The current economic downturn is reminiscent of the Great Depression. Both marched lock step into economic pea-soupers beside punctured housing markets. As in the 1930s, until the current housing market stabilizes ”“ another two years ”“ there”™s not a lot anyone can do to change things.
If this analysis came from an economist, it likely would have roots in the latest algorithms and just as likely have roots in the gauzy realm of “plus or minus 5 percent.” But in this case, the economics are grounded in the life experience of Scarsdale resident Eugene Rogliano. Post-crash in 1929, he lost five businesses in a single day, the result of losing $50,000 to a pre-FDIC-insured bank vault in Crestwood. He still works today at 102, giving him the sort of epochal bona fides not found on too many resumes.
“The big reason we are in a situation like the Great Depression is the housing,” he says, seated in the Edgewood Road home he has shared since 1945 with Helen, his wife of 67 years. “We are in the same condition now as we were in then. The price has become secondary to the fact there are not jobs.
“To end the Great Depression, of course, there was the war effort. Today, we have a war, but the war effort is not reflected in the general economy. We”™ll have to wait for housing to come back.”
When he was 11 years old in 1918, Rogliano went to work. He stuffed 500 pounds of Italian sausage into casings per week for the family grocery store in Tuckahoe. Today, he still recalls his sausage-stuffing technique and demonstrates it in his kitchen: using his right thumb to pack the sausages while playing out the casing with his left hand. The prevailing wage was of little interest. “Pay? You gotta be kiddin”™ me. There was no pay.”
So, “When I was 12 I told my father I didn”™t want to make sausage anymore. He said, ”˜Sonny boy, if you learn a trade, you can always put it aside and you can always come back to it.”™”
Since then, Rogliano has owned and run a number of businesses and seen more business cycles than could fit in a textbook. He likens the current downturn ”“ he calls it a depression ”“ to the Great Depression, which he knew first-hand as a crushing foe of business.
In 1928, his father staked him $100 and told him it was time to get out of the family”™s Tuckahoe house. (No bad blood; the two remained close until Antonio Rogliano, born in 1869 in Calabria, Italy, died in 1934.) Rogliano got a bank loan and bought three gas stations and two repair garages ”“ “I always loved mechanical things” ”“ between Bronxville and Mamaroneck. On a Friday late in 1929, he made a $50,000 deposit of business receipts in Crestwood National Bank. By Monday morning, the bank had failed. The money and the businesses were lost in an instant.
Antonio Rogliano”™s advice about learning a trade paid off. Now unemployed, the one-time sausage stuffer landed a job as a butcher paying $9 per week on North Avenue in New Rochelle. He quickly landed a better job ”“ $12 per week ”“ as a butcher in a Chester Heights grocery and finally he managed a Gristedes for $35 per week at the corner of Popham and Garth roads in Scarsdale, where today there is a 7-11.
Until 10 years ago, Rogliano ran a kosher slaughterhouse in Sioux City, Iowa, that shipped a million pounds of meat per week to all corners of the U.S.
Today, says Rogliano, “I still keep my finger in the mix. I work mostly by phone.” He and son Bruce Rogliano (mainly Bruce these days) run Eugene Rogliano & Son in Bronxville, a restaurant supply business.
Rogliano is a living link to the county”™s demographic makeup. The Tuckahoe of his youth was peopled by stonecutters of Italian stock. But when Bronxville”™s Gramatan Hotel (razed except for the ground-level stores and the elevator tower in 1972) and its 300 rooms needed workers early in the 20th century, the owner brought African-Americans north from South Carolina; they lived in Tuckahoe, including in rooms above the Rogliano grocery store. He said many blacks in the Tuckahoe area today can trace their presence to the Gramatan-South Carolina job link. The Italians, aided by Antonio Rogliano, got about the business of building the village”™s Church of the Assumption, dedicated in 1912.
Rogliano offers no quick fix for the current downturn, though he knows it will turn around. “Maybe we should allow installment payments for taxes,” he says. “There are problems with this, of course: If you ain”™t got it now, you probably ain”™t going to have it in six months. But they should probably at least be able to try. You hate to see people lose their houses. Houses are the key to recovery.”
