The next is excerpted from Each Time a Bell Rings, a guide of essays about It is A Fantastic Life by Lauren Theisen and Emily St. James. It’s accessible for buy now.
The bridge in Seneca Falls actually does look identical to the one which George and Clarence discover themselves beneath in It’s a Fantastic Life. It’s brief, accessible to pedestrians, made from metal beams that be part of collectively to type triangles, and stands just a bit bit indifferent from the city’s important road. I knew once I began scripting this guide that Seneca Falls claimed to be the real-life inspiration for Bedford Falls, that this New York village with a well-known feminist historical past hosted a pageant for the film yearly, and as I began my work, I seemed ahead, particularly, to standing on that bridge. I knew, after all, that it wasn’t the true bridge, that any type of location taking pictures was cost-prohibitive, and that the film was filmed in California. However I used to be questioning if I would channel a little bit of George Bailey in myself, searching onto the water, reenacting a terrific American second of hope rediscovered.
After I truly went to Seneca Falls and stood on that bridge, nevertheless, I discovered myself much less considering fiction and extra attracted, as a substitute, to a plaque that’s hung there for over a century, which commemorates a really actual story.
Perhaps it was simply because the solar was shining on a beautiful morning, or perhaps it was the stark distinction from my house in busy Brooklyn, however Seneca Falls clicked for me the second I laid eyes on it.
In contrast to the Bedford Falls of the 20th century, there’s no practice that’ll get you proper into the city. As a substitute, I’d taken an Amtrak to Rochester on a Friday in Might, spent a pleasing night there, after which rented a automotive within the morning to drive forty-five miles down the freeway after which a bit longer down extra remoted nation roads. Arriving from State Road, I noticed the small downtown backed up in opposition to the river like one thing straight out of a ceramic village set. After I parked and began strolling, I glimpsed the bridge from a distance, its gentle inexperienced contrasting with the blue, blue sky. Immediately, I felt like I had come to the appropriate place. This was precisely the type of village that the Baileys may name house.
Somebody way more vital than me had this response again in 2002, serving to construct momentum for the It’s a Fantastic Life celebrations that the city would go on to host. Karolyn Grimes, who performed Zuzu, first visited Seneca Falls in 2002. She didn’t come on a beautiful Might morning, however when it was snowing. Upon arrival, she obtained out of her automotive, noticed the bridge, and he or she mentioned, “I’m house. That is as near Bedford Falls as you’re going to get.”
That’s what Anwei Legislation informed me once I visited her on the It’s a Fantastic Life Museum in downtown Seneca Falls. She coincidentally moved to this place in the exact same 12 months that Grimes visited, drawn by the human rights historical past of Seneca Falls that features former resident Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the 1848 conference that stoked the ladies’s rights motion. Anwei Legislation went on to play a essential half within the creation and ongoing work of the museum—“Cofounder, most likely the director. We don’t care an excessive amount of about titles,” she mentioned, laughing once I requested about her official position.
Legislation was sitting at a small welcome desk, greeting guests in between my questions. I’d requested about how a lot Seneca Falls acknowledged the connection to It’s a Fantastic Life when she’d first began dwelling there. She mentioned that the city may need a screening over Christmas alongside a canned meals drive, and that folks talked concerning the overlap with Bedford Falls, however it was Zuzu’s look that actually began the momentum. Grimes introduced again people related to the movie—her fellow grown-up little one actors and descendants of Donna Reed and Frank Capra—and thus started an growth of Seneca Falls’s identification, which now features a packed annual multiday It’s a Fantastic Life Competition, that includes particular friends, displays, performances, actions, meals, and naturally, a neighborhood screening.
The museum itself opened in December 2010, and it did so in a big location. Whereas I visited at a short lived spot down the road whereas the same old constructing underwent renovation, the true house of the museum is on the web site of what was once the Seneca Theatre. Opened by Charles Fornesi in 1913, it was each the primary film home in Seneca Falls and, per Legislation, the entrepreneurial work of the village’s first Italian American, who was partially answerable for different Italians becoming a member of the neighborhood.
I used to be a minimum of a tad involved, earlier than I visited, that the museum would change into a cynical vacationer entice, however it was something however. Admission, true to the spirit of the movie, was a recommended 5 {dollars} that you can toss in a basket. The
reward store subsequent door, which was manned by Legislation’s husband, Henry, didn’t settle for bank cards as a result of he didn’t know methods to work the machine. For those who needed to purchase an decoration, pin, or postcard with out money, you needed to go exterior and take it again to Anwei. To me, it was not a spot that valued cash, effectivity, or flash. It did, nevertheless, draw sufficient individuals to rapidly fill the restricted house in its first hour of operation on Saturday morning. Shifting previous the exhibited gadgets, I navigated a wide range of places and encountered people from all generations—one little one informed Anwei they known as their grandmother “Zuzu.” Anwei makes some extent of asking each customer the place they’re coming from, and over the earlier summer season, she’d logged vacationers from all fifty states.
I discovered the museum cozy and private, with a type of rambling storytelling nature that endeared itself to me with its quirky type. It mainly had an entrance space, a giant exhibit house, a narrower hallway filled with gadgets, and a smaller exhibit house, all laid out with the unofficial care of any individual’s front room. There are only some identified props from the film nonetheless in existence, and the one one on show on the museum was a pair of Violet’s earrings. However as a substitute, the museum was full of tributes, connections, and digressions via the themes of the film and the lives of the individuals who introduced it into the world.
In accordance with Anwei, the museum opened with only one case that includes gadgets from Grimes’s assortment and has expanded, because of donations from these with ties to the movie or simply hardcore followers. Yow will discover autographs, a cigar lighter just like the one in Mr. Gower’s retailer, Lego and ceramic recreations of Bedford Falls, copies of non-public essays concerning the film, a Christmas tree, a “George lassos the moon” drawing resting on a piano, and way more. Relatively than inform a definitive and full story, curators took what they’d and turned it into an absorbing expertise—one which maybe takes no matter feelings and recollections of the movie you deliver into Seneca Falls and attracts them a little bit nearer to the floor.
“There’s a number of males who discuss how a lot it means to them, as a result of they really feel like they’ve been George Bailey in some unspecified time in the future of their life,” Anwei mentioned. “We get individuals in right here who cry and simply—they only bear in mind.”
With regards to Frank Capra’s Bedford Falls and the true Seneca Falls, I really feel an urge to channel a well-known line from one other Jimmy Stewart movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend turns into truth, print the legend.” The official line of the museum is a modest declare. Certainly one of their indicators reads, “Whereas there are numerous similarities to Seneca Falls, we don’t consider that Frank Capra needed Bedford Falls to be one particular place. Bedford Falls evokes fond recollections of small cities in every single place. As one customer to our museum mentioned: ‘Bedford Falls is in your coronary heart.’ ” That mentioned, the village clearly revels within the connection. The restore store proper close to downtown is “Bedford Falls Storage.” The sandwich place the place I ate my lunch offered a wide range of It’s a Fantastic Life paninis—I obtained the “Bedford Falls.” There’s a public house adorned with a number of giant bells devoted to a person named Menzo D. Case, whose plaque calls him “a modern-day George Bailey.” And the postcard I took house with me from the museum, a wintery scene that highlights the bridge, is daring sufficient to learn, “Seneca Falls … The Actual Bedford Falls.”
Whereas there’s no robust documented connection between Frank Capra and Seneca Falls, the circumstantial proof is each enjoyable and engaging. I realized extra about it once I walked over to the Seneca Falls Historic Society and met with its govt director, Jonathan Monfiletto. The Society is headquartered in a reddish-brown mansion north of downtown, proper subsequent to the library, and dates again to the 1800s. I talked with Jonathan upstairs in an workplace filled with books and papers. He was fairly new on the job and clearly very excited to be there. We chatted for a bit concerning the historical past of Seneca Falls, after which, once I requested about Capra, he confirmed me a newspaper article from December 1996 that shed some gentle on the beginning of the Seneca/Bedford Falls momentum.
That article, revealed in Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle, mentioned the fiftieth anniversary of the film introduced renewed media curiosity in Seneca Falls because the inspiration for its setting. The issue: There was no proof that Frank Capra had ever been there. The closest the museum can definitively place him across the time of preproduction is New York Metropolis, some 250 miles away, and from there, it’s solely conjecture that he perhaps visited household in Auburn, a former house of Harriet Tubman that lies simply to the east of Seneca Falls.
That’s the place Seneca Falls’s Tommy Bellissima, then seventy-four years previous, got here in. The native barber, raised in Sicily, informed reporters in 1996 that some fifty years earlier, he had minimize Frank Capra’s hair. In accordance with Bellissima, he wasn’t accustomed to Capra when he walked into the store as a result of he didn’t know a lot about American movies, however the title caught in his head. The filmmaker, he says, complimented Bellissima on his surname, which implies “very stunning” in Italian. The barber didn’t return the nicety, nevertheless, as a result of “Capra” means “goat.” Someday later, although, he noticed Capra’s title and movie in a film commercial and remembered his Italian buyer.
“I’m constructive that was the man,” Bellissima mentioned.
You possibly can scoff at this, and a few do. An AP article about Bellissima additionally consists of an opposition quote from movie historian Jeanine Basinger, who says about Seneca Falls, “Allow them to have their fantasy.” On an expert stage, I can see her level. Actually, there’s not any proof accessible that may enable a journalist to print “Bedford Falls got here from Seneca Falls” as a truth. Give it some thought an excessive amount of, particularly from a distance, and all of it may begin to sound like idle hypothesis.
However then there’s that bridge, inconceivable to overlook and simply as laborious to overlook.
“The Best Reward,” the brief story on which It’s a Fantastic Life is predicated, bears little significant resemblance to the masterpiece it will ultimately assist spawn. However the artists behind the movie took a perfunctory piece of writing and exploded it into one thing with a lot coronary heart, depth, and massive concepts about America that it achieved immortality. And one among their many enhancements—a small selection within the grand scheme of the movie, however one with a large intangible affect, I feel—was to vary the introduction of the Clarence character. Within the Philip Van Doren Stern story, the mysterious stranger simply seems subsequent to a depressed George Pratt on the bridge, saying, “I wouldn’t do this if I have been you.” Within the film, after all, Clarence falls out of the sky earlier than George Bailey can bounce off the bridge, then flails round within the water as a result of he bets that George’s deeply ingrained selflessness will override his surface-level stress and melancholy.
For those who select to consider that Capra got here to Seneca Falls in late 1945, then this modification within the story is unmistakably linked to the bridge in that village. That’s as a result of this construction simply off downtown, the place you possibly can stroll over the Cayuga–Seneca Canal, has a plaque from 1917 devoted to Antonio Varacalli, who, it reads, “Gave his life to save lots of one other.”
Varacalli is without doubt one of the heroes of this village, and Jonathan informed me a number of what’s identified (or partially identified) about him. He was twenty-one in 1917, however he may need been a youngster who lied about his age to get work. He’d come to Seneca Falls along with his father to earn cash whereas the remainder of his household stayed behind in Italy, working both on the canal itself or at one among its factories.
On the morning of April 12, 1917, Varacalli was at work on the canal with a number of different males, in line with contemporaneous articles within the Syracuse Herald and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Round 11:00 a.m., a youngster named Ruth Dunham got here to the now-famous bridge. Per the Herald, “The younger girl stood on the east stroll of the bridge for a while, after which, within the plain sight of a rating of individuals jumped over the railing.” Varacalli, with out eradicating any of his work clothes besides his hat, plunged in to rescue her. He succeeded in pushing her shut sufficient to shore that the opposite males may get her out of the water, however he himself was unable to swim to security. A few hours later, males used drag hooks to deliver his physique again to the floor.
Ruth Dunham, the Democrat and Chronicle reported, stayed unconscious for a number of hours after she was returned to her house on Bridge Road however survived. The paper attributed her suicide try to a nervous collapse. “For the previous six months, Mrs. Nettie Dunham, the younger girl’s mom, has been confined to her mattress and the woman has cared for her mom nights whereas working days as a stenographer,” it mentioned.
For the true believers within the Capra connection, this echo of Clarence and George cinches it. You have got It’s a Fantastic Life’s placement within the basic Upstate New York space, in a city with the title “Falls” in it, with visible and financial similarities. After which you’ve got the change from the unique brief story so distinct that you would be able to image precisely the way it occurred. Capra, at some point, walks via Seneca/Bedford Falls, crosses the bridge, sees the plaque honoring a fellow Italian American, learns a little bit extra concerning the story, and decides that this real-life sacrifice can also be one thing that he’d like George Bailey to emulate.
One thing I haven’t talked about but is that It’s a Fantastic Life is explicitly a really Christian movie, to the purpose that it was no shock when Pope Leo XIV named it one among his very favorites. My love for the film doesn’t come from a spiritual place, however once I myself lastly stood on the bridge in Seneca Falls, I had what felt like a non secular expertise. Alone, in blue-gray post-rain climate, I used to be drawn to a plaque on the fence separating me from the canal. “Right here, April 12, 1917, Antonio Varacalli gave his life to save lots of one other. He honored the neighborhood. The neighborhood honors him.” Surrounding the plaque have been as many as 100 bells tied to the webbing of the barricade.
From that spot, you possibly can image the previous. About 108 years in the past, a younger girl had jumped into this water, and a person had jumped in to save lots of her. Certainly one of them made it out alive. Thanks a minimum of partially to the visible provided by the film, the picture in my head was particularly evocative. The Seneca Falls bridge asks you to take inventory of your personal selflessness, your personal braveness. It’s a monument to a unprecedented problem and a reminder that at any second, we may be known as upon to behave in a state of affairs that has life-or-death stakes.
Stated Jonathan in his workplace, “I used to be speaking to somebody just lately and was like, ‘Man, what would I do in that place?’ I’d hope I’d bounce in. However would I simply be paralyzed by worry?”
Antonio Varacalli’s life ended on that day in 1917, however Ruth Dunham lived on. Per Ancestry.com, her ailing mom died two years later in 1919. Just some months after that, Ruth married Charles Winslow, and he or she lived with him within the Washington, DC, space for the subsequent few many years. Charles died in 1958, and Ruth lived till 1980, when she died on the age of eighty-three. An obituary from The Washington Submit lists Charles as being survived by a daughter, “Mrs. Arthur J. Williamson,” and three grandchildren. That’s mainly it. That’s what I’ve obtained. In
looking out via newspaper archives for months after visiting Seneca Falls (with assist from Jonathan too), I used to be not capable of finding any obituary for Ruth (Dunham) Winslow or something that may have illuminated what her life was like within the years between her rescue in Seneca Falls and her loss of life sixty-three years later.
I hoped to search out tales of Ruth serving to individuals, spreading love, or simply doing one thing fascinating with all these years that Antonio had given to her. I needed the domino impact to be clear and apparent, one thing like George Bailey saving the lives of all these males on the transport as a result of he’d saved his war-hero-to-be brother, Harry, all these years earlier than. I needed proof that Ruth had been particular, that she had lived this nice large fantastic life full of tons of grandchildren and time spent pursuing passions that touched the lives of so many.
For no matter purpose, Ruth didn’t appear to get the type of lasting obituary that features as proof of a life nicely spent. However I used to be motivated to fill the void on this story, to search out a way that Ruth had modified the world for the higher. And fortunate for me, just a few people truly beat me to it just a few years earlier.
After a very long time trying to find traces of Ruth in older newspaper archives, I stumbled upon a 2022 article revealed in Auburn, New York’s The Citizen. It’s by Buffalo Information columnist Sean Kirst, who wrote that he’d skilled the identical irritating lifeless ends that I had making an attempt to comply with up on the Ruth-Antonio aftermath. However he known as upon a genealogist named Megan Smolenyak, who tracked down two vital ladies to the mission. One was Elizabeth “Lill” Kress, the granddaughter of Antonio’s sister, Elisabetta, who got here to America together with different relations because of a fundraising effort by the Seneca Falls neighborhood after Antonio’s loss of life. The opposite was Kathy Williamson, the granddaughter of Ruth—who, to her information, by no means spoke about her suicide try or handed down the story of her rescue for posterity. Kress and Williamson went on to satisfy face-to-face in Seneca Falls solely as a result of that act nonetheless conjures up a lot curiosity from followers of the film. Each of them took careers that embodied the type of help-the-community idealism that It’s a Fantastic
Life promotes: Kress was a nurse practitioner in Upstate New York, and Williamson was a particular schooling trainer in St. Louis. And after they linked, they each may perceive a bit extra about why they’d the lives they did.
“If Antonio hadn’t saved Ruth, I wouldn’t be right here and Kathy wouldn’t be right here,” Kress mentioned.
Unusual, isn’t it? How every individual’s life touches so many others? A part of me can’t assist however be terrified by the enormity of that selection and even annoyed by the unfairness of all of it. However one other half—one which badly needs to maintain feeling some thought of religion—needs to have fun the sacrifices that some people make for others and to experience all of the methods we’re capable of make an affect with the nice reward that’s our lives. The village of Seneca Falls is a love letter to this incomprehensible energy, one which all of us possess from the second we’re born.
© 2026 by Emily St. James and Lauren Theisen, used with permission from Hanover Sq. Press, an imprint of HarperCollins
