Long Life, Part 2

It’s more than just healthy foods and exercise

I would like to continue quoting from the book “Outliers” The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. Here’s the continuation to last week’s article:

“The Rosetans began buying land on a rock hillside connected to Bangor by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two-story stone houses with slate roofs on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel and named the main street, on which it stood, Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they soon changed it to Roseto, which seemed only appropriate given that almost all of them had come from the same village in Italy.

In 1896, a dynamic young priest by the name of Father Pasquale de Nisco took over at Our Lad of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons, and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent, and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant – given the fractious relationships the English and Germans and Italians in those years – that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans.

If you had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the precise Foggian southern dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto, Pennsylvania, was its own tiny, self-sufficient world – all but unknown by the society around it – and it might well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf.

Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent the summers on a farm in Pennsylvania, not far from Roseto – although that, of course, didn’t mean much, since Roseto was so much in its own world that it was possible to live in the next town snd never know much about it.

“One of the times when we were out there for the summer – this would have been in the late nineteen fifties – I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society.” Wolf said years later in an interview, “After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having a drink, he said, ‘You know, I’ve been practicing for seventeen years. I got patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.’ “

In Gladwell’s words, “Wolf was taken aback.” (To be continued)