ANNARINO FAMILY: John and Mary,My Paternal Grandparents
Josephine “Mary” Mescari liked to say she was started in Italy and finished in America, born four days after her parents disembarked from their ship. The Mescari family came from Siracusa, Sicily and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her marriage was an arranged one; she met her fiance’, John Anthony Annarino the day before her wedding. Chaperoned by her aunt, she and John took a brief carriage ride around the block, barely exchanging a word. This set the stage for a failed marriage and eventual divorce.
John Annarino had been born in America, the son of immigrants from Termine Immerese, Sicily. A handsome charmer, the marriage did little to slow his pursuit of female attention. As a young girl, I met many older women who got stars in their eyes when they learned he was my grandfather. The women loved him as much as he loved them. Mary’s sister Annie, who cussed like a sailor, once told me that my grandfather was a wonderful man who would have stayed with Mary if she had not acted like the g.d. Virgin Mary.
Mary bore John five sons: John, Joseph, Joseph, Francis and Angelo. Her second child Joe,named after her father, died in childhood. She then named her third child after him. John was seldom home. When Angelo was four years old and lay dying, suffering heart valve damage from a bout of rheumatic fever, the doctor sent for John to say good-bye to his baby son. He did not come. Angelo, surprisingly, survived. The marriage, unsurprisingly, did not.
Mary left John to live with her parents in Cincinnati. She earned her living washing and ironing altar linens for the church; the boys supplementing her income doing odd jobs at the Findley Market. Eventually, they moved back to Newark where the boys graduated from St. Francis De Sales H.S. Under pressure from an embarrassed Joe, now old enough to be aware his father was “living in sin”, Mary finally divorced John. John gave the boys jobs working for him at his market stall. Angelo would rub his hands to get out the stiffness telling the story of spending hours cleaning celery stalks in ice water. His body never forgot that pain.
Interestingly. divorce did not separate family. Mary, John and his new wife Angeline were guests at Sunday dinners and every holiday gathering at our house, no sign of displeasure or remorse. But, Mary loved John and cried for him in private. And John’s only expressed regret as he lay in the hospital dying, was divorcing Mary. He and Angeline had no children. John had a daughter with Angeline’s aunt, but she has never been acknowledged. At mass one day, shortly after they married, Angelo pointed out his “sister” to Angela. She looked just like Angelo. She was never again mentioned.
ANNARINO FAMILY: Angelo Sr.,My Father
Angelo remained the baby of the family his whole life; Joe often referred to him as “brother”, or more often “baby brother”. Angelo just smiled his impish grin and chuckled, since the title inevitably was used when Joe was questioning something Angelo had said or done which disturbed Joe’s equilibrium,something Angelo delighted in doing. He was suspended from school for continuing smile at the Bishop,after several warnings to stop, which only increased the spread of his grin. Instead of going home with a note, he went to the movies…for the next three days. His mother learned of his suspension when his teacher made a home visit since Angelo did not return after the one day suspension. He laughed when discovered, happy to have had a 3 day school vacation.
After graduating from high school, Angelo hitchhiked to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center with 5 cents in his pocket and joined the US Navy. He learned to swim when he was tossed into a 30 foot deep pool; the same strategy he used teaching his children to swim at Buckeye Lake years later. Before WWII Angelo saw north Atlantic duty,escorting supply ships to Great Britain. On Sunday, December 7, 1941 his ship, posted at Pearl Harbor, was at sea. It was ordered back into harbor after the attack, slowly cruising into a harbor strewn with burning ships and dead bodies. Soon after he began duty in the South Pacific, manning a gun turret aboard various destroyers. His bunk lay atop a bomb, but he slept like a baby. He received 29 bronze stars, numerous battle ribbons and the accolades of Admiral “Bull” Halsey when he jerry rigged his turret after a direct hit to keep on shooting, the only gun kept operational after a particularly damaging battle at sea. The ship had to be towed back to New York harbor for major repairs.
One of a few experts in the emerging field of electronics, Angelo taught electronics at Princeton University while his ship was in dry dock. He and his buddies spent Saturday nights at CCC dances at a Catholic church in Staten Island. One night, a girl he had met the week before introduced him to her best friend, Angela Abbruzzi as a joke, “Angela, meet Angelo!” They danced every dance together. He asked her to marry him.
ANGELO ANNARINO AND ANGELA ABBRUZZI,My Parents
After the dance, Angelo insisted on seeing Angela home. She refused;he ignored her. Her parents did not allow her to attend dances, nor date. She kept shooing him away from her. Every morning, Angela saw Angelo standing across the street from her house where she waited for her bus to work. She would tell him “Go away!”. He would push aside her hand and pay her bus fare, sitting next to her all the way; later, taking the return trip with her at the end of her shift. After a few weeks of this, her Father, who often sat on the porch asked her, “Angela, when you gonna ask that nice a boy to come over here to meet me?”
Dating was pulling Angelo away from a bar and keeping him sober at the ice cream shop, then taking long walks in the park. The first time Angelo tried to kiss her, Angela shoved him so hard the park bench flew over backwards. Once, as he put it “testing her” character, he instructed his cousin Pauline to write Angela a letter pretending to be his wife, and including a photo of her new baby. Angela refused to see him after that letter, until his cousin, his brother, and his Mother all wrote explaining this was another of Angelo’s unfunny stunts. When repeating this story, Angelo giggled and grinned while Angela swatted him with a dish rag.
They married on on a snowy day, one week before Christmas, Angelo’s Father John paying for an elaborate NYC Italian wedding. Immediately, after the ceremony, Angela and her new husband visited her father in the hospital. Their honeymoon was a trip to Ohio to meet relatives.Soon after their Newark arrival, they learned Angela’s father Angelo had died and immediately returned to Staten Island. They rented a one room apartment and returned to their jobs; Angelo at Princeton, Angela as Executive Asst. to the CEO of a chemical company in N.J. A week after, the true owners of the apartment returned and evicted the newlyweds, who had paid 6 months advance rent due to war-time housing shortage. They moved in with Angela’s mother Louise. Angelo transferred his pay voucher to Angela’s Mother for the duration of his service.
Angelo returned to the Pacific, surviving more battles, and hundreds of kamikaze attacks. Finally, he returned to NYC, packed up his 9 months pregnant wife and moved to Newark to join his brothers in a new venture, The Center Cafe. Family seemed more attractive to him than an offer to become a professor of electronics at Princeton. The baby was home again, with his “baby”. Their first child, Angelo, Jr. was born soon after their arrival.
A LETTER TO US ALL
Dear Us:
Did you ever hear of the Golden Rule? “Treat others as you would be treated.” When asked which of the ten commandments Moses shared with the Israelites was the most important, Jesus advised questioners to “Love others as I have loved you.” In the 60s, even non-believers of any religion, or of even the existent of God, followed the precept “Lead with your heart.” “Flower children” believed in love, for everyone, at all times. And those were turbulent times. We watched freedom riders maimed and killed, their busses set on fire, their murdered bodies hidden and buried in shallow graves. We watched the perpetrators of violence go free; the Citizen Councils ( marketing change for KKK) often included law enforcement and local judges. This is the America currently referred to when Trump supporters urge us all to “Make America Great Again.” They no longer wear white robes nor hide their faces. They wear red ties, dark suits and sometimes red hats.They pretend to be news anchors on FOX News and elsewhere. They pretend to be president like Elon Musk. The delivery system of hate may have changed; the racism and sexism have not. We are experiencing a backlash to the progress made over the past 50 years. It took 50 years for it to grow this strong.
I was a resident student advisor (RA) at Lincoln Tower on the OSU campus in Columbus, Ohio in the late sixties and early 70s. I was also a student activist. I had to become one because I believed in the Golden Rule. I watched Black students, Jewish students and women students derided and demeaned. I was privy to racist commentary because white students assumed they could say them to my white face with my full agreement. White men also felt safe making sexist comments to me despite the fact I was a woman. As an Italian-American I was sometimes mistaken for Jewish and heard my share of anti-semitic remarks. Much of the time such hate-talk was passed off as a joke. Whenever I heard the joke I stopped the speaker and explained nothing they said was funny, nor factual. I demanded such language never be used while in my presence. Those who just joined in to feel safe in the crowd became serious and apologized. The bullies did not apologize. But they shut up. “Stand up to shut them up” became part of every day life on campus. That is activism at its core.
I had a few empty suites on my floor due to an on-going criminal investigation. A mentally ill student was on trial for arson, having set fire in a suite the year before. Once the case was resolved, those suites were re-opened and spaces filled, as were other vacancies on my floor. Who moved in to those spaces? Black women looking for a safe space. Some had repeatedly been locked out of their rooms by white roommates. Several had threatening notes nailed to their door; threats to rape or kill them because they were Black. Most were ostracized and demeaned daily by white roommates. Their complaint to Student Affairs fell on deaf ears. When the spaces opened on my floor, they found refuge there.
Our dorm was typical for OSU where Black students made up a tiny percentage of the student population. My floor was unique. I held floor meetings to discuss expectations that we would all follow the Golden Rule. When I saw or heard of a racial incident I immediately intervened. Soon, I was doing racial mediation on a regular basis. Black women entered the elevator and experienced white women moving close to the emergency call button, with hand hovering, ready to cry for help from women just like themselves returning exhausted from a day of classes ? Time for mediation! Call everyone together and talk it through. Day after day. Incident after incident. It was exhausting for the Black women, and the Black men who visited them, to face daily racial challenges and outright discrimination.
Another RA and two students worked with me to develop a racial mediation program in our dorm. Whenever the Student Judicial Council was handed a case involving a white student and a Black student in dispute, it was handed off to us to mediate the conflict. Our efforts were not always welcomed, but we persisted. Incidents of violence, write-ups to judiciary, and racial conflict decreased. Today, this program would be outlawed by the President who gleefully extorts OSU by threatening loss of education grants and federal funds for programs and research. OSU has caved to the bullies. OSU is not standing up to shut up the racism. It would cost money. And money is god in America, and on college campuses.
OSU is caving to racists and bullies again. And, not just OSU. Columbia University, indeed nearly all colleges and universities, if not all, are caving to racist bullies under the guise of following the law, accepting the lawless and illegal actions of the current administration. Following the law would require universities to protect the free speech rights of faculty and students, to abide by employment contracts and civil service laws to protect both administrative employees and faculty. Universities with law schools had readily-available experts to stand up, speak out and take action. I was an Associate Director of Law at Ohio University. There is a national organization of such attorneys. Why are they so silent? Why have university presidents and provosts not joined arms to defend their campuses against illegal searches and seizures of students? Why did Columbia University not come to the aid of Mahmoud Khalil and his family? If they did so in any way, it was neither apparent nor sufficient.
The Poster Boy President leading the racist mob of greedy Americans spoke at the DOJ recently. His racist and personal attacks on lawyers, prosecutors and judges, was accepted and even cheered. Racism and greed cross all boundaries and sexual preferences, exist within every profession, religion and community group. It is a constant and persistent threat to the principles of democracy. Those whose racism had been laid low, who crawled under rocks to hide their sins, have crawled back out, empowered by the greed for wealth and power, threatened by those they spurn who have finally found success on a more equal path, and undermined by their own sense of failure despite the promise of an American Dream. Instead of blaming the greedy power-brokers of industry, banking and finance, politics and education they blame their fellow victims. Their racism blinds them to truth, and they willingly embrace false-hoods and disinformation. They would not recognize a fact if it stared them in the face. They would prefer to attack the fact and the experts offering the truth of the fact.
As a lawyer, as an educator, as a writer, I am heart-broken over the loss of my country, my Constitution and its guarantees of personal freedom for all persons who are in this country…no matter where they came from, or how they got here. That is the promise of America. That is the American Dream. Shopping for cheap goods because your existence only matters if those power-brokers can make a buck off you cannot fill the place freedom once filled within the American heart and psyche. Woke? Woke is what is required to survive the on-slaught against a free people who simply want to find a good-paying job, buy a house, feed and educate their family. The power-brokers want us to stay asleep. Like children, we are angels in our sleep, causing them no discomfort, and quietly staying out of their way as they take over our economy, our government institutions, our military, our banking system, our educational systems and local/public schools…even our post office!
Wake up, my fellow lawyers, my fellow professors, my fellow school teachers, my fellow social workers, my fellow counselors, my fellow retail workers, my fellow waitresses and caterers, my fellow babysitters, my fellow students, my fellow Catholics and people of faith, my fellow Americans. Wake up and stay woke! We have work to do, if we can stay awake to do it loudly and persistently. This is no time to lie down and feign sleep. God knows, none of us sleep well theses days.
Leave a comment
Filed under COMMENTARY, FAMILY STORIES, POLITICS
Tagged as African-Americans, American economy, backlash, Coumbis University, couselling, DEI, disinformation, DOJ, education, elon musk, Equal rights, history, immigrants, judges, law, love, mediation, NACUA, Ohio University, politics, post office, progress, propaganda, prosecutors, racial mediation, racism, refugees, Republican Party, schools, social work, The Ohio State University, trump, univesitiies, Us Constitution, woke, women