Mike and Emma named their first child Irene Ernestine Fragale. She was born in Ford River. The name Ernestine was definitely after Emma’s mother. I speculate that the name Irene came from the name of John Fragale’s first daughter. Mike may never have wanted to see John again, but the name Irene must have appealed to him. He certainly would have met her while staying in Manistique.

Their second child was named Harriet Bertha Fragale. Bertha is easy to account for, since Emma had an older sister named Bertha. That story of Emma working as a household servant before her marriage included a young girl in the house who tragically took sick and died. That girl was named Harriet.

The third child was my grandmother, Margaret Regina Fragale. The only known instance of the name Margaret in the family at that time was Mike’s sister Josephine’s daughter, Mary Margaret Citino, who had been born about two years earlier. The Escanaba Fragales had some German immigrant friends who lived for many years across the street named Hubert and Virginia Bubser. Virginia was godmother to Harriet and Margaret, and she was listed as Regina Bubser on the documents, possibly her middle name.

There was a story which might have involved Mike’s desire for a son to carry on the Fragale name. This story was that Mike, upon learning that he had yet another daughter, got a bit inebriated and emotional, and comically tried to wrestle a baby carriage up the basement stairs.

427 South 18th Street

The house was built in 1917, and Irene told me that it cost $2000. To put things in perspective, Mike Fragale made two dollars a day on the ore docks. Mike and Emma lived in that house for the rest of their lives. There were two bedrooms along the left side, the master bedroom and the girl’s bedroom behind it, with the bathroom between them. The living room was in front, and behind that on the right were the dining room and the kitchen. From there, stairs led up to the attic, which was unused, and down to the basement, which had rough stone walls and was where Emma had a wash tub, scrub board and chair. The front door to the house opened into the living room, and Mike’s favorite chair sat near to it. There was a rear door which led from the kitchen to the side yard.

The Fragales had an upright piano, and Irene had a true talent for playing it. She studied piano for eleven years, but when they looked into professional lessons for her, the fee of fifty dollars per hour put an end to that.

As I’ve said, Emma rarely smiled. Emma’s granddaughter Pat tells the story that near the end of her life, in 1982, Emma took Pat’s husband Wayne’s hand and gave him a big smile. A week or two later Emma was dead. Emma’s son-in-law Brendan used to say that Emma smiled like she had a.......well, we’ll leave what Brendan said for another time. In contrast , Mike Fragale was always smiling, and had a silly side. Irene told me that when her mother made doughnuts, her father would waltz around the house with one on each finger, eventually eating them all..

The Fragales also owned the corner lot next to the house. They never built on it, and despite offers, they never sold it. The 500 block of 18th Street had no houses back then, so in addition to a sunny southern exposure, you could see more than a block without any obstruction. The family kept a large garden on that corner lot, big enough that a horse and plow were used to break the soil in the spring. My mother remembered seeing this operation when she was young, so the garden existed at least into the 1940's, but Mike’s granddaughter Pat (Irene’s daughter) remembered the side yard only having a bench in it, so the garden was gone by the late 1940's. Irene said that she and her sisters sold bags of tomatoes up and down the street to the neighbors out of a small wagon.

It seems that the Fragale family had farming in their blood. Mike’s brothers and sisters out in Pennsylvania were all involved in growing things. The Kennett Square Fragales eventually specialized in mushrooms. Mike’s brother Louis and others grew Roses. Granddaughter Pat remembers that the back yard in Escanaba was Mike’s pride and joy. He filled that yard with flowers that he tended, gladiolas or irises or whatever. He often earned ribbons for them at the Escanaba Fair. Emma had a skill indoors with African Violets of all colors. Pat said that she thought that her grandma knew magic, starting new plants from fallen leaves.

Working on the Railroad

Mike worked on the railroad, on the massive ore docks in Escanaba, first for the Milwaukee Road, then for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. He was a member of the Top Dock Ore Handlers Union, Local 400. In the 1910 census, Mike’s occupation is illegible to me, but in the following three censuses, he’s a “top dock worker,” a “freight handler” and an “ore dock worker,” likely all names for the same job. While I’m sure that seniority counted for something, it was still basic physical labor.

Ore was dumped from the railroad cars into “pockets” high up over Lake Michigan, and when the ore ship was in position, large chutes, occasionally called spouts, were swung outward from the docks until the ends were in position over the cargo hatches on the ships. It seems that every other chute was deployed, so ore was dumped into the ship at twenty-four foot intervals. In a perfect world, gravity would do most of the work. But in practice, the ore could arrive as a wet or frozen-solid mass in the railroad cars, or become a wet or frozen-solid mass in the pockets. It would then be nasty work freeing up the ore, using sledges and long poles. After those pockets were emptied, the ship would be winched along the dock a number of dozens of feet, until different chutes could empty different pockets into the hold. Irene told me that her father would have to clean out the chutes on occasion. When Mike got home from work, he was often so filthy that Emma made him go straight to the basement to strip off his clothes before entering the rest of the house.

Mike Fragale must have seen both the worst and best of times on the docks. During 1931 and 1932 (great depression years) there was a fifty percent drop in shipments. At the turn of the century there had been 500 or more men working for the Chicago & Northwestern railroad in Escanaba, out of a total population of 9000, and three decades later the numbers were similar. But in 1932 there were over a thousand men unemployed in town, most of them the sole wage earners for their families. It got so bad that the Milwaukee Road closed its two ore docks and transferred all of its business to the Chicago & Northwestern docks. The Milwaukee Road docks never really recovered, became neglected and were later demolished.

By 1942, there had been a complete turnaround. The war effort resulted in the busiest years the ore docks had ever seen. Improvements were made in Escanaba because the United States was worried about German sabotage to the Soo Locks. Escanaba had held most of the ore shipment records anyway, since boats which didn’t have to go through the locks could carry heavier loads. Through all of these times, Mike Fragale rode to work each day on his bicycle.

Getting Around, Trips out East, and Learning the Language

Neither Mike nor Emma had a car, or ever learned to drive. In those days you could still live that way. Escanaba is still a small city, but the little neighborhood grocery stores and such are now mostly gone. It also helped if you knew neighbors and friends who did have cars. The Fragales occasionally got out of town in the early days with one such neighbor couple, on day trips and picnics.

In 1926 they took a real trip, however, to visit the Mike’s relatives in Pennsylvania. Mike had not seen many of these folks (if not all of them) for a quarter of a century. His job came with a railroad pass, a free ticket to just about anywhere the railroad went. Mike’s daughter Margaret later related how warmly the relatives out east embraced the family, actually running out of the house with open arms upon their arrival. It was quite a contrast to the staid habits of the German relatives in Upper Michigan.

None of Mike’s relatives ever came to visit in Escanaba, though, and Irene told me that they never went out east again as a family. Mike and Emma did return to Kennett Square around 1950, but that appears to have been the only other time. I have photographic evidence that Mike’s niece, Lucie Leo, and her sister-in-law Mary visited Escanaba in the late 1950s, but I’m not certain who else might have been with them. Relatives in Pennsylvania remembered Margaret and her husband Brendan, and Harriet and Irene, from at least one other trip to Kennett Square.

An interesting story came out of that 1926 trip. My grandmother Margaret told my mother that Mike had mostly lost the ability to converse in Italian. There had been no one who spoke it in Escanaba. My grandmother said that Mike had needed an interpreter to speak with his sister. Josephine Fragale-Citino’s daughter Helen told me that her mother managed to speak English well, so that leaves Mike’s other sister, Mary Fragale-Leo. Mary’s granddaughter Melania said that her grandfather Serafino Leo spoke English well enough to get along, but her father Archie Ruggieri really mastered the language. Perhaps Archie served as interpreter between Mike and Mary.

Mike spoke in broken English, and he had learned it from a wife who had grown up with Germans, and I’m sure he picked up more than a bit on the ore dock. Someone gave Mike some remedial children’s grammar books at one point, but Emma took them away from him. Not that he swore a lot, and by all accounts he was a quiet man, but my mother distinctly remembers him invoking the names of certain religious figures, in Italian.

Ed, Brendan and Dick

The three Fragale girls married three local Escanaba boys:

Irene married Edward James Stratton, son of Edward Mitchell Stratton and Nora E. Mogan.

Harriet married Leon Richard Schram who went by the name of Dick. He was an athlete in college, and competed in the pole vault at Marquette University, winning second place in the NCAA championships in Chicago. Dick hitchhiked from Escanaba to California in 1931 for the Olympic tryouts, since the Olympic committee did not have the money to pay his way. He lost seventeen pounds during the trip, and didn’t make the team. A fascinating figure from my childhood, Dick Schram also was a noted football and basketball referee, taught science in high school, and repaired black and white televisions and more in his basement.

Margaret married Brendan Roger Williams, son of Roger Nicholas Williams and Leah Elizabeth Laviolette. Brendan was also an athlete, and he had starred on the high school football team with his brother Marlin. He won a scholarship to play football at Marquette University, but was forced to leave school early after a family member from the Williams side revealed to the Jesuits that he had married a Lutheran.

Emma’s family was German Lutheran, but both Irene and Margaret converted to Catholicism when they married. Emma had never wanted Mike to go to the Catholic church. The Lutheran minister in town started his sermons with “Thank God you weren’t born a Roman Catholic!” Even Emma eventually stopped attending the services. Years later, on his death bed, Mike asked his daughter Irene to bring a priest so he could receive the sacrament of confession, and be reinstated in the church. Irene did as asked, and as far as I know, Emma never knew about it. When Emma herself was near the end of her life, she too sought out the Catholic Church, and was later allowed burial next to her husband..

609 South 18th Street, the War Years and Beyond

There was another house in the family, just down the street. It had started out as a tiny place and was built by the Leisner family, the city of Escanaba says in 1920. My guess is that after the death of her husband in 1915, Ernestina Leisner wanted to be closer to her kids in town, not out in the country at Ford River. She lived alone there through the twenties, a block down the street from her daughter Emma, and only two or three blocks from her son Herman. In 1931, there was a tragic fire, and Ernestina died there. Mike Fragale then bought the house and made additions to it which possibly doubled its size.

From the early 1930's to about 1949, Irene and Ed rented 609 South 18th Street from Mike for twelve dollars per month. All four of the Stratton children were born while they lived there: Joan, Jim, Don and Pat, four of Mike and Emma’s eventual eight grandchildren.

Brendan and Margaret rented a house one street over, at 427 S. 17th Street, until Brendan joined the army and left to fight in Europe. Margaret and her two children, Harriet (my Mom) and Mike, moved into the Fragale house until Brendan returned. There was a frightening time when they were notified that Brendan had been wounded in the war, because at first they were not given any details. It turned out that Brendan had been shot clean through the forearm, and he made a complete recovery. When Brendan Williams returned to Escanaba, he bought a house at 324 S. 17th Street. This was the house my mother grew up in, still only a two block walk from the Fragale house.

These were fine years for the Fragales, with Irene and her family just down the street, Margaret and her family only a few blocks away, and Harriet and Dick renting a second floor apartment on Ludington Street, downtown. Pat said that the kids were always welcome visitors, met inside the back door with hugs. Grandma Fragale almost always had bananas in the fruit bowl. She pronounced it “banano,” which became a silly family tradition. Pat said that the kids would tear through the house in a circle: living room, dining room, spare bedroom, bathroom, bedroom and living room again. Grandpa Mike, wearing his usual suspenders and sitting in his usual chair would joke, in his broken English, “Stop that running, or I’ll cut off your feet!” My mother told me that one weekend morning she woke up hungry, and since her parents were still asleep, she roller skated over to her grandparents house with a frying pan and two eggs. Grandma Fragale did make her breakfast, and mom got into a small bit of trouble over it.

Ed Stratton worked for the phone company, and from 1949 on he was transferred from here to there. First, about four years in Sault Ste. Marie, then a short time in Marquette, then three years in Menominee, then back to Marquette. They would often drive to Escanaba after moving out, occasions for Margaret, Harriet and Irene to convene a gabfest with their mother, seeming to all talk at the same time. Ed sought out chores to get away from the women. All the Stratton and Williams cousins would play, and often Irene and Harriet would perform duets on the piano. Pat remembers sometimes visiting alone by train, and when she was picked up at the station it might even be reported in the local newspaper.

When the Strattons left Escanaba, Dick bought the house at 609 S. 18th Street from his father-in-law, Mike Fragale.

The Last Decades