A Great Big Thank You

Today's post is very different from what you've been reading. Today is the day for a tribute to the best man I ever knew.

He was good to me when I wasn't even being good to myself. He lent me his car when I had nothing -- even less than nothing -- so that I could visit my daughters on alternate weekends, and bring them to my mother's house, because he knew the importance of family.

There are a lot of old jokes about brothers-in-law, but they don't fit Ed Milo.

He served his country, his community and his family with honor. He loved and protected my sister for almost 5 decades.

Talk about a man who will be missed!

Rest in peace sailor, firefighter, family man.

Chapter 21: Dawn of the Fifties.

It was my birthday, New Year's Eve, 1949. My age had finally reached double digits, and I was full of myself. I had responsibilities downstairs at my Grandmother Campobasso's store, and although I had an allowance for the work I did, it wasn't as much as my friends Little Louie and Saucer Eyes got for doing the same things!

It wasn't that Grandma was a miser or anything like that, but it was her way of showing me the value of money. For example – she had customers who bought the paper from her every day, but couldn't always get to the store. So, “Gram,” who always called me “Big Boy,” would have me deliver the paper to their homes, some as far away as Herman Melville's house at 114^th Street, near the Hudson River. (No, I never saw him there.)

If I had delivered the papers as a regular paperboy, I would have made twice as much money, plus tips. But Gram was splitting her profit with me, so there was less to go around.

I did other chores around the store, too. I was always a kid who liked to stay up late, so when the store closed at 11, I would go down in the cellar and bring up cases of warm beer and soda and restock the coolers, so there would be a full complement of cold drinks for sale the next day. My perk for doing that wasn't money, but full access to the goodies before I went upstairs to bed.

I'd sit in a booth with a comic book, a bottle of Nehi grape soda and a Devil Dog. Later, when Gram had one of the first television sets installed up in a corner of the store, I'd forego the comic book and watch Broadway Open House and the original Tonight Show. That's where I got my love of the visual medium and paid attention to all the commercials. Little did I know that somebody I would be writing and producing them!

Since I was used to staying up late, and my birthday was on a Saturday night, and the New Year began the next day on Sunday, I stayed up and listened as Guy Lombardo's orchestra played on the radio.

The fifties would see lots of changes in the world at large, and in my world. It would be the decade of nuclear testing, cold war and the Korean “conflict.” Closer to home, it would be the decade when I got my first two wheeler, a shiny chrome Shelby with streamers on the handlebars, push-button horn and even a battery-powered headlight. I would fly through the streets, expanding my world from the local movie theater to all of Troy. I even ventured north to Pleasantdale, and caught the eyes of girls I'd only imagined before – girls with blonde curls, like my cousin Coke's German wife, and freckled girls with flaming hair the color of Rhonda Fleming's.

By the end of the decade, I'd be graduating from high school and facing a future of technological wonders, unimaginable back in those days of rabbit ears and test patterns. There's more to tell about the Caserta and Campobasso families, and the changes that affected every family in Little Italy and beyond, and I'll be sharing those stories in the future.

Chapter 20: Changes.

The last year of the forties brought many changes to 13 Liberty Street. The Case/Caserta family was splitting up. Well, part of it was leaving the old homestead – my father, Ed Case, my mother, Esther Campobasso Case, and me, their son, Little Eddie, were moving to my grandmother's new building at the very beginning of Lansingburgh, the northern section of Troy.

Her confectionery store, now a full-fledged grocery store with booths left over from the time she had a soda fountain, was on the first floor of a solid brick building on a busy corner. Grandma Campobasso lived on the second floor, and she and her now deceased husband had rented out the third floor for extra income. Now that she was prosperous, she needed her younger daughter close by more than she needed the rent, so we were moving.

I was coming up on my tenth birthday, and, with the presumption of youth, thought I had figured out the real reason why we were moving. I had overheard a conversation, and confronted my mother with “the facts.”

“So why didn't you tell me that nobody likes Aunt Giovi,” I said in my most accusatory tone.

“What are you talking about?,” my mother said.

“I heard everybody talking the other day, and they said that nobody likes Aunt Giovi.”

(She was my father's widowed sister, who lived upstairs over us on Liberty Street with her sons and daughter Michelina.)

“Everybody loves Aunt Giovi! She's the nicest of all the Cases. Where did you get such an idea? Nobody would even think that!”

“I heard it – just before Dad went to Riposo's for pizza night.”

My mother laughed until there were tears in her eyes. When she stopped, she said, “Anchovies. Your father asked what everybody wanted on their pies, and they said, 'anything but anchovies.' Nobody in the family likes anchovies, not Aunt Giovi.”

I felt like the little fool I was, but still, I knew there was a family problem. As the red left my face, I remembered the arguments between my mother and her sister Rose, who lived next door with my father's older brother.

“Then it's something between you and Aunt Rose. Why are we moving? I don't want to go!”

I was good at tantrums back then.

“It's nothing to concern yourself with, Eddie,” she said. “Sometimes grown-ups just don't get along – even if they are related. Especially when they're related. We're moving and that's that.”

That was as much of an explantation I would get, until many years later, when I made a startling discovery about a cover-up involving the two sisters and a local midwife.

Another big change at the Case family compound: The flat we were leaving wasn't going to be empty for long. The Berlin Airlift was ending, and the family's brave little jeep driver, Coke, was coming home, but not alone. He was bringing his post-war bride, Hilda, home, and they were going to set up housekeeping in our old space.

As I look back on that year now, I can see how the next generation was becoming more American and less Italian. Before the war, and certainly during it, it would have been unthinkable for an Italian boy to marry anybody but an Italian girl. But Coke didn't wait for the family's approval – he fell in love with a buxom blonde beauty, married her and brought her home.

In high heels, Hilda was nearly half a foot taller than Coke, but neither of them seemed to mind it. In fact, they took joy in it, even matching some of the jokes that family and friends made about the towering German and the pipsqueak Italian, and their new “Axis of Love.”

We were moving out. Coke and Hilda were moving in. And still, there were more changes to come. At Thanksgiving dinner in 1949, Coke's beautiful sister Mike brought her boss from Tiny Town Togs, Siro, to meet the family. I had a crush on my cousin, even though she was 15 years older than me, and I couldn't help disliking Siro for the way he treated her. I think “fawning” was the word back then. He pulled out her chair, gave her first choice of every platter that was handed to him, and looked at her lovingly, no matter who else at the huge table he was talking to. Of course, she reciprocated, and it was obvious to everyone that these two young. dark descendants of Italian immigrants, although from different worlds, had found each other and fallen in love beyond repair.

So, it was no surprise when, after Midnight Mass at St. Anthony's that year, Siro and Mike announced their engagement and she flashed an engagement ring with a diamond so big that one of Mike's jealous co-workers called it “skate-able.” Father John Bosco Pantera would perform the wedding ceremony the following year, and he didn't seem all that thrilled about it.

After settling in on the 3^rd floor at my grandmother's, I discovered that I was expected to help out around the store after school and on weekends, and although I resented the loss of some of my freedom, I learned the value of work and the rudiments of business. Of course, we still got together at Liberty Street on Sundays for the usual family dinner, but now we were more like outsiders.

More about that next time.

Chapter 19: The New Priest Fills the Gap

As “Coke” boarded the train at Troy's Union Station, his beautiful sister Michelina – Mike, to all who knew her – was the only one who stayed at home. She and her brother were as close as siblings can be, and all the time he was driving his jeep during the war, Mike prayed longer and harder and visited St. Anthony's more often than anyone, beseeching Mary and the saints to spare her brother.

He was spared, and then, three years after the war was over, the Berlin airlift took him away again. What, you might ask, was the importance of a jeep driver in America's and Britain's concerted effort to fly supplies in to Berlin, a former enemy city that was being blockaded by Russia, a former ally?

Richard Reeves describes it beautifully in his recent book, “Those Daring Young Men,” in which he recounts the amazing accomplishments of the British and American flyboys who, at the peak of the airlift, were bringing in more supplies for their former enemies than had been transported by rail. That was a very big deal, and deemed impossible by many experts, until American ingenuity proved them wrong.

The landing and take-off strips were composed of metal grid work, similar to the kind I remember driving over on “singing bridges” in the past. The landing lights were spaced evenly along three metal runways. With planes landing on the two outside runways, and taking off from the center one at an unheard of rate of every minute or so, precision was key.

The jeep drivers played a key role in helping the pilots and navigators know just how much space they had, and how much time it would take for their patched and weary planes to come to a stop. The jeep driver would floor the pedal, driving as fast as he could down the runway in question, then slam on the brakes and count the number of lights he would skid past until the jeep screeched to a halt.

That information would be radioed to the incoming plane, so everyone would know precisely where the plane, loaded with tons of essential food and materiel, would stop. The ground crews would be nearby, unloading the plane, refueling it and sending it back for another run as fast as humanly possible.

It was the kind of excitement “Coke” had been missing since he delivered the mail to the front lines of Patton's army three years before, but without the same level of danger. In fact, now that GI's were feeding the Germans rather than killing them, attitudes were different. The Berlin frauleins whose men were gone – and there were many missing – had new heroes. And the heroes had money, food, and time to spare. Even a five foot nothing soldier like “Coke” attracted his share of blond beauties.

Back home in Troy, Coke's beautiful sister Mike wasn't aware of the lack of danger “over there.” To her, Uncle Sam had sent her brother back into the thick of it, and so she resumed what had been her wartime habit of stopping in at St. Anthony's shrine church every morning before going to work at Tiny Town Togs, and every evening when the final whistle blew.

When Mike went into the confessional at the end of every week, her sins were no more serious than jealousy of a co-worker, swearing at her mother, and anger at God for sending her brother back into harm's way.

It was all pretty routine for the priests at St. Anthony's who heard her Friday confessions, and they usually prescribed a couple of Hail Marys and sent Mike on her way. Until J.B showed up, that is. Father John Bosco Pantera, OFM, had just been assigned to St. Anthony's after a few hard years at a Franciscan mission church in Central America. The head of the order knew J.B. was in need of rest and relaxation, but could never have known just what that “r and r” would entail.

The first time Mike spoke with Father J.B. was in the darkened confessional. She hadn't see this tall, muscular 35-year-old with skin burnished from years in the tropical sun and a face that could lead you to believe he was related to both Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney. Handsome and pretty, at the same time.

Father J.B didn't just accept Mike's sins – he asked questions – personal questions about the reasons for her jealousy, anger and frustration. He made her think. It was like the intimate one-on-one conversations she would have with her brother, before he was shipped to Europe, twice.

Mike opened up to this soft voice in the darkness, and soon she was revealing secret wishes, hopes and desires she didn't even tell her family. He gave her some kind words of advice, told her to say an entire rosary. She thanked him and left the church, stepping into a world that was brighter than she remembered it.

That was Friday. On Sunday, she saw the man with that comforting, understanding voice for the first time, in his gleaming white vestments, on the altar and in the pulpit. And the second time she saw him was later that same day, playing bocce in his undershirt in the backyard of 13 Liberty Street.

Michelena's uncles had invited Father John Bosco Pantera to the family gathering. And she didn't mind at all.

Next: People talk.

Chapter 18: Backyard frolics and another farewell.

As life returned to normal after the war, and the abundant American lifestyle returned, family feuds and grudges were pushed below the surface at 13 Liberty Street, and the backyard once again became a joyous place. For children, adults, and child-like adults.

Uncle Luigi Ritorno (we were never allowed to call him Lou, or Louie) was an interesting case. He had been born in American, but, like many Italian families that were split between the new and the old world, the young were often sent back to Italy – either because there wasn't enough income to support them here, or because their labors were needed over there.

The Ritorno family owned a small olive grove and press somewhere in Calabria, near the “toe” of the Italian boot, and was brought back there when he was only a couple of years old, presumably to be brought up to be educated in the family business. So he grew up learning only Italian.

Before he was able to put his knowledge of the olive oil business to good use, however, the family lost their land, and he was forced to re-emigrate to the US, the land of his birth. But, returning to Troy as a teenager in the 1930's, he was one of those rare natural-born Americans who couldn't speak a word of English.

As a result, the little American English he did learn to speak was fractured almost beyond recognition, and he wasn't able to secure employment equal to his Italian training. He ended up having to settle for menial jobs, as a janitor in local factories, and as a busboy in local restaurants to supplement his meager day job earnings. And he didn't do much to debunk the Italian belief that the Calabrese are hard-headed.

Poor Uncle Luigi. Marrying into the Case family didn't improve his lot in life. The men in the family, victims of discrimination themselves outside Little Italy, now had someone in their own enclave on Liberty Street to take it all out on. Luigi became the butt of frequent practical jokes.

Later in 1948, it would get even worse for him, when a popular new radio comedy would debut about Italian immigrants trying to learn English. It was “Life with Luigi,” with an Irish-American actor named J. Carrol Naish caricaturing Luigi, and Alan Reed, later the voice of Fred Flintstone, playing his Italian landlord.

I remember The Case men playing a game called “Boss and Underboss,” and using it as a way to tease our Luigi. Following a series of bocce or pinochle games, the captain of whichever team won would be the “Boss,” leaving the captain of the other team as the “Underboss.”

They would empty a quart of Stanton's lager, from the brewery around the corner, into as many glasses as it would fill, and begin. It was over before the heads on the beer disappeared, but despite its speed, the game was intricate and entertaining to a little boy. And as I reflect on it, it was educational, too.

The Boss would open with a proposal, directed at the Underboss. “A glass for you and me, and a glass for all the members of my team,” he might say. He knew this was unacceptable of course, and the Underboss would make a counter-proposal. “A glass for you and me, and a glass for two of my team and two of yours.” A counter-counter proposal from the Boss would follow, and so on, with a little give here and a little take there, until, as I recall, everyone had a glass of beer in front of him except Uncle Luigi, who would rant and rave in his broken English as the rest quenched their thirst. Alternately, they would cruelly force him to drink the entire quart himself, and then tease him for being drunk.

Luigi always got to drink a normal amount eventually, of course, but he was singled out because they all knew that his frustration would always result in some outburst. When he had “gone dry,” they'd open another bottle, he would drink, and all would be forgiven. Until the next time.

Uncle Luigi loved to dance, especially the Italian folk dance called the tarantella – supposedly named after the gyrations that a victim of a spider-bite would be forced to undergo.

One late spring Saturday in 1948, when the family was gathered outside, enjoying a rare day of leisure, Vincenzo, my father's bachelor brother, the family prankster, played a different kind of trick on Luigi. Using a long extension cord, he set up a record player on the back porch, to provide Italian background music for the family. Luigi began dancing to a lively tarantella.

People were clapping and cheering, and Vincenzo took advantage of that to quickly lift the needle and place it back near the beginning of the record. He did this several times, until Uncle Luigi, gasping and sweating and finally realizing that this was the longest song in history, caught Vincenzo in the act.

Wiping his brow and plopping down on the cobblestones where he had been prancing furiously, he looked accusingly at his brother-in-law and uttered what has become the family motto:

"You thinga somebody don't know somathing? Somebody knows somathing!”

The laughter was cut short when the mailman came through the gangway into the backyard with a special delivery letter for my cousin “Coke,” the jeep driver in WW II.

He tore open the official looking envelope and gave us all the news – he was being called up to use his driving expertise on German runways, to help support the Berlin airlift.

©Copyright 2010 Frank LaPosta Visco

Next: The new priest fills the gap.

Chapter 17: Peace in the world, not at home.

On May 8, 1945, the day the Allies accepted the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, the world celebrated. It was VE Day --Victory in Europe. Just over 3 months later, on August 15, we celebrated VJ Day – Victory over Japan.

Now, prosperity really was just around the corner, although things would never be the same as they were before the war. Many more women had experienced the liberating sense of worth of being the family breadwinner, and were resentful when the jobs they had been doing were taken away and given to the returning men. Was this the beginning of the equal rights movement for women?

There was still war on the horizon, of course – but it was a Cold War, as Soviet Russia, our ally in the war, began their land grab and swallowed up much of eastern Europe and a divided Germany.

At 13 Liberty Street, everyone did their best to return to the way things were, but the men who had been in uniform had seen and experienced too much to be the same as before. Of course, they were idolized as conquering heroes by the family, especially us kids, but we knew enough not to ask too many questions as they packed away their medals and souvenirs.

During the second half of the 1940's, as I got older, I sensed that the two Campobasso women who had married into the Case family, Esther, who was my mother, and Rose, her older sister, didn't seem as cordial as two sisters should be.

It's true that there were many years between them, but it didn't seem as though that was reason enough for some of the remarks that flew back and forth. Even though many of them were in Italian, which the children didn't understand, the adults couldn't hide the tone of the comments. Even though Italian is a beautiful language, there are angry phrases that can be spit out, and on several occasions, they were.

Children don't miss much of what's going on in the adult world, and even in the whispered comments and the attempts to cool down heated arguments, we knew there were things that kept our parents, aunts and uncles on edge.

Turns out that it wasn't just the sensitive nature of Italians and their easily offended sensibilities that caused the heating up of language and the icing over of relationships. There always seemed to be an uneasiness between the sisters, especially when they would take us – me and my double cousins – out for a stroll in the neighborhood. Since two sisters had married two brothers, I had the same grandparents on both sides as my cousins, Rose's children did.

So, I wondered as I got older, why both my mother and her sister seemed at a loss for words whenever people would look at us and assume that we were all beautiful siblings. I certainly came to understand their fear of the malocchio, or evil eye. The way I understood it, Italian superstition said that if a child is praised or envied by someone who doesn't invoke God at the same time, a curse is placed on that child, and it has to be removed. By a strega, the Italian word for witch. (You can read more about it, here.)

Luckily for us, we didn't have to go far to find someone empowered to remove the evil eye. Another one of my father's sisters, Philomena, lived with her husband Luigi and daughter Annamaria in a flat on Fifth Avenue, around the corner from Liberty, and across the street from Stanton's Brewery.

I remember Aunt Phil putting three drops of oil into water, saying some Italian words, then doing something with needles and scissors to remove the malocchio. What would happen if the curse weren't removed, I'm not sure, but there seems to have been the fear of sickness, or maybe even the secret ritual was performed when a child was already sick, in the belief that the sickness might have been caused by an inadvertent curse.

I'm not superstitious myself, but I firmly believe that when the malocchio is removed from a mildly sick child, the sickness will disappear in seven days. And that without the ministrations and mumbo jumbo of the strega, the cure will take a week.

In our family, it was said that the ability could be passed on only from mother to daughter, and only on Christmas Eve. I don't think Aunt Philomena taught it to Annamaria, and even if she had, Annamaria didn't have any children, so the practice – in our family – ended there.

But even when someone complimented the beauty or health of me and my double cousins and also invoked the name of God, the Campobasso sisters who became Case sisters still seemed uncomfortable, and often avoided each other for days. There was something they didn't want others to know. I was determined to find out what it was.

©Copyright 2010 Frank LaPosta Visco

Next: Backyard frolics and another farewell.

Chapter 16: Life on the Homefront

We called it the homefront, because it was everybody's war, not just those men and women in service who volunteered and were drafted and were committed to doing their part for the noble concept of freedom.

World War II was a war during which everybody did their part. It meant making sacrifices. Materials that were needed “over there” were rationed over here. Gasoline couldn't be bought without coupons. The same held true for anything made of rubber. If you were lucky enough to have a car, you had to make do with worn, patched tires and inner-tubes. Meat, butter and sugar were needed to keep our troops fit and fighting.

Every smoker saved the aluminum foil that lined cigarette packs, formed them into shiny round balls and donated them to the war effort.

Scrap drives were common, too. It seemed that nothing was wasted – if it was metal and no longer of use, it would be collected, melted down and turned into a weapon of war.

At 13 Liberty Street, the backyard garden was expanded, and even the venerable Italian custom of growing your own vegetables became support for the war – they suddenly became Victory Gardens, turning a tradition into an act of patriotism.

Eddie Case tried to enlist, but with a wife – Esther – and a child, me, and a heart murmur from his undernourished childhood, he was labelled 4F by the Selective Service, known as the draft board, and so kept his job at Cluett, Peabody & Company, now turning out army issue clothing, and joined the others in the Case clan in following the progress of the war on two fronts.

After dinner, the family would gather around the big console radio in the living room, and hear commentators like Edward R. Murrow, H.V. Kaltenborn and Lowell Thomas report from exotic locations, spewing names of places and battles that we had never heard before, but would become famous or infamous in future history books.

My father was an early graffitist – I told you earlier how he painted the romantic words of a song on our backyard wall to impress my mother when they were courting. Now, he turned the stone retaining wall into a kind of memorial of honor, listing the names and titles of our relatives who were serving overseas.

And as each of them came home – and as fate would have it, they all did – he would make a banner of letters that spelled out each name with a big “Welcome Home.”

The children of the Case family followed the lead of our fathers and uncles, and put on our own fund-raising shows. I was pretty young, but the older cousins always found a way to include everyone of us kids in our USO shows. We'd learn dance routines, songs and poems. We'd perform our versions of the popular musical stars of the day, like Al Jolson. I'm sure we didn't raise a lot of money in those days, simply because there wasn't a lot of money to be had, but whatever it was, we felt like we were doing our part, and it was a good feeling.

Trains ran through Troy's Little Italy in those days, and passenger trains were given over to transporting troops to the various training camps and points of embarkation. Those troop train schedules were noted by the families, and the women would pool their resources and make sandwiches and whatever sweets they could bake with limited ingredients, and hand them up to the uniformed boys as they eagerly reached out of the train car windows. Of course, the USO was always there, with coffee and doughnuts, cigarettes and smiles.

Keeping up the morale was important, because as prevalent as the propaganda was, the news from the front was not always good. The Allies – Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and Russia – were playing catch-up in troop strength and war machinery. Factories in American became dedicated to turning out tanks, jeeps, airplanes, guns, rifles, bombs and bullets. Shipbuilders turned out battleships, tenders, PT boats and landing craft.

We listened in early June of 1944 as D-Day was launched, and despite the terrible losses of so many Allied soldiers, we felt that the might of our forces and the rightness of our cause would prevail. There was hope building for success in Europe, and in the Pacific.

One by one, the welcome home signs went up, and all our cousins returned to Liberty Street sound of body and limb, but forever changed by the experiences we could only imagine, and the stories they were so reluctant to share.

Things were never going to be the same again, even though an era of prosperity was on the horizon. Tensions in the Case family had been put on hold for four years. But when the last bomb had been dropped overseas, the battles on the domestic front were just being joined.

©Copyright 2010 Frank LaPosta Visco

Next: Peace in the world, war at home.