In 1940, Joe bought Lena's uncle out of Roman and assumed sole responsibility for charting the company's course. The $125,000 it cost him left Roman strapped for cash, however, and in his need to cut the operating budget he made a terrible mistake. One of the line items he trimmed was insurance; a few months later, at a cocktail party in Yonkers, the Pellegrinos heard radio broadcaster Walter Winchell report a four-alarm fire at a macaroni plant in Long Island City. Staring at one another in horror, they leapt into their car and sped south toward the Triborough Bridge. As they pulled up onto the span, they could see the Roman plant ablaze and crumbling. Joe parked the car in the middle of the bridge and stared solemnly at the scene of the holocaust. Lena, he said finally, tears streaming down his cheeks, I'll never build another plant in New York. Then he got back into the car, drove to the fire, and convinced the fire chief to let him into the burning building so he could rescue the company records.
If Joe had harbored dreams of rebuilding at the same site, his dreams would soon have evaporated anyway. The plant fire burned for three days; before the ashes cooled, two creditors served him with summonses -- one less than the three that would have forced him into bankruptcy court. And while his friends in the industry phoned in their sympathies, grief didn't stop them from hiring away his salesmen or cutting off his supply lines. Underinsured, contemptuous of lawyers, and $120,000 in the hole, Joe persuaded his creditors to settle accounts for 40? on the dollar. Only one business, Rossotti Lithograph, his box supplier, refused to go along, saying they would be content to wait around for full payment. He appreciated the faith. But Rossotti was a name that would come back to haunt Joe Pellegrino when the scene of the drama moved to Lowell.
II LOWELL
By 1940, Lowell, Mass., had become a city abandoned to, and by, its own history. Once the center of the American Industrial Revolution, her textile mills symbolized both the shift from agriculture to manufacturing and the exploitative excesses of unfettered capitalism. When textiles went south after World War I, the industrial infrastructure of the city collapsed under the combined weight of excess capacity and inadequate demand. By the late 1930s, 40% of the city was on relief, and a Democratic mayor was campaigning on promises to cut taxes and slash city spending.
Not everyone saw Lowell as a wasteland, however: in 1939, a vacant bleachery on the south side of town became the new headquarters for a growing macaroni company with roots in Boston's North End. Founded in 1912 by a trio of immigrant Sicilians -- Gaetano LaMarca, Michele Cantella, and Guiseppe Seminara -- the Prince Co. began as one of three small pasta manufacturers in the Italian enclave on the edge of Boston's waterfront. Twenty-seven years later, having outgrown both its Prince Street birth-place and a larger plant on nearby Commercial Street, the company needed even more room to expand. Lowell had a ready supply of surplus labor, and when the city offered a 300,000-square-foot facility for $10,000, the decision to pack up and move 23 miles north was easy.
More complicated from the standpoint of corporate growth, however, was the issue of management. For the three old friends from Villa Rosa were beginning to tax the limits of their expertise.
My father and his partners weren't really businessmen. The way it started, Mr. La Marca and Mr. Seminara used to have this bakery, see, and my father worked for them. At some point they decided to try the macaroni business, so they asked my father about it, because he'd had some experience [making macaroni] over in Italy. I think they agreed to put up $1,000 each -- only my father was $200 short, so he threw in a horse and cart of his, which is how he became the chief salesman. La Marca had the most education; he ran the company. Seminara was in charge of production. They must have been doing pretty well, because they borrowed $250,000 when they opened the [Commercial Street] plant, and you didn't get that kind of money from Yankee bankers in Boston on a handshake and a whim. On the other hand, I'm not sure they always got along with each other, either.
(Vincent Cantella)
Two years after moving to Lowell, Prince was carrying a $300,000 debt load and losing $5,000 a month. Orders had fallen off sharply, relocation costs had somehow escalated from $50,000 to $200,000, and the company's principal lender, Union National Bank of Lowell, was making noises about calling in its notes. Aware through industry contacts that Prince was hurting, Pellegrino nevertheless hoped it could solve some of his problems, notably the difficulty of finding reliable supply sources in the New York market. When he turned up in Lowell looking for help, however, he found his supposed saviors in worse shape than he was.
For starters, a tour of the plant convinced him that the product wasn't selling because it wasn't being dried properly (sweat and dry, sweat and dry). What he saw of the front office persuaded him that a firmer hand on the management wheel would do wonders for the balance sheet. Sizing up the situation, he proposed a new partnership. He would make the business profitable in a month, he promised; if successful, he would get one-quarter of Prince's stock for $50,000 -- the last of the insurance money -- plus a voting-trust agreement giving him effective control over all production and sales decisions. Then he went back to New York.
