Yummm.

Another departure from my normal blog postings, if there is such a thing. A recipe I found on line for three ingredients I was fortunate to have in the house. Enjoy. And Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

Cranberry, Pear and Apple Crumble Recipe

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) and place rack in the center of the oven. Butter or spray with a nonstick cooking spray, a 2 1/2 quart (2.75 liter) casserole or oval gratin dish, or a 10 inch (25 cm) deep dish pie plate. For Crumble Topping: Place all the topping ingredients (flour, sugar, cinnamon, salt, oats, nuts, and butter) in a food processor and process just until the mixture has clumps the size of peas. (This can also be done in a large bowl with a pastry blender, two knives or your fingertips.) For Filling: In a large bowl combine the sugar and cornstarch (corn flour). Peel, core, and slice the apples and pears and toss them, along with the cranberries, in the sugar mixture. Once thoroughly combined transfer to the prepared baking dish. Spread the topping evenly over the fruit. Bake for approximately 35-45 minutes or until bubbly and the topping is golden brown and crisp. Remove from oven and place on a wire rack to cool for at least 15 minutes before serving. Serve with softly whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. Refrigerate leftovers and reheat before serving. Makes about 6 servings.

Crumble Topping: 3/4 cup (95 grams) all purpose flour 3/4 cup (155 grams) light brown sugar 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup (70 grams) old-fashioned rolled oats 1/3 cup (40 grams) chopped walnuts or pecans 1/2 cup (113 grams) cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces Filling: 2-3 tablespoons (30-45 grams) light brown sugar 1/2 tablespoon cornstarch (corn flour) 1 1/2 pounds (680 grams) Granny Smith Apples or other firm apple - peeled, cored, and cut into 1 inch (2.5 cm) chunks 1 1/2 pounds (680 grams) ripe Bartlett or Anjou Pears, peeled, cored and cut into 1 inch (2.5 cm) chunks 1/2 cup (50 grams) dried cranberries (or fresh cranberries that have been, rinsed, drained, and picked over.

I'll Be The Judge of That.

I can't say it was a triumphant return to the stage, but I hope the audience had as much fun watching as I did playing the irascible judge in Troy Civic Theatre's initial offering, "The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge."

My recent stage experience is pretty sparse, and this was only the second show I auditioned for this year, each, coincidentally, for the part of a judge.

The first, which I didn't get, would have been a huge stretch -- not age-wise, but acting-wise -- it was a 2-person play, and the male was a retired judge at Nuremburg, beginning to lose his faculties, and dealing with a young, sharp-witted assistant.

The part of Judge Stanchfield R. Pearson, for which I was selected, was a lot less complicated. This judge out-scrooges Scrooge, and deserves the eerie finish that the play provides. But the only variation is in the character's bellowing and anger -- he's the most cartoonish character in the play, and honestly, I don't think I'm ready for any more variation that that. On top of that, it was an enhanced stage reading, not a full-up production, so when I stumbled, I had the script in front of me, and experienced actors around me to help cover me.

Hopefully, I'll develop and grow into other, more complex characters over time.

Today, I want to publicly thank all the members of the company and cast for their support, and also to my family and friends who took the time from a busy holiday season to come to the show. They were all kind enough to tell me that they enjoyed it.

I don't know if anyone missed the absence of postings over the last few weeks; I was using my energies to concentrate on the play.

That's all for today, except for this -- the short "bio" I wrote for the Playbill:

Frank LaPosta Visco grew up in Troy, watching his father and three uncles, known as the Visk Brothers, put on many shows that helped support, entertain and unite the residents of Troy, especially those of Little italy, and is happy to (finally) help continue that family tradition as a member of the new Troy Civic Theatre Company. "Somebody knows something."

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.