Quest for Adventure Spawned Colorful Tales

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 15, 2009; C08


In the San Francisco of Paulo America Tolovi's youth, pigs roamed the undeveloped south side near the pork and cattle processing plants, he recalled.

He and his twin, Pietro, as well as his other brothers, Octovio and Antonio, would hop the electric trolley from their Daly City home and ride into the nearby metropolis, visiting Sutro's bathhouse, the city zoo and Golden Gate Park.

But the pigs stuck in his mind. They'd gather in empty lots, on undeveloped hillsides and between the industrial and residential areas of the damp and beautiful city, he told a friend for an oral history. San Franciscans, just a few years after the trauma of the devastating 1906 earthquake and its resulting fires, were in no mood to live and let live.
Mr. Tolovi, who became an archivist with the Defense Information Systems Command and who died Jan. 16 in Arlington County, said that irate residents near Golden Gate Park finally had enough, banded together and, from a truck full of gasoline, sprayed the roaming pigs, then lit them on fire.

"The Chinese came to take the burned pigs back to Chinatown for food, but it had to be stopped due to the potential for disease. It was a god-awful mess," Mr. Tolovi said.

Officials with the San Francisco Historical Society knew all about the slaughterhouses, the likelihood of escaped pigs and even a small Chinese community in that part of town. But they never heard of a pork inferno.
But then again, they weren't there in the freewheeling 1920s. Who's to say it never happened?

Mr. Tolovi was the kind of boy who, after he was caught trying to sneak into the 10-cent movies without paying, organized his friends to collect empty bottles for the deposit refund. Entrepreneurial? Sure, until the grocer caught the gang stealing the empties they'd just turned in from behind the store and re-returning them.

His mother, an Italian immigrant who rarely ventured outside the family home and who learned English by listening to the radio, insisted that her boys not speak Italian under her roof so that they would be completely American. His father, an Italian immigrant who made wine in his basement, worked at a bakery. He became acquainted with A.P. Giannini, another Italian immigrant who founded Bank of America. The Tolovi accounts were always with B of A.

Paulo, born May 19, 1919, was still a youngster when a baseball hit him squarely in the right eye. The injury eventually prevented him from getting a driver's license, a loss he never seemed to mind. He never used a credit card until 2006, said his friend Larry Waldron, although Mr. Tolovi's wife, who died in 2002, handled them.

He always looked for adventure. On a dare, he drank a large container of pig's blood from the rendering plant.

"It was pretty awful, but I didn't throw up and thus was recognized as a tough guy," he said.

After his 1938 high school graduation, he sailed as a Sea Scout to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, worked in a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Big Sur and hopped freight trains, riding the rails as far as Minnesota, where railroad agents spotted him and other underage hobos and sent them back to the West Coast. He joined the Merchant Marine and sailed to South America in 1939, just in time to see the Germans scuttle their pocket battleship, the Admiral Graf Spee, which had terrorized the Atlantic seaboard by sinking nine Allied merchant ships.

Realizing that a world war was about to start, Mr. Tolovi tried to join the Navy. He was rejected because of his poor eyesight. The Army took him, despite his poor vision, in April 1941. He was made a supply sergeant in an infantry company and was sent to Europe in 1944.

He escaped injury but was often under fire; ferrying communication batteries in a truck convoy near the German border, he heard the rattle of bullets hitting the truck. When it stopped, he found all his cargo shot to pieces.

He persuaded French farmers to trade their homemade wine, which he poured into empty fuel jerrycans and swapped again for supplies. During the Battle of the Bulge, he forwarded his signal company's newly arrived boots to infantry soldiers.

"They needed them more than we did," Mr. Tolovi later said.

His division was among the first to cross the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, Germany, in March 1945, the only remaining railroad bridge over the Rhine River. In the first 24 hours, 8,000 Allied troops crossed, and Mr. Tolovi had a photo taken of himself with the flag that had been flying there.

By April 1945, he was sent to Nuremberg to support the war crime trials. His subsequent postings included stints in Italy, Korea, Japan and France until he settled in the Washington area in 1963. He retired as a sergeant major in 1967.

At the Defense Information Systems Command, he worked several jobs and eventually built and maintained the agency's first library. The stories and documents he collected for the agency were undoubtedly colorful -- the DISC's archive is now named for him -- but it would be hard to match the tales he told from the first half of his life.