My Hero

My grandfather on my mother's side, Pasquale Camardi, could have been the poster boy for "American Immigrant" magazine. One of the regrets in my life is that I wasn't smart enough to sit down with Grandpa when he was still alive to hear the stories of his travels from Grassano, Italy to America. I would have asked him what life was like in the old country, and what made him leave all that was familiar to risk a new life in a foreign land. With help from the Immigration Records Center at Ellis Island, and assisted by the charming written recollections of my Uncle Mike (Grandpa's youngest child) I was able to tie together some pieces of Pasquale's life. When I was a kid, Grandpa was just a nice old Italian man who didn't speak much English and always wore white shirts and grey cardigan sweaters. Who knew then that when I grew up Grandpa's real worth as a man would sink in to the point that he would become my hero.

Pasquale came from a small town in southern Italy called Grassano, in the Privince of Matera in the region of Basilicata. I don't know if it had any influence on Grandpa's decision to leave Italy, but in 1908 there was a horrific earthquake that hit the area just south of Grassano. Hardest hit were Messina, on the northeast Sicilian coast, and Reggio di Calabria, in the province of Calabria on the Italian mainland. From all accounts, both cities were completely destroyed and reduced to rubble. The devastation caused by the earthquake was amplified by a tsunami that shortly followed, engulfing the coastlines on either side of the Straits of Messina, striking with waves exceeding 20 feet in some locations. Coincidentally, Grandpa made his first trip to America on March 31, 1908 sailing on The Brasile, but I'm guessing that it was more the economic hardship that prevailed in Italy at the time rather than earthquakes and tsunamis that motivated the move.

Pasquale made a second and final trip to America on May 1, 1912 on the ship San Guglielmo. He was followed by his wife Caterina on September 6, 1912 who traveled for some reason under under her maiden name of Schiavone, with their daughters Anna and Mary, on the ship Sant’ Anna. Interestingly, on the ship's manifest, Anna and Mary's last name was mis-spelled as "Amardi" instead of "Camardi." Because of the mis-spelling I never would have located their immigration records if I hadn't checked under the name of Schiavove. The family settled in Brooklyn, moving into a cold-water flat on Dean Street, between Rockaway and Hopkinson Avenues. In this same cold-water flat another daughter named Frances (my mother) was born on February 22, 1915.

(The following is excerpted from Uncle Mike's narrative)

Pasquale provided for his family by working as a laborer in laying sewer pipes in Brooklyn. Caterina, who was an excellent seamstress, worked at home, sewing by hand the linings in men’s coats and jackets. The cold-water flat contained a cast-iron stove located in the kitchen. The stove burned wood and coal and was used for heating the flat and for cooking. To save money, Pasquale got up every morning at 3:00 AM and walked along the Long Island Railroad tracks in Brooklyn picking up coal that had fallen off the train cars hauling coal to the freight yards. He used what coal he was able to gather to heat the flat. Caterina, in between sewing jobs baked bread and pasta, bottled tomato sauce, made and preserved sausage, made her own root beer and sarsaparilla and later on, home brewed beer and also prepared every meal for the family.

Soon after Frances was born, Pasquale and Caterina left Brooklyn and settled in Camden, New Jersey. With the little money they had saved in Brooklyn they were able to purchase a brick row house at 440 Clinton Street, Camden. In 1917, a son was born to Pasquale and Caterina. They named him Michael. Sadly, Michael passed away in 1919 at age two. He died of diphtheria. In 1923, another son was born. They also named him Michael (Uncle Mike) born on May 4, 1923. During their stay in Camden, Pasquale worked as a craftsman doing carpentry and as a steam fitter. Caterina was still working at home sewing garments. In 1926, Pasquale and Caterina moved back to Brooklyn where they rented a cold-water flat at 103 Hull Street (between Hopkinson and Rockaway Avenues).

During this time, Pasquale worked for the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. Caterina was still taking in home work as a seamstress. In 1928, Pasquale decided he wanted to quit his job at Brooklyn Union Gas and go into business. With the few dollars Pasquale and Caterina had saved over the years, and whatever small profit they gained from the sale of their house in Camden, Pasquale opened a men’s hat cleaning and blocking shop located at 475 Sumner Avenue, Brooklyn. The shop not only provided a hat cleaning service, it also sold new men’s hats or fedoras from such brand names as Stetson, Knox, and Dobbs to name a few. It also had a five-chair shoe shining section. The business proved to be quite successful, and in 1950 Pasquale decided to move his store to a new location on Rockaway Avenue near Fulton Street.

I remember the store at the new location. It had a wonderful smell from chemicals used to clean the hats, and from leather and shoe polish. Grandpa seemed like another man at his place of business. At home he didn't say much, relaxing by watching wrestling matches on TV and yelling at the villains on the screen as if the faked matches were for real. At the store, he was much more animated, greeting customers, giving orders to his crew, and generally fitting the mold of the successful entrepreneur. Pasquale, like so many immigrants, came to America to work, to become an American citizen, and to make a better life for his family. Unlike today's illegal immigrants who sneak into America to take what this country foolishly gives them for free, Grandpa and his generation came to America to give. They built this country and became a proud part of it. Grandpa, if you're listening, you made us who we are, and so we honor you.

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Flashbacks

My brain cells are burning out at an an alarming rate, and this takes a toll on my memory. There's a lot of stuff rattling around in there, but I can't always bring up the information I'm looking for, kind of like a five-year old hard drive with too many saved files and viruses. Interestingly, as I get older, I can often recall words and images from sixty years ago more easily than the current stuff. For example, I can sing the words to most advertising jingles from the 1950s without a hitch. I can also look at old "collector" cars as they roll out for sale at the great Barrett-Jackson TV auctions and identify the make and model of most American cars from 1950 to 1960. When our stickball game got interrupted by a car cruising down the block, we used to compete to see who could identify it first.

Sometimes I'll hear the words to an old song or see an image that immediately transports me back in time. For instance, the sound of the Flamingos singing "I Only Have Eyes for You" (The Flamingos – I Only Have Eyes for You) finds me as a shy teen standing on the dance floor of our local church-sponsored confraternity dances trying to work up the nerve to ask a girl across the floor to dance with me. I had to make the most of the slow dances because I never learned to do the swing or Latin dances until later in life, so my opportunities were limited. What if she said no...was there a longer, sadder walk in life than the one back to your smirking friends after getting shot down. It was an art trying to improve your chances of success, maybe with a tentative smile or encouraging eye contact, but there were still risks. I can feel the back of my neck getting hot just thinking about it.

Once in a while I'll see footage from an old Dodger or Yankee game that takes me back to Grim's Tavern. Bob Grim was signed as an amateur free agent by the NY Yankees in 1948. His Major League debut was on April 18, 1954 for the Yankees. He wore uniform number 55 during his entire time on the team. He won 20 games (the first Yankee rookie to win 20 since 1910) and lost only 6 that year, with a 3.26 ERA, and was voted American League Rookie of the Year. Grim opened a bar, which as I recall was on Broadway in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. His father ran the place and was friends with the father of Tommy Dowd, a pal of mine. This connection got us into the cool, dark interior of the bar for Cokes, and once in a while we got to see Bob Grim, later in his career, serving up 15-cent beers to the neighborhood philosophers.

I'll be driving on the Belt Parkway from Brooklyn to Long Island passing familiar landmarks, and suddenly it's 1953 and I'm in Uncle Nick's car with my cousins pressed in around me in the back seat. We're heading out to Alley Pond Park in Hempstead (a major trip for us then) for a picnic Italian style. For most people, picnics mean hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad and corn on the cob. For us, it being Sunday and us being Italian, that meant lasagna, meatballs, sausages and braccioles and THEN hamburgers and hot dogs. Picnics were special because it got kids and adults outdoors together for group games, a rare chance to play softball, horseshoes and of course bocci. While it was meant to be play, some of the men were very competitive and it wasn't long into a spirited, noisy game of bocci before the ruler came out to see who had rolled his ball closest to the "baleen".

Smells too, trigger memories. Whenever I go to a street fair and get a whiff of the frying zeppoles, it reminds me not only of the great street feasts that were held in the neighborhood, but of Christmas Eve at Grandma Camardi's. We were probably one of the few Italian families that did not do the traditional seven fish dinner on Christmas Eve. Instead, Grandma and her daughters baked homemade pizzas and fried up a batch of zeppoles sprinkled with powdered sugar. For the latter they rigged up on the stovetop a metal basin filled with sizzling hot oil into which they allowed the children to form their own zeppoles out of stretchy dough and drop the donut-shape d delicacies into the hot oil. This is not an activity you will find on the "Fun Things for Kids to Do at Christmas" list, but we never lost anybody.

Growing up I never thought of my childhood as remarkable, in fact it seemed quite ordinary to me. We played the games kids had always played, visited Coney Island, relished a trip to the Horn and Hardart Automat, and spent a lot of time with our families and extended families. We got through school, found a job, got married and had kids...that was the template for life and we pretty much followed it. Off in the future were lurking such issues as the struggles for women's equality, equal rights for minorities, gay rights, scandals in the Catholic church, the omnipresent welfare state, Woodstock, civil disobedience, Viet Nam and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. In light of how uncomplicated my childhood seems in the rear-view mirror, I have decided in many ways that it was remarkable and one I almost wish I could guarantee for my children's children.

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"Thank God Almighty, Free at Last"

It seems to me that back in the Fifties we had a lot more freedom than kids do today. We walked a mile to school unescorted, ran errands in the neighborhood by ourselves, went to the movies with friends and rode our bikes far and wide. We played on the streets for hours every day without parental supervision. Granted it was a different time, but certainly not without risks. I just think kids were given credit for having some common sense and the ability to get by on their own. Also, there were watching eyes everywhere including nosy mothers who stayed home to raise their kids, and cops who walked a regular beat and who had no reservations about straightening out any kid who stepped over the line. Just the same, we used our freedom to do some pretty stupid things.

We played ball games in the street every day the weather permitted. Money was scarce, so whenever a ball (a Spaldeen of course) wound up behind a fence or on a roof, we thought nothing of retrieving it. Spinners, a local supermarket, had a loading dock behind the store in the middle of our block. It was enclosed by a tall, wrought iron fence. At either end of the fence were two brick towers to which the fence was anchored. We couldn't climb the iron fence because it had nasty, pointed iron bars, but the towers were scalable. The main obstacle was that the towers were topped with barbed wire and broken glass. Despite these hazards we regularly took turns climbing carefully over that fence to recover our ball and then resumed the game. Big risk for a 15 cent ball but we were young and willing.

We grew up at a time when smoking was considered cool. Many of our parents smoked and we couldn’t wait to try. Having no money to buy cigarettes (store owners thought nothing of selling them to you if you could pay) we came up with a solution. We each bought 25 cent corn cob pipes. Our little band of Huck Finns would walk to Highland Park blocks from prying eyes and light up. For tobacco we would pick up cigarette butts from the street, strip away the paper, and use the remaining tobacco to fill the pipes. We were probably around 10 years old at the time. As I got older I began to snitch Luckies or filtered L&Ms from my father’s pack. I enjoyed smoking but quit when my first child was born. After nearly 50 years I still get an urge once in a while, but considering the price of cigarettes today, I’m glad I kicked the habit.

If we were supremely bored, which was rare, we would wander over to my friend Vinny’s front yard to watch his grandfather and the other old, Italian men in the neighborhood play a card game called Brisk. I think the game may have originated in Italy, but no matter, the old guys played it with gusto. We would sometimes bust their chops and imitate the Italian phrases and exaggerated gestures they used as the game became animated. One day their patience with us ran out, and Vinny’s grandfather innocently asked us if we wanted some cherries. Of course we took them not realizing that the unique taste of the cherries resulted from the homemade Italian liqueur they had been soaked in. As we began to feel the effects of the booze and stagger around, the old men nudged each other and laughed at us. Lesson learned: never mess with old Italian men.

We rode our bikes everywhere, usually staying within a ten block radius of our block, but sometimes we took “road trips”. We would go as far as 5-10 miles from home to places like Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in the hopes of seeing a real live ballplayer. Another popular destination was Howard Beach in Queens where we would go fishing off the Broad Channel bridge. You need to appreciate that to get to these places we had to traverse some of the most heavily trafficked streets in the city. No helmets, no training wheels, and no fear. We carried air pumps and kits to repair the occasional flat tire because we knew that if our mothers ever found out about these little jaunts, we were dead meat.

What’s interesting is that our parents rarely knew of the crazy and sometimes dangerous things we did. They weren’t on top of us every minute we were out playing. There were rules that had to be followed like coming home at dinner time and not getting into any trouble that would embarrass the family, but we were pretty much on our own. We were out of their hair and keeping ourselves amused…that was enough for them. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how this freedom to grow up without someone telling us what to do every minute of the day would teach us self-reliance and the ability to make our own decisions, clearly not always good decisions, but ours to make and suffer the consequences. I think all of us who grew up this way have a decided advantage over today’s over-supervised, under-adventuresome kids.

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Street Values

I find myself returning to the theme of "resourcefulness" in describing kids of the 1950s. We didn't have Toys 'R Us back then, and even if we did, our parents didn't have the money to spend on frivolous things. Every once in a while an exception was made, but as a rule we had to find ways to amuse ourselves that didn't involve store-bought toys or games. Bikes were handed down, baseball bats and gloves often contained more tape than wood or leather, and so many games were played with nothing more than a pink Spaldeen ball. We also used discarded materials like fruit crates. old clotheslines and empty refrigerator boxes to create "toys" that were as much fun as anything that Fisher-Price ever dreamed of.

A few years ago these Razor Scooters were all the rage for around 80 bucks. We built ours for free with an orange crate, a board and one old roller skate. You had to take the skate apart to separate the front wheels from the back, then remove a piece of rubber from inside the skate which allowed the wheels to swivel freely, making turning the scooter easier. The wheels were then attached to either side of a four-foot board to fashion what looked like a modern-day skate board. The crate was liberated from the loading dock of Spinners Supermarket and nailed to the board to complete the scooter. Some kids decorated the front of the crate with bottle caps, and added V-shaped wooden handles to make steering easier. Old roller skate, $0; four-foot board, $0; orange crate, $0; cruising down the street on your homemade scooter, priceless.

Westerns were the rage on television with Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers starring in tales of the old west. This made guns a regular part of our play, but not being able to tote real six-shooters, we made our own. The side rails from the same orange crates used for scooters were fashioned into carpet guns. It would take too long to describe how this was accomplished here...suffice to say that the wooden guns used thick rubber bands to propel cut-up one-inch squares of linoleum at our intended targets (each other) at an alarming speed. Accuracy was tough since the squares sailed wildly after being fired. Parents today would have apoplexy if they found their precious child playing with one of these, but we had fun and sustained just the occasional gash.

Spaldeen-based games are many as you know if you were lucky enough to grow up in the fifties. Stickball, punchball, stoop ball, off-the point, box ball, Ace-King Queen, dodge ball, triangle, hit the penny and plain old catch. Girls used Spaldeens to play a game where they bounced the ball, sometimes looping one leg over the ball while they chanted rhythmically: "A" my name is Alice and my husband's name is Al, we come from Alabama and we sell apples. The idea was to chant your way through the alphabet from A-Z, as far as you could go without missing a beat or losing control of the ball. We played these games for hours on end, never feeling for a minute that the fun we could have was in any way limited by the 15 cents we had invested in the equipment.

"Five-ten-fifteen-twenty..." was how the guy who was "it" would count up to one hundred while everyone ran and hid. Hide-and-go-seek might seem like a baby game, but not the way we played it. Guys would hide under cars, in empty garbage cans, on rooftops, maybe even sneak home for a "sangwich" while the poor guy who was it spent a very long time seeking. There were variations on the game like ring-a-leevio or kick the can, where whoever was it had to be careful not to stray too far from "home" where a tin can was placed, because if one of the hidden players could sneak up and kick the can off home base, the game started all over again. Not complicated, but it helped pass the time for the 12 hours a day we were on the streets. Remember Red Light Green Light, Statues, Johnny on the Pony, Double Dutch Jump Rope, King of the Hill, playing cards on the stoop...all great games with one thing in common, they cost nothing.

When all a kid has to say is "I want", and the checkbook fairy delivers, that child is being robbed. Robbed of the chance to exercise imagination, creativity, inventiveness and yes, resourcefulness. Learning how to use things that are at hand, devising rules, developing a sense of fair play, learning to use your hands, and interacting with other children are things paranoid parents pay a shrink small fortunes to help their children develop. We learned them for free on the streets of Brooklyn.

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A Dream Comes True

When you're poor, sometimes even relatively simple things seem almost unattainable. This is especially true for kids. Don't get me wrong, as a kid I didn't mope around feeling sorry for myself, but instinctively you felt that if something cost more than you could ever save up, it wasn't meant to be. Looking back, there were times when that pattern was broken...those magical moments when the planets and stars aligned, and suddenly the unattainable was yours. When these treasures came into your possession, it made a real impression, more so than for those who take them for granted. Here is a special one that I remember most fondly.

As a ball player, you made the occasional splash with a big hit...maybe drove in the winning run late in the game, but you made your reputation with your glove. A good defensive player was greatly valued by coaches and never sat on the bench. As an outfielder I was solid defensively. I had a strong arm, got a good jump on fly balls off the bat, and I was fast enough to run them down. Unfortunately the glove I used was a badly worn hand-me-down. The pocket was too small for an outfielder, not like the newer model gloves that were in the windows of the Davega sporting goods store on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn.

Davega's sold uniforms and equipment for most sports, and its windows were a powerful lure for kids. We would walk down Rockaway Avenue to Pitkin and stare at the magnificent array of satin team jackets, colorful uniforms, footballs, basketballs, hockey sticks, and especially the baseball gloves. Gloves for infielders, first baseman's mitts with those two big fingers, catcher's mitts with perfectly padded pockets for handling blazing fastballs, and there, on a plastic display stand, was the glove I craved with all my being, the Rawlings Don Larsen model glove. It was a thing of beauty, all soft, buttery leather and rawhide stitching, with the red Rawlings label on the outside. It was huge, made for leaping, acrobatic catches that turned sure home runs into routine outs. I could almost feel my teammates pounding me on the back as I trotted back to our bench...great catch Jim, and coach Bryan muttering: Good 'D' kid!

Who was I kidding, the glove cost around sixty bucks, serious money in the Fifties. I wanted to go into the store to ask the man if I could try it on, you know, just to see how it felt. I changed my mind when I realized how much worse I would feel if I actually touched the glove, smelled its pungent leather, and pounded the pocket with my fist. I decided against it, and made up my mind not to look in that store window so much because the sheer longing for that glove was making me crazy. I'd do the best I could with my old glove and the hell with it.

That Christmas I was excited since even poor kids get stuff under the tree. As my sister and I opened gifts, I spotted a box shaped like it contained a pair of shoes. (Hey, it may have been Christmas, but it wasn't uncommon for parents to slip in a few practical things you needed anyhow in the guise of a present.) As I took off the paper, my eyes widened and my jaw dropped. There it was, nestled in red tissue paper, my Rawlings Joe Dimaggio model outfielder's glove! I couldn't speak. If the box had contained a million dollars in cash I couldn't have been more surprised. I saw the smile on my father's face...I can only imagine how hard he must have worked to persuade my mother to make such an extravagant purchase.

It was months until baseball season but that glove never left my sight. I rubbed it with linseed oil and, after placing a baseball in the pocket to help shape it, wrapped it with rubber bands until it was moulded to the perfect fit. I used that glove until the leather was nearly worn away, and I'll say with some modesty that over the years I took my share of extra base hits away from disappointed hitters. We tried not to spoil our kids as they grew up, but sometimes, when you knew how badly they wanted something that cost a lot of money, you caved in and bought it. Seeing the looks on their faces was worth it. I just hope my Dad got his sixty bucks worth from the look on my face that Christmas morning so long ago.

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LOOKING FOR A WORTHY CHARITY? TRY THESE FOLKS: Children's Craniofacial Association

Momma's Boys

I saw a poster at the mall featuring a famous athlete urging kids to "...play outside at least one hour a day". Are you kidding me? Pleading with kids to go outside and play is a modern-day phenomenon in an age when they'd rather sit around on their asses playing video games, texting and watching that 52-inch TV. (Oh, oh, here he goes again.) It's no wonder obesity, diabetes and even hypertension are very real health problems for the young. When I was a kid, the poster at the mall might have read "...please remember to come inside once in a while for meals and sleep". We lived in the streets, constantly playing ball, riding home-made skate scooters, shooting marbles or just sitting quietly on the stoop for a few hands of Gin Rummy or the Italian card game called Brisk.

Even when kids do play today, there is a supporting cast of adults that boggles my mind. Kids are driven everywhere, fitted out with pro-style uniforms, and provided with the best sporting equipment money can buy. Then there are the manicured ball fields, gleaming gymnasiums, indoor pools and ice hockey rinks, all featuring neat bleacher seats, clean rest rooms and fully stocked refreshment stands. Play is supervised by coaches, assistant coaches, equipment managers, paid referees and umpires, and of course doting parents hollering rude things at the opposing teams and game officials. You wonder if left to their own devices whether these kids could ever get a game off the ground.

In 1950s Brooklyn we had the bare essentials. For baseball we used taped up balls, dinged bats and cardboard boxes for bases. The "field" we played on was a vacant lot that had to be cleared of stones, broken bottles and assorted debris so we could round the base paths without risking a trip to the hospital. For basketball we played in a public park. The baskets were metal rims with no nets. You got into a game by challenging whoever had the court. If you beat them, you played on. If you lost, you waited your turn to challenge again. Uniforms were inelegant; shirts vs. skins (kids who played bare chested). There were no umpires or referees, but there were unwritten street and playground codes that kids respected and abided by.

Sides were chosen simply. Two captains, usually the most dominant players or kids who emerged as natural leaders, picked their teams. A coin flip or bat toss determined who chose first. Unlike today's politically correct rules, developed by well-meaning but wrong-headed adults, every captain back then wanted the best players on his team since the object of the game was winning. Not every kid always got to play the way they do in Little League games today where the object is building self-esteem and having fun. In today's system even the worst kids get into the game, even though they clearly have no interest. Mom and Dad want them to play so they fumble their way around while the other kids groan and tease them unmercifully every time they strike out or make an error. There is no incentive to get better because their playing time is guaranteed. They never learn to compete on a level playing field, and Mommy and Daddy tend to run interference for them their entire lives.

Any disputes that arose in our street games were resolved on the spot by agreed-to means devised by the kids themselves. If some outside factor disrupted the normal flow of the game, someone called "hindu" which was the term all kids understood to mean a do-over. To get around the lack of baseball umpires, there were no balls and strikes...batters got two swings to put the ball in play. If they hit two foul balls, they were out, period. In basketball, if someone felt they were fouled, they called it themselves on the honor system. Only egregious fouls were ever called; incidental contact was part of the game and we all were OK with that. Any disagreements were handled by saying" "I'll choose you for it". Once, twice three, SHOOT! You called odds or evens in advance and the winner got the disputed decision.

I've said before that I think the lessons and values kids learn in the streets are as valuable as those in the classroom. Modern-day adults feel the need to schedule and manage every moment of their child's life, maybe because they were bullied as children and don't want to see their kids go through that. The funny thing is they are actually hurting their child's chances for acceptance by peer groups. Kids are very perceptive, and will immediately label any kid who is being overprotected by parents as a "momma's boy". Better if the kid can find his own way of being accepted by the group. Even if he can't hit a baseball or make tackles in football, there are other skills that kids value. Let the kid find out what those skills are and develop them to earn the respect of the group. Don't underestimate your child; coping with challenges and overcoming adversity really do build character.

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Things Italian Mothers Say

Back in the Fifties, before an Italian woman was permitted to become a mother, she was required to attend Mamma Mia Boot Camp and memorize a set of sayings that she would use to guide the development of her children for the rest of her life. Every kid raised in an Italian home heard these sayings at some time growing up. It wasn't just the words...they had to be said in a special way so that they bored right through your thin outer layer of bravado and struck you deep in that guilt-ridden place in your heart. It didn't matter either if you were five or fifty, living at home or on your own, you were always fair game. Here are some of my favorites.

Finish your dinner...kids in Europe are starving. Now I was a pretty good eater so I didn't hear this one that much, but there were certain foods I just would not touch. Boiled fish, lamb, lima beans, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, anything that looked slimy. I would push them around my plate or try to hide them, and when Mom reminded me about the starving children I wanted to say: "Here's an idea, why not just wrap up those sprouts and mail them back to Brussels". I knew that if I ever wised-off like this it would bring a sharp rap to the head with the dreaded wooden spoon, so I just shut up. I always wondered if there was some kind of bizarre guilt-exchange deal made whereby European mothers used starving children in America to get kids to eat their pierogis.

If (insert name here) jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge would you do it too? This one came out when you wanted to do something your mother opposed, and you set her up by foolishly saying: "Well Vinnie Accola gets to do it". (Buzzer sound, Sorry, wrong answer but we have some lovely parting gifts for you. Thanks for playing.) And then Mom says, wait for it now, "If Vinnie Accola jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?" I don't think it ever occurred to Vinnie to jump off any bridge, and if he was crazy enough to try it, I certainly wouldn't follow. There was no kid comeback however that would counter this bridge argument. The Mother's Handbook said that this saying, when uttered with sarcastic contempt, would quell any foolish thing your child wanted to do, and by God it did.

Wait till your father gets home. This was the Italian mother's last resort after she had tried every trick she knew to get you to stop behaving like a jerk. Mothers were smart enough to use it sparingly to avoid diluting the ominous threat these words carried. When you had pushed your poor mother to the brink she took a deep breath and let it fly. The words were spoken slowly and deliberately, as if blows were being delivered. "Wait (smack) until (smack) your (smack) father (smack) gets (smack) home." I always felt bad for my father. He wasn't mad at me, and usually too tired from work to chase me around the kitchen table, but he had to make an effort. If Dad hit me I tried hard to pretend it really hurt because I knew his performance in carrying out my sentence was being judged by Mom, and God help him if I didn't suffer enough.

I only pray that someday you have a kid like you. This was my introduction to the concept of Karma...what goes around comes around. The Italians probably have a more sinister term for it since we have sinister terms for everything. I thought at the time that they needed to pull this one out of the Mothers Handbook because it had absolutely no effect on me. I wanted to say: "That's it? That's all you got? That someday if I get married I might have a kid like me? I'll take my chances". Little did I know that this was an Italian "time-release" curse that always came true...genetics guarantees it. I'm extremely proud of my children, but there were times when they were growing up that my mother's words came back to haunt me.

I'm not mad at you, just disappointed. Bullseye. This was the dum-dum bullet that mothers loaded in the guilt gun when regular bullets were not having the desired effect. They usually played this card when you were too old to hit, and smart enough to realize that the impact of these words hurt more than any hairbrush across your butt. I could withstand any corporal punishment my parents could dish out, but no kid wanted to be a disappointment to his mother. The phrase stopped you in your tracks, and no matter how argumentative you were feeling, you usually stared down at your shoes and mumbled something like: "Aw I'm sorry Mom, please forgive me". Score one for mamma. Hey, even Superman feared Kryptonite.

Mother's Day is coming up and it makes me think about how I could have been a better son. There are small and big things I would do differently if I had the chance, but there are no do-overs in life. I am the son of an Italian mother, and any good in me comes mostly from her. While it may be true that I could have been a better son, she could not have been a better mother. Happy Mother's Day mom.

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Sauce or Gravy?

My daughter-in-law is Alicia Vitarelli Pantaleno, the morning news anchor on New Jersey's channel 12. YouTube - Alicia Vitarelli, Anchor/Reporter, 2010 She has been honored by several New Jersey organizations as the "Italian-American Woman of the Year". Alicia is beautiful and smart...we are very proud and happy to have her in the family. Anyhow, at a recent dinner in her honor, Alicia kidded an audience made up mostly of Italian-Americans that she had taken a survey of her New Jersey viewers to determine whether Italians refer to the red stuff they put on their Sunday pasta (Macaroni to Italian-Americans) as gravy or sauce, and that the winning term was "sauce". The crowd erupted..."No, no, it's gravy" they hollered.

Alicia correctly pointed out that if you went into any restaurant in Italy and asked for gravy on your pasta, they'd look at you funny. True Italians call it sauce...marinara sauce, putanesca sauce, Bolognaise sauce, but NEVER gravy. It started me thinking about what we called it growing up Italian in Brooklyn, and I remember my mother and aunts referring to it as gravy. My theory is that the term originated with Italian-Americans whose ancestors came from Southern Italy where cooking is in the peasant-style and more down-to-earth. Subtle and complex tomato sauces came from places like Rome and other cities in Northern Italy who use different ingredients to flavor them. Immigrant Italians from Southern Italy made thick, rich, flavorful Sunday gravy, period.

There are many ways to make gravy, even within our family, where my Mom and her two sisters learned how to cook from their mother, their recipes varied. My Aunt Anna was the purist, often making her own pasta from scratch early on Sunday mornings. We lived across the hall from her, and sometimes I would wander in and see her standing behind a large kitchen table where she had laid out pasta dough cut into shapes like little hats, bows or noodles. She would then dust these with flour before cooking them for Sunday dinner. Her gravy was delicious and was often one of the courses at our holiday dinners. Her husband, my Uncle Jim, came from Italy and, like most Italians, loved his macaroni. He would sit at the table with a small pen knife cutting up yard-grown, red hot peppers onto his pasta. He would wash it all down with harsh homemade red wine sipped from a pint-sized flagon with a metal spout.

My mother made the best meatballs and braccioles. Her secret was fennel seeds in the meatballs, and raisins and pignoli nuts rolled into the braccioles. Her cooking was plain in the Southern Italian style, but hearty and delicious. My Aunt Mary (I hope she will forgive me for saying this) was probably the least gifted of the three sisters in the kitchen. Her gifts lay elsewhere, mainly in starting and operating small businesses in a day when women in business were not all that common. Aunt Mary was the Ralph Kramden of the family, who always had an idea for making money. She also had a patient, understanding husband, my Uncle Nick, who encouraged and helped her. The difference between her and Ralph was that many of her ideas actually worked.

Italians will usually swear that nobody cooked like their mothers. All Italian women had their little tricks for making the best Sunday gravy...some insisted that meatballs only be made from a mixture of ground up beef, veal and pork; others added ingredients like red wine, pork skin, ribs, or even hard-boiled eggs to liven up their gravy. (I love eggs almost any way you can cook them, but I draw the line at putting them in Sunday gravy.) Great scenes on the big screen featuring "gravy tips" include Clemenza in "The Godfather" teaching the "made" guys who were in the middle of a shooting war how to make three-meat meatballs and to always add a little red wine, and Paul Sorvino in "Goodfellas" showing Mafia guys in jail how to use a razor to slice garlic paper-thin so that it dissolved in the gravy.

In our family we are not as unwavering as the old timers who made it a non-negotiable rule that Sundays and Wednesdays were strictly macaroni days. I will say that when we do sit down to an old fashioned, noisy Italian Sunday dinner, with plates flying all over the place and aunts, uncles. cousins and friends talking over each other, it still gives me a feeling I can't quite put into words. It's almost like the spirits of those aunts, uncles, cousins and friends long gone are somehow still with us. I feel blessed having been born and raised Italian, proud to be part of a people who may be imperfect, but who know how to eat, drink. laugh and love with the best of them. A la famiglia!

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The Solution is Simple

I read today where Our Lady of Lourdes School in Massapequa Park on Long Island is closing in June because of low enrollment. Since Our Lady of Lourdes was the name of my old grammar school in Brooklyn, it saddened me to read this news. Many Catholic grade schools are closing all across the country because they are simply becoming too expensive to operate. That wasn't always the case, in fact, when I attended Lourdes in the 1950s, the average student came from what we would call today a "poor" family. It's funny but nobody ever told us we were poor. All our neighbors were in the same boat...poor maybe in liquid assets, but rich in values like love of family, reverence for God, and a thirst for education.

Catholic Schools were bursting at the seams in the 1950's. There was a nominal tuition fee, but every family found a way to do without something else so that tuition could be paid. Why did people sacrifice to send their children to these schools? Results. Many of the immigrant families who came to America at the turn of the 20th century understood too well that the way to a better life for their children lay in education. It's not that the public schools were bad at the time, in fact, back then New York City had one of the finest public school systems in the country. What the Catholic Schools offered that made them so popular was not only a first class education, but also religious instruction and character building that synched perfectly with the values of first generation Americans.

The methods used in running a Catholic School were harsh by today's ridiculously lenient standards, but man did they work. The business of those schools was learning, and honestly, by that measure they did a hell of a job. I would equate the educational value of my eighth grade diploma to that of almost any NYC high school diploma in 2010. We were drilled in the fundamentals of writing and grammar, knew math up to elementary algebra, were taught geography (I'd bet some high school kids today couldn't find the United States on a map) and real history, not the revisionist crap they peddle these days. We learned art, music, civics...how government operated, we were even schooled in etiquette, something that we could badly use in 2010.

There were no discipline problems; if you stepped over the line you got whacked upside the head. That simple but effective prescription usually discouraged repeat offenses, and teachers were free to teach. I don't think my parents set foot inside the school until the day I graduated. They were perfectly content to give the teachers leave to discipline me when required, knowing perfectly well that I probably deserved it. If any kid's parent was summoned to school, it was serious. Parents didn't go with the attitude that their kid was right and the teacher wrong, quite the opposite. They went to listen, and to do what the teacher suggested to remedy any "problem" that came up. The kid was almost sure to get whacked by his parents for causing them the embarrassment of a visit to school.

I'm sure the methods used in Catholic Schools in my day have been toned down, but even so, any student, even in a modern Catholic classroom, knows they are there to learn. The nuns and brothers may have put away the rulers and the thumb screws, but the air of discipline is still there. They simply do not put up with the crap they tolerate in public schools. Little thugs who should be in jail are given "time outs" to think about their transgressions. When a kid is suspended from school, they don't get sent home because their parents are both out working to make those Lexus payments, no, they receive "in school" suspensions where they sit in an empty room next to a pretty young teacher to "punish" them. Insane.

Mayor Bloomberg should get rid of that Muppet of a Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and bring Brother Jude of the Franciscans out of retirement to reorganize the system. Parents should be banned from school unless summoned. Teachers who fail should not be protected by unions and sent to "rubber rooms" to collect paychecks for doing nothing, they should be sent packing. Kids who are chronically troublesome should get to spend two minutes in the hall with the biggest, meanest teacher who has the authority to talk some sense into them, capisce. I guarantee in five years the United States would regain its pre-eminent position in education, and not have to take a back seat to the Russians, Indians or Chinese.

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