Early Life and Family Background

The story of Frank Sinatra begins with immigration, as do so many American stories of the twentieth century. His father, Anthony Martin Sinatra, was born in Lercara Friddi, a small village in the interior of Sicily, in the late 1890s. Lercara Friddi was a poor agricultural community whose residents were increasingly drawn to the prospect of emigrating to the United States in search of economic opportunity, and Anthony Sinatra was among those who made the journey across the Atlantic as a young man, settling eventually in Hoboken, New Jersey, the dense, working-class city directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Sinatra's mother, Natalie Maria Della Garavente, was also of Italian ancestry, born in 1896 to parents who had emigrated from Rossi, a small town near Genoa in the northwestern Italian region of Liguria. Known throughout her life by the nickname "Dolly," Natalie Garavente was a formidable, energetic woman whose personality and ambitions would profoundly shape both the city of Hoboken and the life of her famous son. She was fiercely intelligent, politically engaged, and possessed of a will that brooked little opposition. She worked as a midwife in the Hoboken immigrant community for many years, assisting at hundreds of births, and she also became deeply involved in local Democratic Party politics, eventually rising to a position of genuine influence in Hoboken's ward structure that would have been remarkable for any person of her era and was extraordinary for an immigrant woman of Italian descent.

Anthony Sinatra, known as "Marty," had a more complicated journey to stability in Hoboken. He worked a variety of jobs in his early years and briefly pursued a boxing career, fighting under the Irish name "Marty O'Brien" in the era when Irish fighters commanded higher purses and greater respect than Italian ones in New Jersey's boxing establishments. His boxing career did not ultimately flourish, and he eventually found steadier employment working at various points in the Hoboken fire department, where Dolly's political connections proved useful in securing the position.

Frank Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915, in the family's apartment at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken. The birth was difficult, and the infant was delivered by forceps, leaving permanent scars on his left cheek and neck. He was the only child the Sinatras would have. Dolly Sinatra was the dominant figure in her son's upbringing, and her influence on his personality, his ambitions, and his relationship to the world was profound and lasting. She wanted her son to be successful in a broad, worldly sense, not merely to secure modest employment as so many men of their class and background did. She dressed Frank well beyond what the family's income might have suggested and provided him with spending money that gave him a degree of social freedom unusual among his peers.

Frank's father Marty was a gentler presence, quieter than Dolly, less dominating, and in some ways closer to the sensitive, inward-looking aspects of his son's temperament. Frank shared with his father a love of music, and it was partly through Marty's appreciation for the popular songs of the day that young Frank first began to develop his own musical consciousness. As a child and adolescent, Frank Sinatra was not a distinguished student. He attended A. J. Demarest High School in Hoboken but left without graduating, one of the signal biographical facts that Dolly, who cared deeply about respectability and achievement, found genuinely difficult to accept.

Hoboken and Italian-American Roots

Hoboken, New Jersey, in the years of Frank Sinatra's childhood and youth was a city that occupied a peculiar and somewhat paradoxical position in the geography of American aspiration. Located directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan, it was close enough to the center of American cultural and commercial life to make that world seem almost tangible, visible across the water on clear days, yet separated from it by a divide that was more than geographic. The men and women of Hoboken's immigrant neighborhoods worked on the waterfront, in factories, in the service trades that kept the city functioning, and they watched from across the river as the great towers of Manhattan rose against the sky, symbols of a prosperity and power that was not, in any immediate sense, theirs.