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EARLY LIFE
California Boy

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Our grandparents came from the northern part of Italy. They came here about 1915, and they had two sons, my dad and his brother Pete. They were wine people so they bought a home in La Crescenta [Calif.] and had a few vines and made their own wine. My dad got married to a young […]
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Both of our parents were very discipline-oriented. Not to the point where we feared them, but to the point where we knew if we did something wrong–and yes we were taught right from wrong–that we would be subject to retaliation. And, yes, we were put under the strap once in a while, but not real […]
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I was born a jaundiced baby and the doctor said “Well, you’re going to have to get some more red corpuscles in him.” And he said, “You’re not going to like this, but the only way I can recommend that is you’ve got to get some red wine in him.” That was the prescription. So […]
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He was small but had a tremendous knack for horsing around and fooling around and joking. All good clean stuff, but just playing jokes all the time. We had a High-Y club that met every Thursday night at church and we’d come down there and play basketball and then we’d have a meeting and go […]
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He was a rascal. When we were young, my mother, if she wanted to make a dessert she’d bake a cake, a one-egg white cake with white frosting. So she got to the point with my sister, “Gloria, you’ve got to learn how to bake. I’ll show you how to make a one-egg cake.” Well, […]
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This was Depression time. And both my mom and dad were Catholic and they wanted to raise the kids Catholic, and they felt the best way to do that and was to put us into a parochial school. So at that time Mary Star of the Sea didn’t have a kindergarten, so we went to […]
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You know when you take your driver’s license test you get an exam, and if you miss more than three you’ve got to come back? I think he had to come back once at 16. The only way I found out about it was my mother, as I remember, happened to mention it one time. […]
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He would never talk about his family, really. He would drag it out of us but he was not going to disclose anything. He would tell us occasional stories when we’d get together, about his bombing the wrong island, for example. So he would occasionally tell those little jokes about himself.
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He claimed to have made a mistake near the end of the Second World War–the plane he was in dropped bombs on an island that was occupied by the British. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, but that was a kind of an apocryphal story that came out of it. You know, […]
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It would be interesting, quite frankly, given his experiences as a bombardier in World War II, his whole perspective on the revolution that’s occurred in precision targeting because he was definitely of the period where you were, despite all the claims, you were very lucky if you hit anything, even close to what you were […]
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