Tom Giugni

Interviewee: Thomas Gregory GiugniSHHS Oral history project Tom Giuni

Interviewers: Dagfinnr Chang-Wick, Hector Rodriguez-Rodriguez

May 9, 2024

Hector Rodriguez-Rodriguez: This is Hector Rodriguez-Rodriguez acquainted with Dagfinnr Chang-Wick. I am pleased to interview our interviewee Thomas Gregory Giugni here at St.

Helena High School in Mr. Blasingame’s class. The day is March 9, 2024, at 3:45pm. Mr. Giugni, can you please tell us–what was your time like here in St. Helena?

Thomas Giugni: So, as I have described, I moved to St. Helena when I was one year old, so that would be 1954. My dad had been in the Navy, and he returned home to St. Helena. We lived at first in Oakville where my grandparents lived and my grandfather ran the Oakville Grocery. And we were there until probably 1959 or 1960, and my parents bought their first home on Hudson Street in St. Helena, and we moved here.

I remember I was in elementary school, maybe in kindergarten, when we moved here.

And we had some close family friends who were my parents' friends from high school here at St. Helena High School. And so we would socialize with them, and socialize with the neighbors. I have some recollection of first, second, and third grade here. I have more recollection of doing fun things with my friends here or doing vacationing with my friends than necessarily school. I had no negative memories at school, but I couldn't even tell you my teacher's names at this point in time from St. Helena. But it was enjoyable.

Dad was a teacher and then a principal here at St. Helena High School

He knew a lot of people. We've been around a long time, my mom had been around a long time. So we had a lot of friends, again from their high school. My grandmother on my mother's side lived here in town. And so I remember visiting her at her small apartment somewhere downtown off of Spring Street. Of course, my grandparents were still in Oakville, so we would frequently go down to Oakville. My dad had one sister, Elsie Jane, and we would spend time with them. At some point, she and her husband, Wayne, moved into Oakville after we left Oakville. My great grandmother on my dad's side, she lived in Oakville, too. So I remember spending a lot of time in Oakville and time here and probably what I remember most about my time; dad was the baseball coach for St. Helena High School.

I remember the team coming over to the house a lot.

And Dad wouldn't call it socializing, but they come to the house and hang out for whatever reason to get away from their parents or whatever. So I remember that. Dad played softball at Carpy field, and I had an uncle who lived right across the street on Adams Street. So we would sit on my uncle's porch and watch softball. I remember when my dad was very happy to turn thirty because then he could join the old man’s softball league. And I think he did better at thirty in the old man league than whatever he played in before, I don't remember. But those are kind of the memories that I have. I remember when we went swimming at the Carpy’s, [they] had a swimming pool at their private home. So we would go to the Carpy’s and swim. Obviously St. Helena High School didn't have a pool then, it was long before this pool was built.

I remember driving through the ttunnel of trees that I noticed was gone now, just north of Beringer’s and towards what is now the CIA, but then it was the Christian Brothers Winery. So those are the prominent memories that I have.

HR: Alright, could you tell us a little bit more about your uncle?

TG: I have several uncles. Are you asking specifically Uncle Henry or Uncle Bill, both who are here in town, or I can talk about both.

HR: You can talk about both.

TG: Okay, so Henry was the oldest of that generation of Giugni’s. And he was born, I believe, in 1884 here in St. Helena, and he was a small businessman.

And eventually he was the one who owned the house on Adams Street. And Henry married a woman first name of Margaret, I don't know her maiden name, I'm sure it's in my family tree. In the early twentieth century, sometime around 1910/1911, Henry went into business with his brother Bill, who was also here in town. I don't know which brother Bill was, but they opened Giugni’s grocery on Main Street. And they ran that and, of course, that now is Giugni’s Delicatessen, but it was a general store. At some point, Henry left St. Helena and, after World War I, he ended up in the Philippines. And I think he worked for the governor of the Philippines, and he was there [for] several years. He came back before the start of World War II and then retired, so to speak, here in St. Helena. I think by then, if he was born 1884 by 1944, he'd be sixty. So somewhere around then he retired and then lived his life here in St. Helena.

The other Uncle, Bill, was the third [sibling]. He stayed here in town.

He went into business with Henry, opened the general store, and then he kept the general store on Main Street, and ran it as a general store. At some point, his son, Bill, or Billy, took it over and converted it into a delicatessen. But at one point, Bill owned the general store in St. Helena, his son Billy ran the general store in Rutherford, but the building's gone now, and my grandfather owned the general store in Oakville, and that building is still there. And I think that Henry helped everybody financially to purchase those buildings or businesses. And then another uncle was Alfred. I don't know a lot about Alfred, except in World War I, he worked at Mare Island. And shortly after World War I, he moved to Hawaii to work at Pearl Harbor. He married in Hawaii and had two sons. At some point in his life, he remarried again and then he ended up staying and dying in Hawaii, in a home on the Big Island.

And then there was another brother, Frank, and Frank played semi-pro baseball

At that time, there were a lot of minor league teams up and down the West Coast. And Frank played in different teams. I don't know all the teams but at some point he changed his last name to Juney, J-U-N-E-Y, because he got tired of the announcers mispronouncing his name. So there's a whole lineage of Juney’s with J-U-N-E-Y in California. Frank ended up buying property in Willows, California, up near Chico, and raised rice, and then, ultimately, his son Norman took over that farm and Frank retired in Ben Lomond or somewhere down around Santa Cruz. And then there was a sister, Edith. Edith married a man [by the] last name of Spencer. And she was a teacher here in St. Helena. In retirement, she substituted at St. Helena High School. There is a little urban legend that at one point, she failed Mike Thompson from progressing from a grade [in] school so [that’s] something that maybe you want to check, but Congressman Mike Thompson, supposedly, one year my aunt failed him. So I have not verified that...

TG: Right! But so Edith stayed here and substitute taught. She supposedly was a mean teacher.

I don't know, I didn't have her. And then my grandfather was the youngest. And there was another sibling who died young and I obviously don't know their name. But all my uncles and aunts at that level were active in sports. So if you looked into the St. Helena High School sports in different years, you can find that my grandfather, who was the youngest, played baseball and basketball, and I think he didn't graduate from St. Helena High until he was twenty or twenty one years old. And then there were no limitations on how old you can [be and] play sports. So he was still playing sports with sixteen and seventeen year olds, and doing pretty well [laughs]

HR: Right. What were some members of your family that you were closest with growing up?

And she went by Sis, she was Auntie Sis

TG: So my dad's sister, Elsie Jane, who married Wayne Malcolm, we were real close to her. It was just Dad and Elsie Jane. We called her Sis because she was the sister. And so we were close to Sis and Wayne, and they had one daughter, Suzi, who is a few years younger than me, and lives now up in Deer Park. So we were close to them. And then my mom's family was Colwell. As I said earlier, my grandmother lived here in town, but my mom was the baby of the family. And all of her sisters and brothers were much older, so I was never real close to them. Although mom was good at getting the family together. So I would see them, and they were spread all throughout California.

One of them stayed here in town, Jewell, who was twenty years older than Mom and married Bill Robertson. And they lived on Hudson Street too, they lived two houses down from us. So I remember interacting with Jewell and Bill and their kids, and they went to St. Helena High School; I have a cousin in Vallejo now, Glenda Robertson, [but] I don't know what year she graduated from St. Helena High School. Sometimes when I see things in the news about St. Helena High School, I'll ask her because she knows more about it than I do. So you know, those are really my memories.

Probably my favorite memories were after we left here and moved to Santa Barbara County to come up for two weeks in the summer to stay with my grandparents in Oakville.

The Oakville Grocery when it was a general store

It was very different from what it is now. Oakville grocery was a general store. It was not whatever it is now. It was more of a mercantile. The house there in Oakville, that's now the 1886 [1881] Museum or whatever it is, that's where my grandparents lived, it was a home. And I remember still staying there in one of the bedrooms upstairs and those were a lot of fun times. My parents were good friends with the Abruzzinis and Jack Abruzzini leased property behind us. I remember he'd come down to plow it--it was old vineyards. And he’d come down to plow and sometimes he'd give me a ride on the tractor for four or five hours of the time, and then give me back to my mom, very dirty.

TG: So those are some of my memories. As I said before, a lot of my memories had to do with going on vacation with people. We’d go up to Mendocino and go to the ocean, and not so much just vacation here.

HR: Right… How did you meet your wife? Gretchen?

We met on a blind date on a sailboat in San Francisco Bay

TG: On a blind date! [Laughter] At the time, I was at Walnut Creek Police Department, and Gretchen was with Trans International Airlines, which is an airline that's gone now. My training officer and her boss were boyfriend and girlfriend, and they decided to introduce us because those two introduced us, and we've stayed together for a long time. That was in probably 1980 that we met.

HR: Did your father ever share any stories with you about what it was like for him growing up in the valley?

TG: He did, and I wish I had listened more. Dad liked to drive around. We would go on rides through town or through the valley, and he would point out houses and say: “So-and-so lived there, and so-and-so lived there,” and I never paid close attention. He would talk about graduating from high school. Some of his buddies in high school included Dan Gruppo, who went by Sonny Grouppo, [and they] graduated same class; Virgil Parodi, who was in the class of ‘49.

He would talk about them; three of them joined the Navy together in either 1950 or 1951 to avoid the draft going into Korea, except for Jursch — and I wish I could pronounce his last name correctly —who decided he'd just get drafted.

You know, in high school, if you look back at the old high school yearbooks from that time, everybody had a nickname.

I have their yearbooks now, and I have some of the newsletters. They're gossipy newsletters about how Tommy Giugni was dating Lennis Colwell. And it was kind of fun to read. So those were his favorite stories. I don't remember him talking about specifically growing up. He had lived here and then his parents moved to Oakland before World War II.

My grandfather at the time was driving trucks for Chevron oil, and they moved to Oakland. They were in Oakland for six or eight years, I'm not sure. During World War II, they moved back and bought the Oakville Grocery. An interesting thing: when my grandparents moved to Oakland, they enrolled Dad in a Catholic school.

So it was just interesting for historical purposes to know what was going on in the world at that time

I've seen the enrollment papers, and at the time, my grandmother was of German descent — this was in, probably, 1936 or ‘37 — and my grandfather was of Italian descent, so they said that on their registration papers, but three years later, about 1941, they enrolled my Aunt Sis in the same school, and then they were both of American descent. So they did not want to claim their German and Italian ancestry around the breakout of World War II.

Dad didn't tell me much about Oakland, [but] I've gone and found things in Oakland. At first they lived in Oakville when they moved back and he would drive back and forth to high school. Mom was living in St. Helena, but they'd known each other since grade school, so they stayed connected. St. Helena was a little town, and you met friends in grade school and you stayed friends. I don't remember much about grade school, but I have a few friends from grade school that we're still friends now.

HR: I believe that your father served in the Navy, is that right?

TG: Yes.

HR: Do you know anything about that? Or did he have any stories about that he shared?

TG: As I said, Dad enlisted in the Navy near the outset of the Korean War.

After going through training in…[Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, IL]. It is not San Diego [humor]. He was assigned to aircraft carriers, but he was a personnel enlisted man so his job was really doing record keeping. Dad was a very fast typer. He claimed that at some point on a manual typewriter, he could type one hundred words a minute. I never saw that, but that's what he claimed. So he talked about that, and he talked about visiting Casablanca, about visiting Gibraltar.

Although sometimes his stories were more about drunken visits, young men getting off the ship and going and having a good time. But he knew Mom from high school, and he started focusing more on Mom. At one point, he wanted to get into West Point. He was going through that process, but at some point Mom became more important, and you could not be married and be at West Point. So he decided he would not do that. When Dad was still in Norfolk, Virginia, Mom and Dad got married

They were married in the Catholic Church in Rutherford. And then Mom went with Dad to Norfolk. And then from Norfolk Dad was stationed in Corpus Christi, Texas, which is where I was born. But as soon as he finished his enlistment commitment, which was probably three years and nine months, he came home.

He had started college at St. Mary's College after graduating high school, so he was two years into St. Mary's when he enlisted. So then he went back to St.

Mary’s, got his degree in history or I don't know what, and then came here and started teaching as a substitute teacher, and my aunt, Edith, who I said was the mean aunt, she helped get him a job here, at St. Helena High School, as a substitute teacher.

HR: Wow. He visited the entire world I guess.

TG: Right, he did, yes. At least on the European theater. I think it's interesting, it was the Korean War, he was never in the Pacific Theater. So he was not in Korea. He served during the Korean War, but he was in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. So it was a much safer place to be. But he was in an old, I call it an aircraft carrier, but it was one of the merchant marine ships that the Navy converted from World War II, so they just put a flat top on it so it could land small planes. I'm sure it was very rough in the ocean… We think of aircraft carriers now, nothing like that [slight hand movement]. It was a much smaller ship.

HR: Could you tell us about your children, William and Tyler?

TG: Sure. So both boys were born in Walnut Creek, which is where we happened to be living, and I was working at Walnut Creek PD. We moved to Fairfield when William was I think in first grade, so it would have been about around ‘86 or ‘87. Both boys went through school in Fairfield. William graduated from Fairfield high, which is my alma mater, and Tyler, who's the younger [one], graduated from Rodriguez High School, which was the newer high school then. So Tyler is now thirty eight. And William is forty one. William is a captain with CalFire. And Tyler is a union carpenter. They both own homes, William’s in Fairfield, Tyler is in Vacaville.

And William has a five and a half year old son, our only grandchild.

HR: You told us that you lived on Hudson Avenue at one point, right?

TG: Correct. Yes.

HR: So how was that neighborhood like?

TG: Well, at the time, the houses were brand new. They're small houses. But as a kid, [age] five, six, seven, it was exciting. Although I do remember they were building some of the homes west of Hudson. And I remember hanging with one of my friends, and I won't give a name because I'm not sure of the name, and we decided we would take the keys out of a dump truck. So we took the keys out of the dump truck and one of the construction workers saw us and chased us down, I think back to his home, where we thought we were hiding until he found us to get the keys back to the dump truck. We didn't try to drive it. I don't know what we were thinking. I was six or seven. Who knows. But at some point I had to tell Mom, Dad, but I'm sure that they weren't happy. I don't remember. I remember doing the act. I don't remember the consequences for the act [laughter].

TG: Gotta have some fun! At the time, there weren't nearly the homes there are now. So we’d go down to the creek [Sulphur Springs Creek] that runs dry in the summertime — it's through that, I'll say construction yard or whatever, the gravel pit, we called it a gravel pit [Harold Smith & Sons] — and we’d go down there and when there was water in it, [go] looking for frogs and looking for tadpoles and whatever little boys are looking for at that stage in our life.

When we moved down to Santa Barbara County, we were near a dry riverbed, so I spent time in the riverbed. I like being around water. So whether there was really water or not, I liked being around the water.

HR: Keep yourself entertained-

TG: Yeah

HR: -here in this small town.

TG: Exactly, yes.

HR: And on that note, what was entertainment, like here in St. Helena, you know, or what do you do to entertain yourself.

The movie house, same one that's downtown, was pretty active then, but it was just the single screen.

TG: We got together for birthdays. I don't remember going to movies there. I think more than anything, going and visiting friends and playing with them. One of our friends lived on Vineyard Avenue at the time. There were really no houses behind them. It was just grape vines at that time, like it still is. Another friend lived on Dean York Lane. So we’d go out there, and there weren’t many houses out by where they were. We’d go and visit them, and they had a swimming pool, so we'd go swim in their pool.

We could walk to both those houses. I remember walking around a lot, riding bikes. At that time — although I don't think at six and seven I was out on my own that much — but parents weren't nearly [so] worried about the consequences of the kids being out, running around. As long as you, you know got home or you said where you were going. Obviously no cell phones, can't call and check. But it was just a much safer time. Main Street was still busy, because it was still a state highway and so it still had trucks, but not nearly the traffic it has now.

There were no stoplights on Main Street at that time, it was long before stop lights

But they weren't needed either, traffic wasn’t that heavy. That's… you know, stealing truck keys, chasing tadpoles, riding my bike. There's a ditch [Springs Creek] along Spring Street, it’s still there, still an open ditch, so I remember playing down in the ditch. If you go east through that ditch at some point, there's an apartment complex or something. That's the top of Spring Street a little bit east of Hudson. The ditch goes under the complex and becomes a culvert under there, so I remember going in the culvert, seeing how far we can go into that culvert. It's still there, I don't know if you can get in anymore, but I have not been down in decades. Those are the memories that jumped out to me.

HR: In your questionnaire, you told us that you would see a train running through the valley, could you tell us more about that?

TG: So that was one of my fond memories about coming to Oakville in the summertime.

At night there would always be a train, I'm sure going both directions, coming north and south on the railroad tracks, and it was a freight train. I don’t remember it being very big, but I remember lying in a bedroom at my grandparents’ in Oakville and hearing the train come up here and blowing its whistle.

It was prunes and maybe walnuts and cattle. It was a much, I'll say more diverse agriculture community than it is now.

At the time in Oakville there were some more buildings across the street from the grocery across the highway. At some point I think there was a train stop there too, but the train would come up, blow its whistle, and come up valley somewhere, I don't know where, and then later at night would come back down, probably emptied its freight or picked up its freight or whatever. At that time, so this would be the early to mid ‘60s, grapes were not the predominant crop in the valley. There were just a few wineries, nothing like now. But that’s my memory of the train. I always liked to hear the train whistle, although it was noisy, but it was fun.

HR: Growing up, what changes did you see happen to the city?

TG: Well, I don't remember so many changes while we were here, except, as I said, they were building more homes there, west of Hudson. I don't know the street names now. But there were just a few homes on Hudson, on both sides of Hudson Street. But now there's not a whole bunch, but several dozen more homes west of there. And they're all similar tract style homes. So I remember that change. At the time, the only schools were the old St. Helena Elementary School, RLS was there as a middle school, and St. Helena High School was much smaller than it is now.

You know, obviously, you can look at the buildings and go and guess when they were built. So, you know, those were kind of the changes. I don't remember the businesses there [downtown], but, now there's a lot of boutique businesses and businesses for the tourists, whereas then there were more businesses for the community. You know, I don't remember what grocery store was in town. And it was probably something that was where Sunshine is at now. Safeway was not there then.

You know, the places down on Main Street were businesses that we'd go to.

Obviously, Steve's hardware was there in some form or not. But you know, I walked down through there now and the wine shops and the gift shops, those weren't there then, but a lot of those changed after I left. When we left, it was a sleepy little farm town. It was a great place to be.

HR: So, do you have any fond memories about the Giugni grocery store?

TG: [Chuckles] So, probably my favorite memories are after Billy and Kathy converted it into the delicatessen.

And, you know, if you go in there now you can still see some drawings that are caricatures of them on the walls: the owners have kept those. It wasn't a grocery store anymore, but it was just… Billy and Kathy I thought were fun. I don't know if that's the case, but I remember that.

But, I'm going to kind of transition: in Oakville, when my grandfather had it [the Oakville Grocery], my favorite memory was in the summertime, when we would come up and visit, he would let us go in and pick whatever soda we wanted, and he would pay for the soda. And at the time, I remember there was RC Cola.

So those were my fond memories of the Oakville grocery

And I don't know what RC stood for, but that's what it was on the bottle, RC Cola, and it came in a sixteen ounce bottle. So it was the biggest bottle of cola that I could buy. So I remember that, and he, my grandfather, who we called Papa, he would let us buy ice cream sometimes and candy that he just, you know, he just paid for. That was his thing. And of course, we could walk in the back — we'd be staying with my grandfather in their home, which, as I said, is now the museum there, 1886 or 1887 [1881 Museum]— and you could just walk in the back and walk through the store, and it was, I mean, it was a mercantile, so it had a little bit of everything. It was not the eclectic whatever it is now, the tour store that it is now.

HR: From your questionnaire, it sounded like you were close to the Abruzzinis, the Morgan, Moe and Taplin families. Can you tell us about how you met them and what your relationship with these families was like?

TG: Yep, so the first one is the Abruzzini family. Really, all of them, they went to high school together, except for the Taplins. Ken Taplin is older than Dad. And- so I'm not real sure how Dad knew Ken Taplin, but Jack Abruzzini — who went by Bruno for whatever reason — and Bob Moe and Dan Grouppo — and Dan went by Sonny — and, as I said, Virgil Parodi and all these others, they went to school together. And since it was a small community, they became friends.

And so, when Mom and Dad started having kids, and when we were back here, that’s who they socialized with. And so I would play with the Abruzzinis, their son, who's my age, Bruce Abruzzini, who lives in Oregon now. And I would play with the Morgan kids. Their daughter, Gail, is my age, and she's a realtor here in town. With the Moes, I remember them more when we went up to Mendocino County, Little River, and vacationed with them. At the time, they didn't have kids, and they adopted two girls and one of them is still here in town. And then one of the Ghiringhelli families, and they were just all high school friends that stayed close as we got older. And so because Mom and Dad were close with them, you know, we'd meet their kids, and we became friends, and that's who we hung out with.

They just know the name because of Guigni’s Delicatessen

You know, I don't remember, except the one young man that I stole the truck keys with [laughs], I don't remember the other kids. And it's funny, because sometimes — so, I'm on a Facebook group, you know, I love this town, St. Helena, or whatever the Facebook group is — and there's people there who recognize my name, but I have to go digging to figure out: “So how do I know them?” And a lot of it's just because they knew Dad, or, or whatever the story is, but I have to dig a little bit to figure out how we knew them.

HR: Does your family maintain much contact between its members?

TG: My parents were the glue, and when my parents died, that glue went away.

So, I have three brothers, there's four boys, my family, I'm the oldest. One of them lives just half a mile from me, you know, so I see him as he drives by the house. And we stop and talk once in a while. Once in a long while we get together. One of the brothers is retired and lives in Atascadero, and so maybe I see him once a year. And then the youngest brother is retired and lives in South Carolina. And I probably see him more than my brother in Atascadero, but it's just, we haven't stayed close.

And then my cousin, Suzi, who was Elsie Jane’s daughter — so she's an only child — and we text and email and call once a while and you know, I'll see something on the news: “Hey, tell me what's going on.” But we haven't seen each other for quite a few years, and she's just in Deer Park. So it's not like she's that far away. But no, we haven’t stayed close.

And on my Mom's side, with the Colwells, we're even further apart, I'd say. I'm going to kind of divert a little bit because Mom's family came here during the Dust Bowl from Oklahoma, and ended up in St. Helena in the early ‘30s. And when Mom was two — she was born in Oklahoma — so somewhere in those two years from 1931 to 1933, they came here. And her dad was working at a winery here in town. I have always thought it was Martini Brothers’.

I have a cousin who thought it was another winery. But he [her dad] fell. He was a nightwatchman, and he fell from a ladder and died. And so Mom's mom, Chloe Colwell, raised her and the other kids as a single mom here in St. Helena, making money by probably doing laundry for people and sewing, and she had a big family, so she had to take care of her own kids. So, just, I think the history of the migration from Oklahoma to California is kind of an interesting bit of US history. And so, just, I don't know a lot about her migration, but it's interesting and she — Mom — did a good job of staying in touch with family, including relatives in Oklahoma, but I've never been back there to meet any of them, so…

When Mom died, I called one of them and said, “Hey, Mom's died, just so you know,” or something like that. He said, “Well, I'm getting real old”: I said “I'm not asking you to come out, I'm just… Mom stayed in touch with you, I'm just letting you know. That's all. So, take care.” I never talked to them again. So no, we don't stay very close. Mom and Dad were the glue.

TG: So, I'll add… So, when Dad retired, he came back to St. Helena

This is where he and Mom wanted to retire to. And the family owned a vacant lot on the corner of Adams and Spring Street. And, so, that was my grandfather's lot. So my dad bought his sister out of it, of her half, and then Mom and Dad built their retirement home there. So, they were able to reconnect with a lot of their friends, and you talk about the Bosetis [“Bosseti” is also a possible spelling] and the McDonalds and the— you know, on and on and on and on, besides the Abruzzinis and the Morgans, and, of course, the Moes had— both Bob and Carolyn Moe had died by then. I can't remember all the different long time families that they were reconnected [with]. Dad loved St. Helena, he was very happy.

But if you were to go to the county records, the tract of land on the southeast corner of Adams and Allun Street is labeled as the Henry Giugni property. And there are six lots there. We own none of them now. But there's one old house that's on Allyn Street — it was where my grandfather was raised — and then different members of the family lived in some of those homes, and eventually we sold them off. So that was early. I keep saying my great grandfather was a stonemason. When he came from Italy, that was his skill. He was in the wrong business, he should have been buying vineyards.

TG: But he built stone buildings, stone bridges and stuff. But that's how he made his living.

HR: Your family tree that you provided to us is very thorough. Where did it come from? Did you do your own research?

TG: Yes. And it's all that's all verbal research, you know, talking to cousins, and asking them, “So tell me about your dad,” you know, “What do you know about your grandfather?”

If I look at Alfred Giugni, who went to Hawaii, there's some legend there that he was a heavy drinker, and that he was married here in Napa Valley — he was working at Mare Island — and then maybe he ran from that marriage to Hawaii. So, is that true or not? I don't know. You know, maybe his kids, his grandkids could tell me.

I told you a little bit about Frank Giugni, who played baseball. There's a legend about Frank that he made his name in baseball by striking out Ty Cobb, in some demonstration game. In fact, there's newspaper articles about it. Supposedly, Frank had some nasty, dirty pitches, things that are illegal now that he was very proficient at then, whether it was a spit ball, or who knows. You know, this was in the 1920s, when baseball was very different than it is now.

So, I’ve digressed from your question, and I forget exactly what it was, so I'll stop there.

TG: And so Hector, obviously, I haven't updated that for a few years. But every once in a while, I'll ask a cousin: “Okay, so look at this. What else is there?” Like I said, I think in my grandfather's generation, there was another girl who was born and died young. But I think even in my dad's generation, there were some marriages that nobody talked about. I don't really want to give names because I'm not sure the truthfulness of them [the purported marriages]. But I've tried: it's just important to do that [ask about family history].

We got together as a family, I don't know, maybe fifteen years ago, and we were at the American Legion hall.

And one of my cousins in Hawaii pulled out a big sheet of butcher paper and asked everybody to start drawing their family tree. She's on Ancestry, and she's done some research. Every once in a while, she'll reach out to me and go: “So who is this person here?” It's interesting because Frank's granddaughter lives near Carmel. Her married name is different, but she's on Ancestry, so the two of them were asking [about the family]. On Ancestry, you kind of see these connections. I’m not on Ancestry, so I don't fully understand how it works. But I know both of them have asked me, “So who's this who's asking about our family?” And I know enough, at least of my generation, to know if they're part of the family or not, so to speak.

I look, every once in a while. I've been on Facebook sometimes and I Facebook [look up] Giugni. There are different branches of the same name, whether related I don't know. In Australia, there's a big group of them, of Giugnis. There's a group of Giugnis around Washington DC or on the East Coast, who I don't think are related. There are some in Texas, they may be related. Alfred’s the one who went to Hawaii, [and] one of his sons’ families ended up in Texas. Giugni’s not a real common name in the United States. In Italy and Switzerland, it's like Smith.

HR: Could you tell us a little bit more about your grandfather?

TG: So my grandfather was Everett Albert. He went by Mike. I have no clue how he got Mike. He was the youngest of his generation. And when he was pretty young, his mother died... no, his dad died. I'd have to look, one of his parents died. I think it was his mother because I think his brother, either Henry or Bill, started taking care of him. Mike was the one who was in Saint Helena High School, so he was born in 1902. And he was, in 1922, featured in a picture of the St. Helena High School basketball team.

So he was still in high school in his early twenties. I don't know why, probably working, or who knows what it was. I'm not sure what he did before he started driving trucks for Chevron oil and how he got into that. Maybe he worked for his brothers, who owned the Guigni’s Grocery in St. Helena; maybe he worked for them before going out on his own.

My grandmother moved to St. Helena at some point, and they met here somehow. My grandmother was a nurse. She was from Michigan and Canada up on the border, and one of her brothers had moved to Santa Rosa, so she followed out here. So my grandfather and my grandmother met here. In ‘31 and ‘33, they were still here, [he was] driving for Chevron. So maybegoingtoRichmondanddrivingeveryday.

Really, until I started having my memories of him — when I was five, six and seven — he was in Oakville, and I always associated him with being in Oakville. He ran the Oakville mercantile, or the Oakville grocery, and he became the postmaster at the Oakville post office. And as he got older, he turned the business of the grocery store over to his son in law, Wayne Malcolm, so Elsie Jane's husband. And then my grandfather, Papa, was just the postmaster for the Oakfield grocery until he retired from that.

And then he lived in Oakville, in their home there, until he died. My grandmother did too, until she died.

They moved there in around 1944, it had belonged to a family last name Durant.

And they were buying the business from Mrs. Durant, Mr. Durant had died. I would suspect his brother Henry, or his brother Bill, was helping him to buy the business and that brought him back [to the valley]. As I said, by then, with Chevron, he'd gone to Oakland, lived there in Oakland before and during World War II, and sometime around 1944, maybe a little bit earlier, came back to the valley and into Oakville.

When dad was going to high school, and he went to high school all four years, so, graduated ‘48. They had to have moved here ‘43 or ‘44. I don't know what the junior high school was then. I don't think RLS was around at that point. It was some academy where RLS is [“Elmhurst” Ursuline Academy]. At some point, my grandfather left Chevron and went into the grocery business, probably around 1944. That's my memory of him: going to Oakville; they had an above ground Doughboy swimming pool, we’d swim in the pool all the time; they had an acre of property, which, at that point, we were living in Santa Barbara County on a typical city lot, so an acre property was a big deal. And plus, behind it, there was nothing but cow pastures and vineyards, all the way to the Napa river. So we could walk down to the Napa River and play in the water, and then walk back to the house. Those are my memories of my grandfather. And that's my memory of what he did. If you go into the Oakville post office, which is now a trailer behind the store there, it has a list of the postmasters, and my grandfather's one of the postmasters there. He really liked that job. He knew everybody in Oakville, which isn't hard to do. There are only three hundred people [laughter].

HR: What was it like attending St. Helena Elementary School?

TG: I remember we were not the original school, because the original school faces on to Adams Street. It was those next set of buildings there, although I probably did a classroom in the original school. I remember more being in the newer school, but it was all the St. Helena Elementary School, it was not this new school off of Crane [Park], that's back here. It was all the school that's on the corner of Adams and Oak. You know, it was fun, it was easy, we could walk to school.

I remember walking to school, it was just five or six blocks. So it was no big deal, even in first or second grade, to walk to school.

I had my friends. Nothing stands out about it. But it was pleasant. I don't have any bad memories about it, so that's a good thing. But I don't remember much specific. Like I said earlier, I don't remember my teachers’ names. I couldn't tell you a lot of my teachers' names from high school. I can't tell you any of my teachers' names from college: I just don't remember those.

HR: Well, that's okay.

TG: Yep.

HR: So, your childhood happened within the backdrop of the Cold War. Can you recall any ways that you felt its influence growing up?

TG: When we were here, I don't remember any influence on it [his life]. But when we moved to Santa Barbara County, we were right next to Vandenberg Air Force Base. I remember  duck-and-cover drills: if there was going to be a nuclear attack, you would get under your desk and cover up — as if we were going to survive it.

HR: [Chuckles]

TG: Those drills were frequent, probably because we were right by a major Air Force Base.

You know, I remember the race to space as a big deal, when Russia — or at the time the USSR — put Sputnik up, and got the first chimpanzee to circle the Earth and then the first man to circle the Earth. That was a big deal. I remember we were pretty aghast that the USSR was ahead of us. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963, so we would have been out of St. Helena for two years by then. Yeah, it was about ‘63, ‘62. So that was a big deal. As a kid, I was afraid of those.

But as I grew older, I didn't worry about it so much. But I was very relieved… relief isn't the right description: I was pretty excited when the Berlin Wall came down. The USSR kind of collapsed. It's very concerning to me now that Putin is managing to kind of recreate some of the [USSR]; they’re not calling it the USSR, but, in my untrained opinion, that's what he's trying to recreate, since he grew up in that regime.

Between the duck-and-cover drills and the talk about nuclear war, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was a big deal for us.

The thought of nuclear war, then, only fifteen or sixteen years after the United States had used atomic bombs: I mean, it was still pretty fresh in people's minds. I was not around to see the atomic bombs dropped, but it was pretty fresh still. As other countries, [such] as the USSR, built their nuclear capability, it was scary. It was a scary thing.

When Kennedy was shot, it was a big deal to me.

I remember, I was in school when that happened. I don't remember the announcement, but I remember going home and watching it over and over and over again, the replay of the shooting and whatever news had. I remember my mother finally saying, “Tommy turn that TV off and quit crying, go find something to do.” It really impacted me for whatever reason. 1963, I would have been ten. And, you know, I couldn't have been very knowledgeable about world affairs or whatever. But for us to lose the president of the United States that way, it was just like, “Holy cow, how can that happen in our country?”

So those were big things. Then, obviously, the Vietnam War: when I was coming of age, there was still an active draft to go to Vietnam, and I did not want to go to Vietnam.

I did not support the war effort. My draft number was extremely high. It was like 355, so I knew I wasn't going to Vietnam. I think back now, to some of those demonstrations: Cal, Berkeley, there was a lot of demonstrations. All of us in the Bay Area were watching those and very aware of those.

And I remember in high school, a lot of students supported that thought process. Now, I'm kind of ashamed of how we treated the servicemen because [it’s] not that our servicemen go to war because they want to go to war, they joined up and they're doing what they're told to. The conversation that I had with your teacher [Mr. Blasingame, SHHS US History teacher], I remember very well the Democratic National Convention in 1968 in Chicago, the pictures in Chicago, police beating protesters, and it was a nasty thing. Will we see a repeat this summer? We'll see. We'll see and find out, won’t we [laughs].

HR: [Laughs]

TG: In a much different time [now]. Being in law enforcement, what we saw from 1968 were mostly — there were some movies — a lot of still photos. Well, if we have a reoccurrence in 2024, we're going to see a lot of cell phone videos out there right away, so it'll be a totally different newsline. Anyway, the ‘60s were a good time, in retrospect, to grow up because a lot of lot of historical things [happened]. But you're going to say that in fifty years-

TG: -you're going to look back and think about what's going on in politics, in the United States and what's going on in the world? I suspect you'll have similar thoughts. Those things [historical events], they're going to influence where we go, moving forward. Everything in history, impacts. We're out way off sailing [laughs heartily].

HR: [Laughs] yeah, it’s okay.

I was more concerned with what was going on in Fairfield, not with St. Helena.

TG: I wasn't here in St. Helena during the Vietnam War, so I don't know how my friends, my acquaintances feel about it. I was just too out of touch. But I will say, Dad subscribed to the St. Helena newspaper forever. And so I do remember, in high school, reading the St. Helena newspaper, the St. Helena Star.

I still recognized people's names, and they talk about sports or whatever, so-and-so and so-and-so. So that was fun. And when my dad died, he still got the St. Helena Star. And I then subscribed to it for a couple years. And then I said, “Ah, I gotta quit,” because I know almost nobody in St. Helena anymore.

HR: So, in post-war America, there was growth of consumerism, and housing construction. And as you told us, there was some housing construction going on [in town]. Looking back on it, did you see its effects on St. Helena?

TG: Sure. I never thought about it that way, but I think you can drive around parts of town and see houses that were built in that era. Hudson Street is an example. But it seems like a lot of the people who came here were families that were just returning, the kids growing up and returning home, so to speak. To me, St. Helena has never really had any big growth spurt. I didn't see it then [as] a place to go to get a job — obviously, there was some work here — and I don't see it now as a place to go to get a job, unless you're in the service industry and waiting tables or something.

But, as my dad would always say, look at the traffic of all the people who can't afford to live here, driving up here to support us. In the ‘60s, it was affordable. In the 2020s, not so much. I don't think it attracted many people in the 60s. I may be wrong, but as an eight year old, I didn't see that.

HR: Did your family move much when you were a child? Could you tell us a little bit about how that was for you?

TG: I can't say we moved a lot, but my dad was chasing his career. He was an educator.

Before my eighth birthday, so after second grade, we moved to Santa Barbara County, and Dad took a job in Lompoc. Then we were there for six years. After eighth grade, we moved to Fairfield. That was a pretty big deal. My friends were all in Lompoc, and I went to a brand new high school in a brand new town, really not knowing anybody. I knew a few people because we arrivedinthesummertimeandImetsomeofmyneighbors,butnotknowinganybody.Thatwas alittletraumatic.

For me, that was the end of it. Dad was there four years later when I went on to college, and then I was on my own life.

So we didn't move a lot. I vaguely remember leaving St. Helena or leaving Napa Valley. That was all I knew at almost eight years old, so that was a kind of traumatic thing. Both of them were traumatic, at some level. Now, it's no big deal. But compared to people I know that were in the military, or people who moved every one or two years, we didn't move a lot. And I've been in the same house now for over twenty years-

HR: What are your thoughts on St. Helena versus other areas that you've lived?

TG: I like St. Helena because it is still a small town

As I said earlier, I don't know how many students are in St. Helena High School. In your graduating class, what are there, one hundred? Maybe 150? And that's so different. I mean, mine wasn't huge, but it was 400 people. And so there's a lot of them I don't know. My dad was active with some of the classes that he was a teacher for, and they stayed close.

I talked to Steve Taplin, and he talks about his class having a reunion every year now because they're starting to die.

But that closeness that you get in a small town… I missed that. Fairfield wasn't huge, I mean, when I moved there it was 40,000 people. It's bigger than that now, but it's way bigger than St. Helena. The disappointing part to me is just how the tourism has impacted all the valley: it brings a lot of money to certain people; it brings a lot of people up here, good or bad. But I think it's disheartening to see so many businesses that are just aimed at the tourists, versus the old mom and pop places downtown. That's disheartening. But I'm not here anymore, so I don't have a say so in it.

My little brother and I kept our parents home for a little while, with the thought that we would share it and come out here for maybe six months at a time. He was living in Los Angeles at the time, and I was just in Fairfield. But in the end, we were never going to do that, come here for six months at a time. We had to buy our brothers out and I didn't want to be house poor. We were fortunate Mom and Dad — they didn’t own it outright — bought this home when they could afford it. The value of properties has gone nuts here. I think that's too bad. As an outsider, I see that as a result of the tourism and, obviously, some of the big money in some of the wineries, so it's too bad that it’s that way. [Dagfinnr Chang-Wick checks recorder] We good, you think? We're getting the sign there behind us? An hours up?

Dagfinnr Chang-Wick: Yep. Is there anything else important that you'd like to talk about before we wrap this up?

TG: No, I think… it's been fun. I wish I had more experience to share with you. Like I said, it would have been great to capture this from Dad because he most certainly had that information. But no, I think highly of St. Helena, so I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you guys.

DC: Thank you for your time.

HR: Thank you.