A rather intriguing set of dates for Peter Bacigalupi is given in the
book by Ron Bopp, "The American Carousel Organ".

In the ledger of 13 March 1906, Peter Bacigalupi buys a 100-note organ
and 22 pieces of music.  Now all us native San Franciscans know in our
blood that the city was 75 to 80 percent destroyed in the earthquake of
18 April 1906 and the firestorm of less than a month later.

Now we see that on 19 August 1906 Peter buys another 100-note organ,
this time from San Jose, California.  San Francisco was a tent city
for most of that summer, while the rubble was cleared.

So the mystery is: Was the first machine destroyed in the earthquake,
or did it survive and give Peter a leg up on the 'entertainment' and
help to cheer up the populace who had to rebuild the city from scratch?

The Italian folks in San Francisco who had the money back in that
time were the fisherman, many who came from Sicily.  I heard that
Mussolini thought organ grinders were demeaning and ran a propaganda
campaign that brought them all home.  Would Bacigalupi have been an
organ grinder who did well?

I think it was said that the Bacigalupo family was more Austrian than
Italian.  I think that part of the world was Austrian until the friends
of the composer Giuseppi Verdi were able to gain independence in the
later part of the 19th century.

World War Two changed things but, during the early part of the 20th
century, Italians were the sophisticated, suave, chic merchants of
San Francisco.

Julie Porter