Flowers for Angelo

On October 15, 2015, my friend Jacolyn and I went to Revelstoke’s Mountain View Cemetery to place flowers on the grave of Angelo Conte for the first time. It was the 100th anniversary of the day that Angelo died in a workplace accident at the Connaught Tunnel. Angelo was one of many labourers at work on the massive railway tunnel through Rogers Pass, but he had the misfortune to be one of at least 13 people who lost their lives during the three years of construction.

Angelo Conte had come from Italy about a year previously, and had been working throughout the province, wherever he could find work. When he left his wife Anna back in Italy, she was pregnant, and gave birth to their daughter while Angelo was in Canada. He never saw his daughter. Almost a century later, Angelo’s great-grandson, Nicola Moruzzi, was shown the fifty letters that Angelo sent back to his wife. Many of them said, in Italian, “I send you a kiss in the wind.” That phrase stuck with Nicola, a filmmaker, who decided to trace Angelo’s travels in Canada, and find out where and how he died. The result was the feature film, “Revelstoke – A Kiss in the Wind,” released in Italy in 2015. During the course of the film, Nicola and his wife Irene Vecchio traveled to Vancouver, Victoria, Kamloops, Revelstoke, and Connaught Tunnel to document Angelo’s time in Canada, and to explore the immigrant experience, to understand what Angelo and his compatriots from Italy would have gone through. Nicola and producer Leonardo Baraldi came to Revelstoke in the spring of 2017 for the Revelstoke premiere of the film. It struck a chord with many of Revelstoke’s Italian population.

The grave of Angelo Conte in Revelstoke’s Mountain View Cemetery

 When Jacolyn and I went to Angelo’s grave for the first time to deliver flowers, it was a poignant moment for me. October 15 was also my mother’s birthday. My mother, Eileen Livingston Harrison, was one of ten children born to Helen and Ulric Livingston. She died in September of 2010, just one month short of her 90th birthday. Taking flowers to Angelo’s grave was a way to remember her as well, since I couldn’t be in Castlegar to place flowers on her own grave. We have continued the tradition each year since, and it links our two families, and reminds us of how interconnected we all are. As Nicola said, “I love how October 15th has become a symbolic day, a moment of suspension, in which universes somehow connect or blend, and the love for Eileen and Angelo becomes one thing.”

 Over the 36 years that I have worked at Revelstoke Museum and Archives, connections have been very important. When I compile the weekly Glimpses of the Past column for the Revelstoke Review, I see how moments in history can repeat themselves, and see the patterns, and the cycles. When I help family historians piece together information on their families, and sometimes even find long-lost relatives, I am acutely aware of how important the lives of past residents are to the reality of our community now. It is important to know historical facts, but it is the personal stories that add to the richness of our community’s history.

 Revelstoke – A Kiss in the Wind is available for streaming on TVO. https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/revelstoke-a-kiss-in-the-wind