THE FOOTNOTES

GRAMPA TONY NAPLES, AN INTERESTING MAN It has been said of Thomas Edison, imagine what he might have done if he had had an education. That puts me in mind of Grampa Tony Naples, my wife’s grandfather and probably the most interesting person I have known. Tony got off the boat from Saviano, Italy at the age of twenty seven. He spoke little English and came from a non-English culture which, in my experience meant that if you were not Irish Catholic, you weren’t all that good. He had to deal with acceptance along with everything else Tony was a stone mason, and contractor in brick laying. He was good at it, from all indications because eventually he had his own company, his own house and an awareness of the need for participation in his community. He had to work hard, sometimes riding a bike 15 miles to Bristol to work and sometimes spending the night in a unheated shack where it was so cold then beer froze. Demands on the job were tough,You did not dare misplace a brick lest you be fired/ He was a founder of St.Ann’s Church in New Britain, an Italian Parish, a founder of an Italian Society which was important to immigrants from Italy who needed a community of their own and a father of seven two of whom were boys. Italians needed to produce people who raised the perception of different people from distant lands and Tony did that,too. One son became a doctor and the other an engineer. Girls at that time did not get the education the boys got. They became the mothers who ran the households, had the dinner on the table when the husband came home for lunch, and to see to the management of the children. I met Grampa Tony when m y future wife brought me to meet her family, and I was impressed by the way non Irish Catholics lived. Tony was most interesting. He had a wine press the cellar where he used only grapes imported from California . He used te cellar like an office, reading the Italian newspaper. He held sway in the TV room where he made.observations-beginning in English and as he got excited icreasingly in Italian-- he knew that man from deKensingatony or remark ne could smell then horses In a western movie Tony was a widower when I met him, and he still had an eye for the ladies. There were eyebrows raise over what Tony and the lady from Oak Street were doing In the old chicken coop in back of the garage. I can still see him all dressed up going out for the afternoon with a sprig of basil pinned on his lapel. Tony had the ability to integrate into a foreign culture to succeed in it and to make it better than he found it. Imagine if he also had an education! Other people were impressed, too. When Tony died, his obituary was o the front page of the New Britain Herald!