Pastore, Mary (Garofalo), 1979 August 21
Abstract
Interview topics include her parent’s employment history and their immigration, the prevalence of home work for neighborhood women, her father’s grocery business, her childhood friends, the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood, expectation of sons and daughters, and area schools and markets. She also discusses her grandfather’s retirement, her sister’s wedding, religious activities and customs, and her children’s employment and families. Pastore describes many area landmarks and neighborhood boundaries.
Dates
- 1979 August 21
Creator
- Scarpaci, Vincenza (Interviewer, Person)
Conditions Governing Access
The collection is open for research use.
Biographical / Historical
Mary Pastore was born in Baltimore in 1907. Both of her parents, Teresi and Vincent Garofalo, were born in Palermo, Italy. Pastore’s father was a stonecutter and he did a sculpture outside of the city hall in Palermo. Pastore attended St. Leo’s School and School #43. She began working at the Coca Cola Building at age 12, and later helped in her family’s store. She married Frank Pastore in 1920.
Extent
120 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, & transcript: 74 pages
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