Month: November 2025

What was my mom like when I was a kid? She was the same mom all through her life. Loving, kind, protective, making sure we had what we needed living on a tight budget. She was a traditional Italian through and through, and raised all three of her children in that traditional Italian way. Traditional Italian culture, like most European cultures, is male-dominated with the women subservient. I have to admit, in the male-dominated Italian culture, the male offspring received much more favorable treatment over their female siblings. Not only was I born a boy—the only son—I was also born last, the baby of the family. So yeah, I was allowed more latitude and got away with more stuff than my older sisters. Not that they resented me for that (ha!).

That was the way of life not only in European cultures, but in the post-war era, where European cultures continued to influence American life. Despite the “Americanization” of the era, the cultural and social contributions of European immigrant groups became more visible. Men were encouraged and expected to get a well-paying job in an era of growing economic opportunity to support their families while, by and large, women returned to domestic roles. Being a homemaker was highly undervalued and, in my opinion, greatly underestimated. It was very common back then to barely spend time with dads because they went to work all day and left us in the care of moms. Moms pretty much ran the ship. They had to. And without them, “the whole dang circus would have fallen apart!”

Today, for the most part, dual income families are the norm and the kids are spending more time with nannies or grandparents, or a combination of both. There are more single moms raising children by themselves than ever before. The kids today are exposed to so much more than we were growing up. We had the beginning of the television culture, much more innocent, muted and demure than the digital streaming culture of today. We had three channels. That was it. And those channels went dark at midnight, not returning to air until six o’clock the next morning. We didn’t have cell phones, computers, or video games. We had the blessing of being able to go outside after school and on weekends to ride our bikes and play with friends, most times all day long, and not returning home until dinner time when Mom called our name from the front door. Speaking of friends, my mom wrapped her arms around my sister’s friends and mine, treating them with love, care, and respect as she treated her own kids. At that time, in the fifties and early sixties, racial discrimination was common. Italians could be very guilty of this, especially toward African Americans. My mother was no different. She talked in a racist way that was kind of embarrassing for us later in life, but when I brought my Black friend, Reggie, over to play at our house, she welcomed him with open arms and a giant hug. That’s who she was. While she grew up with racist beliefs in her Italian upbringing, my mother had a beautiful heart and soul, and it NEVER mattered if our friends were Black, white, green, or purple, she embraced them and treated them with kindness and respect because she genuinely cared about them.

As a teenager in the more liberal sixties and seventies culture, I got into music. I wanted to play the drums, but we couldn’t afford them. So my mom encouraged me to take up the guitar. I was obstinate and refused that advice. But Mom knew best. I ended up learning to play guitar, starting with a bass guitar and forming a “garage band” with my friends. We would practice at our drummer’s house but as our amps got louder, we had to find another basement. My mother actually encouraged us to practice in our basement and it didn’t matter how loud we got. She wanted us to be there.

As a young teen, I took up smoking. I thought I was hiding it from my parents pretty well, of course, my mom knew. While she would’ve rather I didn’t smoke, she told me “if you’re going to smoke, I would rather you do it in front of me.” She never wanted us to hide anything from her.

It was my mother who taught me how to drive a car. In the sixties, as domestic roles were changing and in order to supplement the family income, my mother became “The Tupperware Lady”, selling Tupperware to other ladies at sales “parties.” She was pretty successful at it. Part of her responsibility was not only to sell the product but also to deliver it to her customers. Tupperware had no shipping arrangements with delivery companies, so salespeople had to make deliveries themselves. I used to go with her to help deliver products to many customers at one time, carrying stuff into homes for her and kind of being a “bodyguard” for her as well. Once I got my temporary driver’s license, she would make me drive to deliver to customers. Lots of deliveries all over the city of Cleveland gave me some great experience driving freeways and backstreets alike.

From Cub Scouts involvement, letting me play baseball and football pickup games after school, teaching me to drive, tolerating rock band practices, and later helping to babysit my daughters, and everything in between, my mom was a big influence in my life.

Which holiday? For me, THE holiday… of course, is Christmas. And if you asked me what my favorite meal at Christmastime was, until about ten years ago, I would’ve said Sausage, Peppers and Onions with my big sister’s Italian Rice casserole. However, a very recent favorite Christmas meal take-over since I began learning to cook in earnest is now Beef Wellington.

For some reason this has become a Christmas tradition with my immediate family, and we now have it every year. But going back to my childhood Christmas celebrations, my favorite meal was always sausage and peppers…a long-standing tradition at Christmas on the Italian side of the family. In fact, most all our holiday traditions came from the Italian celebrations ever since I can remember. We would all gather for Christmas at my Nana & Nanu’s house in Cleveland. And by all, I mean ALL our extended family, which included the families of my mother’s three siblings. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws. Occasionally, from the Puerto Rican side of the family, my father’s brother Uncle Louis and his wife Aunt Jean (Italian side) would be there with Uncle Louis’s specialty—Spanish rice (to die for).

Every year, my Nana’s basement was decked out with Christmas decorations, and tables of delicious food like sausage, peppers and caramelized onions, pasta and meatballs, lots of homemade bread (for sausage sandwiches), salads, shrimp, charcuterie trays of salami, prosciutto, olives, and lots of cheeses, and pizza—both with and without (white) sauce. And of course, a large spread of traditional Italian Christmas cookies. My mother and sisters would bake cookies such as “Do-Do’s” (dough-DOUGHS), which are small balls of chocolaty, nutty goodness frosted with a smooth lemony icing. Sesame seed cookies known as “Giuggiulena” (joo-joo-LENA) which feature a combination of anise and toasted sesame seeds, “Pizzelle” (pit-ZELL-eh), thin, wafer-like, and crispy, traditionally flavored with anise and, my favorite, “Pignoli” (peen-YO-lee), made with almond paste and covered with pine nuts. Other Italian styles of cookies occasionally made an appearance in various years, such as rainbow cookies, wedding cookies (snowballs), chocolate sandwich cookies and something called “Dead Man’s Bones”…which it seems is traditionally known as “Dead Man’s Beans”.

And of course…we didn’t eat any of the main dishes like pasta and sausages and peppers without first welcoming a visit from Santa Claus! Maybe just nibbling on the charcuterie meats & cheeses while we waited for Santa.

Our Italian family Christmas celebrations were colorful, very loud…and really delicious!

My father grew up in Caguas, Puerto Rico, an American territory since 1898 when Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the U.S. after the Spanish-American War. As an American citizen, my father served honorably for this country in WWII. In post-war 1950s America, Latinos faced harsh discrimination from landlords and employers, were ostracized by society and often profiled by law enforcement based on their appearance or language (Hey, 2025…sound familiar?)

My father was a very quiet man, one of those people who only spoke when spoken to. I learned from my mother that he had a rough go of it early in their married life. He spoke mostly Spanish and had a broken English accent, which improved over the years. He was one of 14 children growing up in Puerto Rico and wasn’t a well-educated man, attaining only a middle-school-level education before having to quit to help on the family farm. I believe that quiet persona was the unfortunate result of the ostracism based on how he looked and spoke. For these reasons, I believe he preferred to keep his opinions and judgments to himself. We have all learned what the ravages of war can do to the human psyche. I’ve read many accounts of soldiers who don’t wish to speak of their experiences in battle. My father was one of those soldiers. In my teens, I finally got him to tell me; he was a field artillery infantryman, fighting in Germany firing cannons and killing human beings. It’s not easy to forget horrible events like those, especially for a man of quiet peace as my father was.

Growing up with my father, you wouldn’t know he had been through many trials and tribulations. He loved me and my sisters unconditionally, although admittedly, I was the “favorite” simply because I was:
a) a boy
b) I was the baby.
In European cultures like mine (Italian and Spanish) I’ve hit the familial lottery when it comes to favoritism:

My father LOVED baseball, as almost all Puerto Ricans do. Baseball was truly THE national pastime in Puerto Rico and naturally, my father was a New York Yankees fan growing up because the Yankees always won and their games were covered extensively in Puerto Rico. When he and my mom settled in Cleveland, Ohio, he was “sentenced” to listen only to Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) games, which at the time, was the sorriest team in baseball.

I remember him walking me down to the corner drugstore once a week—just he and I—to buy me some superman and Batman comic books, or, in his broken English-accented, “comedy books” (his accent always reminded me of “Ricky Ricardo” on I Love Lucy!) He taught me how to cut the grass (mow the lawn), how to tie a necktie, how to take care of our dog, how to fix things using only duct tape and string (he was NOT a handyman by any stretch of the imagination), and how to drive a car. And he passed on his love of baseball to me. One lasting image of my father is him sitting in our basement near the radio tuned to a Tribe game, lights dimmed and the burning ember of his cigar lighting the room like a beacon. My father occasionally suffered from migraine headaches, and I remember his self-treatment technique of sitting at the kitchen table with a towel draped over his head, breathing the steam from a hot bowl of Vicks VapoRub. My father didn’t really cook, but I remember his amazing oatmeal raisin cookies he would bake. Only he could bake them that well. Believe me, I tried. I remember he would let my daughters play with his hair—Nanu hair, as they called it—and he was just sitting in his chair, soaking it all in.

Of all the things I learned from my dad, I’m blessed to have learned how to be a loving husband, a proud father, and a good person to my friends and extended family. He was a kind and gentle soul, who loved his children and grandchildren with every inch of his huge heart.

I lost my father in 1993 to Alzheimer’s. Although, because of that terrible disease, I had lost him over a year before, when his memories failed and the genial man we knew retreated to stoic confusion and silence. Tomorrow, my wife and I will donate and participate in my third Walk To End Alzheimer’s event, dedicated to my father’s memory. This awful disease took hold and slowly stole his essence, his quiet, loving personality, but how he shaped my life and the great person he truly was, will be with me forever, and I cannot wait to see him again on the other side of the rainbow.

Alzheimer’s Association