Photograph of walnuts and children's toys from the Pier 21 Exhibition.

An Excerpt from The Immigration Story of Angelina Crosdale

But before we could be on our way, we had to go through customs. My father had declared only the usual items that an immigrant would bring; clothes, bedding, (as a matter of fact, we had 2 very large bags full of sheep's wool so that we could make our mattresses or weave blankets with this. Had we only known! The customs officials enquired as to whether my father had any meat products such as sausages, prosciutto, salami etc. My father said he had none. However, the officers were obviously aware that these items were very often in the belongings of the Italian immigrants so they decided to search our trunks. I recall, again vividly, that my sister and I were sitting on one and the gentlemen lifted us up gently and put us down to the side of the trunks. Unfortunately, at the very top of the first trunk, there was a small cloth bag containing cornflour which had been given to my father by a neighbour to give to her relatives in Montreal as a gift. My father innocently answered that this was cornmeal when the officer questioned him about its contents. (All this dialogue was through an interpreter, naturally.) My father did not know that within the cornmeal, the neighbour had hidden a chunk of homemade pork sausage. Somehow, during the trip, the flour must have settled and as the officer picked up the bag, the flour settled on the bottom and there was a link of sausage clearly sticking up from the flour. The office had a pretty good idea as to what this was and so he proceeded to cut open the bag where he found the meat product. So now, both officers proceeded to unearth everything in both trunks. At the time that my grandmother was packing the trunks for my father, wherever there was a little space where nothing of value could fit, she would put in a few walnuts in the shell. As you can imagine, there were many such small spaces and therefore the trunks had quite a large number of walnuts in all the nooks and crannies. I can see it as clearly as it was yesterday: as the officers would remove more items from the trunks in search of some contreband meat, there was a cascade of walnuts from the trunk onto the polished floor. My sister and I would try as fast as possible to scoop them up or chase them down before they came underfoot of the rest of the multitude at Pier 21. I know that we did not pick all those walnuts up and after the officers were through (they found nothing else) my father was too tired and disgusted to worry about walnuts. To this day, I wonder how many people enjoyed my grandmother's walnuts. I think of the walnuts as our family's first contribution to this country that has given us so much.

Accession Number: S2012.737.1