Lucca Vaccaro

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      Sex: M

AKA: Luca

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Individual Information

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     Birth Date: 1858 - Sicily
    Christening: 
          Death: 29 Nov 1936 - New Orleans, Orleans, Louisiana, USA
         Burial: 
 Cause of Death: 

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Parents

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         Father: Stephen Vaccaro
         Mother: Mary Pumilia

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Notes

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General:

Per Times-Picayune December 15, 1913 page 24
LOUISIANA MONEY IN HONDURAS PLAN
Big Tract Secured and Sugar Mills and Distilleries to be Established
A big Honduras Sugar Planting and Distilling Company was chartered in this city Thursday. The name is the Honduras Sugar and Distilling Company and the capital is $1,000,000. The charter was prepared before J. M. Quintero, notary public.
The business of the company will be manufacturing sugar and distilling spirits in Honduras at a place named El Porvinir, near Ceiba, where the company has magnificent lands, some of which have been used for banana raising and some of which is virgin land and all well adapted for sugar.
SUGAR AND SPIRITS
The owners of the land are E. P. Dutu and E. C. Warren and the Dutuville Planting Company of this city.
Others interested are Felix Vaccaro and brothers of this city and Charles A. Farwell, of Millikin & Farwell, big Louisiana sugar plantors and dealers. The Honduras owners will put in their lands, the Vaccaros will put in their railroad interests in Honduras and take stock besides, contracting to handle the output and supply the plantation transportation, etc. Mr. Farwell will remove his sugar mills from his Stanton plantation below the city and put them up in Honduras and it is hoped to have the sugar mills working there within ninety days.
The transaction as handled by Albert Breton, vice president of the German-American National Bank, who will be president of the company. Felix P Vaccaro will be vice president; the managers in Honduras will be Messrs Dutu and Warren and the general manager will be A. W. Norman. The attorney for the company is Lamar C. Quintero of this city, who is familiar with Central American business affairs.
INTEREST COMBINED
The stockholders and their holdings are as follows:
Felix P. Vaccaro, $25,000; S. D'Antoni, $25,000; Joseph Vaccaro, $25,000; Luca Vaccaro, $25,000; Milliken & Farwell, $70,000; A. Breton, $5,000; W. R. Irby, $5,000; E. P. Dutu, $75,000; S. E. Warren, $75,000; A. W. Norman, $5,000.
Mr. Farwell is president of American Cane Growers' Association and was one of the hardest fighters against the removal of the duty from sugar in the tariff bill recently passed which it is claimed will put the Louisiana sugar plantation out of business.

Per New Orleans States (New Orleans, LA) September 1925 Page 1
RISE OF VACCARO FIRM IS GREAT BUSINESS ROMANCE
DAY LABORER IN YOUTH, IS MASTER OF MILLIONS
Mr. Frost Tells Story Of Achievements Of 3 Vaccaro Brothers by MEIGS O. FROST
It takes America to produce a story like this. America, where the only limit to a man's achievement is the power that has its being in his brain and heart and hand. America, where what you were weighs nothing in the scale compared to what you are; and where what you will be can never be safely predicted from your origin.
When the Hotel Roosevelt, newest and most magnificent hotel in the South with the addition of its towering annex, opens to its full capacity this October, it will be the scene of a great banquet. Not, as is customary, a banquet by the owners to their friends. Nothing so ordinary is this.
At the Roosevelt there will gather for that banquet more than five hundred of New Orlean's folk, leaders in every walk of life in the South's greatest city. They will gather there to pay honor to the Vaccaros and the D'Antonis.
Rightly they do this. For they are honoring something more than mere wealth. They are honoring the keen brains and clear eyes and indomitable courage of a man who began life penniless, son of simple Italian farmers in the little village of Contessa Entellina, who started work as a laborer in Louisiana for seventy-five cents a day, and who here in New Orleans, beginning with a capital of a bride and twenty dollars, has built up the great Vaccaro fruit importing, steamship, railroad and commercial interests.
Rules Great Enterprise
Yes, it takes America to produce a story like this. And here, for the first time, exclusively in the New Orleans States, is told the amazing story of the rise of Joseph Vaccaro, Lucca Vaccaro and Felix P. Vaccaro, three Italian immigrant brothers, and of Salvador D'Antoni, their associate in the great business of the firm of Vaccaro Brothers and Company.
New Oreans is the home of that firm. But its interests reach out from New Orleans into the tropics, where it pours a stream of gold into Honduras, Nicaraga, Mexico and Panama.
Many a lordly ruler whose name has gone down in history of Joseph Vaccaro's native Italy, wielded a power that was puny beside the power in the hands of this son of simple Italian farmers. Today at the age of seventy, as president of Vaccaro Brothers and Company, a fleet of sixteen great steamships moves at his word.
Two hundred miles of tropical railroad bears his cargoes to the palm fringed beaches. More than 500,000 hectares of land produces his crops, while an army of more than three thousand employees do his bidding on his payroll. And yearly from those tropics his steamships bring 8,000,000 bunches of bananas into the markets of the United States of America, of which he is a citizen.
Began as Laborer
There at the head of that commercial empire stands the man who began his work in America, an Italian immigrant lad, paid seventy-five cents a day down at the mouth of the Mississippi River where he wove willows into the "mattresses" that lined the banks of South Pass when the great Eads jetties were being built to give a permanent deep-water gateway to New Orleans.
It takes America to produce a story like this.
Yet you cannot get that story from Joseph Vaccaro. You cannot get it from the lips of Lucca Vaccaro or Felix P. Vaccaro or Salvador D'Antoni.
Not that they are ashamed of their origin. They are proud of it. But their personal modesty is such that when the conversation turns to them, they grow tongue-tied, and dumb. Only by many questionings of their intimate friends who know their personal history, is the New Orleans States enabled to give to the world this intimate sketch of the man who came to this city penniless and founded a commercial empire that has made him and his associates probably the most powerful financial group in the South today.
Invest Millions Here
But, though they are world figures in their field, there is in the hearts of the Vaccaros and the D'Antonis an affection for New Orleans where their fortune was built - a love of the old home town - that is a remarkable trait of human loyalty. They haven't said it with flowers. They have said it with dollars. Somewhere between $15,000,000 and $20,000,000 are their investments in New Orleans.
Keen business men admit with surprising warmth that had the Vaccaros invested that money in their own fruit business the returns would have been far greater. But with the feeling that "we wanted to do something for the town where we got our start," the executive heads of that Vaccaro organization have poured millions of dollars into New Orleans investments.
It is an amazing group of men, those heads of the Vaccaro interests. Joseph Vaccaro, 70, is president of Vaccaro Brothers and Company. Lucca Vaccaro, 68, is vice-president. Felip P. Vaccaro, 60, is secretary-treasurer. Three brothers. And Salvador D'Antoni, 51, who after he became in the early days the business associate of Joseph Vaccaro, also became his son-in-law, is general foreign manager of the great interests of the firm. A close corporation, you observe. A family corporation. And it will continue so. For the next generation of Vaccaros and D'Antonis, heirs to millions but every one of them trained in as hard a school as though he had been born penniless as was his father, form the roster of junior members of the firm, every one of them keen and trained to leap into the saddle the minute "the old folks" decide to dismount.
Four Sons Active
John Vaccaro, 43; L. J. Vaccaro, 35; Joseph Vaccaro, Jr., ("the baby," they call him smilingly) all four sons of Joseph Vaccaro, are active in the work of the firm today.
And C. D'Antoni, 46; with B. S. D'Antoni, 25, are the remaining junior members of the firm.
Here, told for the first time, is the story of the origin of the great firm.
Joseph Vaccaro, a mere child less than ten years old, first came to America with his parents from the little Italian village where he was born. They came to New Orleans. They didn't like it. They went back and of course little Joseph Vaccaro went back with them.
But something in America had touched his childish imagination. He begged and pleaded to be allowed to return. And he did return.
Barely past the age of ten, he was placed on a sailing ship headed for New Orleans. He landed in Louisiana, a boy on his own resources at an age when modern children are mostly cared for almost like babies. He worked at various boys' jobs. Then when he was in his early 'teens, came a chance to earn seventy-five cents a day down at the mouth of the river, weaving willow mattresses that were anchored there by great rocks to prevent the scour of the current gouging out the banks that line the channel.
His most intimate friends tell this story.
Little Joe Vaccaro straightened up his weary back one day down at the mouth of the river. Past him, heading out into the Gulf of Mexico, a great ship went its majestic way.
"Looks fine, don't she," said one who stood beside him.
"Someday I'll have them running like that," said Joe Vaccaro.
And he meant it.
The next that his friends remember, Joe Vaccaro, about sixteen, was working cutting rice at a dollar and twenty-five cents a day on a plantation at The Jump, down by Sixty-Mile Point towards the mouth of the river. (He owns that plantation, today, by the way.)
Then he came back to New Orleans.
He was a man now, almost seventeen; earning his own way. He didn't have any job. He didn't want one. He was going to have a business of his own. Didn't he have twenty dollars cash in his pocket? You bet he did.
So he got married. The bride was Miss Lena Musacchia of New Orleans. They rented a little furnished room out on Chartres street near Esplanade avenue, back of where the No. 9 Fire Engine House stands today.
"We had to rent a furnished room," Joe Vaccaro has chuckled since then to one or two of his intimate friends. "All the furniture I had was on my back."
Began in a Basket
So the Vaccaro business started. It began in a basket, literally.
Pretty soon the basket wasn't big enough. So Joe Vaccaro started a little fruit stand in the old French market where Grimaldi's Fish Stand is today. The fruit stand's business grew. Felix Vaccaro and Lucca Vaccaro whom he had left behind in Italy, mere babies, came over to America, and joined Joe Vaccaro. The fruit stand by now had expanded into a little fruit and produce business in Ursuline street. It expanded still larger on Decatur street between St. Louis and Toulouse with Felix and Lucca as partners.
Then, when Joe Vaccaro was about thirty years old (this was some forty years ago) he took in Dominick Tortorich as partner in a fruit and produce business at 1121 North Peters street, while Stephen Vaccaro, the oldest son who died in 1922, took over the original business. After five years of partnership it was dissolved.
It wasn't all easy sailing in those days. Joe Vaccaro has told one or two of his friends of one little episode. He had a small line of credit with the Fruit Auction Board. Very small. He couldn't go a dollar beyond it. Into New Orleans came a shipment of 4,000 cases of lemons from Messina, Italy. Joe Vaccaro wanted those lemons. He knew he could sell them. But to buy the whole shipment was far beyond his means. The man who today handles 8,000,000 bunches of bananas a year, at that time couldn't buy those 4,000 cases of lemons. He asked for them on credit. The Fruit Auction Board turned him down cold.
Finds Friend in Roth
Then up stepped Charlie Roth. The same Charlie Roth New Orleans knows in the real estate business today. He was then an official of the Fruit Auction Board.
"I'll stand good for anything Mr. Vaccaro wants," said Charlie Roth. And Joe Vaccaro got his 4,000 cases of lemons.
About this time two young Italians were developing a little business on the Mississippi River. They were brothers: Salvador D'Antoni and Camilla D'Antoni. They owned a battered little lugger. In New Orleans they would buy a lugger-load of fruit, and take it up the river, peddling it across the levee to the sugar plantations that lined the bank. Joe Vaccaro sold them the fruit they peddled. That was the beginning of the association of the Vaccaro and D'Antoni families.
Also about this time there were greart orange groves down the Mississippi River. The Louisiana orange was becoming famous. Joe Vaccaro had a little capital and credit now. The D'Antoni brothers had a boat - that battered lugger. So Joe Vaccaro worked out the idea of buying up the down-river orange crop and bringing it to New Orleans in the D'Antoni lugger. They got together.
On Cocoanut Venture
Then, just as this infant business was getting under way, there came what all Louisiana remembers as the Year of the Big Freeze. The orange groves down the river were wiped out. That was in 1899.
Were the Vaccaros and D'Antonis discouraged? They were not. Joe Vaccaro knew one Captain Travieso, Italian master of a schooner. They were talking of trading opportunities.
"I'll tell you," said Captain Travieso, "There's a lot of cocoanuts can be picked up on the island of Rautan, about thirty-eight miles northeast of Ceiba, off the coast of Honduras. You can swap provisions for cocoanuts."
But a boat was needed for a trip like that. The D'Antoni lugger was all right for the Mississippi river but not for the Gulf of Mexico to Honduras. So Joe Vaccaro did some heavy thinking. He had a rich friend - though not the kind who would lend money to him . That man was the late Salvador Oteri, a great fruit magnate of his time in New Orleans. And Salvador Oteri had, idle at its morrings in New Orleans, a battered-old-schooner.
Joe Vaccaro went to Salvador Oteri.
"I see you've still got that old schooner over there," he said.
"Sure," said Salvador Oteri. "Do you want her? I'll give her to you."
Salvador Oteri was the most surprised man in the world when Joe Vaccaro took him up. "But he didn't give him the vessel. That wasn't business. What he did do was take Joe Vaccaro's note for $2,500 and sell him the schooner.
Lugger Starts Fleet
"That schooner was the Santa Oteri. She and the little D'Antoni lugger were the foundation of the Vaccaro fleet. The schooner herself was the foundation of the Vaccaro deep sea fleet. She rests today in honorable retirement in the harbor at Rautan.
Joe Vaccaro and his brothers stretched their credit till it cracked. They loaded the Santa Orteri with provisions and headed for the island of Rautan in the Caribbean. They got their cocoanuts. But they learned that the real fruit production was on the mainland of Honduras. They went to the mainland.
Voyage after voyage they brought back to New Orleans cocoanuts, limes and pineapples. They had no sheltered harbor. On the open roadstead of that tropical coast they moored that crazy little schooner caro, worked up to their necks in water alongside brown and black skinned labor getting the loaded lighters out to the schooner's side.
Their keen eyes were on the banana business after the first trip. It was no business to be grabbed with ease. The competition was strong. The Oteri interests of New Orleans were firmly intrenched. The interests that later built up the gigantic United Fruit Company were there on the ground.
Enter Banana Field
But the Vaccaros went to work. And they sailed out of Honduras on their little schooner with a few contracts for the banana output of some planters in Honduras. They came back to New Orleans with those contracts in their pockets.
Now they had to have a steamship. Cocoanuts and limes and pineapples might travel by sail, but bananas demanded the speed of steam.
So they chartered through a steamship agent the little 300 ton tramp steamer Premier. She is still at work down in the Caribbean, working for a wrecking company. She carried 8,000 bunches of bananas. It was a mighty cargo for the Vaccaros in those days. Today their palatial steamers carry 100,000 bunches at a trip and two magnificent liners are now building at Belfast and on the Tyne to enter the New Orleans service just after the first of the year, raising the total of the Vaccaro fleet to 16 steamships flying the house flag of blue, white and blue with the red "V" in the center.
It was touch and go for the new business. Competition was strong. Early in the game the Vaccaros discovered they must have railroads to carry the cargoes to the coast.
"Every dollar we made in those days was put right back in the business," old Joe Vaccaro chuckled recently in talking over the old days with a friend. But they started their railroad on the Salada river and along the coast to Ceiba. Today they have 200 miles of magnificent railroad, and a splendid sheltered port.
Business Grew Fast
Old Joe Vaccaro stayed behind to handle the New Orleans end of the business when once they had it started. Felix Vaccaro and Salvador D'Antoni went along in the Premier for the first load of bananas, and with their own hands helped load it.
And the business grew. Their first offices were in the little brick building upstairs over what is now Cajoleas restaurant, on the corner of Camp and Gravier streets. Presently the offices moved to the Interstate Bank building. Then they filled the eleventh floor of the Queen and Crescent building. Then the twelfth floor. And this week they moved to their new quarters; downstairs and the whole fourteenth floor of the new Union Indemnity building that Vaccaro has built.
And the man at the head of it all - the man many of the folks of New Orleans know in friendly fashion as "Old Joe" Vaccaro - as he sits in his offices in the Union Indemnity building is curiously unchanged in his democracy from the boy who wove willow mattresses at Port eads for seventy-five cents a day and a quarter a day in the fields of the do???????? (words lined out) plantations at Narrin and Myrtle Grove.
Trained Sons to Work
He and Felix and Lucca Vaccaro still will stop and talk with leen personal interests in the personal affairs of their old employees, white and black alike. They cling to their old friends. They are chary of making new ones.
They have trained their sons to work. By their dress and bearing you could never distinguish them from the average moderately prosperous business man. They do not, as the English say of the arrogant, "throw their weight about." There is no pose about them. They are simple folks who started with nothing and builty up an enormous success, probably beyong their wildest dreams. But it hasn't spoiled them.
And so, when early in October five hundred New Orleans leaders in every walk of life pay the Vaccaros and the D'Anotonis honor at that great banquet that marks the opening of the new Hotel Roosevelt, those Orleanians in typical New Orleans fashion are showing their appreciation of the honor that belongs to New Orleans in having as its citizens a group of men who began with so little and who have done so much.
For the story of the Vaccaros and the D'Antonis is a story of which any community might be proud.
And it takes America to produce a story like that.

Per Times-Picayune October 6, 1925 Page 8
BUILDERS
More than six hundred Orleanians, representing the city's professional, financial, business and civic leadership and membership, joined in the tender last night of a testimonial banquet to the Messrs. Vaccaro and Dantoni. The tribute paid these four by the spokesmen for the entire community was as remarkable in its way as their careers. Others have climbed from small beginnings to high places in the fields of business and finance, but comparatively few have been honored so impressively, by a whole cityful, as were the honorees at last night's banquet.
The story of Joseph Vaccaro's coming to New Orleans as a lad; of his struggle for a foothold; of his sending for his brothers Lucca and Felix; of Salvador Dantoni's enlistment with them; of the steady expansion of their business and multiplication of their interests, has been recited in the news columns. It is one of the romances in real life more often recorded in this land of opportunity than anywhere else in the wide world. It testifies to the sterling qualities of the four - their business sagacity, their courage in occasional adversity; the affection and loyalty that held them together in teamwork during the years of their climb to command of great enterprises and mastery of millions.
Something more they possessed: Whereas other masters of millions, after amassing their fortunes, have invested in "tax-exempts" and "taken it easy thereforward, these four have poured millions into constructive enterprises here in the city adopted as their home and the headquarters of their business. The great Roosevelt hotel annex is the most familiar of their direct investments here, but is only one of many. The money they have made has been devoted in very great part to community-building. The constructive service to which they have devoted so much of their wealth has earned the community tribute paid them last night in the great hotel that stands as testimony to their desire to promote the community welfare.

Per Times-Picayune December 1, 1936 Page 8
Luca Vaccaro, Sr.
The life story of Luca Vaccaro, Sr., who died in his New Orleans home Sunday night, constitutes an interesting chapter in the stirring history of American development and opportunities. Natives of Italy, the Vaccaro brothers came to New Orleans in their youth. Their first business venture was a fruit stand in the French market. From that modest beginning they and their associate, Salvador Dantoni, developed varied and great-scale enterprises, some of which were merged, 10 years ago, into a single $50,000,000 corporation. Their great fruit and steamship business are the most familiar of the Vaccaro enterprises, but they had and have many other interests. For years their investments in constructive enterprises have benefited New Orleans, and their service to the community was given impressive recognition in 1925 when hundreds of representative Orleanians honored the Messrs. vaccaro and Dantoni with a testimonial banquet.
Luca Vaccaro retired a few years ago from active business life, but maintained his keen interest in New Orleans and its welfare. A generous but unostentatious giver to charitable and other good causes, his passing is widely and sincerely mourned.