The Cozzolino family

Salvatore (1884-1974) had left Naples in 1905 to make a new beginning in America. After the 1906 earthquake, he felt that better opportunity awaited him in San Francisco where he knew many workers would be needed to rebuild the city. Sal was a leader. He soon found a job working for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. at $5 a day. The job was exciting and challenging to him, and he quickly became a supervisor of one of the gangs. After working for a short time, he commented one day to his wife, "Retire me with $5 a day and I’d live like a king.”

Soon his parents came to California to live. Now he had a good Italian family except for one thing, children of his own. He felt he was on top of the world when in 1911 he became a father to a boy, Mike. He and Amelia had a wonderful life together until the fateful year of 1918 when the flu epidemic hit the United States. He grew restless with too much time on his hands, so he rented some land by the Schlage Lock Company on San Bruno Avenue (later Bayshore Boulevard) In addition to working days at PG&E he planted potatoes and worked his field at night. Potatoes, a cash crop, gave a good return for his time and Sal saved most of the profit. A few years passed, with Sal continuing to work for PG&E, but he was still restless and his friends knew it. One day a friend approached Sal and offered to send for his sister who still lived in Italy. He said that the two would make a good couple, but if they didn’t get married, he had to repay only the cost of the $50 boat ticket with no other obligations. His friend’s sister, Nataline (1891-1941) agreed to the bargain, and she arrived in San Francisco with all of her belongings in a suitcase. The two struck it off and soon they were married.

Sal wanted to make a new life for himself and Nataline so he rented five acres of land along Ludeman Lane in Millbrae from the Spring Valley Water Company. The rent was $100 a year. The Spring Valley Water Company had established itself as a supplier of water to the metropolis of San Francisco and in the process had acquired thousands of acres of land on the Peninsula. The five acres were surplus land that lay behind the Spring Valley Water Department superintendent’s house to the west of El Camino Real, along Ludeman Lane where some other Italian flower growers, the DalDons and the Bertocchis, raised crops. This land had been part of the Rancho Buri Buri and a few of the descendants of Jose Antonio Sanchez still lived on this section of land.

The property he rented had never been farmed before and was barren of rich top soil, but hard work and determination would change that, Sal told his wife. The first crops he planted were vegetables as the market was good for them, and he felt that at least he would always be able to eat if things went bad. The vegetables were loaded the night before and driven at 3:30 A.M. by wagon to the San Francisco wholesale market. On the return trip he would stop in South San Francisco at the stockyards and load his wagon with cow manure that he could use as fertilizer in the fields. After a few such trips to town, the soil became richer and more suitable for other crops to be grown. Flowers were given to him by the Dal Don family and he experimented with raising them as a cash crop. It worked, and he got enough confidence to expand his fields to include more flowers, a crop that would eventually prove to be a better money-maker as the vegetable growers in Colma were out-competing Millbrae in produce.

The family increased in 1922 with the birth of a daughter Molly. Two years later a son Sandy was born. After moving to Millbrae, Marie was born, followed by Flora and son James.

The Cozzolinos worked hard, prospered, expanded their business and bought land and developed the land on Ludeman Lane for farming. When the 1950s emerged, however, the demand for land for housing became an inescapable reality and the Cozzolino family finally had to quit farming in Millbrae. The land was sold and family housing sprouted up where flowers and vegetables had grown.

Sal’s son, James, continues the family legacy of farming on land he purchased near Half Moon Bay along State Route 92.

In Millbrae, there is a street named for the pioneering Cozzolino family.