In Laura Lipari’s lifetime, there have been many astounding changes. She was born in 1914 in Cleveland Ohio to Italian (No! she would say, to Sicilian immigrants. ) Although she wrote her series of books when she was only a 92-year-old, she is now looking forward to her 103rd. birthday and she is still writing. Her father,who was an immigrate, has a classic American story.
No one was particularly welcoming to her father, a 14-year-old, and the youngest of a fairly successful merchant in Sicily. His father, Laura’s Grandfather was in a wheel chair and had nothing left to offer his youngest son having given his tile manufacturing business to his older sons. So he urged the boy to take his savings and a boat to America.
No one was at the dock to greet him because his uncle was not able to get a day off work and travel to NYC from Ohio. The boy had no way of knowing how hard it was to be given a day and there was no way to let him know there would be no one there to meet him. He trusted the port authorities who urged him to give his suitcase and cash to them for safe keeping while he walked up the street for a modest meal. When he got back, his belongings and money were gone. He found his way to the rail station and met some “nice peasants” (read hobos) who helped him hop a train headed to Ohio, where he had a few relatives.
The young Sicilian worked his way until he owned the largest construction company in North East Ohio. The Curro Construction Company eventually built part of Crile Hospital and the original Lake Front Airport. Laura, his oldest child, graduated with honors from Floor Stone Mather, the Women’s college campus that is now Case Western Reserve.
In her time, she saw the telephone become a household item, and the radio replaced by the TV. Her father turned his horse and buggy in for one of the first Packard cars, complete with built-in flower vases between the upper part of the windows.
Laura became a romance language teacher and adjunct professor and she loved history. She wanted to be a diplomat but girls didn’t do such risky and adventurous work in those days. She would have loved being a librarian, because she was and still an insatiable reader. So how did she come to write books of her own? It seemed a natural thing for her. She first started writing the life stories about her husband’s family. During World War II she was in Sicily and became part of the wave of combat. These stories tumbled out of her typewriter. Red Scorpion Press will be publishing this series of historical novels for young adults sometime early in 2018.
Much later she would write the series Grandma Shares Her Faith. The idea for this series came from gathering her grandchildren in a cozy circle and telling or reading Bible stories to them. She read stories she found at the library but eventually she wrote her own. What is different about Laura’s series is that she noticed how many questions the children asked as she read the stories to them. She also noticed how sweet and childlike the questions were. It gave her a chance to write the stories in a way that made them more accessible to the children because she incorporated the questions and answers as part of the text as well as the children themselves. Stay tuned for more about Laura and her life as a writer.
