Biography
Joseph Fontana was a New York shoe-worker picket imprisoned for strike activity in 1929. The Daily Worker of November 28 reports that he had just finished a seven-month sentence and received a reception at a union council meeting. The newspaper explicitly corrects its preceding issue, which had erroneously said he had just been sentenced. Exact prison-admission and discharge dates, the formal charge and measured complete custody credit are not established by this report.
Reported completed sentence and a contemporary correction
Joseph Fontana was a New York shoe-worker picket imprisoned for strike activity in 1929. The Daily Worker of November 28 reports that he had just finished a seven-month sentence and received a reception at a union council meeting. The newspaper explicitly corrects its preceding issue, which had erroneously said he had just been sentenced. Exact prison-admission and discharge dates, the formal charge and measured complete custody credit are not established by this report.
The article says he appeared at Monday’s union council meeting. That meeting reference is not assigned as his release date. The printed seven-month sentence is preserved as the contemporary description of completed imprisonment, not converted into 210 days, exact custody endpoints or a separately verified calendar-credit total. No birth or death date, demographic category, religion, party membership, institution, judge or prosecutor is supplied. The historical release is not represented as current imprisonment.
Daily Worker, November 28, 1929, original page 2, 265 More Shoe Workers Strike in New York.
The Daily Worker of August 12, 1929, reported that a shoe-workers conference voted to send greetings to Joe Fontana, then actually imprisoned on Welfare Island after picketing during the Griffin and White shoe strikes. This contemporary report described a six-month sentence. The later November 28 report already recorded in this profile described a completed seven-month sentence. The discrepancy is preserved; no exact admission, discharge or numeric actual-duration total is inferred from either nominal sentence.
