by Cookie Curci

Our Santa Clara Valley is known the world over as Silicon Valley, where high-tech companies spring up overnight and blossom and grow to unbelievable heights.

But long before the computer companies began to grow, the Santa Clara Valley was known for something else--fruit. Thousands of acres of fruit trees flourished and the valley was the nation's leading grower of prunes, apricots, walnuts and cherries. And it was in the shade of these trees that my own family flourished.

My grandmother Maria Carmela came to this area from the town of Tricarico, Italy. The daughter of a tight-knit Italian family, she and her siblings came to America after her parents had both died of influenza. Rather than face life in the town orphanage, the children pooled their money and boarded a ship for America. Maria Carmela dreamed of starting her own family, having her own children to love and care for in the same way that she had felt loved. Her dreams of the family she would soon start kept her going on the long sea voyage from Italy, through the processing center at Ellis Island, and as she traveled by train across her strange new country to California.

Days after arriving on these shores, she stepped off the train at the Southern Pacific depot in San Jose, and into her new life.

A prearranged marriage awaited her. Although she and her intended husband, Antonio Curci, had never before laid eyes on one another, when they finally did meet it was love at first sight. The newlyweds settled into the poorer section of town, in a roomy wood-frame house that struck Maria as a palace. So many wonderful rooms--she and Antonio could fill them with children!

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