American First Italian Always

Essay of the 1st Winner was David W. Marren

 My Italian Heritage

                 No matter what, my Italian heritage will always be a prominent part of my life.  I don’t often realize it, but my mannerisms, my attitude, my faith, and even my cuisine, are all results of my ancestors.  In all of my habits and traditions, there is no escaping the Italian influence in my life.  Sometimes we can reflect on the lives of our ancestors, and see how their actions and decisions have shaped our own lives.  I will reflect on this now.

                Pietro Fugazi was a baker in Genoa, Italy.  He was a young man with a strong will, and the wisdom to seize an opportunity when the time came.  The time came.  He and his wife boarded ship and took his baking skills to Manhattan, where he began working for the prosperous company of Ferrara’s.  When the young couple decided to have children they moved to Staten Island.  It was here that Claudia Fugazi was born – another piece to the puzzle in the prolific Staten Island town, teaming with Italian predominance.  She lived there most of her life, met the charming, witty David Marren in high school, and married after his return from the war.  They bought a bright yellow hose on Princeton Avenue, in New Dorp, Staten Island, and had six little rascals.

                Years before, unknown to the Fugazi family, there was another auspicious young man who had traveled to America.  His name as Paqual Antonelli, but upon his arrival in America decided to be called “Joe”.  His mother was from Sicily, his father from Naples.  His family also settled in Manhattan, where he grew up in a brownstone, in the heart of Greenwich Village.  Joe became a truck driver, and before long he owned his own trucking business with his four brothers.  At the age of twenty-eight, he married a young lady name Eugene, and they had two boys.  Their older son, William Antonelli, joined the Marines and served in World War II.  He married his neighborhood sweetheart, Joy Driscoll, when he returned.  They started their own family in the Village where their children where enrolled in Our lady of Pompeii School, took part in the May crowning, learned the Ave Maria, and had a playground on the roof.  They delighted in such traditions as The Feast of San Gennaro, gellato on Mulberry Street, cannolli’s from Bruno’s on Bleecker, and the smell of sawdust and cheese from the corner deli.  Eventually, they took that fateful ferry ride to Staten Island, where they bought a home on Princeton Avenue.

                And so it was in 1962, on Princeton Avenue in New Dorp, Staten Island, the Marren and Antonelli families first met.  The eldest son of Claudia Marren’s little rascals was David.  He became acquainted with the lovely Deborah Antonelli.  Deborah and David became good friends.  Together, they walked to elementary school, rode bicycles and shared in the neighborhood activities.  Though their lives took different directions once they college years came, and they lost touch.  After graduation, Deborah moved to Florida with her family.  A few years later David accepted a position as a pharmacist in Florida – in the same town.  They happened to meet each other by chance in their new lives, and they reminisced of their old Italian neighborhood and the fun times they had spent together.  They shared the traditional Christmas Eve at Deborah’s sister’s house, where nearly every typed of fish imaginable was prepared with care and delicious perfection.  Deborah’s parents also introduced them to all their friends at the Italian American Club, where her mother later became the reigning “Queen Isabella.”

                And so they married and had two sons.  One of whom is currently reflecting upon his Italian ancestry, in an essay about his relatives.  The other will probably be doing the same a year from now.  But for the moment, (and we now can that in is no coincidence), the former son will conclude his essay, and reside back to his kitchen where he can top pieces of garlic bread with mozzarella cheese and bruschetta from an afternoon snack.  Probably, the son reflected, not unlike a snack enjoyed by Pietro Fugazi soon after his wife had returned from the market.

Essay of the 2nd Winner was Joseph P. Traina

America’s Italian Leader

                After listening to his 1984 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, I assume great pride in sharing at least a cultural identity with the great Italian-American Mario Cuomo.  For years leading up to and following the address known as, “A Tale of Two Cities,” or “Shining City” Cuomo would earn the titles of author, attorney, orator and 52^nd governor of New York.  The effective governor would twice set records for popularity of reelection pools and during his 12-year term, he would create more than a half-million jobs for New Yorkers leading the sate through two national recessions.  He would be hailed by critics and supporters as “fiery and enigmatic, torn, intensely introspective,” “a national here” and ‘the nations most gifted philosopher-politician,” (The Boston Globe).  Though, at his core Mario Cuomo would be best described as an Italian always and an American first.

                In the 1920’s, Immaculato Cuomo, Mario’s father, emigrated with wife Andrea in pursuit of a better life from poor Salerno, Italy.  To meet ends, Immaculato dug and cleaned the sewers of New York City until 1931 when he was able to open a small grocery store in South Jamaica queens.  Mario Mathew Cuomo was born on June 15, 1933 in the apartment above the store the youngest of three.  Mario slowly but surely learned to speak English engaging in books and in the world of radio serials.  Early education for the young and curious Cuomo began in the public school system but would lead to enrollment in St. Johns Preparatory School, a Catholic high school of more academic rigor.  Once there, Cuomo displayed academic excellence and athletic prowess.  The athlete, modeled after Cuomo’s here Joe DiMaggio, signed a $2,000 contract at age 19 to play centerfield for the Pittsburgh Pirate organization right out of high school.  Only weeks before, Mickey Mantle had signed with the Yankees for a mere $1100.  However, his dreams of professional Baseball were soon crushed after a wild pitch hospitalized him for a month.  He returned to school continuing academia at St. John’s University supplemented by a scholarship for semi-professional basketball.  At graduation in 1953, he excelled receiving high honors and three years later earned a bachelor’s degree at the top of his class from St. John’s Law school.  Mario climbed the political ladder beginning as an attorney in smaller firms staying involved with, in his words, “the only party I could safely identify,” the Democratic Party.  In 1954 Mario wed the former Matilda Raff. 

                Having grown up first generation Italian-American, Cuomo always held true the values of the hard worker and quoted in American Heritage Magazine.

                “When my mother and father came [to American], they could not speak the language.  They had no skills.  They had one thing, a willingness to give labor.  But it had to be at the lowest level.  My father was literally, a ditch digger in New Jersey, literally.”

                The next three decades would be preparation for one of his proudest roles.

                In 1982 Marion Cuomo was elected Governor of New York.  Furthering New York’s reputation as a leader in progressive social programs and legislation, Governor Cuomo made strategic economic investments to balance 12 consecutive budgets.  Programs included the largest homeless housing assistance program, the most expensive drug treatment network, a nationally recognized plan to deal with AIDS, the largest program for the mentally ill in the United States, and a revolutionary 10-year commitment to New York’s children called “The Decade of the Child.”  The investments he initiated accomplished everything from making roads safer than ever to building a network of high-tech facilities.  His building program constructed the new Stuyvesant High School, Riverbank State Park, and about all of Battery Park City.  As a result, foreign investment in the State more than double and new export opportunities were created for thousands of New York firms.  The state received its largest tax cut in history when Mario Cuomo served as Governor.  He improved public safety enacting the nation’s first seat belt law, building necessary prison space, and employing innovative approaches to criminal justice – especially in the area of drug-related crime.  Governor Cuomo appointed every member of New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, regarded as one of the finest state courts in the nation, including the first African-American judge to serve a full term, the first Hispanic, and the first two women, one of which he also selected to serve as Chief Judge.

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Cuomo’s growing popularity from so many successful projects sparked attention from higher stations.  When encourage to run for president in 1983, 1987 and again in 1991 he chose to stand apart and when approached by President Clinton offering a seat on the Supreme Court, “Would be wonderful, would be heaven,” Cuomo uttered, but then explained his reluctance to leave the fray, “I didn’t want to give it up.  I wanted to be in the game.”

                Not only is it through works such as these but also in his charisma that we find the character of a compassionate politician.  In responsibility to others Mario made an effort to speak for those more often neglected a voice in legislation.  The outspoken Governor Cuomo tackled issues of abortion, capital punishment, religion in politics, the poor in America and nuclear war.  In a lecture at the University of Notre Dame entitled “Religious Belief and Public Morality,” Cuomo expounded much of his own torment as Catholic and a politician.

                “The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on:  the truth that to assure our freedom we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful.”

                “I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or nonbeliever, or as anything else you choose.

                We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.

                This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experience in government.  In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a persuasive and dominant concern.”          

                Many of these lectures, essays, books and interviews reveal Cuomo as an American leader resolute not solely in his personal beliefs but most of all in the power of democracy.

                Since research Mario Cuomo I don’t hesitate to describe the man in a word inspiring.  Cuomo reach his stars and made them shine brighter which is everything I can hope to accomplish in my own time.  As one who has grown up third generation Italian American on the power side of the city, I find a great pride in reading and the talking to my parents and grandparents about the accomplishments of Mario Cuomo.  To know that he could become so influential from his situation makes me believe that surely there is some positive change I can make in the world.  In his electrifying 1984 speech Cuomo asserted this while underlining the errors in Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City” which ignored the stories of those like Cuomo’s family.  He said,

                “It’s a story, ladies and gentlemen, that I didn’t read in a book, or learn in a classroom.  I saw it, and lived it, like many of you.  I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day.  I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.  I learned about our kind of democracy from my father.  And I learned about our obligation to each other from him and from my mother.”

                “And that they were able to build a family and live in dignity and see one of their children go from behind their little grocery store in South Jamaica on the other side of the tracks where he was born, to occupy the highest seat in the greatest state of the greatest nation in the only world we know, is an ineffably beautiful tribute to the democratic process.’

                It has been my fortune to study the great American here, Mario Cuomo.  In all I have learned and of all the qualities I will work in incorporate into my own character one has sustained throughout this piece:  Italian Always – American First.

Copyright © 2001-2008 Florida Federation of Italian American Clubs, Inc.