2026-39 Almost Italian

Mike Antinora, My Mother’s First Love

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 39 of 2026

Prompt: What Wasn’t Written Down

“You were almost Italian. His name was Mike.” That is all my mother told me. 

And then I found him in her 1942 diary, the writings of a sixteen-year-old. 

Mike Antinora, found in Margaret Nolen's 1942 Diary.
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I don’t know how sixteen-year-old Margaret met Mike Antinora, a soldier from St. Louis. Her parents were known to pick up hitchhiking soldiers and invite them home for dinner, sometimes even offering them a place to spend the night. Perhaps that is how Mike came into her life.

The first entry that mentioned Mike was September 15: “Got a letter from Mike. He is coming Saturday.” On Saturday she wrote, “Mike and Leon came down. They took Bet and I to a show. Got home on last street car. They stayed all night. We played cards until 2 o’clock.”  The next day they went to Bristow and “had fun with M and L”. 

By October the relationship had grown. “

20th: “Mike sent the sweetest bracelet with and Air Corps wings on it. His letters are getting more serious everyday.”

21st: “Mike proposed in a letter. Showed bracelet off at school.”

24th: “Mike and I set out on the front porch and talked until 2:00 a.m. He asked me to wait for him until the war was over. I haven’t accepted yet.” 

25th: “Went to catholic church with Mike. It was a very pretty sermon.”

Then Mike was gone. 

Nov. 3: “Got a letter and a package from Mike. He is in New Jersey. He sent me a sweetheart letter case.”

Nov 4: “Got a letter from Sam (Mike’s brother). He asked me to come to St. Louis Thanksgiving.” (She didn’t go.)

Dec 2: “Got letter from Sam. He thinks Mike is in New Oran Africa because of a picture they saw in the paper Nov. 27.”

Dec 16: “Got a nice lace table cloth from Antinora family.”

Dec 24: “Called Mike’s mother because I had a letter from him. He was 20 days out at sea.”

Jan 2: “Got letters from Mike and Leonard, They are in India.”

And that was it. Nothing else was written about Mike. 

Mike Antinora married Catherine Margaret “Kitty” Farrell in 1948 in St. Louis. They had one son, and four daughters, one of whom became a nun. Mike and Kitty both passed away in the St. Louis area. 

I don’t know what happened between Mike and Margaret. Did they continue writing? Did she eventually tell him she wouldn’t wait? Did the war and the distance simply bring their romance to an end? Her diary offers no explanation.

But I do know that more than fifty years later, she remembered him well enough to tell her daughter, “You were almost Italian.”

And now I know his name.