Menotti’s father, Jack, was an Italian immigrant who moved to this country as a toddler with his parents in 1905. He eventually landed in Texas, where he married Angelina Vitanza of Dickinson. Camella was the second of the couple’s six children. The family owned a grocery store, a gas station, and a cattle ranch.
“I learned to do everything from my daddy,” she said. “We had 200 head of cattle. I would help slaughter them. They’d do the killing, and I‘d do the skinning.”
It sounds brutal now, but Menotti loved it.
“I took the bladder, and I blew it up. It makes a nice ball,” she said. “From 4 years old until I was 21, I rode horses, and I did barrel racing. That’s all we had [in rodeo events] for girls at the time.”
On the ranch, she learned to feed and take care of the cattle. She also sold hides in Houston, loaded hay, trained horses, pumped gas, fixed flats, changed oil, dug postholes, mended fences, and learned to turn bull calves into steers.
Her family history is recounted in the information that Menotti’s longtime friend John Unsworth assembled when he nominated her for the Cowgirl Hall of Fame.
“In the 1940s and early 1950s,” Unsworth wrote, “her family also put on jackpot rodeos at their ranch.” In jackpot rodeos, local ranch hands and others pay entry fees, which make up the jackpot from which winners are paid.
Menotti worked along with her siblings, doing things like keeping time, running concessions, and organizing the rodeos. When the local chamber of commerce asked the Dickinson High School senior class to pick a rodeo queen, they chose Menotti. She held the title of rodeo queen of Dickinson until she joined the convent a few years later.
Mary Swindell, Menotti’s younger sister, still lives in Dickinson. Although the family was Catholic and very religious, she was surprised when Menotti became a nun. She described her sister as a loving person, a good athlete and rider who has done well at everything she’s tried.
“She’s always been my hero,” Swindell said. “I’m very proud of her. The whole family is.”
Menotti represented Dickinson in the Houston Fat Stock Show and Rodeo from 1949 to 1951 — she remembers riding in the grand entry with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. In 1950 she was named runner-up for the title of Houston Rodeo Queen. Kathryn Grant of Houston won.
“She was a beautiful girl,” Menotti recalled. “She was going to the University of Houston at the time. She won a car and a trip to Hollywood.”
That trip was the first divergence in their paths. In Hollywood, Grant became an actress and later married Bing Crosby. Menotti, after joining the convent, taught at Catholic schools all over Texas — in Beaumont, Dickinson, Fort Worth, Houston, Sherman, and Wichita Falls — as well as in Hollister, Calif.
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What an interesting and inspiring story of life.