Ruthless (3 page)

Four

Starting a Family

There's a certain way some people, particularly men, express their affection for a friend, a kind of feigned antagonism punctuated by insults, cursing and a punch to the shoulder.

Well, one day, Loretta and I were sitting in her childhood home down on Seventh Street in Mount Carmel. We had been dating for a while and were just hanging out at her place. Her uncles were there, playing cards in the dining room, and the racket coming out of that friendly card game was something to hear.

“I had good cards that last hand,” roared one.

“The hell you did! You don't know a damn thing about cards,” came the rejoinder. On and on it went.

The noise level was unbelievable. I thought the house was going to bust apart at the seams. From where I sat in the living room, it sounded like an
all-out
fight was erupting. They weren't even mad at each other but were just being themselves, loudly, and that was the way they communicated. In fact, that is how I remember nearly all the Italians in my hometown
communicating—very
loud with lots of emotion and gesticulating.

I knew Loretta from high school. She was in my class but in those days was going with another guy, Joe Chango, who was the quarterback on the football team. Loretta was a cheerleader, and they made quite a couple. I had always found her attractive. She was about 5'2" and had dark hair and blue eyes and an olive Italian complexion, which I liked. A
blue-eyed
Italian. Very unusual. We didn't have too much to do with one another in high school, even though I had designs on her. Fat chance I had then, since she was going with the star of the team. After graduation, though, she went to Philadelphia for nurse's training, and Joe married another girl. When I found that out, I made a move. Loretta and I began dating not long after I joined the Marines.

Like most Italian families, Loretta's was close and demonstrative.

She brought this characteristic to our relationship, and it affected how we got along. You could say that the signature trait of our entire relationship was that we argued. A lot. As in, all the time. Still, I found her attractive and she was smart, but there were things we did not see eye to eye about. She was not shy about letting me know it, either, with her piercing stare or equally sharp tongue. So, while we stayed together for nearly 30 years, it was not without a level of strife. I admit that I had my doubts that this relationship would last long term. The day before we got married I even said to her, “Loretta, do you really think we should get married? We argue constantly.”

“Oh, yes, Ron, we should. It'll get better after we're married. You'll see.”

Of course, it only got worse since we were together all the time. The truth about why we got married was that she was pregnant. That's the way things were back in the 1950s: if you got a girl pregnant, you took responsibility and married her. Abortions were illegal, and although it was possible to get them, they were really frowned upon. I had just gotten out of the Marines and found a job working for an insurance company. Loretta had finished nurse's training and was working in a hospital in Philly.

When we were married in February 1957, we had both just turned 21. Nobody ever found out Loretta was
pregnant—not
our families, nobody. After the wedding my dad asked me to come back to Mount Carmel and work in his insurance firm, so we got an apartment on Oak Street, and I went to work for my dad. On September 4, our first child was born, a son we named Ronnie after me.

In the end, though, things in Mount Carmel did not go well. I had a
falling-out
with my dad (that we later patched up), so we moved down to Levittown, Pennsylvania, with Loretta's parents in 1958. My
father-in
-law
got me a job with Hydrocarbon Research, and we rented an apartment in Bristol right next to the New Jersey border. Shortly thereafter, I took another job selling cookware. I did really well right away. My income shot up, and we moved to Willingboro, New Jersey, about 20 miles east of Philadelphia.

Except for the arguments with Loretta, life was good. I really enjoyed Ronnie, and I was making enough money selling cookware that I could pay all my expenses for the month with one week of work, which left us with a lot of extra money.

My good income had a drawback, however, and this explains something about the problems Loretta and I had in the marriage. Loretta came from a
well-ordered
family background. Her people were the salt of the earth. Her father worked in the mines while she was growing up, and it was a steady, secure job. He was always home for dinner, and the family ate together every evening. The family routine was stable. They went to Mass every Sunday. That is the way she grew up, and she wanted to bring that into the family she was raising with me. Unfortunately, a salesman's hours can be unpredictable, especially since I was selling cookware and I often had to make calls in the evening when people were home. This was a real bone of contention with Loretta because her vision of a stable family life did not include a husband who was entrepreneurial. The truth is that we had quite different personalities. Loretta wanted to raise kids and have a stable family life. I was a
risk-taker
and interested in finding some answers to life. Now, some marriages might work with two opposite personalities like that. But both Loretta and I were
strong-willed
, and it just never worked out. My kids will tell you that they cannot ever recall a time when Loretta and I got along.

Still, having Ronnie and later the twins Denise and David in my life was wonderful. I loved looking into their blue eyes, holding their tiny hands, hearing them gurgle and laugh. It was great.

When the twins were about three months old, we had them christened. I rented the Mallard Inn, a restaurant off Route 38 in South Jersey. Carlo and Augusta Racine were their godparents and carried them into the ceremony. We catered a nice big dinner for the guests and everybody had a really good time.

Our family spent David's early years in Willingboro. It was a wonderful place to raise a family in the 1960s. Half a block from our house, you went through a gate in a cyclone fence to a park with football fields, baseball diamonds and a swimming pool. I taught all my kids to swim by the time they were three years old, and they could dive off the
three-meter
board by age four.

I bought a
two-story
,
white-shingled
house that had red shutters. Our
one-car
garage was attached to the house, and if the boys climbed out their bedroom window, which they often did, they would be standing on top of the garage. The kitchen had an island stove, and I stood the kids on chairs around it while I taught them how to cook breakfast and other dishes.

When David and Denise were toddlers, I decided to build a play area in the yard for them so they could be outside but safe from the street. My father and I went to a lumber supply for posts, fencing, hardware and anything else we needed. We spent the day
sledge-hammering
posts into the ground, making sure everything was vertical, nailing the cross braces to the posts, cutting the fence boards, nailing them up, and making and installing a gate. It was a job and a half, but we were quite pleased with the result. I brought Dave and Denise outside to show them their new play area. They both immediately walked over to the fence, climbed up and over and looked at us, smiling proudly from the other side. The humor of the situation was not lost on either my father or me, and at that point all we could do was laugh.

I taught Ronnie and David how to play football and baseball. When Dave was a little kid, he could not hit a baseball for the life of him. I could toss him a beach ball, and he could not hit it with a tennis racquet. When he was about eight I decided enough was enough.

“David, come on,” I said. “We're going to teach you to hit once and for all.”

He, Ronnie and I grabbed a bucket of balls, a bat, and gloves and marched down to the park.

I began lobbing him pitches. Whiff. Whiff. Whiff. Foul ball. Whiff. Grounder. Whiff, whiff, foul. It went on like this for some time. Ronnie played behind me and shagged the balls whenever David made contact. David never got discouraged and kept at it. Then, at one point, bingo! His
hand-eye
coordination kicked in. After that he could not miss. I moved farther back and stopped lobbing and started pitching. Line drive. Line drive. Hard grounder. Long fly. He hit nearly everything I threw him, and after that he could hit. In Little League he must have hit .600. You could not get the ball past him once he got the hang of it.

Both he and Ronnie played “
pee-wee
” league football. Ronnie was three years older and played in a higher division, but Dave, small as he was, played too. I had to put
two-and
-
a
-half
-pound weights in his shorts pockets so he could make the minimum weight for his team. He was really small. Even today, he stands, at most, 5'4". Like me, David was skinny as a kid, but he was tough and scrappy. Both Ronnie and Dave did well, and their teams won championships. David played free safety, and he was a determined player. Nobody broke loose for a touchdown on him. The boys would come home after a game, and their uniforms would be filthy. Loretta was always good about scrubbing and washing them, and by the next game they looked brand new again. In our own ways, both Loretta and I were very engaged parents.

As often occurs with little brothers, David idolized his big brother. Both were good students, but Ronnie was more athletically gifted. Ronnie never gave David any reason to dislike him, and they got along great. In fact, I don't think Ronnie ever gave anybody reason to dislike him, and I have been told that, as adults, Ronnie and David couldn't be more different.

Like most households with energetic kids, ours was often boisterous. Ronnie and Dave would sit in a cardboard box at the top of the stairs with their football helmets on and slide down, crashing at the bottom. All my kids were given a lot of freedom so long as they did their chores and listened to their mother and me. Other than that, they were free to do pretty much as they pleased. All of them, however, were fastidiously neat about their possessions and the rooms they shared.

Our last child, Lori, was born in 1962, two years after David and Denise, and at that point our family was complete. Lori also had blue eyes and was blonde like the others, but her hair darkened and became more like Loretta's as Lori got older. My work continued to go well, and, despite the number of mouths to feed, we still had plenty of discretionary income.

Both Denise and Lori were dancers. Loretta or I drove them to their lessons, and they learned tap dancing, ballet, jazz, you name it. In Atlantic City was a place called Tony Grant's, and he held talent shows for kids called “Tony Grant's Stars of Tomorrow.” Denise and Lori danced in the shows as a sister act. On stage they were like shadows of each other, they were so in sync. Both had great moves and natural rhythm.

The Jersey shore was only about an hour's drive east, and we often went there for summer vacation. We'd spend the day at the beach, come back to our rented house, clean up and go out for a fish dinner. Those were wonderful times.

All the kids were
good-looking
, bright and a real joy to be around. Many days I would come home from work at night, and if they were still up we'd sit around the table and they would yap at me. I let them talk about anything and everything. I never talked down to them. I talked to them as individuals, and I think they liked that. They could tell me anything or ask me anything. “What'd you do today, Dad?” I'd tell them about my day and then ask, “How about you, Denise? What did you do?” We would sit around just talking to one another.

There was a tradition in the coal region that when you had company, you sat around the kitchen table, not in the living room, and had a beer or a cup of coffee. One time Bernie Lyzak, who played sax in a polka band I was part of, came for a visit with his wife, and when they were leaving he told me, “Man, your kids are just like adults. They can carry on a conversation about anything.”

One thing about my kids: I never made them feel wrong for telling me things. I never made them feel guilty for anything they did. I would talk to them and sort out how to deal with it. I might tell them they had to do the dishes for a week as a penalty if they did something wrong, but then when it was over, it was over. Consequently, they were pretty open with me. That was something I learned as a kid. When an adult got on me for something I did wrong I felt bad, so I decided never to do that to my kids.

One time when he was a youngster, David got in a spat with a neighbor kid and punctured holes in the kid's bicycle tires with a dart. The kid's mother came over and let me have it. I defended David and sent her away. Then I shut the door and asked David, “Did you do it?”

“Yeah,” he confessed, “I did.”

I made him do chores for a week as a penalty and that was that. I never let things like that fester. Once they confessed and they took their penalty, it was over. This was years before Scientology, and I later realized that I should have made David apologize to the kid and buy him new tires to square things.

Ronnie was always smart and very athletic. He was really fast. In
pee-wee
football, once he got into the open, he was gone.

Denise was also really fast, but what I recall best about her is that she was super helpful. She always wanted to help us around the house or help other people. She was affectionate and extremely loyal. She would do anything for her friends.

Lori also wanted to help out whenever she could. One time, we were laying tile and Ronnie, David and Denise were helping. Lori was too young to help, so she snuck off into the kitchen and made little sandwiches and lemonade for us. That was her contribution.