Joe Moglia was born on April 1, 1949, in the Inwood section of Manhattan, the first child of John and Frances Moglia. He was baptized Giuseppe Hugo Moglia, in the Italian tradition of naming a firstborn son after his paternal grandfather.
Joe’s mother, Frances, was Irish. While she conceded the naming of her baby to her husband’s homeland tradition, she did decide that there was no way in hell that she was going to call her son “Giuseppe.” And she knew that using the English version, “Joseph,” wouldn’t work—John’s Italian relatives would just translate it and call him “Giuseppe” anyway. She needed something completely different. Fortune smiled on her in that regard. Joe’s paternal grandfather, for reasons unclear, had always been called “Jim.” So Joe’s mother decided to call her son by the same name. By doing so she would still, technically, be hewing to the Italian tradition.
It worked. Everyone in the family—aunts, uncles, cousins—called Joe “Jim” or “Jimmy.” His three living siblings do so to this day.
As a toddler, Joe thought his name really was “Jim.” He had no reason to believe otherwise. No one had ever told him his real name.
That is, until he went to school. When Joe was five years old, his parents enrolled him in kindergarten class in a little stone house on the grounds of the Payson Playground in Inwood. On the morning of his first day of school ever, Joe and his mother made the five-minute walk from their apartment to the playground. Streams of other kids were walking with their moms in the same direction.
When they reached the stone house, Joe and his mother went in and found a classroom filled with the clamor of small children. Joe’s mother smiled and made small talk with some of the other moms. After a while she crouched down in front of her son. Joe started to feel nervous for the first time that morning. His mother patted his head and gave him a good-bye kiss on his cheek, then told him “I love you” in her mellifluous Irish accent and started to walk away. But she stopped suddenly in her tracks, whirled around and came back. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she told Joe. “They’re going to call you ‘Joseph’ here.”
“Why?” asked Joe.
“Because that’s your name,” she said, then patted his head again and left.
Joe gave her what he now calls his “what the hell?” face. From that day on, the outside world knew him as “Joe.” Within the family, he would always be “Jim.”
“My cousins would always say, ‘No wonder Jim’s all messed up. He never knew his name,’” says Joe.
Joe’s father, John, was born in Pessola, Italy, a small, valley-bound rural hamlet in the province of Parma. With tensions between the socialists and fascists in the country rising, and with rapid industrialization resulting in a scarcity of jobs outside of cities, the Moglias moved to the United States in 1927, when John was eleven. They lived in an apartment at 4535 Park Avenue, in the Italian section of the Bronx.
John never went to school in the United States. During the day he worked in his father’s fruit store. In the evening he took classes in ballroom dancing. He became quite good at it and would eventually compete in national dancing events. He wanted to be a dance instructor when he grew up.
But John’s father thought his son’s dancing was utter nonsense and forced him to go to work instead and help support the family. In his early twenties, John opened his own small fruit store, Hillside Market, on busy University Avenue in the Bronx.
Then, as his new country entered World War II to fight against his old one, John was drafted. After basic training at Fort Bragg, he served as a sergeant in the 57th Quartermaster Sales Company in France, supplying the Allied forces with all of their basic material needs, save for ammunition and medical supplies. John’s experience in the fruit stores prepared him well for the detail-oriented job. Relatively speaking, it was a good post to have during wartime: John did most of his work from well behind the frontlines.
Sometime after V-E Day, as the Allied war effort wound down, quartermasters were taken from their posts near the battlefields and dispersed across Europe to help supply the war-ravaged citizens. John was reassigned to Belfast, where he started the 58th Quartermaster Sales Company. An Allied quartermaster, because of his access to food and other basic goods, enjoyed a role of prominence in many of these destitute European cities.
Within the grounds of the Belfast Zoo, on the northeastern slope of a promontory known as Cavehill, there was an art-deco building named Floral Hall, which was built to host dances. It had opened just before the war but was only now being properly used, as American servicemen and local lasses were caught up in the ecstatic joy of the Allied victory. John Moglia still loved to dance, and fancied himself, in his dashing uniform, as a young Rudolph Valentino. He became a regular patron of Floral Hall. So did a young Belfastian woman named Frances McLarnon.
One evening, as Frances was leaving the hall with some friends, John, standing outside, spotted her. She was singing along to a dance tune. She had a pretty voice. John was immediately smitten. He walked over and introduced himself. “I want to dance with the person who was singing,” he announced.
Frances was hesitant. But the American serviceman eventually got his way. They met the next night at Floral Hall, and danced together for hours. “My mother was initially really reluctant to get involved with this guy,” says Joe’s sister, Mary. “But my father was pretty charming then, and he could dance well.” Frances was relieved to find out that John was Catholic and not Protestant, which to her family—proud members of Northern Ireland’s minority denomination—would have been a nonstarter. Their courtship in Belfast was chaste. “My mother was a good Catholic girl and my father respected that,” says Joe’s youngest brother, Paul. He believes that John may have endeared himself to the McLarnons by pilfering for them a few of the much-desired items they had lived without for years—like new undershirts and stockings—from the quartermaster store.
Just a few weeks after meeting Frances, John was sent home to the United States, and he went back to work at the fruit store. He was heartbroken but undeterred. When he got back to the Bronx, he unleashed a steady barrage of letters upon Frances. “He was a good letter writer. He expressed himself well,” says Paul. John corresponded with Frances for the better part of two years before he asked her, via letter, to move to the United States and marry him.
According to family lore, the McLarnons studied the mailed proposal and weighed its pros and cons. They knew John was Italian. That was a mark against him. But he was Catholic, which was a good thing. And he was a business owner. Another check in the “pro” column. Then they examined the return address on his letters. It read “Park Avenue.” The McLarnons asked their Irish friends who’d been to New York about Park Avenue. “That’s where the millionaires live!” their friends told them. “Then my mother’s parents said, ‘You can’t let this guy get away!’” says Joe.
Frances sailed to the United States without her family. There she discovered that John’s “business” was a ten-by-thirty-foot fruit store on a busy, grimy street. She moved into John’s two-bedroom apartment, which was indeed on Park Avenue, but the significantly less-gilded portion of it in the Bronx. The apartment overlooked the noisy, sprawling, industrial wasteland of a railroad yard. John had also failed to mention that he still lived with his mother, his sister, and two of his brothers. They spoke mostly Italian to each other, just as the rest of the neighborhood did, and rarely bothered to try to include Frances, who spoke no Italian, in their conversations.
Despite all these presumably unnerving departures from Frances’s expectations, she and John were married almost right away. None of her family made the trip for the wedding. One of John’s brothers (and her new apartment-mate) walked her down the aisle and gave her away.
As the story goes in the Moglia family, Frances wrote her parents a few months later and told them: “I have no idea why people here make such a big deal about Park Avenue.” Though the entire story may be apocryphal, it does accurately convey her humor, good-natured disposition, and willingness to adapt. “She always told me that story with a huge smile on her face,” says Paul. “She never said she was disappointed.”
She did, however, have ample reason to feel that way. The young American serviceman whom she married—back home after the terrible war, struggling to make a living—was a lot less charming than she remembered. “All traces of that expressive man who loved to dance quickly vanished,” says Paul. “He seemed angry about his lot in life, about the fact that he had to work grueling hours in the fruit store six days a week to make ends meet.”
In 1949 John and Frances Moglia finally moved to an apartment of their own at 1825 Riverside Drive, a six-story, utilitarian, brown brick building in Inwood, a predominantly Irish neighborhood in Manhattan. The Moglias lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the building’s uppermost floor, for which they paid a monthly rent of $88.
Inwood is the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan. Legend has it that this is the place where the cunning director-general of the New Netherlands colony, Peter Minuit, “bought” the island of Manhattan from the native Lenape Indians for a few trinkets worth $24 in present-day terms. It was also the home neighborhood of Harry Houdini, Jim Henson, and Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).
The Moglias had five children: first Joe, then Johnny, Bernadette, Paul, and Mary. All seven of them were crammed into that two-bedroom apartment. The boys slept in one bedroom (Joe and Johnny shared a bed for a while) and the girls slept with their parents in the other one. In addition to the two bedrooms the apartment had one bathroom, a foyer, a kitchen, and a living room. “There was always a line for the bathroom, and the living room, which was the biggest room in the apartment, was off limits to the kids,” says Paul. “But what strikes me now is that it didn’t feel to us like we were all on top of each other. It didn’t feel small. We didn’t know any other way.”
At the time Joe’s father owned a fruit store on 181st Street in Washington Heights, the neighborhood just south of Inwood, called Cabrini Market. He worked six days a week, rising at 5:00 a.m. to go to the store to receive deliveries of fruit, and not returning home until 9:00 p.m. after closing up. Work was his life. Joe remembers only one family vacation during his childhood, when the Moglias went to Newburgh, New York. They were supposed to stay for a week on a lake and go horseback riding and boating. It turned out there were no horses, the only boat was a rickety rowboat, and the “lake” was really a pond that was, at best, thirty feet in diameter. After only three days Joe’s father got restless and took his family home, while he went back to work at the store.
As soon as they were old enough to communicate with customers, all of the children worked shifts at the store. (“For my tenth birthday, my present was to work at the store from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.,” says Paul.) Occasionally a city inspector would visit the store and fine John for using child labor, even though they were his own kids. Sunday was the only day the store was closed. After 9:00 a.m. Mass, the Moglias would either visit John’s relatives in the Bronx and sit through protracted, three- to four-hour lunches, or they would pack a lunch and picnic at nearby Dyckman Street Park on the Hudson River. And every Sunday John would take an extended afternoon nap that was not to be disturbed under any circumstances.
John Moglia had dark black hair. He was a hard, wiry man, nearly six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds. His shoulders bulged with muscles developed from lifting crates of fruit every day. His hands were huge, knotty, and scarred—like a stonemason’s—from yanking open boxes of fruit and trimming heads of lettuce. Joe’s father was in every way the Italian Il Padrone, the unquestioned ruler of the family. He was the provider, and that alone commanded his family’s respect. “When I was four, my mother would make us sing this song: ‘Clap your hands, clap your hands until daddy comes home. Daddy has money and mommy has none,’” says Joe’s brother Johnny.
“Once in my life I want to come home and be treated the way Mr. Moglia was treated when he walked into the apartment from work,” says Dave Hunt, a childhood friend of Joe’s from Inwood. “Everything in the house just stopped and everyone snapped to attention.” Frances and the children would all greet John at the door. One of the children would take the shopping bag—filled with fruit from the store—from his hands. Another would draw a hot bath. When John was done bathing, he would sit at the table—alone, since everyone else had already had their dinner—and eat the hot meal that Frances had prepared just for him. “They all appreciated how hard he worked,” says Hunt.
Despite all the appreciation and attention, John was not particularly warm in return. While he was having his dinner, Joe would often grab his homework and come join his father at the table, but John would usually just continue to sit there in a sullen silence. “He wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who asked you how school was that day,” says Joe. He was also frequently ill-tempered. “When he got into one of his moods at the fruit store and started yelling, the guys who worked for him would just turn to each other and say, ‘Uh-oh, it’s gonna be one of those days,’” says Johnny. There were days like that at home, too. One freezing winter Sunday Joe and Johnny were in the apartment playing with toy guns they’d received for Christmas. The noise woke their father from one of his sacred naps. “He just walked out of the bedroom and took our guns and broke them in his hands,” says Johnny. “It was terrible.”
John frequently used physical means to get his message across. Back then, the beatings he administered to his children (mainly the older boys, Joe and Johnny) would have been considered somewhere on the extreme edge of normal. Today, they’d probably be over the line. John O’Leary, a family friend, remembers John Moglia once scolding Johnny for some transgression. “Johnny stared his old man right in the face and said ‘You ain’t so bad,’” says O’Leary. John hit him. Johnny pulled himself back up and repeated his defiant line. His father hit him again. Johnny got back to his feet and said it again. “Finally Joe stepped in and said, ‘Johnny, just shut up or he’s going to kill you,’” says O’Leary.
Another time, Joe was napping in his bedroom when Johnny came in and told him that their father wanted to see him. Joe walked into the living room and his father started hitting him. “What did I do? What did I do?” asked Joe. His father said: “I told you never to go down to the river.”
“I had no idea what he was talking about,” says Joe. Later, Johnny explained to Joe that he had just told his father about the time he and Joe had saved a baby pigeon that had been stranded on the banks of the Hudson. “My father was pissed because he thought I had risked my life and Johnny’s to save a stupid bird,” says Joe. “The thing was that it had been a whole year since we did it.” Apparently his father’s rage had no statute of limitations.
John’s work seemed to be the main source of his anger. “I think he felt financially stuck in a business he’d grown up in. He owned his own store. Relative to many of his peers, he was financially successful. But I think he felt even more pressure because of that,” says Paul. It didn’t help that he was a drinker, too. Not exactly an alcoholic at the time, but somewhere close to it.
For the record, Joe has a slightly gentler view of his father than his siblings do. “Deep down, I really believe he was a good man,” says Joe. “He was just self-absorbed and so focused on providing for us. He was definitely a ‘glass half-empty’ guy.”
Joe’s mother was the family’s counterbalance, the “glass half-full” parent, the velvet glove to their father’s iron fist. Frances was pretty, a stylish dresser who liked to sport flamboyant hats and big, dark sunglasses. “She was sort of like an Irish Jackie Onassis,” says Joe’s daughter, Kara. Says Hunt: “She was a knockout. In a neighborhood of somewhat plain and dowdy women, she really stood out. When she walked into a room, you knew it.”
Her natural hair color was auburn, but she enjoyed changing that, dyeing it various different shades. (She would open her own beauty salon in the 1970s when she and John moved to Yonkers after Mary, their youngest, went off to college.) Frances was always humming or singing. The Moglias had a small piano in the apartment, and Frances played it daily. One of her favorite songs was “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.” Back in Ireland as a young girl she had sung the challenging Adeste Fideles solo in her church at the Christmas Mass. Always the first to dance at weddings, she was an animated woman who loved to tell jokes and laugh. She doted on her family and friends. “She had a way of making you feel like you were important,” says Johnny.
She and her husband seemed to have little in common. They were not very affectionate. “They really didn’t know each other that well when they married,” says Paul. “But I never heard her complain about her marriage. The most she would ever say was, ‘Marriage is not always a bed of roses.’ But there was a lot of love and energy in the house and in the family, mainly due to her.”
What Frances and John did have in common was a strong work ethic. While John spent his days and nights at the store, Frances occupied herself with raising her five children. She was fiercely protective of her brood, providing them shelter from both their tempestuous father and the world outside their doors, which, given their neighborhood, could sometimes be particularly tough on children who were as safeguarded as the Moglias were.
Inwood was, in many ways, a great place for a kid to grow up. It’s bordered by the Hudson River on the west and the curling Harlem River to the north and east, and is home to two big wooded parks: Inwood Hill on the banks of the Hudson and Fort Tryon to the south. The parks and water give the neighborhood the feeling of being isolated from the rest of Manhattan. Inwood was loud and busy. On scalding-hot summer days, children swam in the rivers and families gathered on fire escapes to get away from the heat of their stuffy, un-air-conditioned apartments. In the winter kids went sledding on the steep slopes of Fort Tryon. “It felt like a small town to us when we were growing up,” says Hunt.
But it was a small town with an inner-city edge, veined in concrete, menacingly shadowed by the elevated train tracks that ran right through the middle of the neighborhood and packed with tenement houses occupied by recent immigrants striving to find their way in the new world. The vibe on the pushy, busy streets was make-it-or-break-it. Some did. Others didn’t. Paul Moglia estimates that 60 percent of the kids they grew up with never made it out of Inwood and instead settled for lives as “cops or criminals,” amorphous demarcations in the neighborhood. While Inwood wasn’t exactly a crime-war zone, it wasn’t a place where you wanted to be on the streets at night, when trouble could be found in any darkened alley. (Jim Carroll, an Inwood native, wrote his bleak, drug-addled autobiographical book, The Basketball Diaries, about growing up in the neighborhood.)
Frances wanted something better for her children. She pushed them to study hard. She also did all she could to stave off the dangerous influences of the neighborhood. She didn’t want her children to grow up too fast. For the most part she succeeded, sometimes only too well—especially in their younger years, when she managed to keep them in a state of innocence that might seem hard to imagine these days.
When Joe was ten he asked his mother where babies came from. He had no concept of what sexual intercourse was; he was just curious. Frances told him that God came down and planted a seed behind a woman’s heart. That seed grew for nine months. Then the doctor took the baby out of her stomach. “That’s why we have belly buttons,” she explained.
Good enough for Joe, who gave no further thought to the matter.
By age thirteen, Joe was in a gang. While it wasn’t exactly the Crips and the Bloods, Joe’s gang, the Tiny Tots, did drink booze, commit minor acts of robbery and roll bums in the park. Some of them even carried knives. But mostly what they did was get into fistfights.
Inwood was divided, socially and economically, by three Catholic church parishes: St. Jude’s (where Lew Alcindor went to school) was predominantly black and Hispanic. Good Shepherd (Jim Carroll’s parish) was populated by the neighborhood’s middle-class Irish. Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, the Moglias’ church and the site of Joe’s grammar school, was mostly lower-middle-class Irish.
Each of the parish’s schools had its own “gang,” and each gang had its own respective territory, determined by borders (usually cross streets) known only to the gang members themselves and not the adult world. If a member of, say, the Good Shepherd crowd crossed into Our Lady Queen of Martyrs terrain, a fistfight was usually in the offing. But, as might be expected in a group of high-spirited, prepubescent boys, much of the fighting took place within their own gangs.
Since most of the really bad stuff—the beat-downs that required hospitalization, the occasional stabbings—took place after school and at night, Joe didn’t have much exposure to that. Athletics kept him off the streets after school. At night he was usually working in his father’s store, and when he did have an occasional evening off, his parents held him to a very strict curfew.
But Joe did get into some bad scrapes, including a particularly nasty beating that occurred when he was thirteen—an unintended consequence of his mother’s ardent desire to protect her son and his innocence. One afternoon as Joe and the Tiny Tots were leaving school, somebody in their group yelled the word fuck. The boys’ teacher, a hard-bitten, streetwise-by-necessity nun, yelled back: “You don’t even know what that word means.”
The boys laughed as they ran to Fort Tryon Park, one of their main hangouts. On their way over, Ray Gonzales, a member of the gang, did the sometimes cruel calculus that young boys do, and got the sense that Joe actually didn’t know what the word meant. He put Joe on the spot in front of the other boys. Joe said nothing. Gonzales told him: “It’s how babies are made, you dumbass.”
Joe, initially embarrassed, believed then that he had gained the upper hand.
“That’s not how babies are made,” he told Gonzales. Joe explained to the group what his mother had told him three years earlier, about God and seeds and belly buttons.
The boys, led by Gonzales, howled with laughter. Then, as if set off by some secret signal, they jumped Joe. They didn’t put him in the hospital, but they gave him quite a beating. Blows to the face and the head were followed by kicks to the ribs and the crotch after he finally went down.
When Frances opened the door to let Joe into the apartment that afternoon, she gasped. He had a swollen left eye and dried brown blood around his mouth. Fresh, bright red blood dripped from his nose. Frances loathed fighting. Luckily for Joe, his father, who also disapproved of fighting, was still at work.
“Did you get into another fight?” she asked. She was visibly angry.
“Ma, I have one question for you,” Joe said. His breaths whistled through his bloody nose. “Remember when you told me how babies are made? Remember? Was that true? Were you telling me the truth?”
Frances pursed her lips and looked down at her hands as she wiped them on her apron and said nothing. That was all Joe needed to see. He ran into his bedroom and slammed the door. He was not punished for fighting.
Joe may have lost that fight, but as he got older, the losses were few and far between. In his teenage years he was fairly big and strong, and very athletic. “He was a tough guy,” says Hunt. “If you got into a beef with him, you had your hands full. But he was never a bully.”
In fact, Joe couldn’t stand bullies, and made a sport out of taking them down a notch. Hunt remembers one day walking up Academy Street toward Inwood Hill Park. He and Joe were going drinking (they began drinking at age eleven, and by thirteen Joe was drinking fairly regularly). Hunt was carrying a brown paper sack with a twelve-pack of beer in it. “For whatever reason, Joe was walking a block behind me,” says Hunt. “And this older kid in the neighborhood, a well-known bully, comes up and just rips the bag out of my hand. Beer cans flew all over the place. But the guy didn’t know that Joe was coming up behind me. When he saw him, his eyes got huge.”
Joe chased down the bully and smacked him a few times. Then he made the kid get on his hands and knees and fetch all of the beer cans. “They were under cars, in the gutter,” says Hunt. “But that guy got every last one of them.”
Joe and his brother Johnny were quite the formidable duo. Just fourteen months younger than Joe, Johnny matured early (“I was sent home from school in the seventh grade to shave,” he says) and was the bigger of the two. Both he and Joe suffered from a stutter, but Johnny’s was much worse. “Johnny would just sit there, in front of all these tough guys and just blubber,” says Joe. “It broke my heart every time I heard it.”
But Johnny didn’t need any help standing up for himself. He let his fists do most of the talking. Those big knuckles never had a problem with being misunderstood or mocked. Joe and Johnny started to establish a reputation in the neighborhood as a duo you didn’t want to mess with. “We didn’t lose many fights,” says Johnny.
Johnny was the more feared of the two, and didn’t mind putting a good licking on another guy. But Joe always held back a bit. Says Johnny: “Joe never crossed that line. He didn’t want to really hurt anybody.”
Fran Perdisatt, a classmate of Joe’s at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, says: “Joe was probably a little more sheltered than the rest of us. Johnny hung out with a tougher crowd. Joe knew them all, was friendly with them, but he never went in that direction. He would always go up to the point when he was going to get in trouble, then he’d back off.”
As the kids in the Inwood gangs grew older, the level of violence and malfeasance rose. Some of the kids fell deeper and deeper into a more hardcore gang life and never got out. Just a few years after Joe got beaten up for not knowing how babies were made, the stakes rose considerably. Ray Gonzales would die of a drug overdose. Another Tiny Tot, John Spaulding, was shot and killed by two cops as he walked a crowded street waving a gun. Seven members of Joe’s class of twenty boys at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs would not live to see the age of forty, due to drugs and violence.
But Joe was on another path, held back from the edge not just by the fact that, as Johnny says, he didn’t really want to hurt anyone with his fists, but ultimately by his reluctance to do anything that would hurt his mother. Through two episodes during his eighth-grade year, Joe would learn this the hard way and, in the process, turn around a life that still hung in the balance.
Getting busted for having a couple of bottles of booze on a school trip might not sound like something that would alter a person’s life. But because of what it did to his mother, it changed Joe’s.
Every year Our Lady Queen of Martyrs hosted an annual school trip to Rye Beach outside of New York City for the kids and some of the parents. Anticipating the outing during their eighth-grade year, Joe and his friends “got the bright idea to bring some booze along,” as he recounts the episode, and to ask the girls, who were traveling on their own bus, to stash it for them. “We figured the nuns wouldn’t check their bags,” he says. They figured wrong. On the day of the trip, the nuns had all the boys open their bags. They found nothing. “We thought we were so clever,” says Joe. But fifteen minutes later, the nuns came barging onto the boys’ bus, holding bottles of liquor. They had checked the girls’ luggage, too. “I was dead,” says Joe.
The principal, a nun named Sister Mary Margaret, called Joe into her office. Then she called Joe’s father at the fruit store. “My father did not like having to leave the store,” says Joe. With the two of them standing there looking at him, Joe made up a story about how the booze actually belonged to a boy named Tommy Robino, who had been kicked out of the school the year before and was now in public school. Joe told the story well, complete with tears. “My father actually looked at the nun and said he was inclined to believe me,” says Joe. Sister Mary Margaret knew better, though. She told John Moglia that the girls told her that Joe had given them the bottles.
“Is that true?” John asked Joe.
“I said ‘yes,’ and before I could get another word out of my mouth, he was smacking me all over the room,” says Joe. “I deserved this one.”
Joe was forced to work in the fruit store that day as his friends made their way to the beach. “I just remember being so sad, being stuck at the store,” says Joe. It got worse for him when he went home and saw his mother. Much worse. She didn’t yell at him. She didn’t say anything, actually. She just cried. “She couldn’t stop crying,” says Joe. “I’d let her down. She knew she could count on me and I let her down.”
Joe was not allowed to take part in the eighth-grade graduation ceremony. He worried that Fordham Prep, the Catholic high school he had worked so hard to get into, would find out and take away his admission. (Prep never found out.) The episode became the defining moment of his childhood, the turning point when he made the conscious decision to make something of his life. “It was the greatest single thing that made me grow up,” says Joe. “I let my mother down. I spent a good portion of my life trying to make her proud of me again, trying to earn back her trust. From that point on, I became really focused.”
Making her proud, though, was only part of it. Later that year, his father came home from work and told him that his mother had to have some sort of surgery and would be in the hospital for a few days. His father didn’t tell him what kind of surgery it was (and to this day, Joe still doesn’t know). John didn’t betray any worry at that time, not that he was prone to showing his emotions, anyway. Joe shrugged it off. “Back then, I thought I was one of the toughest guys in the neighborhood,” says Joe. “In fact, I was one of the toughest guys in the neighborhood.” And being tough meant never showing emotions around his family, never letting down that wall.
But later that night, as Joe lay awake in bed, he heard a noise coming from his parents’ room. He tiptoed down the hallway. Light was coming from the cracked-open door. Joe looked in and saw his father kneeling at the foot of his bed. He couldn’t see his face. But his strong shoulders were heaving forward. He realized his father was silently sobbing. “I’d never seen my father cry before,” Joe says.
He went back to his own bed and was suddenly wracked with fear about his mother. Then it hit him: though he’d made the pledge to make her proud, he’d been trying to be such a tough guy that he had never told this woman—whom he loved more than anyone in the world—how he felt about her. That night he prayed, asking God to save her so he could rectify his horrible mistake. He promised he would demonstrate his love for her every day, and would never take the love of others for granted.
His mother eventually recovered from the operation. Joe never forgot that night.
Joe and his siblings all made it out of Inwood and into solid professional careers. Johnny has had his ups and downs in business, but he has been the owner of restaurants, nightclubs, strip clubs, and liquor stores. Before she died, Bernadette was a manager at Citibank. Paul is a clinical psychologist in Long Island, and Mary is a portfolio strategist in Rochester, New York. Given the temptations and pitfalls of their childhood neighborhood, their professional success is remarkable, a testament to their parents’ strengths and their own ability to draw on those strengths. From John, they learned lessons about the ethic of work. And like Joe, they all desired to be worthy of their mother’s unconditional love.
Joe’s father may have been tough to live with, but his life can be considered a huge success because, among other reasons, he fulfilled the American immigrant dream of giving his children the ability to create lives better than his own.
His oldest son, in particular, outperformed any expectations his parents might have had for him. Joe worked hard at improving himself in all facets of his life. He participated in the athletics program at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, which, though modest, had its share of successes. (“A lot of the guys I went to school with had been held back a year or two,” says Joe. “That’s why we were pretty good at sports.”) Joe also sought out opportunities outside of school to brush up on his skills. He organized tackle football games in the park and constantly played stickball in the streets to hone his batting eye. He joined youth leagues in both football and baseball, and was on track to become a star in both sports. And despite his tough-guy façade, he studied very hard for school, fulfilling his mother’s wishes. “Joe had, like, a 100 average in seventh grade,” says Johnny. “I got really sick of the nuns asking me, ‘Why can’t you be like Joe?’”
He embraced a leadership role in his family as well, trying to make up for the attention and encouragement his siblings didn’t get from their father. “We would all go to him for advice or if we had any problems,” says Paul. Joe gave Mary a locket on her tenth birthday. He scolded Bernadette when she wore a dress that he thought was too short. He gave his parents a photo album for their fifteenth wedding anniversary that he worked on for months. And as Joe grew older, he especially loved to dote on his mother. Every few months he would give her a small present—a book, some flowers, a piece of jewelry. “It was like a competition,” says Mary. “Like he wanted to show her how he could take care of her and how much he loved her.”
Joe brought intensity to everything he did—including having fun. “I used to love working with him in the store,” says Paul. “He was hilarious. He would keep up the patter with the customers, keep everything light and make jokes. Sometimes he would take me to a local Chinese restaurant for lunch and he would have me laughing through the entire meal.”
As the children all grew into adulthood, Joe continued to take the lead when it came to family matters. He delivered the eulogies at the funerals for both of his parents, and later for Bernadette, his carefree and fun-loving sister who died in 2009 at age fifty-six after a long battle with various health problems.
Going to high school at Fordham Prep in the fall of 1963 was a huge deal for Joe. Academically, it was one of the best Catholic schools in the city. Located in the Bronx, an hour away by bus, it got him out of Inwood, at least during the daytime. And it had very good athletic teams.
Joe’s father, who was quite bright but had never gone to school, was curiously suspicious of education. (Later in life, when his daughter, Mary, graduated from law school, John told her: “I’m proud of you, but don’t go around thinking you’re better than I am.”) Frances, however, insisted that Joe and his siblings get the best schooling they could, even if it pushed the family’s budget to its limits.
Joe earned good marks at Prep. He worked hard at it, as he did at everything. Paul remembers frequently waking up late at night and seeing his brother sitting on his bed with his homework papers in his lap, lost in deep concentration.
But playing sports was what Joe enjoyed the most. It was a release from studying and working at the fruit store. He was a very good outfielder on Prep’s baseball team, with a strong arm and good discipline at the plate. He started as a sophomore and led the team in hitting all three years, batting over .400. He became the captain of the team his senior year.
He stood out even more in football. Joe made the varsity team as a sophomore, and he started on both offense (as a guard) and defense (as a linebacker). At just 180 pounds, Joe was undersized, thirty to forty pounds lighter than some of the other players. But he soon learned that he could use his mind as well as his body to get leverage over the competition. A quick study, he watched the players on the opposing teams, and turned their weaknesses to his advantage. He never missed a play in a game. In his junior year, he was viciously clipped on one of his ankles. That ankle never quite healed fully for the rest of his sports career, but he played through the pain. He wore the number 60, which seemed to be an appropriate one for an undersized, overachieving, two-way football player.
The football coach at Prep was a man named Joseph “Sammy” Ososki. He was famous for having played in the 1942 Sugar Bowl, in which he helped Prep’s parent school—Fordham University—beat the University of Missouri 2–0 in a game that was played in a driving rainstorm. Ososki was the quintessence of old school. He’d grown up in coal mine country in western Pennsylvania and, as a Marine, had survived Iwo Jima. “He was a brutal man and a brutal coach,” says Robert Sior, a high school teammate of Joe’s. “He could have never coached today.”
One of Ososki’s annual traditions in training camp was to have the team practice for six hours straight in ninety-degree heat—with no breaks for water. He screamed and he threatened his players, and slapped them when he thought they needed it. He believed you didn’t mold boys into men—you sandblasted them. Ososki was also famous for his theatrical halftime speeches. If his team was down, he would often shift the pipe in his mouth so that the smoke would waft into his eyes and make them water. He wanted the team to think that their tough old coach wanted to win so badly he was crying.
Joe knew from his experience at home how to deal with a man like Ososki. As a result, Joe thrived on the Prep team. He played hard, even when he was hurt. He was disciplined on the field and rarely made the same mistake twice. “Joe was easily one of the best players we had, a ferocious hitter,” says Sior. “And he was a leader. He really naturally took on the role of getting the team in line.” Ososki liked that.
As Joe entered his senior year at Prep, he started getting some attention for his play. Colleges around the northeast wrote him letters, mentioning athletic scholarships. “I really loved football,” says Joe. “All I wanted to do was play the game in college.” But his parents didn’t want him to leave home.
It was pretty clear where Joe’s father stood on the issue. He thought Joe’s love of sports was childish and frivolous. Like his own father before him, he believed that doing anything but working for a wage and providing for one’s family was a betrayal of masculine responsibility. He refused in any way to encourage Joe in athletics, and he let Joe know that he was angered by the fact that they took him away from the fruit store.
John never saw his son play a baseball game. And he went to exactly one of Joe’s football games, the traditional Thanksgiving Day game that pitted Prep and Xavier High School during Joe’s senior year, which would turn out to be the last football game Joe ever played. It so happened that the fruit store was closed that day.
Despite his father’s resistance Joe was prepared to leave home and go to a college to play football and perhaps even baseball. But then the one person in his life whose wishes he could never ignore stepped in. As Joe was considering offers from different colleges, his mother sat him down one night and told him that his father was unwell and that he needed him in the fruit store. “I just couldn’t say no to her,” Joe says.
It turned out that Joe had one more reason for not enrolling in some college far from home to chase his football dreams: A pretty, five-foot-six, dark-haired girl named Kathe Lutz.
Just like his father, Joe met the first true love of his life at a dance. The circumstances were a bit different, however. “I introduced them, sort of,” says Dave Hunt. Fordham Prep hosted a dance one night during Joe’s sophomore year. The school was—and remains to this day—all male, so female dance partners had to be shipped in from all-girl Catholic schools in the area.
That night Joe and Hunt decided to leave the dance early. “We were probably going to try to find some beer,” says Hunt. As they were walking out of the hall, they passed a group of older boys who had already graduated. Because of their ages, they weren’t allowed into the dance. Apparently, they found this circumstance frustrating. “As we walked by them, one of the boys just stepped up and, without saying a thing, punched me in the nose,” says Hunt. “The punch pushed my nose back up into my face and knocked me down.”
Joe went chasing after the boys while Hunt sat on the sidewalk with blood pouring down his face. “Out of nowhere, this very pretty young girl came up and asked if I was all right and gave me some tissues,” says Hunt. It was Kathe. Joe returned to Dave after a few minutes, having been unsuccessful in trying to catch the older boys. Kathe caught his eye immediately.
The two began dating. Kathe lived in Yonkers, an hour-long bus ride away for Joe. Kathe liked Joe’s confidence. “He seemed to be able to achieve whatever he set out to do,” she says. The relationship got very serious right away. With a girlfriend he wanted to stay close to and a mother insisting he was needed at home, Joe decided to forgo his college athletic career. He enrolled at Fordham University. But he would not be playing football there. Fordham—Vince Lombardi’s alma mater—had canceled its football program in 1954.
Instead, Joe buried himself in his studies and work. He majored in economics. He continued to do shifts in the fruit store. He drove a mail truck in Manhattan. He also drove a cab.
Near the end of his freshman year at Fordham, Joe began to seriously think about trying to play football again. He had pretty quickly realized that his father was not ill; his mother had just wanted to have her oldest child close and to preserve family harmony by keeping his father happy. In a rare moment of putting her own desires ahead of those of one of her children, she had misled him.
And things with Kathe, while serious, were also tempestuous. “They argued a lot,” says Johnny. “I remember one time he was on the phone with her and they were yelling at each other. When Joe hung up he started punching the wall. I said, ‘How can you let her make you get so upset?’ Then he turned from the wall and started punching me.”
Joe reached out to the colleges that had contacted him the year before. They all said he’d be welcome, but there would be no scholarships. Unfortunately, Joe couldn’t afford to go without financial support. He was stuck at Fordham.
It hit him then that he would never play football again. So he began to think about coaching. He approached the new football coach at Fordham Prep, Bruce Bott (who had succeeded Ososki when he retired), and asked if he could become an assistant. Bott said yes. Joe started with the junior varsity team, coaching the offensive and defensive lines and making $800 a year. He discovered two things very quickly: He had an aptitude for coaching, and he loved it. The fact that he never got the chance to play sports in college would always gnaw at him. But he would eventually grow to love coaching even more than he did playing.
Then Joe’s world changed. He and Kathe had been dating on and off for five years, alternating between being madly in love and never wanting to see each other again. In one two-week period in the fall of Joe’s sophomore year, they broke up for what looked like the last time; then they got back together again. During that reconciliation—one of the many they’d had over the course of their relationship—they had intercourse for the first time.
Kathe got pregnant. They were both nineteen years old.