Sorgi, Mary, 1993 June 11, Milwaukee, Wisconsin:
Recorded interview and transcript available online.: Mary (Machi) Sorgi was born on March 5, 1911 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was one of Seven children born to her parents, who were immigrants from Sicily. In Milwaukee, her family lived in the large Italian neighborhood which was generally identified simply as the Third Ward, just south of Milwaukee's downtown area. The area was broken up, in part, to clear space for the growing interstate highway system. Mrs. Sorgi attended public schools in the area, and she was graduated in 1930 from Lincoln High School. Following school she had several jobs, and she was married in 1936. Her husband was a policeman and they had one daughter, Laurina, in 1938. Following the birth of her daughter, Mrs. Sorgi experienced bouts with depression and nervous breakdown and, in response, she decided to find employment. She went to work for Gimbels department store in Milwaukee, starting as a seasonal employee, and rising to become a head buyer, not only for the Milwaukee store, but for many of the Gimbels stores around the Midwest and the country. At the time of the war, she was already working as a buyer and had to take frequent trips to New York on business during the course of the war. After the war, she continued to work for Gimbels as a buyer until she retired in the early 1970s. Today, she runs the gift shop at the Italian Community Center in Milwaukee, which is located in the third ward neighborhood in which she was brought up. She lives in Bayside, Wisconsin.
: Mrs. Sorgi speak of many issues of interest in regard to wartime life in Milwaukee. What is most interesting about her interview is that on some level, her life was not wholly disrupted, and she reflects on the war as something that affected her work more than as an even which shook the world. Her memory of Pearl Harbor surround the fact that when she heard the news she was in the middle of a buying trip and was, in fact, meeting with a supplier on the Sunday in question. She talks about how it was often difficult to get a decent hotel room in New York during the war when she would have to go there on buying trips. She also discusses the change in what she would buy for the store, which reflected what items were in demand during the war years, or which items they knew that they could sell. The only member of her family who was in the war was her brother-in-law, and that did not seem to impact her in the way that a closer relative at war might have. She also speaks at length about the Italian community in Milwaukee, both at the time of the war, and how it has changed in the fifty years since the conclusion of the war. As someone who was, and is, very involved in the neighborhood, she is in an ideal position to comment on the evolution that has taken place amongst Italians in Milwaukee. Other topics that she discusses include: the effects of rationing and the black market on her community and her family, the limited role of the church in her life at the time of the war, and the legacy of the war in her life and the lives of those around her.
