Italians’ Club in Hawthorne Dwindles Away : Lifestyle: Immigrants from a tiny Italian village maintained close ties in the Casalverano Club. But they grew old, the city changed and their children haven’t filled the empty seats.

The four boccie courts once teeming with men now sit mostly idle. The park benches where men gathered to play scopa, an Italian card game, are often empty and silent. And the Saturday night Italian folk dances are growing more and more infrequent.

For years, these now-dying traditions were the focal point of the Casalverano Italian Club, a once-vibrant, men-only social club for Hawthorne’s large community of Italian immigrants, many of whom came from the same tiny village, Casalvieri, in south-central Italy.

At the club’s peak, its calendar was filled with spaghetti dinners, picnics and parties. Members built the boccie courts at Hawthorne Memorial Center, and every April, they would dress in traditional costumes from the old village and hold a dance to honor the founding of the club.

But in recent years, many of those native Italians who made Hawthorne their home have died or left for other communities, threatening the club’s survival.

“A lot of the Italians don’t live here anymore,” said retired insurance salesman Steve Lococo, a native of Sicily who joined the club five years ago. “We’re trying to get younger people into the club, but they’re so busy. We need the new blood, but somehow we just don’t have the younger people living in Hawthorne anymore.”

In hopes of attracting new members, the club--once exclusively for former residents of Casalvieri--has opened its doors to other Italians and even non-Italians who happened to marry an Italian. Recently, the men have started bringing their wives to the monthly meetings “to fill up the room a little more,” Lococo said.

Part of the problem, club members say, is that many of Hawthorne’s Italian families have moved to San Diego County during the last 10 to 15 years to escape the crime, traffic and urban sprawl that have engulfed the city.

“A lot are leaving because too much is going on in Hawthorne now,” said club secretary John Lococo, a Hawthorne savings and loan executive. “I loved it here in the ‘60s. It was real country-like. But things have changed. It’s not the same.”

Hawthorne Police Sgt. Vince Schiavi, a native of Italy who moved to Hawthorne as a teen-ager in the early 1950s, remembers how it used to be.

“When I first came here . . . it was a real close community,” Schiavi said. “It seemed like every weekend, someone was getting together at someone’s house. And then, little by little, they just retired and moved, or the kids grew up, so that there’s not a lot of Italians left down here.”

Once, though, there were hundreds. And many of them came from Casalvieri, a village so small that it appears on only the most detailed maps, a tiny dot of a town nestled in a mountain valley about 70 miles southeast of Rome. The village dates back to the 11th Century, club members say, and is noted for housing the relics of its patron, St. Onorio, and for a castle built by the counts of Arpino.

When asked what it was about Hawthorne that attracted so many Casalvieri natives, club co-founder Bob Marsella, who left the village as a teen-ager and later moved to Hawthorne, could only venture a guess: “It was here. It could have been anywhere in the world. Some of the first people who came here happened to stop in Hawthorne.”

By all accounts, Ralph Rocca was the first Casalvieri native to sink roots in Hawthorne.

Rocca, who had left the village before World War II in search of work, was living in Detroit when he came to visit a friend in Hawthorne in 1944. Rocca, then 26, was tired of the cold Midwestern winters, and when his friend offered him a job in the construction business, Rocca jumped at the opportunity.

In those days, Rocca recalled, Hawthorne was a quiet, centrally located town along the Red Car route, with one general store, a gas station and no street lights. It was also less humid than neighboring beach cities.

“It was clear, warm--different from Detroit,” said Rocca, 71, who now lives with his wife in Hesperia. “Then my father came, my mother came, my brother, some friends. But I was the first one.”

The immigrants and their families kept coming, and by 1965 the number of families from Casalvieri and neighboring villages who had moved to Hawthorne hovered around 100, Rocca said.

The city became known as an enclave of Casalvieri natives who were bound together by a common language and heritage, who shared traditional foods and made a point of attending the same Sunday Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church.

“As soon as someone was sick, everybody knew about it,” Schiavi said. “It was like a network. Everybody gave a hand and helped each other out. . . . It was the same for us in those days as it is for Latinos today.”

Eventually, the men began discussing the idea of forming a social club.

Rocca’s brother, Onorio, 72, who now lives in Torrance but who comes to Hawthorne to play boccie three times a week with a handful of longtime friends, recalls that the Casalverano Italian Club was officially registered in April, 1966, “to make us feel we’re still part of a little town where we came from.”

The club’s bylaws, which Marsella said were written by the high school-age children of a few members, are highly detailed, including 57 articles and 17 amendments. To become a member, the bylaws say, an applicant must pay a $25 initiation fee, have the endorsement of two other members and must prove himself to be “sane, male, well-mannered and not less than 18 years old and who believes in God.”

Once accepted into the fold, members are duty-bound to “lead an honest and industrious life and to abstain from the excessive use of alcoholic beverages and profane language,” the bylaws say. The annual fee to be a member is $90, and anyone convicted of a felony can be expelled.

In the early years, club members met often for fund-raisers and special events that drew as many as 200 people. But in the last 10 years, the functions have become less frequent as the club lost members.

Some of the founding members died. Others moved to the San Diego County city of Vista, where quiet streets and lower real estate prices reminded them of an earlier Hawthorne.

Although the members who stayed behind have tried to interest their children in joining the club, they have generally had little success. Today the club has about 45 members, less than half the number it had at its peak, John Lococo said.

Larry Guidi, 32, a Hawthorne native whose parents emigrated from Bagni di Lucca, Italy, in 1956, said he joined the club in 1977 to help him keep in touch with his Italian heritage. But he said he soon left because he had trouble relating to the club members, most of whom were old enough to be his father. Also, he felt his opportunities for leadership would be better elsewhere.

“I went to one of their dinners, but I felt like an outsider even though I’m an Italian,” Guidi said. “The young guys don’t want to join clubs like that. They’re all a bunch of nice men . . . but it’s boring for young people.”

On a recent Monday night, about 10 club members, their wives and a couple of their teen-age daughters are gathered in a small conference room at the Hawthorne Memorial Center for the monthly meeting. The men and women, who sit on opposite sides of the room, had set up Italian and American flags beside the club’s officers. Thumb-sized replicas of the flags and a bottle labeled “Dago Red Wine” adorn the head table.

At the back of the room are plates of Italian submarine sandwiches and slices of fresh fruit. Most of the members speak with heavy Italian accents, but the entire meeting is conducted in English and begins with the rap of a gavel and a salute to the American flag.

Although the club is based on the friendship and fraternity of those with a common heritage, a visitor soon sees that all is not quiet within their ranks.

Club members are trying to decide whether to stage a Halloween party this year. Marsella wants to throw the party as the club has always done. But most of his fellow club members, noting the poor turnout of recent years and the fact that nearly all of their children are now adults, do not.

Soon, the debate leads to talk about the annual Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties, which also have suffered from poor turnout in recent years. Marsella wants a Christmas party, but club President Bill Pedrino suggests that the members reserve a table at a restaurant for an adults-only Christmas dinner.

“We’ve been having these functions for the kids, yet no one shows up,” Pedrino complains. Last year was so bad, he says, “Santa Claus even forgot to show up.”

“What? These people have no kids anymore?” Marsella replies. “What happened to the kids?”

Pedrino’s voice begins to rise. Last year, he says, he brought 80 teddy bears back from Chicago for children expected to attend the club’s Christmas party. “I thought that room was going to be full. Instead, I had to take those teddy bears back to Chicago.”

But traditions die hard with Marsella, who is turning red with anger. “You know why I don’t want to go home at night?” he says. “I don’t want to listen to my wife. Now I don’t want to listen to you!” Besides, he adds, “maybe I’d like to bring the Christmas spirit back a little bit.”

Softened by Marsella’s admission, Pedrino changes course. “I don’t have any kids to love, so I love Bob,” he declares, to which Marsella replies: “I’m overwhelmed by all this love. I’m going to disintegrate soon.”

As the meeting comes to an end, the women gather the leftovers while the men fold up the flags. “They argue a lot,” admits John Lococo’s wife, Sara, a native of Sicily, “but we are all friends.”