To the Residents of 2740 Keating Street

(Note: I buried my father at Arlington National Cemetery in January, 2005. Since I had a little time to spend before catching my plane back to California, I decided to make a short side trip to Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, where my family first lived upon moving to the Washington, D.C. area. It was still there, and very much as I remembered it. When I got home, I wrote a letter to the current residents. I never received an answer, so I don’t know if they even read it. I found it again, ten years later, and thought I would share it with you. I’ve updated it slightly. And, yes, I’m sending another copy to the current residents.)

June 23, 2015

To the residents of 2740 Keating Street:

Sixty years ago, I lived in your house. That is our only connection, besides this letter.  I drove by your house ten years ago and wanted to stop and knock on the door, but I had a plane to catch, and it was too cold to wait around, anyway. I wanted to let the residents know that their house has a history behind it, and that it meant a lot to me then, and still means something to me now. That’s why I’m writing this letter. You are probably not the same people who lived there ten years ago, but it’s your house, too.

I am sixty-seven years old now. My family moved into the house in 1952, when I was four. It is the first house of which I have clear memories … memories that I know are my own, and not the result of stories I have been told about my childhood. The memories I have are the memories of a little boy, and probably won’t make much of an impression on you. (For example, I remember the heater vent at the bottom of the stairs, and how nice it was to sit by it and change from my pajamas to my daytime clothes. I could do this in the three-minute cycle when the furnace was blowing hot air. That was very important for a four-year-old-boy on a cold morning. Is that hot air register still there, warming cold children who still dress in a hurry?)

The neighborhood was a bit different then. The houses across the street were being built, and the shopping center didn’t exist at all. There were just woods there. Keating Street ended just on the other side of 28^th Street. There was a pile of dirt there, left over from construction. It was maybe ten or fifteen feet high. To a five-year-old boy, it looked like Mount Everest. I see that it is gone now, and Keating Street has been connected to the shopping center. But what surprised me is how many of the landmarks of the neighborhood are still the same … the parking lot behind the building, the apartment house up the block, and so on. They look incredibly small now, seen from a grown man’s height, but I would still recognize them.

The neighborhood was integrated then. I don’t know what it’s like now, but in the early Fifties there were an equal number of black and white families on the block. I am forever grateful for that, because it spared me from most of the poison of racial prejudice. We kids played together more or less peacefully, creating the usual number of friends and enemies, but the relationships were always personal, never racial. (Much later, I found out how unusual this was for Maryland, and for suburban Washington in general.) Of course, I heard the racial epithets that kids always pick up and throw at each other, and I asked my father what they meant. He told me that they were just the words of stupid, thoughtless people and that they didn’t mean anything. And I could look around the neighborhood and see for myself that this was true. That is not the worst way to raise a young boy.

Here is a picture of my parents in front of the door:

I think this picture was taken when they moved in, in 1952. My father had taken a job with the US government and moved down from his hometown of Syracuse, New York. He was fresh out of college, but was 36 years old, because he had been in the Civilian Conservation Corps and then had fought in World War II before he was able to go to college on the GI Bill. He died in 2004, on the day before Thanksgiving, and we buried him at Arlington National Cemetery on January 14th. (That was why I was in town.) He is buried next to my mother, who died in1994, and a brother I never knew, because he was stillborn.

Except for the ironwork added the door, the house looks pretty much the same as it does today. I also have a picture of my father with me and my brother Joe. I think it was taken around 1953, judging from how small I was.

I am the blond-haired one on the right. The other one is my older brother Joe. That little box by the door of 2742 is where the milkman used to put the bottles of milk he delivered every morning. (That, of course, is one of the things, along with the lack of the ironwork on the door, that tell you that it was in many ways a different, more trusting time a half a century ago than it is today.) The front step is where my brother and I waited for the mailman to deliver the Classics Illustrated comic books that we ordered by mail, and (if it was summer) where we read them when they arrived. That’s how I learned to read.

I have one more picture:

It’s dated September 1955, so I’m a little taller. That tree is probably the very same one that’s still in front of your door almost sixty years later. I am glad that it survived. About a year after that picture was taken, we moved out of Keating Street to the first of several houses in several cities, wherever my father’s job would send him.

There are many more memories I have of 2740 Keating Street: of sitting on the stairs while my father taught me how to tie my shoes; of my father laying on the floor with an injured back; of losing a small statue of a saint and praying to Saint Anthony to help get it back; of buying loaves of bread wrapped in waxed paper for a quarter from the “grocery bus” that went by the house, in the days before the 7-11; of helping my father paint his car in the parking lot out back (I painted the wheels bright red); of walking to Hillcrest Heights Elementary school along with other kids my age, paraded in a row like ducklings by the older “safety patrol” children; of smashing caps with a rock against the back step, leaving little gunpowder smudges that made my mother mad at me…

But every family leaves memories like this. Yours will, too. They will echo through the house, with your voices added to those of everyone else who’s lived there. 

Thanks for your attention, if you’ve made it this far. I’m really not expecting an answer to this letter, but would be happy to read anything you have to say on what the house means to you. I hope that it will leave you with a few memories as happy as mine have been.

I do have one favor to ask of you. When you move out of the house, please leave this letter where the next residents can find it … maybe taped to the inside of a cupboard door. Maybe you could add your own to it, to let the new residents know what sort of people have been living there in the past.

Sincerely yours,

                                        

John LaTorre

 

Two Stories about my Grandmother

©2015 by John LaTorre

I didn’t know my grandmother well, sad to say. We never really communicated, because she preferred to speak to my brother and me in Italian, and seemed upset that we didn’t understand that language. I don’t ever recall her asking us what we were interested in, or what we’d been doing lately, or what we wanted to be when we were older. That may have been because all her other grandchildren grew up in Syracuse, and she was involved in their lives to a far greater degree than we were. But we moved away from Syracuse when I was four years old, and I only saw her intermittently after that … perhaps two or three times a year when we were in the States, and never when we were overseas, except for a few weeks every two years or so. We were strangers to her, and she to us.

There’s a picture of my grandmother surrounded by some of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My brother is behind her, and I’m in the front, lying in the grass and trying to ignore the camera. In a strange way, it seems to symbolize our relationship to her, my brother out of her line of sight and I apparently wishing I was somewhere else.

But there’s no question in my mind that she loved my father, and he loved her. I would see the letters she wrote in a spindly script, beginning with “Caro figlio.” Dear son. The letters were in Italian. So were the letters he wrote back, beginning with “Cara Mama.” We’d get at least one letter a month when we were overseas. In those years when we were living in the United States, Dad would telephone her every week, if not more often.

Grandma was born Palma Mammella in Monopoli, Italy, in 1880, according to the family history my father left us. Monopoli was (and still is) an Adriatic seaport in the province of Bari. Her formal education lasted six months, but she taught herself to read and write. “She went to dressmakers school until she was fifteen years old,” Dad noted. “The teacher gave her extra work to take home so she could make a little money.” She became a professional seamstress. I have always found it ironic that, to my best knowledge, the only other person in our family who sewed for a living was myself; I was a professional sail maker and tent maker for twenty years. I wonder what she would have made of that. She taught my father to sew, and over the years he’d re-seam some of his cloths to suit himself, sometimes adding pockets or zippers. I do that, too.

Palma married Raimondo LaTorre, my grandfather, in “about 1903” as my Dad stated, although elsewhere in the history he had the date as 1904. Raimondo was a country policeman, who was raised on a farm and also worked at whatever jobs he could find. Palma gave birth to two girls (and a boy, who survived only five months) before the family left Italy in 1912. In the New World, five more children were added to their brood. Her husband worked at various jobs all his life, including two unsuccessful years as a farmer. (The farm no longer exists; its acreage is now buried beneath one of the southern runways of Hancock Airport.) I have no memory of Raimondo, since he died in 1949, when I was a baby. After his death, according to my father, “...my mother was determined to get her U.S. citizenship and went to school to get the necessary education to pass the exam. Which she did with great success. She ended up knowing more about American government and history than many native born Americans.”

I have only a few memories of Grandma, mostly playing cards with a skill and ruthlessness that separated me quickly from my pennies and gave me a lifelong aversion to gambling. She died in 1971, at the age of ninety-one. My parents and little sister were overseas, and my older brother Joe was doing graduate studies at the University of California. Since I was living in Maryland at the time, it was up to me to represent my father at her funeral, and I was one of her pallbearers.

Despite her supposed proficiency with the language, her lack of fluency sometimes caused some confusion. A classic example was when my father was enrolled at Syracuse University after World War II. One morning, the phone rang in my grandmother’s house, and she picked it up.

“Good morning, Mrs. LaTorre,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “I am the Dean of Students at Syracuse University, and I’m calling to tell you that your son Joseph has made the Dean’s List this semester.”

“I don’t care,” my grandmother replied. “He’s a good boy.”

I love that story, because it demonstrates her suspicion that boys, even good boys, will be up to mischief once in a while. But it also showed her fierce determination to love and protect her own, not matter what they may have done.

That protectiveness also shows up in my second story, along with a touch of what Sicilians call “omerta,” a concept now familiar to the world at large due to the stories Mario Puzo and Joe Valachi told about the Mafia. It may not have been as strong an influence in Bari as it was in Sicily, where (as Puzo wrote) it was unthinkable that a person would collaborate with anybody in authority or even converse with innocent strangers who were simply asking directions. My father told me of a time, when he was a very young boy, when a local criminal was living under the family’s porch for a week or so to hide out from the law. Whether my family’s reluctance to inform the police was due to fear of retaliation or dislike for the police, my father did not say.

It so happened that after graduating from Syracuse University, my father applied for a job with the Central Intelligence Agency. Because it involved a security clearance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent two agents to inquire of my father’s background. They interviewed some of my dad’s friends and instructors, and came at last to visit my grandmother. Let us imagine the scene in the parlor of 237 North Beech Street, as they introduce themselves:

“Mrs. LaTorre,” They begin,  “we’re from the government, and we’re inquiring about your son Joseph.”

“I got no son,” my grandmother replies.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. You’re Palma LaTorre, of 327 North Beech Street in Syracuse? We have you as the mother of Joseph LaTorre.”

“I got no son.”

“Well, then, we’re sorry to have troubled you.” They get up and leave. No sooner does the front door close than Grandma is on the phone to her oldest daughter Anna.

“Anna! Anna!” she says in Italian. “There’s some men from the government looking for Joe!”

“Oh, Ma!” says Anna. “Don’t you remember? Joe said that there’d be some people from the FBI to visit us for that job he wants in Washington!”

Grandma drops the phone. As two very confused FBI agents are opening the door to their car, the front door of 327 North Beech Street flies open, and there’s Mrs. LaTorre, running down the sidewalk toward them. She’s waving her arms and saying “Come-a back! Come-a back! I tell-a you EVERY THING!”