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If you had been passing the St. John's Catholic Church in the steel town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, one day in the spring of 1939, you would have seen crowds of people, seven hundred or more of them, going inside. The cars in front of the church would have told you that it was a funeral that had brought such throngs of people there.
"What a very important person it must be to have so many people going to his funeral!" you would have thought. "It must be the mayor, or the president of the largest bank, or a famous explorer, or perhaps the richest man in town."
If you were curious enough, you might have asked someone, "Whose funeral?"
"Mario Ezzo's," the answer would have been.
"But who is Mario Ezzo?" you might well have asked.
The answer would have surprised you. "He's the shabby little old man who was always cleaning the streets."
After such a strange answer, you would have made a business of finding out why so many people were honoring a shabby old street cleaner. And this is what you would have learned.
Seven years before, Mario Ezzo left Italy to make his home in America. This country was good to him, and he learned to love it. He still loved Italy, but there was room in his loyal old heart for the love of two countries. He was glad of work to do, even though his wages were so small that he could not lay aside much money for the time when there might be no way for him to earn, for the time when his feet would be less quick and his arms less strong.
The time finally came when no one seemed to need his help. He went from place to place, looking for work, but there were enough younger men to do all the work for which there was money to be paid. Finally, there was nothing for him to do but to tell the men who gave out relief money that he, Mario Ezzo, could find no way to earn. When the relief agents looked at the little old man, they did not hesitate to put him on the relief rolls. He was so shabby and so wizened that they were sure he must be very poor. They wondered why he had not come to them sooner.
"Here are three dollars and sixty cents," said the relief agent. "Come each week and you will receive the same amount."
Mario thanked him and went away.
Now so far this story is just like the story of hundreds and thousands of other people. But here comes the part that is different. Some men would have grumbled because three dollars and sixty cents a week is such a wee amount of money. They would have wondered how the government expected them to live on so little. They would have been sure that never again would they do any harder work than bringing a loaf of bread home from the bakery.
That was not Mario's way. When he thanked the relief agent, he really meant that he was grateful. When people are really grateful, they think of some way to show it. The first thing that Mario did when he left the relief office was to get a huge stiff brush. Then he went out into the dirtiest street he could find and began to sweep. He swept and he swept. Six days of the week and eight hours of the day, Mario Ezzo could be found sweeping the streets of Aliquippa. Each day he worked, rain or shine, and was seen at different times going beyond the town limits to repair sewers and dig surface water drains. He whistled as he worked, for he was a happy man. Why should he not be? He had work to do for others.
"Why do you work so hard?" people would ask him. "You get your relief money without working. Why bother to work?"
And Mario would stop whistling long enough to give an answer in English that was hard to understand. Italian was so much easier for him to speak. "I think this is a wonderful country," he would say. "I decide I will be an honest man with this country.
They give me money to live. So I keep this town clean like table. It makes my bread taste sweeter. I am a man because I work." Then Mario Ezzo would bend to his work again, sweeping and sweeping as he whistled old Italian melodies.
This was the little old streetcleaner whose funeral was packing the church. The people of Aliquippa, most of them steelworkers, later erected a monument for this man who worked for others so humbly, yet so usefully. The inscription on the stone reads, "Work makes me feel good inside. My bread it tastes sweet."