The Immigrant Prince

From Ellis Island to the corner grocery to the country's largest macaroni company, "JP" Pellegrino's story is the story of American enterprise.

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I ELLIS ISLAND

I was 12 when my father met me at Ellis Island. I made the trip alone, in steerage. My mother died right after I was born, in 1907, and my father left Italy a few months later, so I didn't really know him at all. The only way I had of recognizing him was a photo I carried with me from Sicily. He met me at the boat carrying a pair of knickers -- I'll never forget this -- and insisted right away that I put them on. I was wearing these tight pants with three buttons down the front, and I said to him, forget it, I'm not going around looking like some Arab. In school, you see, we'd read that Arabs wore knickers, all the way down to their ankles. He told me everyone would laugh at me in those tight pants. Well, I said, I'm sorry, but I'm not wearing any knickers. Put them on, he said. So I put them on -- but over my other pants, you know. Then we went home.

(Joseph Pellegrino)

In the four decades from 1880 to 1920, more than 26 million immigrants made the voyage from the Old World to the New. They came from small towns and farms, factories and urban ghettos; they came from Ireland and from Poland, from Russia, Rumania, and a dozen other sovereign states. They came from Italy -- more than 2 million of them in the years spanning 1901 to 1910 alone. Mostly poor and ill-educated, they came to an America long on possibilities and short on guarantees.

One of these immigrants was Joseph Pellegrino, age 12, a native of Mastretta, Sicily. Pellegrino's father, a stonecutter by trade, had himself emigrated to the United States in 1908, finding work on the Rockefeller estate near the banks of the Hudson River. When he could afford it, he sent for his only child, meeting him at Ellis Island and taking him home to a third-floor walk-up in lower Manhattan.

Young Joseph spoke no English and left school for good in the eighth grade. With few skills to fall back on, he soon found his calling as a hustler and street vendor, selling everything from shopping bags and shoeshine stands to Coney Island frozen custard. By the time he reached his early twenties, his father was dead, a victim of lung disease. Joseph scraped together $12,000 in savings from a variety of enterprises and sank it into a grocery-store partnership with two fellow immigrants from Mastretta.

The business thus established was a paradigm of how commerce evolved in the ethnic pockets of urban America circa the 1920s: neighbor to neighbor, bloodline to bloodline, immigrant to immigrant. But Joseph Pellegrino's destiny far transcended that of the prototypical small-time immigrant entrepreneur. Today, at age 79, "JP" is the incumbent -- and as yet unretired -- board chairman of the Prince Co., an enterprise established by fellow Sicilians and built by Pellegrino, with the help of family and colleagues, into the largest independently owned manufacturing company of its kind in the United States.

Independence, an idea much on the nation's mind this July, has meaning for companies as well as countries. From the neighborhood grocery to today's $200-million-a-year business, Pellegrino and Prince have faced virtually every opportunity -- and obstacle -- a man and a company can confront. In simple terms, theirs is a classic American success story; yet little of their story translates into easy simplicities.Filled with catastrophic setback and vicious ethnic rivalry, it dramatizes the effects of old loyalties, new opportunities, and intergenerational conflict on a business and a family coming of age in twentieth-century America.

It was just a coincidence, but the uncle who raised me [in Sicily] happened to be in the macaroni business, that's how I knew something about it. I worked for him. At that time they made macaroni with these big wooden blocks. You'd take a stick and put the flour and water in there, mix it by hand, then you'd use the stick to knead the dough back and forth, back and forth. Then you'd cut it, roll it, cover it with wet cloth, push it through a screw press, then you'd take it out in the sun to dry. Drying is always the tricky part. You got to dry it and sweat it, dry it and sweat it, over and over again. See, if you dry the macaroni too quick, the moisture locks inside and you get case hardening, and when macaroni gets case-hardened it breaks all to hell when you go to cook it. So you got to sweat and dry, sweat and dry. The exact same principle applies today.

(JP)

When Joe Pellegrino met her in 1928, Lena Realmuto was already working for her own father, Pietro, co-founder and president of Roman Macaroni Co. Started in 1894, Realmuto's company had grown to $300,000 in annual sales by the 1920s and was dominating the Manhattan pasta market. Lena, the oldest of five girls (all seven brothers had died prematurely), was a graduate of Columbia University who had put her college degree to work keeping the books and tracking the accounts for her father and uncle. Love blossomed between Lena and Joe: they married on September 21, 1932. So did the bond of respect and affection between Pietro and his son-in-law. Invited into the family business, Joe put up $12,500 for an equity position and commissioned salesman's beat. In six months, he was selling 50% of the plant's production. Within a year, he was running both the family and the company.

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