Finding Fifteen: How My Daily Walk to the 911 Memorial Became a Journey of Love, Hope & Survival by Oliver Timothy

Author:Oliver, Timothy [Oliver, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

GERALDINE CAMPANIELLO was 21 years old when she met Tony for the first time in 1960. He too was 21, laboring many hours for Leonard’s Bakery & Pizzeria on National Street in the Corona section of Queens, New York. She was a waitress at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s five-and-dime store in nearby Forest Hills.

Anthony “Tony” Luparello was born on November 24th, 1938—at a time when dictator Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party was plunging Italy into an ill-fated alliance with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Tony grew up outside of Palermo, Sicily—the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea—separated from mainland Italy by the Strait of Messina. Tony is the second youngest of five children born to Santino and Provedenza Luparello. By 1959, the couple decided to emigrate the family to America, a few at a time. Tony, fearful of Italy’s compulsory military service, escorted his mother, and one of his sisters, Catherine, on the long trip by steamship overseas. They ended up at a relative’s house in Chicago. With only a fifth-grade education and little understanding of the English language, he had trouble finding work. But what Tony lacked in a formal education, he made up with a clever mind and skillful hands. He knew how to make marble floors from his days of watching his father in Sicily. As a quick, visual learner, Tony could build or fix anything. After eight months in Chicago, Tony moved east to Corona, then a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood.

He found work at Leonard’s. He found Geraldine.

Geraldine is the second youngest of seven children. Her father worked in the salvage business in the Flushing section of Queens, near present-day Citifield, home of the New York Mets. Born and raised in Corona, she had recently graduated high school in nearby Long Island City. Geraldine’s mother, Evelyn, was Irish, her father, Gerard, was Italian. The Campaniellos spoke English at home, but Geraldine could understand Italian from picking up words from her grandmother, mother and Aunt Mary.

When Geraldine was 16, her mother made an announcement. “You are going to live with your aunt.” Aunt Mary was a widow and Evelyn didn’t want her to continue to live alone. Mary lived 10 houses away in the tidy neighborhood where all the two-family homes are bunched side by side.

On weekends, Geraldine and her aunt stopped at Leonard’s for dinner after day-long shopping sprees. From behind the pizza counter, Tony checked out Geraldine but had a difficult time striking up a conversation. He had dark thick hair and a thick accent. Aunt Mary served as their translator.

“I went there a lot before (Tony and I) had a conversation,” Geraldine recalls. Tony asked Aunt Mary for permission to take her niece out for a date. Geraldine was hesitant. “At first, I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t understand him.’ ” Once she got to know Tony, Geraldine said yes.

She remembers the site of their first date—the RKO Movie Theater on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills—but not the movie, because she fell asleep. Tony watched the film a second time with Geraldine sleeping beside him.

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