Edited interview with Peter Greco (PG), son of Camille Salvia. Interview conducted by Joe Manning (JM) on November 26, 2007, and again on July 28, 2010.

JM: How did you react to seeing the photo for the first time? And what do you think about the caption?

PG: I find the photo a very insightful look into my grandmother's life. And to see my mother as a child was rather eye opening, in addition to seeing my Uncle Joe and Aunt Josephine as well. The home on Hudson Street, to which my mother made reference many times in her life, was a rental, no doubt. I noticed the carpet in the lower right of the photograph was in disrepair, something that they would not have chosen to fix themselves. I'm sure the landlord didn't see any reason to do anything about it either.

The room was a work room. It may well have been the kitchen. It looks like they are sitting at a kitchen table. The caption says it was December 1911. It looks like the time on the clock is 12:30, or at least a time before 3:00. My mother would have been old enough to go to school at that time. Could it be a weekend?

JM: I believe it's during the week, because Mr. Hine said, ‘The bag of cracked nuts on chair had been standing open all day waiting for the children to get home from school.' They had no children who were older, so I think he means that he had observed the open bag of nuts before the children came home. Perhaps he waited for them to come home before he took the picture. It's hard to know for sure.

PG: If I am correct about the time, then it's either a Saturday or Sunday, or a school holiday, and the caption is wrong. In any case, there was never any pressure on the children to support the family, even though there were 10 children in the family at the time the last one was born. My grandfather was a stevedore for the railroad. I was told that he often shined shoes on weekends in a subway station. We often read about families being large at that time so that parents could rely on them to help bring home the bacon, but I don't think that happened in this family. I know that when the kids left high school, they went to work and they contributed to the upkeep of the family.

JM: Are you surprised that your grandmother was shelling nuts at home to make money?

PG: When I was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, I never saw her do piecework, although that was common in the neighborhood in which I lived. She would keep herself busy with housekeeping chores and preparing meals. Crocheting was a favorite pastime. She would shell peas for hours. She always bought things in large quantities for her large family. In the photograph, it may well be that the nuts were brought in to be decorticated or shelled for re-packing for some company. I don't deny that. But I find it difficult to believe that she would have pressured the kids to do it. If the caption suggests pressure, it has to be righted. This was a close, cooperative family.

JM: This was one of a large collection of photos Hine took for the National Child Labor Committee to investigate work that was being done in the home, as opposed to a factory. They showed various types of work, mostly work for the garment industry, and in some cases, shelling nuts or working with other food items. The thrust of the investigation was to show two things: children worked at home, and food was being handled under possibly unsanitary conditions. That's why he mentions the cat and the condition of the home. We can't be sure whether your grandmother was relying upon the children to work. Maybe they were doing it voluntarily, perhaps as a family activity.

PG: Like sitting around the table doing a jigsaw puzzle, as was common on weekends.

JM: One of the purposes of my project is to try to offer some context for the Hine photographs. The validity of his work has not been strongly challenged, but a photo can tell you only so much. Who is to know, a century later, what was really going on in the photo?

PG: When I was in the third grade, we moved from a home on 54th Street, Brooklyn, to 52^nd Street, where my grandparents lived then. We lived next door to them, so I was in there virtually every day. I would often see my grandmother working on some project, such as shelling beans or preparing greens for the evening meal. She would patronize the peddlers who were at the time allowed to move around New York with trucks full of produce. She would get a bushel of this and a bushel of that.

They probably had one or two closets in their home. People didn't have many clothes to hang in closets then. So to see what may have been clothes strewn on the chair in the picture is not surprising. Not once in my life did I hear my mother or any of her brothers and sisters even intimate that they were less than reasonably cared for as children. I never heard the words ‘poverty' or ‘poor.' I'm sure they never lived high on the hog; I remember one of my aunts telling about my grandmother watering down the sauce if she had to. I never heard anyone express any resentment, but only fondness for their parents and for one another. I think that would have been the case in most of these families.

JM: I saw what some of these places looked like at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. You could get a sense of how small they were, and how dark they were, and how they had to climb a lot of narrow steps to get up to them. The room shown in the photo looks very much like that.

PG: I grew up in a three-story brick home that was old enough to have had illuminating gas instead of electrical wiring. It was not commodious but was quite adequate. Interestingly, my father sold it for $25,000 in the 1960s. That part of Brooklyn has now been gentrified, and the property is assessed at over $800,000.

JM: Was your mother a high school graduate?

PG: I assume she was. I know the last five kids were. And I am pretty sure that the older ones, Florence, Theresa, my mother, Joe and Josephine, were graduates, too. My grandmother was illiterate, and English came to her with some difficulty. So Josephine must have played a primary role in the education of the kids, along with the public schools. I think that anyone of them would have done well in college if they had gotten the chance. Florence was a stenographer until she retired, and a good one. Frances ‘skipped' three half-years in school. Grammar and usage were important concerns; their penmanship was special , spelling flawless.

JM: When did your mother get married?

PG: I think it was in 1929 that she married Peter Greco.

JM: Was she working at that time?

PG: Yes, she was a dressmaker for one of the garment shops. She made a lot of my sister's clothes when we were kids.

JM: Did she work the whole time you were growing up?

PG: She never worked after I was born.

JM: Do you have any siblings?

PG: Just my sister Barbara, who is four years younger than I.

JM: Did you go to college?

PG: I went to Fordham, and subsequently to Columbia, from which I received a doctorate in geographic education. I was a teacher in the public schools. Then I taught at the University of Chicago, Syracuse University, and what is now called Western Oregon University. I finished my career as a high school teacher, as a result of a reduction in force at Western.

JM: How were you able to afford college?

PG: I went to Columbia on the GI Bill; I had been in the Army. My dad put me through Fordham. He worked in the insurance industry in downtown Manhattan. He also had a brokerage business on the side. He was very good at it, and a good provider. I didn't have to work for wages when I went to college, unlike some of my classmates.

JM: Did your parents live in Brooklyn all their lives?

PG: They moved to New Jersey about 1967, where my sister had bought a home. They lived about a mile away from her. My dad died in 1969. At that point, my mother asked her sisters to move in with her, but that didn't work out well. So she moved in with my sister. Finally, she had to go to a nursing home because my sister couldn't handle her physically anymore, and she died there about two years later, at age 95.

JM: What was your mother like?

PG: Mom was soft-spoken, a word merchant and grammarian. She had great composition skills, and she was also a good mathematician. I relied on her significantly when I was in school; I did well in school, in large part because of her. She was given to aphorisms that you and I grew up with, such as ‘A stitch in time saves nine,' and so on. One of my mother's most important memories was a fire they had in their apartment when she was a girl. She hurt herself escaping from the house. She lived for many years with pain in her leg, a condition that, today, would call for a hip replacement.

Mom was conservative in her politics and a deeply religious Roman Catholic, not unlike the Salvia's in general. My parents were pretty straight-laced. They had a deep sense of responsibility. My mother dedicated herself to her husband and children. She spent a lot of time preparing our meals; whatever needed doing, she did selflessly and lovingly. She was very frugal. Whenever I think of the Salvias, I think of the old adage about the Overseas Chinese: ‘They made $10 a week and saved $12.'