By Marshall King, Truth Staff
ELKHART -- After a long day of winemaking, the supper table in Dominic and Sarita Cataldo's house was full Monday night.
At one end were Sam Tsiumas and Chris Arvanitis, among others. They'd cooked the lamb chops for supper on the grill in the Cataldo's back yard.
Joe Cataldo, Dominic and Sarita's nephew who came to the United States as a child, was seated next to Sam Moreno, originally from Puerto Rico. Others filled the seats around the table laden with bowls of beans and tomato salad, baskets of bread, a plate of cheese and glasses of wine from several years ago. This group would finish the last of that wine before the night was over.
But in the Cataldo's garage that day, they had pressed nearly 20 barrels of crushed grapes.
That wine will develop and mature over the coming years, as the lives of these immigrants did in Elkhart County.
They came for different reasons.
Dominic Cataldo got on a boat after his father bought him a ticket.
Arvanitis came to the U.S. to earn enough money to buy a taxi in the old country and never left.
In Goshen, Maria Hulewicz's family came here in a different way, leaving persecution in Ukraine to start a new life.
They all came and stayed and worked and raised families.
"We did OK, but our children are going to do a lot better," Dominic said.
***
Dominic Cataldo's father, Joseph, came to Elkhart in 1912 with three brothers. They went back and forth between the U.S. and Italy. Joseph eventually stayed in Italy after things weren't good here and he lost his American citizenship.
President John F. Kennedy gave it back and Dominic came with an American passport in 1962 as a 21-year-old.
His father bought his ticket.
"My dad told me, 'You need to go to America because that's where the opportunity is,'" he said.
He got off a boat with no money and traveled to Elkhart with his brother, Bruno. His second day in Elkhart, Dominic got a job at Duke Mobile Home in Bristol where Bruno worked. When their brothers Antonio and Paul arrived, that's where they also went to work. A year later, Dominic got a job on the line at another mobile home factory in Elkhart, stayed to clean the factory after work every day and worked 10 hours on Sundays at a car wash on Indiana Avenue. At one point he also built truck campers at night.
Even after he married Sarita in 1969, he rarely stopped working before the sun set, he said.
***
Arvanitis left Greece in 1967.
"I came here for two years to raise money to go back and buy a taxi in the old country," he said.
His father and brothers were in New Buffalo, Mich., so he cooked there in a restaurant, then in one in South Bend.
He bought a Burger Dairy store along Elkhart's Franklin Avenue in 1971.
He worked long hours, selling milk, gas and lottery tickets, until he sold the business nearly two years ago.
"This is the best country in the world," he said. "If you like to work, you achieve anything you want."
***
Maria Hulewicz spent seven years of her childhood living in the side of a hill with her family in the Ukraine.
She was one of three children who lived in a small hole her grandparents dug after Soviet Communists captured her father, Myhailo Turchyn. He'd spent seven years in Siberia doing hard labor. The Communists took their farm, land and nice home.
Two years after he came back to live with the family, riders in a black car took him in the middle of the night.
"They never heard from him again. Nor did they know what happened to him," said Olga Stickel, Maria's daughter.
During Perestroika in the 1990s, she learned he was shot and killed the day after they took him.
"They take away everything from us," Hulewicz said, remembering as she sat around the kitchen table of her Goshen home.
Her mother, Fatyna, scrounged for food, but sometimes resorted to feeding them leaves and dumplings made from ground corn cobs, Maria said.
They escaped by walking across Eastern Europe, caught between Russian and German armies during World War II, Stickel said.
The family ended up working on farms in Germany and living in displaced person camps there. Following the end of World War II, they were being taken back to Ukraine from the camp, but Fatyna begged in Polish for the young German drivers not to take them back.
"It was panic. It was screaming," Hulewicz said of those moments in the truck.
The drivers stopped, unlocked the back of the truck and raised the hood as if there was engine trouble. The family escaped and walked in the woods for two weeks.
They met up with others who didn't want to return to Ukraine.
Maria, then in her teens, went to work as a waitress. The family filled out forms to go to Uruguay, but Stickel, who was 2 years old, kept getting sick and delayed their trip.
After Eleanor Roosevelt asked Congress to raise the quotas for immigrants, the family was lucky enough to get visas from Germany to the United States. Hulewicz came with her husband, Stanley, and her daughter, the first of her three children.
They came on a ship with more than 1,000 people and arrived in New York City. Maria's mother and stepfather came less than a year later. They lived together in an apartment in Newark, N.J., where they worked and saved their money.
In 1953, Stanley Hulewicz moved to Goshen. Friends of people they sponsored to come to the United States lived here. Stanley wanted to get his family out of the big city. He bought part of Henry Cripe's orchard on the north side of Goshen along C.R. 21 where a few other Russian and Ukranian families were settling after World War II.
He settled his family into a house among the apple trees. He worked at Johnson Controls. Fatyna had a cow, chickens and a garden. She helped care for Maria and Stanley's children while Maria worked in factories.
In 1966, Stickel went to college, paid for in part with nickels and dimes her stepgrandfather gave her instead of taking the bus home from work.
"Education was an important concept," said Stickel, who cried Monday as her mother told the stories of her family. Stickel is a judge now and can repeat the stories that her classmates wouldn't have believed when she was a child growing up in Goshen.
She and her family feel lucky, as her grandmother did to have come to the U.S.
"She was so happy to be here," Maria Hulewicz said. "So happy. She prayed for this country day and night. We have a good life. We was very happy."
***
This country needs hands, Arvanitis said.
"We need people to work," he said in Cataldo's back yard while they searched for ripe figs on the small trees in his friend's garden.
He'd like to see the government make a way for Hispanics who came here illegally to become citizens like him.
Cataldo, who has seven Hispanic employees, said the country needs Hispanics to fill jobs.
But he wishes they would be here legally.
"I don't think it's fair," he said, noting there are problems because when they don't have driver's licenses and can't get insurance.
Hulewicz asks why they don't come legally. She said some Hispanics are nice people, but she wants them and their children to show respect here.
"I don't want them to destroy this country," she said.
***
In Italy, Cataldo's family owned a vineyard.
In Elkhart, he started getting grapes from California a few years ago.
A half semi-load in 2001 turned into two this year. About 50 people came to Cataldo's home and business to pick up their grapes for the fall winemaking.
A number of years ago, Sam Moreno got to know Cataldo, who got him interested in making wine.
"Now it's what we do," he said.
Moreno put a few drops of wine on a spectrometer and looks through out in the daylight outside the garage. He tells the others after nearly two weeks, the juice from the grapes is completely fermented. He helps Cataldo's other friends and family fill a press with crushed grapes.
Moreno was born in Puerto Rico, so he was a U.S. citizen when he came to New York for college. He ended up in Elkhart to raise his family.
"It has been a good community for us," he said.
Other groups have come over the years. Germans and Swedish immigrants are part of Elkhart's history. In the past 10 years, another wave of immigrants from Russia and the Ukraine joined those who were already here, according to Hulewicz.
In Dominic's garage Monday, the grapes went into the press, juice streamed out and Michael and Dominic Cataldo, Dominic's grandsons, took turns filling a pail and emptying it into another tub. The juice goes back into plastic barrels cleaned with a pressure-washer.
Arvanitis, Tsiumas, Cataldo and Moreno. Together, these men from different parts of the world, made wine as friends.