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'Everyone Turns Out To Be Something'

Tampa produce tycoon Tony Valenti, right, is believed to have been the 1913 newsboy. Valenti died in 1975.

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By PENNY CARNATHAN and GARY R. MORMINO The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 8, 2007

The photograph captures a moment in a child's life in Tampa, March 1913.

He's a small boy; the folded newspaper he clutches is about a third his height. He stares at the camera with a dark look that might be wary, or weary, or angry. He wears a coat with a Peter Pan collar and stands barefoot on a sandy city street in front of a trash bin. The caption tells us only that, at 4 years old, he's "one of America's youngest newsboys."

Lewis Hine, a turn-of-the century investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, shot many such poignant portraits. The faces of pale little girls looking longingly out the windows of factories and stoic little boys coated with the dust of coal mines helped lead to laws regulating child labor in the United States. Most of the collection, about 5,000 photographs, is housed in the U.S. Library of Congress.

Some of the children Hine identified; some he did not. Tampa's little newsboy was among the most famous of those shot during Hine's three visits here. His picture appeared in countless exhibitions and books, making him an anonymous catalyst for changes that would better the lives of millions of children yet to be born.

Earlier this year, the portrait caught the attention of Joe Manning, a history buff and author from Florence, Mass. His questions got local historians scrambling like detectives to a murder mystery. Who was that child? A quixotic quest, maybe, but too tantalizing to ignore.

They dug. They found an answer. And they unearthed a story that's both common and uncommon.

'He Just Grabbed Me'

Manning initially searched for the descendants of the children Hine identified. He succeeded about 75 times over the course of a year.

"But I kept staring at the ones with no names, and that fact alone made them even more haunting," he says.

Last summer, he began selecting anonymous portraits. He chose the ones that called to him, tugged at him as he surfed the Library of Congress Web site. He wrote to the newspapers in the towns where the photos were taken and asked them to publish the pictures along with something about his search for an identity, a life's story.

"Everyone's got an incredible story," says Manning, 66, who hopes to someday compile these tales in a book. "Here's a person who could have amounted to nothing. But everyone turns out to be something."

By the time he called The Tribune in September, he had found the unsuspecting descendants of three young, formerly anonymous workers. He didn't anticipate their thrill, the rush of emotion. A 69-year-old woman, who knew only that her father had grown up poor in Kentucky, saw him for the first time as a 12-year-old working in a tobacco field. The picture was 91 years old.

Another descendant promptly bought three books about Hine.

"I could be doing this for the rest of my life," Manning says.

Just as with the first three, he couldn't ignore the picture of the little Tampa newsie. "He just grabbed me," he says.

Manning researched the photograph and found it had been widely circulated. "It was one of the most iconic of the pictures."

In October, the Tribune published a story about Hine's Tampa photos and Manning's project. Several of the local portraits ran with it, including one of three jaunty young newsboys linked companionably arm in arm. The photographer's rich caption information identified them as the Bellenti brothers: Crosoria, 10, Joe, 9, Sam, 7, and Tony, 4. They lived on Garcia Avenue and sold newspapers from 6 a.m. until late at night. They spoke little English and did not attend school.

The photo, like that of the mystery child, was taken in March 1913. But there were only three boys pictured, not four. Obviously, the littlest brother was missing.

Could the unidentified newsboy be Tony Bellenti? How many 4-year-olds might Tampa have employed?

We turned to the old city directories in the Tribune's library. These precursors to today's telephone books list every address in the city, street by street, and attempted to name the residents at each address and their occupations. The other half of the directories list residents by name, in alphabetical order.

The Tribune's oldest directory is from 1929 - the information in it would have been gathered in 1928. It revealed no Bellentis on Garcia Avenue. No Bellentis, in fact, in the city.

Paul Camp, Special Collections librarian at the University of South Florida Library, checked city directories from 1910-13. He, too, found nothing, even when he searched alternative spellings.

"Could be they lived with relatives by another name, weren't noticed by the directory compilers, or weren't here at the particular time the compilers gathered information," he speculated in an e-mail.

"Or that their name was Valente," came the response from another in the e-mail circle. "If they didn't speak English well, and the photographer was unfamiliar with Italian names?"

Camp searched and found two possibilities on Garcia: Antonio Valente, a baker, and his wife, Anna, and Antonio F. Valenti, a peddler and a boarder. Neither listing included the names of children, if there were any.

We Go To The Guru

If anyone knew the answer, it would be Tony Pizzo. He was Hillsborough County's official historian and founder of the Tampa Historical Society. He even has an elementary school named for him.

Alas, he died in 1994.

Dedicated preservationist that he was, however, he donated to the USF Library nearly 300 boxes of documents, photographs and manuscripts he had collected.

"I've found Tony Pizzo's copy of the little Italian newsboy … it was misfiled," Camp e-mailed the group. "On the back, Tony wrote, 'Tony Valenti, newsboy, became a tycoon in the produce business.' Unfortunately, Tony doesn't say how he knew that the newsboy Tony Valenti was the same as the Tony Valenti who became a success in the produce business."

The produce tycoon, Camp learned, died in 1975 and was laid to rest in Myrtle Hill Memorial Park. His obituary indicated he was born in 1907, which would have made him 6 years old - not 4 - when the photo was taken.

How would Pizzo have known Valenti was the little newsboy? Camp dug some more.

"Nothing conclusive to back up Tony Pizzo's statement," he reported, "but nothing to prove Valenti wasn't the newsboy either. I'm inclined to put considerable weight on Tony Pizzo's identification … given the family's prominence in the Tampa Italian community."

It was fairly easy to find Valenti's two sons, who still live in Tampa. If anyone should know, they should.

"All that I know is, No. 1, if the kid was 4 years old and it was 1913, if those are facts, he couldn't have been my father," says 71-year-old Tom Valenti.

His dad was a storyteller, he says. He regaled his children, and everyone else, with his tales. They were usually funny, and they almost always had something to do with his life, present and past. But he never talked about selling newspapers as a little boy. And he never lived on Garcia Avenue; he lived on 14th Avenue.

One of his dad's good friends, Tony Pizzo, had said something, however.

"Tony Pizzo told me that picture was my father," Tom Valenti says.

After the October Tribune story, Tom's uncle Joe Caltagirone - his mother's sister's husband - told Tom that Tony Valenti himself had once said he was the boy in the picture.

Tom Valenti has his own reason to believe it may be true.

"The picture is a very good likeness of one of my grandsons," he says.

Tony's youngest brother, 87-year-old Sexton Valenti, was born when Tony was about 13 years old. Sexton, who lives in Temple Terrace, says a lot of kids worked back when they were growing up.

"In those days, everyone was poor. I worked in the bakery around the corner from my house when I was about 10 years old."

Tony sold newspapers, he says.

"The Columbia restaurant, 22nd Street and Seventh Avenue, that was his station."

His mother, Rosalia, told him that, he says. He has a vague memory of her showing him the little newsboy photograph.

If the photo is Tony Valenti, his childhood wasn't quite as grim as Hine often described. Tony, who also went by T.J., attended school and was very studious, Sexton says. But, as with many immigrant families, everyone worked to keep food on the table and a roof overhead.

Their father, Giuseppe Valenti, had immigrated to the United States from Sicily in the late 19th century. He had stomach problems and took his growing family to Tampa after a New York physician advised him to find a warmer climate.

"He had a produce cart and pulled it in Ybor City," Tom Valenti says. "Eventually, he got enough money for a donkey, and the donkey pulled the cart."

Living on a peddler's wages, the family had to be resourceful. Tony's mother often sent him out to cut watercress from a ditch for the evening salad.

In 1920, nine days before the birth of his 11th child, Sexton, Giuseppe Valenti died of a ruptured appendix. Tony left school about that time; he'd made it to middle school.

His lessons would resume with the proprietor of N. Geraci & Co., a lucrative produce wholesaler located two blocks east of the Columbia restaurant. Valenti eventually managed the business, and when Geraci died, his two sons asked the astute businessman to stay on. He became vice president and, with a partner, started his own business as well. Lazzara & Valenti delivered Geraci produce from Sarasota to Tarpon Springs.

"My father put three of us through college," says Tom Valenti, who has a brother and a sister. "I can't recall wanting for anything except more time with him because he sure worked a lot of hours."

When Tony's baby brother Sexton was mustered out of the military after World War II, Tony bought him a brand-new Dodge truck and got him started as another successful produce seller.

But he wasn't all work. Every Saturday night, he took Tom's mother, Mary, up to the Columbia for a night of food and dancing with friends.

And then, at 40, came the heart attack. He was wise enough to cut back on his hours.

"He adjusted his work habits," Tom says. "He went to work at 6:30 in the morning and left at 11:30 (a.m.)."

All those produce sellers in California, whose clocks were set three hours later than Tampa's, had to wake up early if they wanted to sell to Geraci & Co. - a big buyer. They had to talk to Tony Valenti before 8:30 a.m., their time.

"It made them get up on the West Coast," Tom says.

A Legacy, Photograph Or Not

The evidence is enough for Manning.

Hine often got ages wrong, guessing his subjects were younger than they were, he says. That might have been because they were malnourished and small, or it might have made for better anti-child labor propaganda. He was pressured to provide heart-rending stories to further the cause.

He also had to gather information quickly. He shot his photos and ducked out before the adults figured out what he was up to.

Given all the reasons for discrepancies, Manning believes the little newsboy is Tony Valenti.

"The effort here has pretty much eliminated the possibility of it being anyone else," he says.

Whether or not Tony Valenti was the child who stared so bravely into the camera in 1913, his lifelong work ethic proved as much a legacy to his family as his eventual success.

"You had to work in order to provide for your family," Tom Valenti says his father taught him. "That all related to having a good life."

Tom and his brother Joe, 73, are stockbrokers at Wachovia Securities.

"We're still here working every day, and we enjoy it," Tom says, "because we've almost gotten the hang of it."

HINE'S GROUP

The National Child Labor Committee, the organization for which Lewis Hine was an investigative photographer, still exists. The group is a private, nonprofit organization that promotes "the rights, awareness, dignity, well-being and education of children and youth as they relate to work and working," according to its Web site. The committee was formed in 1904.

Each year since 1985, the group has presented the Lewis Hine Awards for Service to Children and Youth. The awards honor unheralded people for their volunteer or professional work. Winners from the Tampa Bay area have included Colleen Lunsford Bevis of Tampa, Lisa-Anne Furgal of Largo and Debbie Tapp of Bradenton.

To view the Lewis Hine collection, go to lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/nclcquery.html. Type Tampa into the search box and click Search. Readers who wish to contact Joe Manning about his project should visit www.morningsonmaplestreet.com/lewishine.html. Reach Penny Carnathan at (813) 259-7612 or pcarnathan@tampatrib.com. Reach Gary R. Mormino at gmormino@stpt.usf.edu or in care of the Florida Studies Program, Snell House, 140 Seventh Ave. S., St. Petersburg FL 33701.

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