GAIL WHITE A riveting World War II memory from an Italian-American

Millie (Sferra) Trocchio grew up in Campbell in the 1930s. A first-generation Italian-American, Millie remembers many of her neighbors adjusting to life in America as well.
"Ninety percent of us were the first generation to be born in this country," she says of her high school classmates.
The neighborhood was filled with people of every nationality. "There were Italians, Polish, Croatian, Slovakian," Millie recalls.
"My father would not allow us to speak Italian," she says, remembering the strong beliefs of her father, Andrew Sferra. "He said we were in America and we would speak the language."
Andrew Sferra was also a great believer in education.
"He subscribed to National Geographic," she says, laughing as she thinks about the magazine. "I don't know why he subscribed to it, but we all read it."
He dreamed of his children -- a son and five daughters -- going to college.
"They used to make fun of him," Millie says of many of the men at her father's work. "They thought he was crazy to want his daughters to go to college."
War changes things
Dreams of college were put on hold when Millie graduated from high school in 1943. The country was in the midst of World War II.
"Those were scary times," Millie says while shaking her head, the memories swirling through her mind: rations of every kind, bomb scares, classmates going off to war.
"Oh, when we look through our yearbook, so many of them died in the war," she says sadly.
While the young men she knew were heading off to war, Millie was determined to help the war effort as well.
"We wanted to work in the plants, but we were only 17," Millie recalls the dilemma she and one of her friends encountered. "We forged our baptismal records and made ourselves a year older."
Millie had been delivered by a midwife.
"My baptismal paper was the only official paper of birth I had. We shouldn't have done that," she says sheepishly, yet admits if she had it to do over again, she would probably make the same choice. "We all had that feeling in us -- we wanted to help."
'Rosie' career woman
With her altered record, Millie was hired by Youngstown Sheet and Tube and became one of the millions of women who went to work during the war, affectionately referred to as "Rosie the Riveters."
"At first, I worked grinding down bombshells," Millie recalls. "If there was a rough spot on the shell, we would grind it down. It was very hard work."
Later, Millie was trained to run an overhead crane.
"Someone would hook on the big bombshells," she said, "and I would load them onto the boxcars on the train. They went directly to the Ravenna Arsenal and were filled with explosives. I used to wonder where those big bombs were going."
She pauses, lost in her thoughts for a moment.
"It is as vivid as can be, but it was so long ago. I can still smell the heat from the furnaces."
New hope after the war
When the war was over, Millie had saved enough money to pay for her first year of tuition at Youngstown College.
After her first year, she married a young man from her Campbell neighborhood, Enraldo "Paul" Trocchio.
"I saw him in that Navy uniform," she says of her husband of 55 years. "What could I do?"
It was 20 years before Millie returned to college.
"He lived long enough to see me go back to college," Millie says of her father.
In fact, Andrew Sferra lived to see all his daughters go to college. Three became teachers, one a nurse and another a secretary.
Today, we don't think twice about women in the work force and going to college.
Yet, only two generations ago, the idea of "Rosie" having a career was held in the dreams of "crazy," loving fathers.
gwhite@vindy.com