A Most Fascinating Conversation

I had a fascinating conversation this morning. Well, not so much a conversation, I just listened intently. There was a gentleman in the office we were talking to about trading and purchasing some land from him. After that was all done, we just sat around chatting. The man's name is Roy Ropelato- he's about 75 or so. He was talking about his family, specifically his parents, and holy cow! This man has such an incredible back story.

Roy's father (I think his name was Albano) immigrated from Trento, Italy (it was part of Austria back then) in 1903when he was 12 years old. Al's family in Italy was starving and dirt poor and back then, boys and men would go down to the docks and would be picked to get on a ship and go to America to work as indentured servants. He never saw his parents or Italy again. He had a brother who was born after he left Italy and they never met until he was in his late 80s and Al's children brought his brother over to America. He came to Southwester Wyoming, not speaking or reading or understanding any English. He was set to work of his debt in the old Cumberland 1 & 2 mines (now Kemmerer, Wy). After he worked off his debt, he kept working in the mines until there was an accident that killed a few people. A brake on a car they were riding in failed and went back into the mine and they jumped out of the car but there was no room in the mine, so the men who jumped out were killed. Al laid down in the car and just waited until it stopped. After that, he never went back into the mines. Instead, he decided to work the land. He married a girl, she also came from the same part of Italy and had immigrated to Wyoming. They're not sure when she came through Ellis Island, but with a name and date of birth and about where she came from, I'm sure I could find it for them. They had 7 children- Al's wife died of cancer when Roy, the youngest, was 6 1/2. They homesteaded midway between what is now Kemmerer and Evanston. When Roy was in his late teens, Al remarried. He lived until he was 94 years old.

Roy was raised on the family land- they had to raise everything on their own. He didn't speak English until he went to grade school- Italian was only spoke in the home, even though both his parents had learned English. They were isolated enough that Roy never even went to town until he left home to go to college. Growing up, he and his siblings used to follow around the sheep that were being herded through the area and wait until some died off then they would go and pluck the wool of the dead sheep and put it in a sack for their dad to sell. The family had their own log school that is still on the old farm- the state would send in a teacher to teach the family kids until there were only a couple of kids left at home. Roy left home to come to Utah State in the early 50s, when classes were held in quonset huts on the quad. After a couple of years, he left and joined the Army and then got out and worked construction for a while until he bought his first cow. He's 75 years old and still gets up and milks every morning. His family owns several hundred acres in the Northern Utah/SW Wyoming areas. He says he can't speak Italian very well any more, but when others are talking, he can understand 99% of what they are saying.

If I knew the family better, I would try to talk them into telling me stories and letting me write a family history. It is one of the neatest things I have heard in a really long time.