Good morning everyone, and welcome---our family joins me in thanking you for coming today to support us and more importantly, to honor and remember my grandfather.
The story of a junior starts with a senior. Paul and Mary welcomed the newborn Paul Jr. in 1944 and gave him his competing Italian-Irish heritage, though his very Italian neighborhood of 49th Street, West Philadelphia made sure the Italian side in him won out. Our Lady of Angels was his home parish. Before long he attended Annunciation, and then Monsignor Bonner and briefly St. Joseph’s University. Vietnam raged by that time, and the Marine Corps came calling for him.
Pop, as we called him, traveled the country with the Marines. He trained mostly on helicopters. As we remember him telling it, just before he was scheduled for deployment in Asia, there was a change in the military’s plans, and he thankfully never had to see combat.
Upon his homecoming he finished at St. Joe’s---ever a source of shared pride between him and my brother Brian---and he took jobs teaching at colleges and as a tax accountant. He admired Cadillacs and loved doo-wop---Deon and the Belmonts, Frankie Valli, the days when harmony was king.
A cousin introduced Pop to Anna Marie, our grandmother, and they danced at Philly’s best clubs to those same street-corner sounds that he loved. They started in West Philly and moved on to Upper Darby and Drexel Hill as their children grew---my uncle Paulie and my mother.
More moves brought Pop different clients---from Anderson Avenue to Lawrence Park to a few spots in Chester County, where Italian families who owned mushroom farms through the generations needed tax counsel and quarterly filings done. It provided the added perk of being closer to us, and Colin and Ella in Malvern, as he aged.
Yet he never really aged, did he? It is said on good authority that the funeral home who specializes in these things could not believe upon seeing him that he was 73 years old. He might have been in his 50s. Just Friday night I was yet again subjected to a theatre usher gushing over the beauty and youthful appearance of my mother. “There’s no way you have a 29-year-old son!” And every time we hear that again, each time we are carded buying a pack of Yeungling or mistaken for college students, we will thank Pop for passing down that gene. Through the end his full head of hair was black as the three-or-four-a-day cups of Maxwell House or Wawa coffee he downed, and the experts can finally now expunge any surviving rumors that the hair was somehow colored or artificial.
Perhaps the secret, his Fountain of Youth, was the coffee. He might have said it was handful of Marlboros a day! Though of course it wasn’t the smoking that took him. By the end he overcame it, with the help of a mandate from Jefferson’s cancer center. Yet the memories stick like tar. Pop commanded the porch outside, maybe Brutus the fluffy dog under his rocking chair. The smoke- and health-conscious parents force you out there, freezing or broiling. We were only a screen door away from spending alone time with him. That is where I remember many more serious conversations. His drug of choice was nicotine, mine cream soda. He might have asked when I first started---Mom gave me my first soda. It was from Brother’s Pizza. It came in a glass bottle. I was hooked. I asked how he started---it was just one of those neighborhood things. The boys. How he wanted to go back and change that, but no one knew any better then.
There is that addictive quality in all of us in the family. You can see it in the way Mom plays a single song on repeat until its lyrics become more familiar than the Hail Mary, or for me, how a milkshake for dessert one day becomes a milkshake every night until the next electric bill is due.
And you could see that same seriousness, that sense of caution and deliberateness and meticulousness, in the Pop smoking on the porch, in the Pop driving barely 50 miles an hour on the Route 1 bypass, and in the Pop who returned from the Marine Corps forever changed. He was always jovial and outgoing, but there was something different, something more calculating, more reserved. The Marines---he was proud of his time there, and his sense of patriotism knew no bounds. He spoke fondly of the mates with whom he trained. Yet uniquely, he was never fanatical about being a Marine. I always credited him that. Perhaps it gave him a sense of discipline to apply to his business life, but I suspect rather it gave him more a sense of reality.
He worried often, and no force on this earth could rush him. One friend from his apartment complex, Tony, once went food shopping with him. Tony checked out and was so tired of waiting for Pop to finish back at the deli that rather than go look for him, he had the employees page Pop on the loudspeaker.
Pop’s loves were many. The fried chicken at Wegman’s, which he brought us often, was probably still on his shopping list when Tony paged him. He loved the Italian club---the one in Kennett is where I most remember him hanging out---and the camaraderie it fostered. He could watch FOX News all day, and the only thing that could cause him to miss Bill O’Reilly’s caustic commentary each night was Fox yanking him off the air. Each bestseller he wrote with Martin Dugard was a dramatic narrative of a historic assassination---Kennedy, Lincoln, even Jesus---and Pop in his thirst for history couldn’t put them down.
He took graduate courses at Penn State and so my earliest memories of Pop revolve around the Nittany Lions, so ingrained in me that I couldn’t betray the football team when I attended another college. We would sit in the living room at Anderson Avenue with the hulking old TV on the floor. Then came 1994 and at Grandmom’s in Drexeline we watched Kerry Collins and I remember the all-white uniforms and the concrete turf at Indiana and Wisconsin and ABC’s coverage. And they kept winning, and we’d wait to see what Nebraska did. Brian and I played a game with him---Pop would sit on the couch and we’d put toy trucks and dollhouses on the floor in rows that reached farther and farther away from him. We’d take the soft squishy football and take turns throwing it to see who could get it to stay in each house or truck. And we shared Penn State together to the end, even a final disappointment at Ohio State this year.
He once told me Penn State wore Madonna blue to honor the Virgin Mary---and while that’s actually true of my other college team, he meant that that’s what the blue meant to him. That’s why it was his favorite color. He was devoted to his faith, especially to Mary, and passed many medals and saints’ prayer cards to us. If faith is a gift, it is the most important of his many gifts to us---along with a belief in education, and how teaching seems to run in his family, and the long hours he spent sharing his tax expertise with us, even once helping us meant more and more laborious work. It was his talent, and he shared it.
Indeed, that is how he leaves us here---with the reminder to give to those we love, to give amongst mistakes, to give even when giving strains us.
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