eat. That was before they were famous.”
Jodis’ childhood memories are rife with visits to the hospital and being in a playpen by the jukebox in her dad’s restaurant. Many of those patrons who became famous would come back and visit the Snack Shack.
Because of her babyhood being spent in front of a jukebox, Jodis was quite a dancing baby. By the time she was 4 or 5 years old, some of those returning patrons were telling Vito to take the family to California because Vito looked like dancing legend Gene Kelly, and the baby could make it on television and compete with Shirley Temple.
“I missed my chance to go to Hollywood,” Jodis said. The family stayed in Chicago because of her mother’s health. Ione died when Jodis was 17.
When she was old enough, Jodis went to work as a waitress in a restaurant where she met her husband.
“This was not the dark-eyed Italian I always told Dad I would marry,” Jodis said. “He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Lithuanian.” Steve Jodis, by some twist of fate, also worked the railroad as a carman.
As a person who was to fix things that go wrong on a caboose or anywhere on the line, Steve traveled up and down the Midwest, from East Dubuque, Ill., to Maiden Rock, Wis.
The Jodis’ enjoyed their vacations by fishing on Lake Arbutus, and on their way home to Chicago would always talk about moving north. When Steve went to work one day, he saw a notice on the bulletin board that the La Crosse area needed a carman. He applied for the job, got it and they moved to a five-acre lot in the town of Holland.
Now Jodis visits her 90-year old father in Chicago once a month, making sure she gets her fill of Italian meatballs.
