May 21, 2001
Pat Don Vito was my oldest friend. We must have met when we were two or three years old, maybe earlier. Until only a few weeks ago, I always called him ‘Babe,’ his boyhood nickname. I will probably call him that now, not as a sign of disrespect, but because to all of us who grew up with him, that was the way we knew him.
Babe and I lived only a few doors away from each other in the same block in Harrisburg, Pa., where we both were born in the mid 1920s. There were only a few Italian-American families living near us--Harrisburg, a city of approximately 100,000 then, having probably no more than 1,000 Italians at that time.
So he and I were united by age (he was a few months younger than me), ethnic background (more through the slurs flung at us by our predominantly Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors than by either of us consciously thinking of ourselves as “Italian”), and close proximity.
Babe was quite simply the closest thing I ever had to a brother. We both (then) had sisters, his brother was to come along quite a bit later. And though we did not go to the same schools until high school, we spent most of our after-school hours together. And every waking hour during the summer vacations.
One of the most vivid memories of my childhood is the sound of Babe’s voice outside our house on warm summer mornings calling,
‘Yoooo, Caaarrrmmenn,’ signaling that he was up and ready to play.
We played all of the games and sports that American boys then (and now) played: baseball, our mutual passion; football (playing which I broke my leg on my fourteenth birthday, as a special present to my poor mother!); basketball (we formed our own team, the Cadets, in snazzy maroon and gray uniforms, and played at Boyd Hall, sometimes the Y); at all of which he excelled over me.
We were the two youngest boys in our neighborhood and I was the smaller of the two. As the youngest we were subjected to the bullying of bigger neighborhood boys who as a matter of course referred to us in ethnic slurs and took pleasure in cuffing us around whenever it suited them. They forced us to put on the boxing gloves, which I detested,(I always had horrible headaches afterward) and to pummel each other with them. And if you objected, you inherited that most hated slur of all-- ‘Sissy.’ Compared to that Wop and dago were terms of affection in Depression America.
Babe went to Catholic school, I to public school, though we had both been born into devout Catholic homes. We both liked to read and would exchange books we especially liked, or recommended them to each other.
In the winters, we would get heavy snowfalls in those years and sledding down the hilly streets of our neighborhood was an annual delight.
Today’s razor scooters are as supersonic jets compared to the thirties’ equivalents, but they were great fun because we had to build them from scratch. A three-foot-long 2 x 4; a wooden milk crate, of the kind that held perhaps a dozen bottles of milk, nailed upright to it; and the wheels from a single roller skate, pulled apart so that the two front wheels attached to the front of the 2 x 4 and the other two to the back; a wooden crossbar nailed to the top of the crate as handlebars, and voila a scooter! Rather than breaking the sound barrier, these conveyances shattered the silence of the neighborhood as their metal wheels screeched across the pavements.
Later, when we had rubber-tired grownup bikes, we went everywhere on them and loved to race each other.
Behind our house stood an abandoned stable. It was a two-story frame building that because we had no car was used for storage on the ground floor. A door on the second floor was reached by a tall ladder propped up against the outside wall and led into a large square windowless room. This seemed to me the ideal place for one of those wonderful clubhouses one always saw in the Our Gang movies.
With permission from my mother to use it as such, Babe and I proceeded to turn it into a place where we would eventually spend long hot summer hours under its high peaked roof. Along one wall we built double-decker bunks, very uncomfortable ones with slats for mattresses, and sometimes we slept up there and would talk ourselves to sleep. During the days the ‘clubhouse,’ as it was known, was the meeting place for a group of neighborhood boys (and true to its grownup, male-dominated equivalents: NO GIRLS ALLOWED) and pinochle games went on from morning till suppertime. The clubhouse had no electricity, but an early portable battery-operated radio brought us all the latest popular songs and the baseball games of the Philadelphia A’s, broadcast as though live , but faked with sound effects in the studio through newswire reports announced by the sportscaster, Byron Sahm.
This was as close to idyllic as we could imagine, a place of our own away from grownups, with sports and model airplane-building leading the lists of subjects debated and argued about endlessly through the torpid afternoons.
Because we lived so close to each other we would often be invited to have dinner by one or the other of our respective mothers. It is a commonplace that all Italian mothers are great cooks-- would that it were so! But in this respect, among a host of others, Babe and I lucked out with our mothers. I never had much of an appetite as a boy ( I still don’t). This is the bane of any mother’s life Italian or otherwise, but Babe more than made up for my lack and would willingly eat my share as well as his own. My mother loved to feed him, and always held him up as a paragon of what a healthy young boy should be.
My sister reminded me that even though my grandfather owned the best Italian-bread bakery in Harrisburg, no one in our family ate bread with pasta. But Babe always did (as do millions in Italy), and it was my mother’s pleasure to urge on him just ’one more slice, Pasquale.’ This in no way is meant to imply that he was a glutton or even slightly overweight, in the Depression years if anyone had a weight problem, it usually was of the opposite kind.
No, Babe was always sturdily built and was in tiptop condition through all the energy children normally expend, but more so in those years because, in spite of bikes and scooters, walking was the preferred means of locomotion, and we must have clocked dozens of miles a day in this way.
His mother was a lovely woman who always managed to look beautiful and well-coordinated in spite of the daily rigors of raising a family. And his sister Sena was great fun to talk and laugh with. Mr. Don Vito was usually away at work during the day, but occasionally he would take us for what used to be known as ‘Sunday drives’ in his well-remembered Hupmobile. This car, a black four-door sedan, was kept in spanking-new condition and sported wonderful yellow-green cut-glass vases on the interior side walls by the back doors. Inserted in each vase was a beautiful paper flower. Had there been real flowers in the vases with water, it would not have sloshed over because Mr. Don Vito never exceeded 35 miles an hour. But those rides were fun. (Simpler pleasures then.)
In essence, we functioned as two brothers would, and the members of each of our extended families knew us and considered us a part of their respective clans. Babe would visit my grandfather’s bakery where we’d have a newly baked hot loaf of bread with olive oil and freshly ground black pepper from my grandmother’s huge solid-brass, square pepper grinder, brought from Italy all those many years ago. Or we’d pop in on Babe’s uncle’s delectable cake and pastry shop on Third Street and go in the back where he’d let us lick the fantastic creams from large mixing spoons. And a journey to the third floor of the Don Vito house would bring us to Uncle Nick Ruggiero’s work room and watch him as he drew or painted.
Movies a couple times a week at the neighborhood National or the Rialto Theatres--how many Saturday afternoons did we spend watching triple-features and serials! (‘chapters’ they were called then); or trips downtown to the huge first-run studio-owned theatres: Loew’s, the Colonial, the Senate. Who were the boyhood movie heroes? Clark Gable, Jimmy Cagney, of course. Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn. But Tim McCoy and Tom Mix were not far behind, if you liked cowboys, and we did! And in a class by himself—Mickey Rooney (still the most underrated great American actor).
Actresses? Nah. Not yet. And if you really wanted to catch a cuff on the head from one of the bullies, just mention Greta Garbo (or Greta Garbage as she was known to young film experts such as ourselves).
We did a lot of model-airplane building and, with the advent of the war, followed the progress of the fighting on the daily war maps in the newspapers.(Television? That was with Buck Rogers.)
Babe’s school, St. Mary’s, held classes only to the eighth grade. For the ninth grade, Babe transferred to my school, Camp Curtin Junior High (named after the huge supply depot near Harrisburg the Confederates were on their way to cutting off when they were permanently deterred by the battle at Gettysburg); the next year we went to William Penn Senior High from which we both graduated in 1943.
Sometime in 1940-41, I began acting upon my love of the theatre (and Orson Welles) and produced and directed a weekly half-hour program for young people called, The Children’s Playhouse. This show played for the next three years or so on Radio Station WKBO and Babe was one of the original group I put together, where he wrote many of the scripts, and, as we all did, generally participated in whatever other functions as were needed . . . though he hated acting, for some reason. The group included Dick Simons, Portman Paget, Hank Hanish, and Nancy Wickwire, who years later joined me in another theatre repertory company at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York and went on to become an actress of tremendous range.
A year or so after the young people’s show began, I produced and directed a weekly hour-long show for adults, a kind of forerunner of The Twilight Zone, called Rain on the Roof (Oooooohhhh!!!). And, along with Pete Wambach and me, Babe wrote some of the scripts for this show. This was all while we were still in high school; we had nothing but energy and by now we were at war and we boys knew that soon we would probably be called.
After graduation, and before we were eighteen, Babe went off to Shippensburg State College, where he awaited the “Greetings” from the Selective Service System but finally decided not to wait and enlisted in the Navy. I ended up in the Army and was eventually wounded in the Battle of the Bulge.
In this period we saw each other only when he would come home from school on weekends or, later, when we happened to have furloughs that coincided. After the war ended in Europe, I was discharged and spent the summer of 1945 in Harrisburg before going off to school at Yale. Babe and I saw a fair amount of each other and continued our marathon all-night gabfests, exchanging experiences from the war, ideas, and our plans and dreams for the future.
From Yale I went on to New York and have lived there ever since. For a while I would come back to Harrisburg on some holidays, and if Babe was there we would see each other. But essentially, our paths in life diverged and, probably mainly due to me, did not keep in close touch, though I did see him in New York a couple of times in the early fifties. But I would hear news of him from my sisters or Dick or Hank and the reverse was true for him.
Here there is a huge jumpcut of thirtysome years to the late 1980s when we began communicating with each other again in long phone conversations between New York and Washington. This went on for a few years until I became upset at some things he wrote in his book, and another hiatus occurred. This time it concerned some hurt feelings over things he had written, not so much about me but about things I had told him about others, in confidence.
Then we picked up again a couple of years ago, and have kept in touch with a fairly consistent email correspondence and through some long-winded (on my part) phone conversations.
In this way, I finally came to meet Mary Lou, a fit companion for Babe, for whom I have real admiration, and to have two lovely sessions with the two of them at the house on the river, in Harrisburg.
Here we finally were, two men in their seventies slowed somewhat by time, though not as much as might have been expected, considering everything. But Babe looked like a high school student trying to play an old man in the class play, with lousy makeup to make himself look older; under the powdered hair and some penciled age lines—it was still my brother-friend of boyhood days . . . and on the banks of the Susquehanna at that. I knew he was dying to rip off the makeup and say, ‘Yoooo Carrrmmmenn,’ it’s me, Babe! I had you fooled, didn’t I?’ Let’s go up to the National and see the Tim McCoy movie. There’re a couple of good chapters with it, I hear.’
No, he didn’t fool me. It was still the same old loyal, steadfast, funny, logical, illogical, infuriating, comforting best pal o’ mine. With whom I spent some of the happiest days of my life. And decades apart could not change that.
He lives on, where he has always resided, in my remembrance of him, and will do so for all who ever knew and loved him.
Copyright © 2001, Carmen Capalbo
Revised July 2001
URL: http://users.rcn.com/mdonvito/carmen