After the Whistle: A Wednesday Night at the Tyrol Club
Inside the Alpine-style chalet on Lamont Ave, Friday night was loud. The Tyrol Club had anchored Solvay since 1929, and crossing the threshold of the 1950s hall felt like stepping out of the shadow of the soda ash plant and straight into the Trentino Alps.
The sharp scent of Louis Nicolini’s Salamini cut through the noise.
Louie, who ran cranes at the Solvay Process plant until the gates chained shut in '86, was pacing near the microphone, waiting to call bingo.
But before he picked it up, he slipped into the back room to check on the real work.
A crew of men crowded around a massive 15-gallon copper paiolo, taking turns throwing their weight against the triese—a heavy, canoe-like wooden paddle.
They had to keep the thick farina, water, and salt moving for forty-five straight minutes to make the polenta.
It was shoulder-burning labor, but these were men accustomed to sweating through a shift, suitably "lubricated" tonight by a few unmarked bottles of wine passed quickly out of sight when the kitchen doors swung open.
Near the front of the main hall, Carlo DeMarchi pounded the table at a joke. Carlo put in forty years as a mechanic in the Machine Shop, and tonight he sat flanked by the old SA Wetside crew, Dan Simiele, Sr. and Vincent Lamparella, Sr.
Between Dan and Vince, they had spent eighty years keeping the pumps churning, in the damp, ammonia-wafting belly of Allied.
"Wrestling that triese through fifty pounds of cornmeal looks about as rough as a night shift on the Wetside," George Kinder said, pulling a chair into the circle.
George knew rough; he had given 42 years to the plant, climbing to Plant Supervisor of Maintenance and running the night roving repair gang.
"It's corn mush with an attitude," a guy at the next table shouted over. "Down in the city they want pasta. Up here, we eat polenta."
John "Jack" Korzyp squeezed past, bumping George’s shoulder. Jack and his brother Richard ran the Bridge Street Tavern, and he knew these guys better than anyone. "You worked hard," Jack laughed, grabbing a piece of bread from their basket, "but you always showed up at my door starving."
Someone chuckled, and the table settled into an easy rhythm, remembering those lunch breaks spent escaping the heat, washing down the day's dust with however many cold beverages hit the spot, and devouring Jack’s grilled kielbasa.
Servers pushed through the double doors carrying platters of golden polenta. The cooks had wrapped it in towels to hold the heat until the cornmeal firmed up.
Now, it stood tall on the plates, molded to mimic the rugged peaks and valleys of the Trentino Alps, with a deep crater pressed into the center holding a pool of dark chicken and onion gravy.
Over the clatter of forks and scraping plates, Alvin Tarolli squeezed the first notes out of his accordion. Alvin, a WWII vet and past club president, spent thirty years at Carrier Corp, but tonight he was just the band.
Beside him, Richard "Deetch" Tarolli—the man who kept the village’s electronics whirring for half a century at Tarolli TV—pressed a harmonica to his lips and caught the melody.
Near the edge of the music sat Mary "Irene" Tarolli. A charter member of the Ladies Auxiliary, she had sailed from Tyrol, Austria, when she was only fifteen, carrying the memory of World War I winters and starvation.
Tonight, surrounded by the noise of the Wetside crew and the steam rising off the polenta mountains, she didn't say much. Instead, she kept her head down, needles clicking in her lap. She was working on another afghan—one of more than eighty she would knit in her 106 years—making sure that, as long as she was around, no one in this village would ever feel the cold.
Author’s Note: The following is a work of biographical historical fiction. It draws upon the real obituaries, traditions, and lived experiences of the men and women who anchored the local community and the soda ash plant, weaving their legacy into a single evening.