Lo Grande, Vincenzina Buscemi, 1979 August 23
Abstract
Lo Grande discusses her friendships with people of other ethnicities, including Jewish and African American, as a young child and teenager. She describes the Belair Market, and other area markets and restaurants, as she remembers it as a child. Lo Grande describes her parents marriage and her parents family and history in Italy. Her uncle and husband were both involved in the fruit industry, and she describes how her uncle would ripen his fruit to make it ready for sale. She also describes her father’s various jobs when she was a child, and how she and her siblings would help him when they could.
Dates
- 1979 August 23
Creator
- Scarpaci, Vincenza (Interviewer, Person)
Conditions Governing Access
The collection is open for research use.
Biographical / Historical
Vincenzina Buscemi Lo Grande was born in Baltimore in 1911. Her mother, Maria Buccheri, was born in Palermo in 1892; her father, Carmelo Buscemi, was born in Calaseibette, in 1883. Lo Grande attended Schools #73 and #93. She began working at the Muskin Shoe Factory as a teenager, and later worked at the Borden Ice Cream factory and the Hecht Company. Her husband, Dominic J. Lo Grande, had a fruit stall in the Belair Market.
Extent
60 Minutes
Language of Materials
From the Collection: English
Existence and Location of Originals
Original format: 2 compact cassettes
Physical Description
Biography form, interview notes, & tape index.
Scope and Contents
The Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project Oral History Collection contains paper records and audiocassette recordings from 1978 through 1980. The paper records are composed of the files kept on each narrator (the person being interviewed) and the administrative needs of the project. Narrator records contain biography forms, interview notes, and tape indexes for approximately 212 narrators. The interview notes briefly describe the circumstance surrounding the interview(s) session. The tape index includes the name of the narrator, the name of interviewer, the number of tapes, the tape(s) length, and the primary subjects covered. Seventy-nine of the records include transcripts. Transcript length ranges from 8 to 65 pages. Some are single-spaced; others are doubled-spaced. The interviews range from twenty-five minutes to three hours in length. One file, #183, and its accompanying cassette(s) were removed from the collection.
Thirty-two interviewers participated in the project. Typically, the interviews were one-on-one sessions between interviewer and narrator; however, single interviewer and double-narrator situations occurred, as did three group “nostalgia” sessions. Most interviews were prefaced by unrecorded, pre-interview sessions that occurred days before the recorded interview.
Each narrator abstract includes the following information when available: the BNHP interview number; the name of the interviewer; the date of the interview; the place of the interview; the length of the interview; the number of tapes used; the length of the transcript; and the file contents, such as subject index, interview notes, and biography form. The abstracts follow the numerical order of the interview number. However, interview numbers are not consecutive, but site specific. That is to say, any omitted number within a site can be found in another site.
When controversial or outdated terms, especially those referring to race and ethnicity, are mentioned in the abstract, the politically-correct term is used and the term or terms used by the narrator has been placed in parenthetical (“ ”) quotation marks. Specific terms from the interviews and textual uncertainties are often placed in parentheses alone ( ). Maiden names of female narrators are placed in brackets [ ].
Creator
- Scarpaci, Vincenza (Interviewer, Person)
Repository Details
Part of the H. Furlong Baldwin Library Repository
H. Furlong Baldwin Library
Maryland Center for History and Culture
610 Park Avenue
Baltimore MD 21201 United States
4106853750
specialcollections@mdhistory.org