Word: di
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Pots of Pasta. Like the Jeep, Libbey-Owens-Ford glass and Toledo Scales, Mike Di Salle is a made-in-Toledo product. He was born in a tenement in Manhattan's Little Italy, but when he was three his parents, Anthony and Assunda, moved to Toledo. In those days, the Di Salle family (expanded by three more sons and three daughters after Mike) lived the skimpy life of a factory worker's family. Papa Di Salle made wine in the cellar, fixed the kids' shoes and cut their hair; mama perspired over steaming washtub-size pots...
From the time he was 14, Di Salle worked summertime in factories. With help from his father ("I still don't know how that man did it"), he went to Georgetown University for two years as an undergraduate and three in the law school. One day in his third year, looking for a place to live, he called at a house with a room for rent and was greeted by the landlady's daughter. He rented the room and, 15 months later, married the daughter-Memphis-born Myrtle England. From papa Di Salle came a curt pronouncement...
...result of that ultimatum was the Lightning Messenger Service-"Quick as a Flash." With a rickety model T, 5,000 blotters printed on credit and a borrowed telephone, Di Salle soon worked up a brisk business to support his wife and still keep on at law school. Di Salle finished law school (at 23), but had a dispute with the dean. "It was all a question of degree," says Mike. "I didn't get it." (Now that he has come up in the world and the law school has a new dean, Di Salle will soon get a retroactive...
...Politeesh. It was the bottom of the Depression, and to make matters worse, father Di Salle had lost his job. To keep the family in spaghetti and tomato paste, Tony Di Salle started a small metal-plating business in the garage. Surprisingly, it prospered (and today grosses over $1,000,000 a year). Mike himself progressed more fitfully than the backyard business. Neither commerce nor the law satisfied him. "Some kids like to be cop," Mike's father once explained, "some kids like to be fireman. But Mike-he wants to be the big politeesh...
...that job, Di Salle came all the way out of the cocoon. He polished up the old idea of a labor peace committee, called it the Toledo Citizens' Labor-Management Committee, and made it an outfit which piloted industrial Toledo through the reconversion period with a minimum of strikes-and also began to make Mike Di Salle's name known throughout the state and in many parts of the U.S. On at least one occasion, the vice mayor showed he had courage enough to sacrifice votes to principle. He thought Toledo needed a city income tax to pull...