Miguel Chavez
RWS 92B
Professor C. Boeck
Being at the Right Place at the Right Time
This is Francesco Campanili, an immigrant from Bare, a little town south of Italy. He migrated to the United States forty-one years ago with his little brother Gino who was eight and six year old little sister Maria. His parents died two years before he came to the United States. He was left with the big responsibility of opportunities. While trying to work for food at the port of Bare at a fishery market, he overheard two men talking about taking a shipment of fish to New York. He remembered the name “New York” because a week before he was helping the newspaper deliveryman off-load newspapers. Francesco had asked the deliveryman if he could be of some help for whatever loose change he had in his pocket. The deliveryman offered a loaf of bread he had in his truck instead, and Francesco accepted. As Francesco was offloading the truck, he noticed on the cover of the newspaper a picture of a big statue of a woman. She was standing on the middle of the ocean holding a book on her left arm and a torch on her right hand pointing it to the sky. He thought it was the most beautiful piece of artwork he had ever seen. Right above the statue were the words “New York fights crime.” After he had remembered the name New York, he immediately grabbed Gino and Maria and went to the ship that was going to America and waited nearby until sunset to sneak inside.
After one month of traveling through the rough sea of the Atlantic Ocean, the fishing shipment arrived at the port of New York. Francesco waited for the opportunity to run out off the ship without being detected from the immigration patrol that was searching the ship for undocumented people. As he saw the officers walking towards him and his siblings, they hid under the fish and did not move until they left the ship. Finally, after fifteen minutes under the fish, Francesco stuck his head out slowly and did not see anyone around the ship. He whispered to his siblings to get up and run off ship as fast as they could towards a factory nearby.
It was tough for Francesco to find a job for the first six months because he did not speak English. One afternoon he was walking past a bakery, and he saw something strange. He saw a man with a black beanie, a long trench coat, and dark sunglasses inside the store. He immediately knew something was not right and suspected the man was going to rob the store. He told Gino and Maria to wait inside the ice cream store next door. He went inside the bakery store and pretended he was shopping for some bread, without being detected by the strange man. The man walked towards the cash register and got a gun out and told the old man (the owner of the bakery store) to pull all the money inside the bag or else he was going to shoot him. As the old man was putting the money inside the bag, he saw Francesco sneak behind the robber and hit him on the head with a hard loaf of bread. The robber was knocked out cold and was tied until the cops came and took him to jail. The old man was so grateful to Francesco that he offered him a job and a room to live in the house.
Seven years passed by; Francesco married the old man's younger daughter and ended up inheriting the bakery store. He expanded the store to add several Italian flavored breads to his menu. The Italian community and local residents noticed the variety of breads and flavors. The word quickly spread and Francesco's bakery store became the most popular store in the city. He opened four more bakery stores in less than two years, and they were very successful. The business spread all over the United States and because he had the biggest bakery business in the nation, Francesco at just twenty-eight years old was the youngest and most successful businessman in New York. His siblings, Gino and Maria, were put into private schools and learned how to speak English quickly. Francesco and his wife bought a mansion in New York with twenty acres of beautiful land near the ocean. The beautiful two-story mansion had seven bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and Jacuzzi. It also had two kitchens, one in each story. The mansion's back yard had a three-mile running track surrounding the house, two tennis courts side by side, a basketball court, a soccer field and an Olympic size swimming pool next to the mansion. Later on, Francesco added a small size movie theater with a full size screen of 144 by 120 inch and fifty comfortable seats for his guests. The small size theater has a top of the line popcorn machine, a six-foot round crystal bubblegum machine, a candy store and a small size bar to accommodate guests of all ages. This idea was made because he wanted to watch his favorite movies, Scar Face and the God Father with his close friends.
Francesco, now an old man, has four boys and three girls. Three of them help run the business. Gino, Francesco's younger brother is a successful lawyer working for the government fighting crime. His little sister Maria is the head doctor for New York's biggest hospital. Francesco, who is fifty-seven years old, is actively involved in politics and is running for mayor of New York.