Carmine was born in Hudson and lived here until he was 39 years old. His father Jimmy came from Italy as a teenager and settled in New York City and got a job working on Holland Tunnel. He had three or four cousins in Hudson. So he came to Hudson, met Carmine’s mother when she was 15 and married her. He used to do concrete work. 

Carmine didn’t complete high school and he learned all the trades on his own. His first job was at a mushroom factory in Hudson for $.35 hr. It was seasonal work only when the mushrooms were ripe. They went out of business so he worked at a refrigerator plant, until it went bankrupt after three or four years. He then worked at Universal Match Factory on printing presses making advertising on matchbook covers, but the spray to dry the ink interfered with his breathing so he quit. He then started photography, which was always of interest. He worked on black and white developing and mixing chemicals. He bought bulk chemicals and developed 4x5 sheet films for newspapers, drying, printing the photos and then putting them on the paper. The biggest part of the business was photo restoration, which was copying old photos.

As kids they spent time at the river. There were Hudson River Day Line trips, coming up from New York City in the morning arriving about 11am. The other boat left Albany in the morning going to Hudson. They were big river boats: Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, Washington Irving. They could carry 5,000 people. There was a recreational park at Kingston Point River. People could take the morning boat out and come home on the afternoon one, spending the day at the park. He did that with his mother once. During WWII these boats were used for troop ships, after the war the Day Line started again but only came to Poughkeepsie, NY.