08 April, 2011

Nat Lena


1328 curtis, berkeley

1 comment:

StoriestoLast said...

A little about Nat Lena:
Nat Lena
Born on a farm in Lucca, Italy in 1885, Nat emigrated to the U.S. in 1902 and worked in New York for a time, before trying caol mining in West Virginia. After a few years, he returned to New York on foot, a journey that took him thirty-six days. Back in the Big Apple, he began working in the concrete industry. He moved on to railroad tunnel construction in Ohio and construction of the World’s Fair grounds in St. Louis, Missouri. He arrived in San Francisco, California in 1907 with $7.50 in his pocket. In Alameda, he worked for Rotarian A. LaPlant as a concrete foreman until he entered business for himself in 1914, and ran his contracting business until retirement. His only formal education was three months of night school when he first arrived in New York. But Nat used to say that his business education began at age ten when he took a contract for farm plowing.
Nat was a member of the Oakland Rotary Club for 47 years (concurrently a member of the Alameda and North Oakland Rotary Clubs). When he died in 1978,
his estate left a $85,000 donation to the Club's scholarship fund, started with funds left by Al Saroni (Sugar and Rice Manufacturer)upon his death in 1961.
In 2009, the Saroni-Lena Scholarship Fund had provided one million dollars to 600 Oakland teens helping them to go to college.
(I'm writing the Rotary Club of Oakland's centennial history book - out in Feb 2012; It is the third oldest Rotary club in the world).

I hope you found this interesting! Love your site!
Linda Hamilton