Whether anyone ever told the late Alfonso Cretarola to “go back to where he came from” — that would be the Abruzzo region of Italy, from which he emigrated to the United States in 1909 — is a question we’ll never be able to answer. But his grandson says the Italian immigrant was definitely ordered once to get out of town — in Pennsylvania coal country, where he was trying to work as a laborer in the 1920s.

“Things were not easy," Francis Cratil-Cretarola says of his grandfather, who eventually found home in a small Italian-American enclave in Reading, changed his name to Francis Cratil and became a naturalized American citizen in 1943. “Our last name isn’t Cratil because he was someone who was wanted from the get-go.”