Contents
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Excerpt
Chapter 1
People who are truly successful, in just about any
enterprise you can name, have a way of standing out
from the crowd. They’re risk takers, they’re forward
thinkers, and they’re showmen. They get good ideas,
and they romance them. They peddle something different
in a different way.
I was lucky in some ways. I was born different—
way out of the mainstream in a little three-room
house on the edge of a mine pit in Aurora, Minnesota.
Disadvantaged? You bet.
My father, Ettore Paolucci, had worked in the sulphur
mines of northeastern Italy. When the sulphur
ran out, he came to northeastern Minnesota in 1912,
recruited by the iron mining companies who sought
hard-working miners. The work was in underground
mines, some half-mile or more down, where it was
deep and dangerous.
My mother Michelina followed a couple of years
later and they married in America.
A whole colony came from my parents’ hometown
of Bellisio Solfare (Beautiful Sulphur) near the
Adriatic Sea.
Being a little sentimental, much later I bought
(and still own) the little hut in Bellisio Solfare where
my mother was raised. She lived there with a sister,
two brothers, and her father and mother . . . six occupants
in a twenty-by-twenty foot room . . . no
running water, no toilet.
In the basement lived a donkey that was brought
upstairs on cold winter nights. His body heat helped
keep the little room warm. But mostly he stayed in the
basement and watched my grandfather, called Nonno,
make wine. My mother also watched, from time to time,
learning a trade that she put to use later on, in America.
In Minnesota, our family—Ettore and Michelina,
my sister Elizabeth and me—wasn’t quite that bad
off, but close to it. My father worked mostly in the
mines, but at one point he got a “good” job ($5 a day)
as janitor at the high school. But he lost that job
when a new city administration came in and passed
the patronage to their own people.
We moved from Aurora to Hibbing, then to other
houses when work ran out or the iron company
claimed the property to expand the mines. We moved
from place to place, each house more cockroachinfested
than the last.
Living like that sure didn’t seem lucky at the
time, but looking back, maybe it wasn’t all bad. It
started a fire in my gut that’s never been extinguished,
and that wouldn’t be there if I’d been born
in some comfortable middle-class household.
Years later, when I started Chun King and became
known as the poor Italian-American from the Minnesota
melting pot who got rich making Chinese food
in the shadow of the iron dumps—that was different.
The publicity alone was priceless.
But no kid wants to be a complete outsider. At
a very early age, I decided to try to be more like the
others—and accidentally came up with my first
trademark.
How well I remember that Saturday afternoon
when I was seven and my sister Elizabeth was ten.
The two of us were fooling around with paper and
pencil on the floor. While we spoke Italian at home,
we both liked English and were good at spelling. We
talked about becoming writers someday.
Liz used phonetics to spell out my name, Luigino,
which worked out to be J-E-N-O. I tried writing that
out in the bold cursive she taught me, adding a big
flourish to the first letter.
Repeating over and over again my new name
with its distinctive spelling, I made a vow that “Jeno”
would show the world that the Paolucci’s were better
than the life they were forced to live. “Jeno” would
find a way out of this mess.
At the same time, I decided to change the spelling
of my last name from Paolucci to Paulucci. I thought
that would make it a little more American, make me
more accepted and liked by others who looked at my
family as “Dirty Dagos.”
How wrong I was. It takes more than a change
of name to end bias, discrimination, and ridicule, as
I found out.
