That’s my grandfather, Michael Patrick Lavorgna.
Mick or Mickey, as he was called, worked as a union carpenter in Paterson, NJ and he carried that trade with him until he could no longer work, building homes at the NJ shore where my grandparents spent their retirement years.
Our family on the Lavorgna side is from a small village in the Campania region of southern Italy and they moved to Paterson to build a better life. Those original Lavorgnas, cousins, and in laws mostly worked in the mills of Silk City, work that afforded them a home shared between generations. Mick started working before high school which he never attended in order to contribute to the costs of raising a family.
My father, also Michael Patrick Lavorgna who went by Mike, was the first in our family to attend college and he ended up with a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree and moved our family to a suburb adjacent to Paterson soon after I was born. Like most kids I played sports but stopped before my junior year of high school to work 5-6 days a week loading trucks in a furniture warehouse. My intention was to save up to buy a car and have spending money and I worked alongside the union day shift guys on Saturdays, mostly hard working and hard living men from Paterson. The night shift was mostly kids like me.
As I sit here in the Barn on this Labor Day weekend my thoughts wandered back to my grandfather and his father and all of the others whose labor provided us, me, with opportunities they never had like the ability to pursue our dreams. In this regard I have lived a very fortunate life.
Reviewing hifi for a living is a dream come true, albeit an impossible one to have imagined when I was younger because the means to this end did not exist. Yet here we are and I am also fortunate to be part of an industry filled with many people who are passionate about their work. While I wouldn’t say the same about my grandfather’s relationship to his work, I’ve yet to meet anyone who cares more about the quality of their work or the quality of their character.
Mick was fiercely disciplined and his sense of right and wrong was clear cut and unshakable and I sometimes wonder if these qualities are no longer necessary the further we remove labor from income. These qualities may even run counter to certain kinds of “success” and I also have to wonder if that tradeoff is something we’ll celebrate 100+ years from now.
Happy Labor Day.