Son of a Musician

By John Marinello

We all have our dreams. We all want to be someone or something special in our lives.

In this book, you will read about a small-town boy who wanted nothing more than to become a stock car driver and, as a fifteen-year-old teenager, became one. I hope you will enjoy this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662415104

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Son of a Musician

John Marinello

Copyright © 2020 John Marinello

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-6624-1509-8 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-1510-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

This book has been written with the hope that it can help the sons of fathers understand why fathers want their sons to follow in their footsteps and help fathers understand why their sons may not want to.

Introduction

We all have our dreams. We all want to be someone or something special in our lives.

In this book, you will read about a small-town boy who wanted nothing more than to become a stock car driver and, as a fifteen-year-old teenager, would become one. I hope you will enjoy this book.

Chapter 1

November 25, 1963, just two days after the brutal assassination of the United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, I was born.

I was the second son of a musician by the name of Victor Joseph Marinello Sr., and my mother was Edith Marie Marinello.

The day, as I was told, was calm and bright, a beautiful Indian summer day. I was born ninety miles northwest of New York City, in a small upper New York State town called Monticello. I had two older brothers, named Earl Albert Conklin Jr., after his father from my mother’s previous marriage, and Victor J. Jr.

We lived in a nice big white house on Hammond Street. My mother worked as a waitress in a local Italian restaurant known as the Rustic Inn. It has since then become an insurance agency that sells auto, life, and health insurance. My mother, as a waitress, supported three kids on whatever tip money she made. My mother and father were divorced, so she raised us on her own. My mother used to teach my brothers and me a lot about God. She also taught us to respect our elders. If we ever were disrespectful, she would punish us with a punishment that would fit the occasion.

Although she was strict and tough, she raised us to be very proud men. Even though my mother was tough, she never forgot how to mother us kids. Sometimes I wonder how a woman alone could be so tough yet so tender.

My father worked as a trumpet player in a local hotel in Monticello. My father retired, moved to Florida, and has since passed. He was a musician for thirty-three years. He sure was a good trumpet player, but as time went on and he got older, he just couldn’t play that well anymore. I never spent a lot of time with my father because as a musician, he usually played a lot of gigs at night and the nights were long. When you are a musician, after you play your set, you mingle with the big names in show business. Some musicians would party backstage, drink alcohol, and try drugs such as marijuana, pills, and cocaine. He would be so tired from partying that he would spend most of the day trying to sleep off the night before. Not all musicians would party like that, but my father sure did. I guess that is why I could never get comfortable around him.

I must admit, though, my father never forgot my or both my brothers’ birthdays. He would always call to wish us Happy birthday or Merry Christmas. He also called to wish us well when he heard that we weren’t feeling well. He just was from another way of life, a lifestyle that was different from everyone else. He had to live his life in the way he felt comfortable and in his own way. I guess we all do.

Someone once told me We are all destined to be what we are, and he was right.

My father was from New Jersey. He was of the Catholic religion, and he loved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. When I was born, he named me John Fitzgerald Marinello after a man he admired. He spoke highly of President Kennedy. He spoke of how President Kennedy was the United States’ first Catholic president and what a great man he was. He spoke of the things he did and the things he tried to do for the country. My father always told me, John, I gave you a great name after a great man. Be proud of that name. It makes me feel better that I gave you his name. I was too young then to know what my father meant by his praise of this man. It was only later in life, through my school years and teenage years, I was able to understand what my father’s words meant. My father was right. President Kennedy was a great man; he was someone my father looked up to. He was someone my father learned from. I don’t really remember too clearly of that stage of my life, so let’s move on to the year 1974, where my memory is much clearer.

In the year 1974, I was eleven years old. My oldest brother, Earl—or half-brother, whichever you prefer—was seventeen, and my brother Victor was twelve. My mother was thirty-seven and was still working as a waitress at the Rustic Inn. Monticello was becoming a town filled with drugs and trouble, so my mother felt it was unfit for us to be raised in. Plus, with her working as a waitress, the mortgage on the house had become too much for her to handle. So we moved to a bungalow colony on Joyland Road in Monticello, where she could afford the monthly rent. It was a quiet neighborhood, and she felt we were away from drugs and other corruptions there.

One night, around the month of April, my mother was tending bar at the Rustic Inn when she met her soon-to-be third husband, Ralph. They were married in June of 1974. So once again, we moved into a much bigger house, which was owned and built by my stepfather, Ralph.

The house was big, and it was beautiful. It was a house that had four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. It also had a finished basement and a two-car garage. The house was built with redwood and cherry wood. The walls in the kitchen facing the front of the house were made of glass separated by redwood beams, which made each segment of glass shaped in a perfect square. The living room also had glass walls finished in the same fashion. The house was on three acres of land with woods, grass, and open fields surrounding it. It was set back in the woods in Sullivan County’s Monguap Valley. The swinging bridge reservoir was our backyard, and it was big too. The swinging bridge reservoir was nine miles from end to end. It was a perfect quiet surrounding with a one-lane country road that separated the forests of beautiful pine, oak trees, and big rocks. The road never had a lot of traffic on it, except for late summer. People would bring their boats out to go on the lake and go picnicking at the campgrounds at both the Swinging Bridge and Starlite Marinas.

We, my brothers and my friends, never really had to worry about a lot of traffic. We would ride our bikes, and I would ride my self-built soapbox derby racer down the big, steep hill in front of my house.

My friends liked my soapbox derby car; it was made of wood, and it had four wheels on it that I took off an old lawnmower I found in the woods. It was blue and maybe five feet long and two feet wide. It had room for only one, and that was the driver; needless to say, that driver was me. I steered it with a piece of rope, which was tied to the front axle. It didn’t have any brakes, so if you wanted to stop, you had to hit something. There was plenty of trees around, so the only choice I had to make was to pick the tree I wanted to hit. It wasn’t very long before every kid in the neighborhood had a soapbox derby car. In the summertime, when school was out, we would have races. I usually won them all.

I loved the summer, when the sun was always shining and it was warm outside. I loved more that I didn’t have to go to school. I didn’t like school. I didn’t want to be there, and all too often, I would get into arguments with teachers. I only wanted to race my soapbox derby car. I had a few friends, though, and we always got along.

On Saturdays and sometimes on Sunday, after dinner, I would go outside. I usually would get to go to Middletown with my stepfather, Ralph. We would leave usually at 7:00 a.m. and stop at a little diner just off Route 17 to have breakfast. Ralph would have two fried eggs and coffee, while I would have a fried egg on a hard roll with coffee. I didn’t talk loud enough, and sometimes the waitress wouldn’t hear me when I placed my order, so Ralph would sometimes yell at me. When breakfast was over, we got back into Ralph’s 1972 Buick Rivera that