Fred Santella 1915 - 2002 Dad was born in Hoboken, New Jersey on December 29, 1915. His mother was Emma Dini and his father was Frank Santella. His mother was born in Manhattan (I think Dad said she was born on Washington and Canal). Emma went to school at St. Anthony's in the village, near Sullivan St. I have my grandfather's last passport. It says he was born in Naples, Italy. I don't know how or when they met but Dad had a couple of post cards that they sent to each other around 1912. At the time my grandmother lived at 173 Bleecker Street and my grandfather lived at 53 Bedford Place. On the evidence of the post cards, he did not have an easy courtship. The language, however, was very high toned and the penmanship impeccable. Dad was a typewriter mechanic and he served as a carpenter's mate in the navy. He built buildings and airfields on a number of South Pacific islands. He did not talk about this much. I can recollect only a few stories about his time in the Pacific. He was in the 15th Seabee Battalion. He said his outfit was known as the thousand thieves and many of the members of the battalion were from the south. There were experienced bootleggers in the crew. Using parts of Japanese aircraft for stills they could make liquor out of anything that was fermentable. If nothing fermentable was handy some individuals were known to drink hair tonic. Dad said watching someone drink hair tonic put him off of drinking for the whole of the war. One story he recounted in some detail was about the time he was unloading supplies on the beach when there was a Japanese air raid. He hid behind a pile of boxes and discovered when the all clear came that he was hiding behind crates of TNT. He would also talk about the time he went to New Zealand for rest and rehabilitation. The battalion spent Christmas of 1943 in Hamilton, New Zealand. He remembered the people he met there fondly and always wanted to return. He sent Christmas cards to people in New Zealand for years. Once a piece of wedding cake came in the mail when one of them was married. I don't remember if it was edible but I do remember that it came in a small tin box that my mother used as a pin box. Another time a Japanese soldier came to close to the camp and committed hari kari. He said that when he first landed they were armed with Springfield rifles. He liked his but he really loved the M1 carbine's they were issued later. He always regretted that he did not take home with him the spare M1 a Marine gave him. He did have a few souvenirs. A huge block of incredibly heavy wood that he kept in his shop for years. It was part of a tree they cut down while building an airstrip. He said he was going to make a violin out of it one day but never did. He finally gave it to my mother's first cousin Alfred. A small dagger with a handle built up of bits of aluminum, plexiglass and bakelite. A naval emblem embedded in a piece of plexiglass shaped into a heart. Not much to show for four years of your life. Although he did not speak of the war he often spoke of the people he had been with and he tried to attend the battalion reunions each year. Dad never graduated from high school. He was very sharp but I suspect his early life was not ordered enough. His mother died in the flu epidemic of 1918 (as did a younger brother - Vincent). My mother said that my grandfather caught the flu when in the army and then brought it home to the rest of the family. I am not sure of the chronology but I recollect Dad's telling me that grandfather was a railway engineer at one time. He said his father was the first Italian member of the railway engineers union. His father also briefly operated a restaurant named Epicure on 8th Avenue, by Greene Street, near Wanamakers old store. Caruso's former chef (Dad said his name was Don Carlo) was the chef. Later in life grandfather was a chief steward in the merchant marine and was always at sea. He left Dad in a series of foster homes. These varied widely. At first he stayed with his maternal grandparents. They did not have much. Dad had the tip of one of his fingers missing. It happened around 1920. It was Christmas time and everywhere there were decorations and toys in the stores. He expected a Christmas present. When he didn't get anything for Christmas he decided it was Santa Claus's fault. They had a small Santa Claus figure in the house and he took it under the bed and attempted to cut the head off of the Santa figure. The ax got caught in a bed spring and he took the tip of his finger off instead of Santa's head. Dad would talk about how his grandmother used to make him eggnog, but she was very old and could not beat it well. It would be all ropey but he had to drink it. When he came home from school in the winter his grandmother would have a baked apple ready for him to eat. His grandfather used to make birdlime and cover the window sills with it. They would eat the sparrows they caught after cooking them in tomato sauce. His grandmother died first. He said she was getting him ready for school and sat down and then he realized she was dead. I found her death certificate in the city records. She died March 12, 1926 of chronic nephritis. Dad was eleven. Dad would always talk about finding out where his maternal grandfather came from. He managed to get copies of his grandfathers marriage certificate and death certificate. Giacondo Dini and Luigia (Louisa) Brignia were married in New York City on August 6, 1881. Giacondo lived in Allentown, PA, was to be 32 years old on his next birthday and was a peddler. Giacondo's father and mother were Lorenzo Dini and Agata Bisordi. One of my father's cousins recollected that Giacondo had two brothers who also immigrated to Allentown. At the time of the marriage Luigia lived in Allentown and was to be 22 on her next birthday. Luigia's father and mother were Giovanni Brignia and Marianna Martera. Dad also remembered a cousin named Faustino Gianelli but was not sure of the nature of the relation. Maybe he was married to one of the other brother's daughters. Dad remembered visiting Faustino's store in Allentown. He said it was across the street from a war memorial statute. It was a fruit store. He thought it was on South street. Faustino's daughter was named Elizabeth McLoughlin, last address 336 Ridge or Rulge Avenue, Allentown, PA 18102. Another sister was named Stella Mazzocchia, last address 62 Hooper Avenue, Staten Island. When Dad's mother and father were married they spent their honeymoon with the Faustino's. The death certificate for my great grandfather says he died November 23, 1929, was a feather dyer, was widowed when he died and had lived in the US for 60 years. The cause of death was cerebral thrombosis. The place of death was listed as 14 Morton St., a tenement. Both grandparents are buried in Calvary Cemetery. Dad said that his grandfather traveled all around America selling religious statues that he and his brother made. Dad said he remembered that his grandfather Dini came from the vicinity of Lucca in Italy and that someone claimed that they were descended from Scottish mercenaries. His grandmother came from Genoa. His Uncle John Dini had red hair and blue eyes and Dad claimed that the other members of the family on that side had similar coloration. He also had an uncle Frank who I never met. Someplace I have a picture that was taken of my grandmother, grandfather and my great grandparents in a parlor in Hoboken. A barely visible reflection in a mirror, is Uncle John, my grandmother's brother. Uncle John used to work in lower Manhattan as a warehouse man and lived in Jersey City. I remember visiting the warehouse once when I was a little boy. He gave my father an impressionist picture of a pair of sturgeons and it had to ride home on our knees in the car. I used to hate the picture but it has grown on me. It hangs on the wall in my mother's basement. When we were little Dad would take us to visit Uncle John and Aunt Louise. Their apartment was in a very old building and the kitchen stoves were coal fired. A stove in one of the apartments caused a fire one day and they were burned out and had to move someplace else in Jersey City. They were married for over fifty years. I know Dad still has a first cousin Charlotte who lives in Denver, and also a has a cousin Adeline Ryan who lives in Kearny, New Jersey, but I don't recollect anyone else. After his grandparents died Dad wandered. Sometimes he stayed with his father's brother, Nick and his wife Zia Prosperina. My mother claimed that this aunt was as close to a mother as he really had. I don't really remember her, she died of cancer when I was very little. I remember a picture of her that Uncle Nick always kept on a sideboard in his living room, a kindly looking lady with grey hair and glasses. Before Uncle Nick died we always went to his house to visit on Sunday afternoons. We would stay and watch the Ed Sullivan show and then walk home. The picture of the Siren that hangs in my old room at home used to hang over the sideboard and the large elaborate vase with Pompeian style decoration that my mother keeps on top of the refrigerator was on top of his sideboard. The picture of the siren came from a woman who couldn't pay a debt and gave it to Uncle Nick in gratitude for letting her off. My mother told me that once a phone repairman came to fix their telephone and became so distracted by the picture that he was getting nowhere with the repair. Zia Prosperina told Uncle Nick that he had to go and speak to the repairman about looking at the picture or the phone would never be repaired. Gino Magazzini was family friend. Gino was tool and die maker by profession but his real love was art. He was a member of the Salmagundi Club and exhibited every year in the Washington Square Art Show. I think he did quite well as his house in Brooklyn was filled with art including the only Fabrege egg and cigar store indian Princess I have ever seen outside of a museum. My mother told me his villa in Italy was even better decorated. Gino claimed Uncle Nick's vase was good luck. He painted twice and in each case sold the painting before it was dry. Uncle Nick worked for the government. He was a collector for customs. Dad would tell a story about his visiting cousins who lived in Pennsylvania. These cousins ran a brewery and continued running it during prohibition. Once Uncle Nick stopped by "the office" and asked for his cousins but did not identify himself as a relative. He just left a card with his name on it and his agency. The guys working at the office took a look at the card saw "Treasury" on it and decided that Uncle Nick must be a "revenooer" and started the process of shutting up operations before his cousin saw the card and realized it was only a friendly visit. Dad had a lot of stories about living with Uncle Nick. One I wish I could remember in detail involved a couple of live eels that were intended for dinner on Christmas Eve. Uncle Nick put them in a tub under the kitchen sink for safe keeping until dinner time. The eels were believers in the power of positive thinking and tried to make it to the nearest body of water. They did not make it but the family was occupied for some time in recovering them. Another tale involved Dad's cousin Johnny. He was supposed to go on a picnic with a group of friends. There was nothing in the house to eat so he made a sandwich of string beans. He was very embarrassed when it was suggested that people switch lunches. He wound up with his sandwich back as no one else would eat it. Uncle Nick had a summer house in Wyndanch, Long Island . My mother claimed he built it in large part with material from Ft. Hamilton. My mother said one of the guards looked into his car one day as he was leaving Ft. Hamilton and said "Nick why don't you just put a rope around the fort and take it too?". I presume from this comment that the material was surplus. My mother claimed that Uncle Nick loved to gamble and lost a lot of money betting on horses. He had an olive oil business on the side and he was always too embarrassed to collect on debts so he went out of business. I don't know why but my father was often left elsewhere. I know he stayed for a while with his father's other brother, Felix. Felix had a restaurant in Greenwich Village called the Bat. It was located at 179 MacDougal Street. I am told that it was very popular with stars from the Metropolitan Opera. I remember visiting it with my Grandfather when I was little. Uncle Felix made an omelette for my brother and I; and I stapled my finger with Uncle Felix's stapler. It was a small black, bakelite one, with Bostich on it in white lettering. I was impressed by the enormous champagne bottles that were used as decorations and by the signs on each table that indicated they were reserved. My mother claimed that Uncle Felix put them there to keep out customers he didn't want. If anyone came in that he didn't want to serve he would simply point to the signs and say there was no room. He sold his restaurant (the site is now an NYU building opposite the old Provincetown Playhouse) and retired to live with his daughter, Tessie and her husband Sal Blasco in Cresskill, New Jersey. He died at the age of ninety three. He went out one morning at 5 am to throw out the garbage, slipped on some ice and cracked his skull. His daughter found him when she got up. Uncle Felix had a son (Patsy) who was killed at Anzio during World War 2. Uncle Felix also had a daughter named Mary who was married to Attilio Russo. They used to live in the Bronx and we would visit them when I was little. They had the ugliest bulldog I have ever seen. Attilio died when I was in high school. I remember going by subway to the wake with my mother. Dad hated funerals and refused for years to go to any. He would just send my mother. As this was at night and in the Bronx I was drafted as bodyguard. I had a test the next day and had to study so I took my notes along in a small notebook and studied thru the wake. Mary noticed me and thought I had a prayer book and commented to my mother about how devout I was. My mother refused to take credit for such virtue and ratted that I was just studying for a test. Mary had two daughters, Frances and Alberta. Alberta never married and lived with her mother. Frances married an Irishman named Frank had a daughter, Mary Frances and was divorced. Mary Frances died in her early twenties of a heart attack. Frances also died of a heart attack a few years ago. Mary did not speak to her half sister Tessie for over 40 years. Late in life Mary had Alzheimer's disease. My mother was speaking to Alberta who asked why her Aunt Tessie and her mother did not speak to each other. My mother didn't know. It's amazing how something that could cause two sisters not to speak to each other for almost 40 years could have faded from memory. Mary died in early 1998 leaving Alberta alone. Tessie came to the wake and the funeral. Dad also stayed for a while with a "rich" family named the Kidney's who were friends of my grandfather. They had a box business in Manhattan and my grandfather used to have his mail sent to their address when traveling. Dad liked the Kidney's. They lived in a large home on 72nd Street, where Owls Head Park is now. Dad recollects that the Kidney's house took up half the block and what is now the park was a private estate. He would talk of the fancy car they had, the Tiffany silver and the gas fired refrigerator they had on the back porch. He always kept with his most precious possessions a small police truncheon that belonged to Mrs. Kidney uncle. It may have been through them that he met the family of the painter of the some of the murals at the Museum of Natural History. Whenever we drove up the Palisades Parkway he would tell us of the beautiful house they used to have on the Palisades. His worst experience was when he was to be left with a family that put hot pepper on their spaghetti. He insisted on doing this also and then wouldn't eat it. They told him he had to eat it but he was stubborn. They decided that he was more than they could handle and decided to bring him back to my grandfather. My grandfather was about to leave on his ship from Philadelphia. The only thing he could do on short notice was to put my father in an orphanage. Dad hated this. He said the orphans never got much food. He remembered that the people in houses behind the orphanage used to throw out bread for the birds. The kids would go over the fence and take the bread and eat it. Recently I went to Philadelphia with Regina and the kids. I told Dad about visiting the museums and he mentioned that he never went to the museums when he was in the orphanage. However the nuns would take the kids to the movies on Saturday afternoon and on holidays the Knights of Columbus came over with a bunch of cars and took all the kids in the orphanage out for the day to Fairmont Park. He said it was a beautiful place; that seems to be the only nice thing he ever had to say about Philadelphia. He had better memories of other places. When he lived on the lower east side he used to hang out with a bunch of kids. They would cut up packing crates and sell them to women in the apartments to use as kindling for the stoves. They would jump from roof to roof across the tenements while playing games and would steal potatoes from street vendors and then make fires in the street and cook and eat them. There was a bakery on the next block and he said the woman who owned it had a small dog. Whenever the dog was left unattended they would nab it and then bring it to the woman telling her "Lady, we found your dog." She would then reward them with cookies. He would also tell us that the National Biscuit Company had a plant over on the West Side. Whenever we drove up the West Side Highway with him he would remind us that when he was a kid you could go to the plant and get a whole bag full of broken cookies for a nickel. We were envious. When my grandfather came home he would bring Dad souvenirs and toys. Things like a live monkey (it stank like hell, peed on everything that didn't move fast enough and tried to bite everything else) or a genuine BB gun. Dad promptly lost this when he used it to shoot out a street light. A cop took it away from him and bent it around the lamp post. The law was enforced differently then. My grandfather also brought home a toy that we recently discovered to be valuable. It is a small wooden toy in the form of a box with the upper torso of a man protruding from the top. When you turn a little knob on the side the mans head rises on a long neck. his arms go up raising a bell he holds in front of him and revealing a human head. A snakes head comes out of the front of the box. We always assumed the box was Indian. I saw one recently in a Japanese antique shop and learned they are called Kobe boxes. They were made by Japanese seamen and are worth $1500-2000. Dad also talked about a friend of his fathers named Mr. Parker. Mr. Parker was the Chief Steward on one of the Vanderbilt's yachts. Dad remembered going on board the yacht and being shown the meat locker, full of sides of mold covered beef, being aged. Dad remembered that he and his father would eat Christmas dinner with Mr. Parker and his wife. The table would be covered with all sorts of glasses and tableware and they would sit, talk and eat for hours. When there were no jobs Mr. Parker and his wife opened a bakery in Flatbush near Avenue J. Dad went to Brooklyn Technical High School. He used to have a book full of drawings from school that he kept in the downstairs bookcase, and an old chemistry book (I still have it - its the green covered one from the 30's) as souvenirs of his school days. He said he left school because he invented something and thought he did not need any more schooling. I believe he always worked as an office machine mechanic. I know that prior to the war he lived in Washington D.C. for a while. After the war he came home and did not want to work. Things were not as flush as they had been during the war. In the Pacific they had heard how much money people back home were making. My mother was a floor lady at a place called Prince Matchabelli and was making 125 dollars a week. Dad would look for jobs and was offered 25 dollars and it seemed like why bother. My mother said my father's aunt told her that the only thing to do was to quit her job to force Dad to go to work. She did. I think he first worked at a place called Paramount Typewriter on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. I think he said the owner was named Buttons, the father of Dick Buttons the skater. Then he got a job with the government at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. He always called it the Base. Every so often he would take us there when we were kids. We thought it was the greatest place in the world. It was a huge complex of concrete buildings. They were really big warehouses surrounding big covered train sheds. He would get up early, eat breakfast and then wait for a car pool to pick him up. He hated trains or buses. My parents bought the house in 1948, shortly after I was born. They paid 11,000 dollars for it. The house was a semi-attached house. Two mirror image homes shared a party wall and were separated from their neighbors by a driveway on each side. The houses were of red brick with flat tarred roofs. Ours was one of only two houses on the block without a garage. My parents said that our neighbors across the alley, the Gesualdi's, had both houses built. They wanted a large yard and so had the second house built without a garage. This was a continuing distress to my father. Dad never had a garage for his car and always had to park it on the street. There were a lot of small apartment houses on 75th street full of people who had no garages either and thus lots of cars in the neighborhood with no parking spaces. Dad would stand at the front window and curse at people who parked carelessly and occupied more than one parking space. When I was very young he used to smoke and chew tobacco. Chewing tobacco was a habit he picked up in the South Pacific during World War 2. If someone parked so as to take up more than one space he would threaten to go out and spit tobacco juice on their car. The first car I can remember driving in with Dad was an old post war Plymouth. This did not last long and I remember its being replaced by a car he really liked, a 1932 Plymouth sedan. This car did not have a heater and we would have to carry blankets to stay warm in the winter. As we drove down the street kids would shout, "Get a horse!". The range of things that Dad would shout at anyone who irritated him cannot be repeated for posterity. He got rid of this car for his dream car, a 1942 Plymouth. I think this is what he wanted before going into the Navy. An old acquaintance, Mr. Milovaka, had it and it was barely used. It still smelled like a new car and had it original upholstery in beautiful condition when we got it. He loved driving this car and his idea of a vacation was to drive forever around upstate New York looking at the countryside. He did not much care where he was going, where he was or whether he was lost. He just loved looking at countryside. The Gesualdi's lived next door at 7418. Mrs. Gesualdi's mother was Mrs. Olivieri. I remember Mrs. Olivieri as always dressed in black and going to church every day. It seemed like she was always cooking fish which we could smell as our kitchen window was just across the alley from hers. The fish came from her son in law, Frank. He was a salesman and a sportsman. He loved hunting and fishing. He would go out from Sheepshead Bay on a deep sea fishing boat and come back with all sorts of fish. He especially liked shark, which Mrs. Olivieri would cook in tomato sauce. He would often give fish to my mother and we would hate this. She tried to make us eat fish on Friday and my brother and I both hated fresh fish. We were among those who counted the invention of frozen food as a boon to civilization when she was finally reduced to feeding us frozen fish sticks. Once you put enough ketchup on them they tasted nothing like fish. My mother said I was a trial to Mr. Gesualdi. I would sit outside and watch him and ask questions about whatever he was doing. She said that sometimes I would ask so many questions that he would give up in disgust and go inside to get some rest. I was always impressed by the fact that Mr. Gesualdi went to work by taxi cab. Mr. Gesualdi died at a relatively early age of emphysema. After Mr. Gesualdi died, Mrs. Gesualdi went to work at the Abraham and Strauss Department store in downtown Brooklyn as a sales lady. I think she enjoyed that job because I recollect her regularly siting out on the front bench with her daughter, Ann and talking about what went on at work. The Gesualdi's were there when we moved in and their descendants are still there now. Mrs. Gesualdi's daughter, Ann married Ray Lazzara. They had two children, Ray and Steve. Both became pharmacists. Ray married a Chinese girl and moved away. Steve still lives with his parents in the old house. Our house was not in good shape when we moved in and my parents were always fixing or remodeling something. They did not have much money but any carpentry work my father could handle and my mother did all the painting. Something always seemed to be in the process of repair or remodeling. I remember one project that involved a thick concrete block wall that defined what used to be the coal bunker. My mother wanted this to be a sewing room and wanted a door in a specific location. My father always thought this was too much trouble. I came home from school one day to find the wall gone. My mother had taken a small sledge hammer and smashed one block. She had then put a hydraulic jack into the space and used it to topple a section of the wall. She then repeated this until the whole wall was toppled. When my brother and I came home we had to pass the pieces out the front window so the garbage men could haul them away. My parents eventually created a third apartment in the basement of the house where we actually spent most of our time. It was a multi-use space. The front room was my mothers sewing room. Next was a large combined family room and kitchen. Next was the bathroom, furnace area and finally my father's shop. This was the best room in the house. He had many mechanics tools, a few carpenter's tools that he had bought from an old Norwegian carpenter and a few do it your self tools like a soldering iron. I used to piddle around at the bench trying to make things; telescopes, radios, little boxes, all kinds of junk. He used to yell at me, as I now yell at Nicholas, Anthony and Dennis, for leaving the bench littered when I was done and not cleaning up. I know they are messier than I ever was. When I was in grammar school Dad had a heart attack. He was home for many months in bed. He refused to go to a hospital for any treatment saying if he lived he lived and if he died he would die in his own bed. He lived. No little thanks to two people. One was his doctor Natale Scozzaro. Doctor Scozzaro lived on 75th street, about a block up from New Utrecht Avenue and around the corner from Dad's Uncle Nick. He would stop by each day and check on my father until he got well enough to go back to work. Dad was not allowed to do anything for months. He could not even shave himself. He said the closest he came to death after the heart attack was when my mother tried to shave him. She finally got the neighborhood barber to come over once a week and shave him. The barbershop is still vivid in my mind. They had these big leather barber chairs and lots of metal chairs. When we were little there was a funny metal gadget that sat on the arms of the chairs and raised us up high enough to have our hair cut. The counters were marble and there were mirrors everywhere. There was this big round chrome gadget that we could never figure out that was supposedly for heating towels. It was supposed to be steam operated and have some sort of boiler and we always worried about whether it would explode. The shop was run by the two Montori brothers. They lived on 75th street just above eighteenth Avenue. I loved going to the barber shop because they had a pile of old National Geographic Magazines they would leave out for the customers to read. These were really old. I still have one I asked for one day. It is from around 1913 and has an article in it on the Troglodytes of Cappadoacia. You don't find stuff like this in barber shops today (not that I have been in one since I have been married). The other attraction was a large head and shoulders picture of Amanda Blake (Miss Kitty from the TV show Gunsmoke) in a low cut dress. This was used as the backing for the mirror they used to allow you to see the back of your head at the end of the job. The last step prior to this was dousing your head with witch hazel and rubbing it in before combing it out. My fathers other savior was his friend Bob Hicks. Bob was a sailor who worked in the Chaplin's office at the base. He spent a lot of time visiting and we would often go places with Bob. My brother and I still have vivid memories of a picnic he took us to upstate New York. It was at a place that had walking trails and a lake and more important food. Food in amazing quantity. They had hamburgers , hot dogs, clams on the half shell (one of Dad's favorites), fried chicken, corn, and drinks. Bob helped my mother enormously when my father was ill and more importantly watched him when he returned to work. Bob found out what my father was supposed to eat and would sit with him at lunch time. Dad said that if he attempted to eat something he wasn't supposed to Bob would take it away from him. Before his heart attack Dad would spend each Saturday morning in the local bar, Mormano's. Bars were different then. He used to take us and we would hang out all morning with him. We hated it. The bar had a lunch counter and there would be pans of suspicious looking food that Dad told us never to touch on the counter. He said they kept it forever, something about saloons being illegal and thus the bars were forced to serve food in order to keep their liquor license. Since food was not profitable they kept trays of it out for show. My brother and I found this very boring but every once and awhile one of the bar maids would take pity on us and slip us either something real to eat or a little sip of some cordial. The bar had a crippled crow as a mascot and we used to stare at it and play games of skee ball on a machine that stood in the corner of the bar. The time I spent in bars as a youth had a good result. When I grew up I had no desire to hang out in bars. I also avoided taking up smoking as I remember hearing my father coughing every morning when he got up. Dad claimed that his father had a similar effect on him. When Dad was little his father would take him to card games. He found these tremendously boring and never wanted to have anything to do with cards when he grew up. Having over 3 generations eliminated most of the bad habits in the family I hope that my kids will be able to continue the trend. It will be hard; the only bad habit Paul and I share is buying antiques. That is not a habit I want them to avoid. After he recovered, Dad started working at a second job on Saturdays. He worked at a place called Ridgeway Typewriter Repair on Fifth Avenue. It had a solvent smell I could likely still identify anywhere and there was always a compressor running for blowing the crud out of machines they were repairing. I remember a fellow that used to hang around the place named Patty McGuff. He was an old typewriter man and had been in the Spanish American war. He used to say that there weren't many like him left around. We certainly had never seen another veteran of that war. The owner of the store was named Stanley Kaye. He looked a lot like my father and people kept thinking my father was his brother. Once a year we made a little extra money by going with Stanley to some ritzy school in Bay Ridge to clean their typewriters. It was a girl's school and they had a whole room full of typewriters for typing class. We would brush them out, clean the type and replace the ribbons and check everything to be sure it worked. Stanley would fix anything major. I think we got paid five dollars. We used to look forward to this as it was the only paper money we would see. Our usual allowance was 25 cents a week. For this we had to dry the dishes and walk the dog. Dad had a lot of friends from the neighborhood, from the Base and from his early days. We used to complain that we could never go anywhere without his meeting someone he knew and stopping for some interminable conversation. Rocky, a detective who survived the sinking of the Arizona and whose hands and arms were covered with scars from swimming thru the burning oil. Jim Reilly, the plumber. Kenny Motely, the phone repairman. Jack Harrington, a customs agent (my father was godson to one of his sons; who grew up to be a priest and President of St. Johns University). Bill Basso, an insurance agent. Ted Gerardi, the real estate agent. I acquired my WW I German army field phone when he had a customer who moved to Florida and took nothing with him. He told Ted to get rid of everything in the house. It looked like they got up, ate breakfast, left the dishes on the table and moved out with just the clothes on their backs. The place was full of silver, crystal, china, and war souvenirs. A row of live mortar shells was a real thrill, but they would not let me keep them. Joe Madeo, a Commander in the Navy. I think Joe was the one who got married while in the Navy without telling his mother. When the first child was born he told his mother he got married. As other children were born he told her about them but never confessed to the first one. He had a lot of trouble explaining the extra child the first time he brought them all to visit. What irritated his mother most was that she had been leaving out one grandchild when sending birthday and Christmas presents. Walter Trepel, who lived in a remote corner of Brooklyn that relied upon the Transit Authority for power and could only use DC appliances. Paul Jensen was a friend I never met. He went to school with my father. He was a tool and die maker and lived on a farm in Virginia. My father would visit every once and a while and come back with a desire to live in the country. Whenever he would say this my mother would tell him she was going to be dead a long time and did not want to start early. My mother grew up in the country. There were three people I remember particularly. Lou Manisero lived in one of the small apartment houses on 75th Street. He used to hang out in Mormano's bar on Saturday mornings too. He worked in the Washington Market as a "butter and egg man". Although I never figured out precisely what it was he did we got an education from Lou about the mysteries of eggs. Among other things he was involved in candling eggs to make sure they were edible. Sometimes he would bring home freak eggs with multiple yolks. We got long discussions on butter and egg quality. I still buy only medium eggs because Lou claimed that they were laid by young vital chickens while the large eggs were laid by old tired ones. Lou would also stop by during the week and he and my father would sit talking about god knows what for what seemed like for ever. He had a wife and a daughter but I don't ever remember seeing the wife. The daughter was older than us but we saw her on the street and knew to say hello. George Lamont lived on 172 Thompson Street in lower Manhattan. He had a blind wife named Julia. Lamont wasn't his real name. I forget why but he used an alias, his real last name was Hamlin. He was a World War I veteran, originally from Messina, NY, and had a son (Gilbert I think) by a previous marriage. George used to visit us occasionally during the summer. Julia was a bit stout and he would always try to get a Hudson cab to bring her over. The Hudson's were big cars with jump seats. You could fit a steamer trunk into the back seat of a Hudson and still have room for three passengers. My recollection is that George and my father could go thru 3 cases of beer in the course of a visit. George did most of the deed. He never seemed to get drunk, he just became more precise in his speech. Dad said that Julia originally lived in another apartment in the same building as George. One day George learned that Julia was going into a home because she could not live alone on what little she got from somewhere. He proposed and they were married. On occasion my father would conquer his aversion of the subway enough to go visit George and Julia. He also had to conquer his aversion to roaches because the place was swarming with them. We would watch with fascination as they crawled over everything. Dad would make us shake our clothes out as soon as we went out of the building. I remember the apartment was small but that George kept a parakeet, had a large collection of Argosy magazines, which he claimed was the best, and kept a zither under the bed. Julia died and George lived on alone with the parakeet. The parakeet would share his beer. Once Dad and I went to visit him and we discovered that the bird had died. George had it for twenty years and could not just throw it in the garbage. He froze the bird and kept it in his refrigerator. As we left he gave it to us, wrapped in aluminum foil, and asked us to take it home to Brooklyn and bury it in our backyard. It is next to the clothes pole. I last saw George shortly before the kids were born in 1977. It was Columbus Day and I had the day off but Regina was working. I decided to walk uptown in Manhattan from the Battery. As I walked up Thompson Street I saw George coming out of the corner bar. He was wearing the oddest pair of eyeglasses. We talked for awhile and I moved on up the island. George was one of the few people I used to send Christmas cards to. He died not long after, I believe of liver disease. When I was little he gave me a catalog from Bannerman and Sons, the arms dealers. It was the 1955 anniversary edition. I read it till it fell apart, then taped it together. It is in the kids bookcase now. Gus Biscardi worked with my father for a while at the Base but then moved on to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Gus would stop by at least once a week. He was by far our most animated visitor and would talk forever about political issues. Gus was a bachelor who lived in Park Slope with his father. He had a sister Sophie and a niece whose name escapes me. Gus's father was a house painter, in the basement I have some of his brushes. Gus loved to take pictures and would always be going to parties and taking dozens of pictures at each party which he would promptly give to whoever was throwing the party. I guess I picked up the photo hobby from Gus. He took me out to a camera store on 13th avenue to buy my first developing equipment. Gus moved on to other government jobs but was always a visitor. He visited often enough to become an honorary family member. Gus had a stroke when he was in his sixties and was confined to a wheelchair. He lives in our old neighborhood so my father who never went anywhere visited him often. His sister Sophie lived with him until she was crippled by a broken hip and a stroke. Tuesday 11/27/02 Regina and I were on vacation in London. When we returned to the hotel in the evening there was a message for us. Call your mother urgent. I did not have to call to find out what she wanted to tell me. When I got through Joyce answered and confirmed what I knew. Dad died last night. Paul said Dad had a heart attack at 5:00. My mother called Ray and Steven. Steven took one look at him and called 911. Ray and Steven went to the hospital with my mother and stayed with her till the end. Dad was declared dead at 8:00. He would not have been happy about being taken to the hospital; he always said he wanted to die at home in his own bed. I cried and could not throw out the note from the desk. He always wanted to find out where his grandfather was born. Maybe now he knows.