Frank Capra

Frank Capra was born on May 18, 1897, in Bisacquino, Sicily, as one of seven children. On May 10, 1903, his family departed for the United States aboard the Germania, arriving in New York on May 23. Capra described the voyage as degrading and miserable, with poor ventilation, constant sickness, and stormy weather. The family then traveled by train to California, where his older brother Benjamin was living. Due to their limited English, the family subsisted on bread and bananas during the journey. On June 3, they arrived at the Southern Pacific station in Los Angeles, a city of about 102,000 people. They stayed with Benjamin, and on September 14, 1903, Frank began school at Castelar Elementary. In 1909, he entered Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School. To earn money, he sold newspapers in downtown L.A. after school and on weekends, sometimes working with his brother Tony, who would punch him to draw attention and boost sales. Capra also performed in a two-man music combo in the red-light district, playing at brothels and other venues for a dollar per night. He worked as a janitor at his high school and became interested in theater, often handling backstage duties like lighting. Despite family pressure to drop out and work, Capra refused, believing education was essential to achieving the American Dream. He graduated from high school on January 27, 1915, and in September of that year, he entered Throop College of Technology (now the California Institute of Technology) to study chemical engineering. The annual tuition was $250, and he received occasional financial support from his family. While at Throop, Capra discovered poetry and the essays of Montaigne, which inspired him to write. He composed "The Butler's Failure," a story about an English butler driven to murder and suicide by poverty. Capra received a $250 cash award for having the highest grades in the school, which included a six-week trip across the U.S. and Canada. After his father, Turiddu, died in 1916, Capra began working at the campus laundry to support himself. When the U.S. declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, Capra enlisted in the Army, joining the Coastal Artillery despite not yet being a naturalized citizen. He served as a supply officer for student soldiers at Throop who were part of a Reserve Officers Training Corps program. Capra discovered at enlistment that he was not an American citizen and was naturalized in 1920. He graduated from Throop with a bachelor's degree on September 15, 1918, and was inducted into the U.S. Army on October 18. He was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, where he contracted the Spanish influenza and was discharged on December 13. An armistice ending World War I was declared shortly after. After recovering, Capra moved to his brother Ben's home in L.A. and took on various manual labor jobs, including errand boy, ditch digger, and orange tree pruner. He also worked as an extra in films and as a prop buyer at an independent studio on Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, which later became Columbia Pictures. He was often unemployed, reinforcing his family's earlier disapproval of his higher education. Capra wrote short stories but struggled to get them published. He eventually became a live-in tutor for the son of gambler "Lucky" Baldwin, later using the Baldwin estate as a location for *Dirigible* (1931). In 1919, Capra, former actor W. M. Plank, and financial backer Ida May Heitmann incorporated the Tri-State Motion Picture Co. in Nevada. Tri-State produced three short films in 1920—*Don't Change Your Husband* (1919), *The Pulse of Life* (1917), and *The Scar of Love* (1920)—all directed by Plank and possibly based on story treatments written by Capra.