A Passing Storm: "Lena"

Newsboy David

Newsboy Daniele

Some little cartoon kids.... In the late 1800's thru the 1940's Newsboys hawked newspapers on street corners and street cars across America.
As first editions came out at 2:30AM, these little kids were working long before the crack of dawn and back at it again for afternoon and evening editions if they could pick up the work. Competition was hard and dirty at times.
Mostly poor boys, they earned pennies to help their parents and , usually widowed or abandoned mothers. A large number of the boys were homeless or orphaned.
They were a tough but good hearted lot of kids.
Those who worked the long hours in the depression years, grew up to serve in WWII as the earlier kids grew up to serve in the First WW. No easy life for these kids who supported families in hard times..
The majority of these children were from desperately poor and were of German, Irish, Russian-Jewish and Italian families. Many of the outcomes to their lives were tragic and harsh but some few rose above it to become successful in later life.

There is an excellant book describing the life of newsboys in the St Louis area called The Dead End Kids of St. Louis .. and the people who tried to save them' by Bonnie Stepenoff.
Google Books has excerpts of it HERE
My interest in the children of the streets began with Lena Loschiavo who sold baskets and pretzels in Cincinnati, Ohio during the early part of the 1900's from early morning until as late as midnight to help support her family. Her story is HERE
These children were real American Heroes and deserve to be remembered.
This is my small caricature of a newsboy proudly wearing a cap his mother knitted for him.
In the stories I made up for the kids, who love a story with every painting, Both kids are first generation American born. Daniele is from Italian heritage and has chocolate eyes.
David is Jewish from Holland and has King David's ruddy coloring. Or.. alternately he is Irish!or Scottish!
You decide who you see.

How is it that we can become so interested in a person just by seeing their face?
This is a photo of a little girl from Cincinnati Ohio .
I took a section and enlarged it and hand colored it.
This photo of Lena LoSchiavo taken in August of 1908, intrigued me.

11 years old, a bit of my own little darling reflected in her face, she sits smiling in a torn and tattered dress.
Shorpy's site did not have too much information on her except for a caption.
The person taking the photos, Lewis Wickes Hine was doing so for the sake of research on child labor at the turn of the previous century. Hines was a photographer and sociologist.
Child labor laws were nothing in those days.

Lena LoSchiavo

I enlarged a bit of the photo and then hand colored this portion of her photo to bring her to life a bit again. She is not finished yet.
Those old photos do very little to show a person's "light" and soul.
From a close up I took from another photo of her, her eyes appeared light, not dark.
So using the coloring of my 'famous anonymous kid', I gave Lena coloring.
Her eyes may have been blue, I used a dark brownish green with violet rings, as per the "kid" . Her skin and lips are also from the "kid".
This is not done with photoshop tricks but by hand and needs more work, but I was anxious to put it up. I spent some time on it Friday and will do more as time allows. As you can see the hands are far from done.

At the Shorpy website, which features old photographs, people were discussing how old Lena looked. Well, not now I think.
It was late at night according to the information known about the photo and the poor kid was over tired.
Also, they were wondering what had become of her. This lovely eager faced child demands attention as there is , to me at least , something intriguing about her.
When I find old photos like this I just have to color them.
To see the original photo in high definition you will need to see it on the website. I took this from a smaller photo and enlarged it myself.

It can be hard tracking people down because spellings vary from site to site. Immigrants were often misunderstood when telling their names to officials and so there are various spellings used in documents and records.
A name like LoSchiavo can become variously Loshavo, Lochiavo, Lochavo , depending on who heard it and how they wrote it down. Since different languages say the letters of the alphabet differently, asking someone to spell it was not always an option.

If I am correct in my research, Lena was born in 1898 in America to Italian immigrants Charles Loschiavo and his wife Mary Gentile Loschiavo. There were 4 children, Giusippi who died 9 days old, an unnamed infant who died at birth , another girl, Petrina who was a few years older than Lena and passed way in 1962 at the age of 67.
Petrina Loschiavo seems to have married John Mercurio.

Charles Loschiavo, Lena's father, passed away at age 34, when Lena was 10 or 11. This may well be why she was selling on the corner to add to the family income. Mrs. Mary LoSchiavo had lost a son in February at 9 days old and her husband in July of the same year.

Lena seems to have married Charles Mercurio at age 16 or 17(?) and had a little girl , Terita, who passed away at age 84 in 1999, 11 years after her mother.
Lena, passed away in 1988 at the age of 90.

She and some of her family are buried in the St Joseph New Cemetery in Cincinnati. I found all this in their interment records.

I also 'Googled' the site of the corner where Lena sold pretzels and baskets from 11:00 AM in the morning til Midnight in front of the 6th Street Market 'saloon' entrance at 209 West Sixth Street in Cincinnati.