Ida Galli Fraschina was born Leonida Galli in San Francisco in 1886 in the small private back room of her parents' tiny grocery store where they lived:
Ida had one older brother, Ismene, born in Lucca, Tuscany, Italy in 1873 before the family immigrated to San Francisco in 1883, an older sister, Elisabetta, born in 1885 and a younger brother, Joseph, born Giuseppe in 1888, the latter two also born in the back of the grocery store.
By 1890, the family was living in the country outside Grass Valley in Nevada County, California. Ida's father, Emilio, had not liked city living and wanted to be a farmer again, as he had been in Lucca. In Grass Valley, he acquired a tract of land that he farmed with a horse and plow, near the quartz mine he had bought, that he named the Ida Mine. Sadly, the mine proved worthless and the farm, too, failed when their horse was fatally injured. When Ida was about fourteen, her father died and the family moved back to San Francisco. In order to help them all survive, Elisabetta and Ida traveled to Portland, Oregon to find work as seamstresses and milliners. Throughout her life Ida continued to make beautiful clothes and hats for herself and her family, as did Elisabetta.
Elisabetta Galli, circa 1903, Ida's older sister and best friend
Another photo of Elisabetta, wearing one of her milinary creations
Ida and Elisabetta in Portland with other seamstresses, circa 1904
Joseph Galli, brother of Ida and Elisabetta, in the straw hat at the left, around 1904-5. Joe eventually moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s and worked as a butcher there.
Both had returned to San Francisco by April 1906, when the Great Earthquake struck. Ida remembered that they were all thrown out of their beds by the force of the quake and that the potbelly stove fell off its feet causing the flaming coals to fly out and set fire to the room where they lived.
They ran for their lives with their mother and brother Joe, everyone in their nightclothes, first to the north on Polk St, through what was known as Polk Gulch, where to their horror they saw that the brick produce market, where their Galli cousins came to work in the very early hours of the morning, had collapsed and knew that they were probably fatally injured. But they could not stop; they had to keep running west, along with hundreds of others fleeing the fire that was consuming the eastern part of the city.
It took days before they found out that their brother Ismene and his wife and child had survived and were safe. By that time Ismene and his family were in one of the refugee camps by Ocean Beach on the Pacific Ocean, whereas Ida and her mother, sister and younger brother were housed in the vast tent camp in Golden Gate Park. They all lived in the tent camps for well over a year--there was nowhere else for people to live.
Life in the tent camps was very difficult. Sanitation was poor and there were epidemics of typhoid and even bubonic plague. The photo above shows a cleaned-up version of the reality of the camps.
Finally the camps closed in late 1907 and early 1908. Ida and her widowed mother, Caterina found a small apartment at 1763 Greenwich in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of Italian immigrants, which had escaped the fire. Elisabetta married in 1908; her new husband Francis Blanchard, who had come to San Francisco from Virginia, was a teamster for the Spring Valley Water Company, which in those days meant he drove a team of horses.
Joseph found employment at the Lorenzini Fruit Company on upper Sacramento St. in the Laurel Heights neighborhood and moved in with his older brother Ismene and Ismene's wife Laura and their daughter Irene, who lived in the neighborhood (later two more children were born to Ismene and Laura, Stanley and Lorraine). The Galli family's life was hard, but they had survived.
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