Edited interview with Ted Salvia (TS), son of Joseph Salvia, conducted by Joe Manning (JM), on August 21, 2006.

JM: What was your reaction to the picture?

TS: I was surprised. I was amazed at how much my Aunt Anne, who is 85 now, resembles my grandmother in the picture. She was my dad's sister, but she wasn't in the picture. The oldest child in the photo was Josephine. The one who was sleeping in the back room would have been Theresa.

JM: When you saw your father, the little boy in the photo, did he look like your father?

TS: A little bit.

JM: Have you seen photos of him at that age before?

TS: No. A few years after that picture was taken, they had a fire in that apartment building, and everything they had was lost. So there are no pictures of that era. No one was hurt in our family. They all got out in time.

JM: Where did they move to?

TS: They moved to Brooklyn. My dad said they moved in with his aunt, whose last name would have been Tancredi, my grandmother's maiden name.

JM: Were you surprised that Lewis Hine, who was working to expose child labor, chose to take a picture of your family in that situation?

TS: That was the one thing I questioned. They have smiles on their faces. I don't know if I would want to classify it as child labor. The family was doing it as a unit. Times were totally different then. If that is classified as child labor, then what about farmers who use their sons or daughters to help milk the cows?

JM: Did your father ever mention working at home like this?

TS: Never.

JM: Did your father tell you much about his childhood?

TS: He said that my grandmother made all their bread and pasta. And it was a chore for him, and for all the boys in the neighborhood, every Saturday, to take a pushcart, push it about 15 blocks, and bring back large sacks of flour for their mothers. There were 11 kids, but one died when she was six. My dad used to say that he never needed to go anywhere else to have a party.

He went to school only through the eighth grade, and then started working to help support the family. He would talk about going down to the market to get stuff. When his dad worked for the New York Central Railroad, they went out on strike. The company offered 17 cents an hour, but the union was holding out for 17 ½ cents. If you found a penny, you never passed it up, because you could get a lot of food for a penny. When I was growing up, he would always pick up a penny off the street when he saw one. I used to wonder why. If Dad changed the plumbing fixtures, he would keep the old ones. It was like precious metal to him. I find myself doing things like that now. He taught me not to waste things.

We lived two blocks from my grandparents, five blocks from the train station. My dad would get off work, walk home from the station, stop and see his parents, and then walk the rest of the way home. The family was always stopping by to check on everybody.

JM: When were you born?

TS: September 10, 1950, in Brooklyn. I have one sister. My dad was 47 years old when I was born. He didn't get married until 1945. My mother was 24 when she married him. Her name was Joan. She died in San Diego, on December 7, 2005.

JM: Was it a problem that your father was so much older than you?

TS: When I was growing up, when my dad got home, he was always too tired to play baseball. But I'm not criticizing him. He was very caring.

JM: Your father was a New York City policeman.

TS: When my father was 14, he tried to register for the draft by lying about his age, and his mother came down and told them the truth. In 1921, he joined the army and got out about three years later, then joined the police in 1926. He started as a patrol officer, and later he was a warrant officer assigned to family offenses court. He worked with domestic violence cases. His job was to find and arrest persons who had abused their spouses, and other cases like that. He would also intercede in cases as they were happening. He often told me about situations where he had to take weapons away from people.

JM: How big was he?

TS: He was 5' 8". He was very strong. He used to work out a lot at the police gym.

JM: Where did you live in Brooklyn?

TS: The Bensonhurst area. We lived at the corner of 54^th and 20th Avenues. We had a single-family house. We lived there until 1964. That's when he retired, after 38 years on the force. He retired as a warrant officer. He loved his job. In 1963, both his parents passed away. His sister Anne lived in San Diego, and he liked it there, so that's where we moved to. I didn't want to do it, because all my friends were in Brooklyn. We actually lived in La Mesa, right outside San Diego, in the suburbs.

JM: What do you do for a living?

TS: I am an engineer in the telecommunications business. I went to college, but I ended up about 15 units from graduating, because I got a good job with Western Electric. Somehow, I never got drafted. I have three children. I got married in 1974.

JM: How close were you to your father's parents?

TS: I saw them all the time. In the summer, they used to take care of my sister and me when my parents were working. At that time, my mother was a waitress. They spoke broken English, but I could understand. They often spoke Italian to each other and to my father, who could also speak Italian.

My grandfather (Thomas) was married previously. Josephine was from his first wife, who died in childbirth. Then he married Lucy. My dad is the oldest of Lucy's children. His sister Camille, who is also in the photo, married Peter Greco. Then she and her husband lived in the house next to my grandparents, who lived at 1970 52^nd St. She lived at 1972 52^nd St. Sometime after my grandparents died, Peter passed away, and Camille moved in with her daughter in New Jersey.

Dad had three sisters who never married. Josephine was one of them. So were Florence and Theresa. When my grandparents died, they were still living in the same house in Brooklyn that they grew up in. In the 1970s, they sold the house and moved to Harrington Park, NJ. My dad's sister Ellen lived in Long Island, where two of his brothers also lived.

My dad had a lot of love for the city of New York. As a child, I can remember him taking me down to Wall Street. If you stand where the Federal Reserve Bank building is, there's a statue of George Washington. You will find chips in the granite. He told me about the anarchists who had a horse-drawn wagon that they blew up right in front of the bank. It killed the horses, but luckily no people were killed. He pointed out to me that it never touched the statue of George Washington.

He could tell you about history, about Sacco and Vanzetti. He was working in the police department when a lot of this happened. As far as dates, he was like an almanac. He had a lot of pride in what he did and where he lived. He went back a few times.

JM: Did you ever go back to Hudson St?

TS: No. That whole area was eventually demolished. I never saw the building. When I saw the Lewis Hine photo you sent me, it was the first time I saw the inside of their apartment.