Somewhere an Angel Is...?

By Joyce Heath Gagliano

Somewhere an Angel Is...? is indicative of a series of notable divine intervention occurrences in my lifetime, as well as in my husband's.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9798888519066

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1: The Sicilians

Somewhere an Angel Is Weaving a Tapestry?

2: The Texans

Somewhere…Is Braiding Threads?

3: The Gulf Coast

Somewhere…Is Passing through Storms?

4: Entering School

Somewhere…Is Watching?

5: A New Name

Somewhere…Is Preparing for War?

6: Falling in Love

Somewhere…Is Matchmaking?

7: Starting Over

Somewhere…Is Shouting, One More Time?

8: Texas Meets Sicily

Somewhere…Is Delivering a Message?

9: Meeting the Family

Somewhere…Is Plowing the Road?

10: Music, Music, Music

Somewhere…Is Humming?

11: The Wedding

Somewhere…Is Singing over the Rainbow?

12: The Honeymoon

Somewhere…Is Keeping Time?

13: The Eruption

Somewhere…Is Heating Lava?

14: Peacemaking

Somewhere…Is Mending Fences?

15: The Wounded

Somewhere…Is Troubling Water?

16: The Healing

Somewhere…Is Throwing Out the Lifeline?

17: Growing Up

Somewhere…Is Doing Something New?

18: Learning Gratitude

Somewhere…Is on Guard?

19: Revisiting the Past

Somewhere…Is Arranging Family Reunions?

20: First Visit with the Johnson Clan

Somewhere…Is Weeding a Garden?

21: The Return Home

Somewhere…Is Taking Inventory?

22: On the Road Again

Somewhere…Is Paving the Middle Road?

23: Sicily Meets Texas for Real

Somewhere…Is Changing Scenery?

24: Second Visit with the Johnsons

Somewhere…Is Antique Shopping?

25: A Miracle in the Making

Somewhere…Is Having a Field Day?

26: A New Traveling Companion

Somewhere…Is Checking Out Kennels?

27: As Time Grows Short

Somewhere…Is Holding Back the Tides?

28: As Life Changes

Somewhere…Is Keeping On?

29: Starting Over

Somewhere…Is Preparing Memoirs?

30: To Begin Again

Somewhere…Is Whispering, One More Time?

31: Alone Again

Somewhere…Is Silent or Absent?

32: Alone but Never Alone

Somewhere…Is Always Hovering?

33: A New Horizon

Somewhere…Is Digging Up the Past?

34: Another Beginning?

Somewhere…Is Doing What Now?

35: Been There, Done That!

Somewhere…Waiting?

Epilogue

Somewhere…Is Watching?

About the Author

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Somewhere an Angel Is...?

Joyce Heath Gagliano

ISBN 979-8-88851-905-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88851-906-6 (Digital)

Copyright © 2024 Joyce Heath Gagliano

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

In loving memory of my husband,

Vincent Joseph Gagliano

(Vincenzo Giuseppe Gagliano)

Acknowledgments

There are friends and colleagues to whom I wish to express my sincerest gratitude for their help and participation in this work. It never entered my head to take on such a task, but Ms. Sheela Wolford, tutor of college English, was the ringleader. She started the assault that led me to at least try it. I met her in Mercy College's Bronx, New York, Campus Learning Center, where most of us adjunct teachers tutored our students when we weren't in the classrooms teaching. Other colleagues who helped Sheela push me into this from listening to my storytelling about my life with my husband are Professors Avril Forde, Alba Nolan, Linda Faigao-Hall (author and playwright of The Female Heart), and Maria Mordan (math tutor), who, along with Avril Forde, kept me supplied with meals when I was burned out of my apartment in 2012. Linda started a little writing club, so those of us who were writing something would meet once a month and read and critique each other's work. After a semester or two, Linda became too busy with productions of her plays, so we stopped meeting, but we got into another club that was started at Mercy College: Shut Up and Write, which was run by Shari Berkowitz. In this one, we didn't read each other's work—we just wrote, undisturbed, for three hours at each meeting with a very short lunch break. This wonderful opportunity ended with the pandemic.

Anna Marie Sill, a dear friend and colleague (teacher of mentally challenged children in schools in Winston Salem, North Carolina), has been reading and critiquing this work since the beginning and has been a mainstay throughout my labor and dry spells. Every single one of these intelligent, kind, and loving ladies has my love and sincerest gratitude for all the help and knowledge they have passed onto me throughout the years. I cannot thank God enough for putting each and every one of these precious souls in my path to hold me up in my journey of teaching and writing.

Prologue

It was New Year's Eve in 2008, and I was sitting in my sister-in-law's solarium, in Frederick, Illinois, watching the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performing at Lincoln Center in New York City. I found myself searching for faces that I might recognize among the musicians. I began to remember that I had often dreamed of leaving the small Texas town where I grew up and going to New York in the hope of seeking a singing career. But never, in my most outlandish and wildest dreams, did it ever enter my head that I would one day be looking for the giants in the business who performed in that world-famous orchestra—giants whom my husband and I had known and worked with in the recording industry many, many moons ago. I recognized no one, so I concluded that my husband and I had outlived them all. Attacks of nostalgia are frequent these days. My husband had passed away on January 3, 2008, at the age of eighty-seven, and his sister's husband had died a few weeks before, on December 11, 2007. She had been married for fifty-six years to a war hero—a retired colonel. She lost him and her brother within several weeks.

I had been married to her brother—a vocal and musician contractor, bassist, singer, producer-arranger, songwriter, and ultimately, recording engineer—for fifty years; so she and I were close friends as well as sisters. Needless to say, it was not a very happy time for either of us.

I had a glorious star-spangled life with my husband, Vinnie Gagliano, as he was well known in the music business when I met him. We worked together, played together, traveled together, laughed and cried together, and fought together, as well as with each other. He was my mate, my lover, and my best friend. After he retired from the recording business, we took two trips a year: We drove to Texas every July, to visit my family, and returned to New York via Illinois to visit his sister and her family. Vinnie was family oriented and believed that all holidays should be spent with family. So, on Christmas Day, since Illinois was the closest, we always drove to his sister's to spend New Year's Eve with her and her family. We couldn't leave before Christmas Day because I was committed to singing in the midnight mass concert in a Catholic Church—St. Clare's Parish—in the Bronx.

After our husbands passed away, we planned on continuing with this tradition without them, and that's how I happened to be in Illinois on that New Year's Eve. When my sister-in-law, Giugi (short for Josephine), and I got together, we mostly shopped, ate, watched DVDs, exchanged memories on how God has blessed us both during our time apart, and reminisced about our husbands. Both of us had remarkable marriages, and both of us had many tales of wonder to tell. With her husband, Col. Robert L. Johnson, Giugi has lived and educated her children all over the world; she, herself, became bilingual, as she learned to speak every language from each country in which they took up residence wherever Bob happened to be deployed. They also collected artifacts and antique furniture from almost every nation on the planet; so their home, an antique itself (one of many in Schyler County, Illinois), was a showplace, indeed! Vinnie and I were fortunate to have met many of their friends while they were visiting the Johnsons during the summers or Christmas vacations. However, this New Year's Eve was the first one that Giugi and I were to spend alone—just the two of us—waiting for the famous ball to drop which announced the birth of 2009, while thousands were watching it live in Times Square and watching the famous orchestra playing in the famous city we both loved and talked about. It was a magical place to both of us, and I was caught up in its spell the second I set foot on its pavement in Grand Central Station in the summer of 1956.

It was suggested to me by friends and colleagues that I should write all my memories since I neglected to keep a diary of our exciting lives together. It was brought to my attention so many times, particularly when I would be telling a story about Vinnie, that I decided to at least give it a shot. There is no mistake in seeing God's hand throughout both of our histories. It was He Who arranged our meeting even though we lived and grew up thousands of miles apart. It was He Who prepared us both for that meeting even though we grew up in two different cultures. It is His angels who carried out His orders in joining not only Vinnie and myself but our two families as well. It has been an exciting and rewarding time, and tracing the Hand of God throughout our journey has been, and still is, more than thrilling.

1

The Sicilians

Somewhere an Angel Is Weaving a Tapestry?

Vincenzo Giuseppe Gagliano, son of Lucia and Leo Lucca Gagliano, was born in New York City at midnight on March 30, 1920. Before migrating to the United States, Lucy and Louie (as they were usually called) had not known each other in their home town of Corleone, Sicily. They met after both of them had migrated to the United States.

Around 1915, sixteen-year-old Lucy set sail on a ship from Corleone, alone, to New York City to visit her two brothers, Tomasino and Carlo, who had gone there some years before via South America. They had left home many years earlier, established a business in mid-Manhattan, and had no intentions of ever going back to Sicily.

From what I've learned about it, I don't believe the brothers ever had any intentions of sending Lucy back either. When she arrived, she settled in with her brothers right away. She didn't speak a word of English, so she didn't go to school. She was totally family oriented, and she really loved and missed her family back home, but she also loved her brothers and knew they needed her. She cleaned their house, did their laundry, and cooked for them as long as they lived, which, incidentally, wasn't very long.

Lucy was a teenager in a foreign country living with two older brothers. One day, her brother Tomasino was in the bathroom shaving when he had a heart attack. He was suffering from the Spanish influenza epidemic at the time. When he fell, his body wedged the door shut and prevented her from getting to him to help. He was already dead when the firemen arrived and removed the door. Lucy never recovered from that trauma. Until the day she died, if anyone stayed more than two minutes in her bathroom, she would knock on the door and yell, You okay in there? At times, that became very annoying, but we realized that it was done with love; everything she did was out of love.

With one brother gone, Lucy began to help herself as best she could. Fortunately, some of her other relatives, cousins, also began to migrate from Corleone and looked her up. It was through them that she reconnected with the Gaglianos and began dating Louie. She also began to teach herself English and studied for the citizenship test. She passed it and became a citizen of the United States of America. She was very proud of this accomplishment, and her children were proud as well.

Eventually, Lucia Gulotta married Leo Lucca Gagliano, and they had four children: two boys and two girls. Their second son, Joey, died of whooping cough before he was six months old. Vinnie was one and a half at the time. Annette was born two years later; and the baby, Giugi (Josephine), was born four years after that. According to Annette, the family moved into an apartment on 107th Street. They had a small apartment with a relatively large kitchen in the middle. In a Sicilian home, the kitchen is the main room, and this kitchen was the center of the apartment with the bedrooms and living room off to the sides. They didn't have a regular bathroom; they had a water closet, and the sink was outside the water closet in the kitchen next to the bathtub (many of these types of apartments still exist in the Bronx's little Italy today). The bathtub had a lid, so it also served as a kitchen table. This area was very important to Giugi. She had always wanted to be a ballet dancer: So, because the floor sloped toward the tub, she pretended it was the sloping Paris opera stage. Performing to the music on her radio, she would frequently dance toward the tub and the invisible audience.

Tragedy had only begun to assault Lucy Gagliano. Her marriage did not last. Lucy let Louie know that it was over by carrying out the old Sicilian tradition: She washed and ironed all his clothes, took the scissors and cut each garment up the back in half, packed them all neatly in his suitcase, and left it outside the door with a note saying, Our marriage is cut in half; do not return. She would not grant him a divorce because they had been married in God's eyes. However, her actions symbolized a clean break, and she knew since it was against God's law, she would never marry again.

Lucy's brother Vincenzo came to America much later via South America. When he arrived in New York, he opened a grocery store with a partner. He lived with his sister, Lucy, and her three children. Vinnie was about eleven years old when his uncle Vincenzo came to live with them. His presence in the house was a blessing, indeed. Since he owned a grocery store, he helped bring food into the house to help his sister and family, so they had no worries about where the next meal was coming from. However, this blessing was to be short-lived.

Legend has it that Vincenzo's death was a case of mistaken identity, but it took its toll on the family, nonetheless. He was shot and killed in his grocery store. Lucy, though not in the store at the time even though it was near where they lived, was a witness to its aftermath. She wasn't allowed in the building; but a policeman informed her, not knowing who she was, that the owner of the store had been murdered and no one could go into the crime scene. She was devastated to say the least.

Once again, Lucy was on her own—alone, with three children to raise and support. Her son was ten years old when the Great Depression started, but thanks to God and her brother, Vincenzo, they didn't feel the effects of it until his death. So Lucy got a job in a sewing factory. Before she went to work there, she took in homework by taking advantage of the Cottage Industry Program, which was peculiar to that era. The program allowed women to take piecework and sew it all together at home. They would get paid when they brought the work back. That way, Lucy didn't have to leave the children home alone. She managed to keep them all eating with a meager amount of help from friends and family. She didn't like to accept help from anyone because everyone was in the same financial shape, and she didn't feel comfortable taking da food out of a someone else's da mouth. She used to say in her broken English, Even if ya had a little money to a buy a blanka, there weren't any to a buya. Those were hard times for everybody, so she wasn't alone in her troubles. The whole country suffered with her.

Even though Lucy was separated from her husband, she was still a Gagliano, and so were her children, so her father-in-law helped her a bit. He was especially fond of his grandson Vinnie, his namesake, and would give him money whenever he could. Lucy's in-laws also watched her girls occasionally while she worked. One of her sisters-in-law was only a year younger than Vinnie, so Lucy's children grew up with their aunt Tessie. Lucy would take Tessie with them when she took her children to the park on weekends. Once they were all in school, Lucy's son, Vinnie, took care of them for her. He was also a good cook, and he always had something ready for his mother to eat when she came home from work.

Lucy couldn't afford to spoil her children. They were as independent as she was. Her independence came from depending on God, and her faith was unshakable. She was a staunch Catholic, and her children were raised in the church. They were taught to believe that everything would be all right sooner or later, and according to them all, it usually was. They had a happy life together because they loved each other and had faith in God.

One evening, when Lucy was on her way home from work, she had only a few coins in her possession; it was not enough to buy anything before payday. So, as she passed a church, she thought of the scripture about the poor woman who gave all she had to the church and was commended for her gift by Jesus, Himself (Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4). Since all Lucy had wasn't enough to do her any good, she dropped it into the poor box at the church with a prayer that perhaps it would do some good elsewhere combined with other donations.

Lucy was a deeply spiritual person, and I learned a lot about the peace of God that the world cannot give and does not understand from her. Everything's ah gonna to be all right, she'd say with her Sicilian accent. Just ah pray to God to give ah you the strength ah to hang on until it is. Her prayers included lighting candles and keeping them lit until the prayer was answered. According to Giugi, she had so many lit candles to the saints around the house that they were fearful that the whole place would go up in flames.

Vinnie's sister Annette was the family's anchor. She was more interested in the welfare of others than a career, her own concerns, desires, and needs; and she was always singing and cheerful. She had a beautiful singing voice but never pursued a career in music. Vinnie once said that he felt she had stepped aside for him, again and again.

Annette was a very popular girl, whereas Giugi was a loner, like her brother, and a bookworm with few friends. Annette was very sociable, and the guys liked her. She was always out on a date, while Giugi was home reading and listening to classical music. I remember Mama Lucy saying, Giugi always wanted to sing and dance. Now she sings and dances in the kitchen. Annette had many opportunities to marry, but none interested her beyond social engagements because family always came first. Growing up without a father hit her harder than it did her two siblings. Therefore, she chose to stay close to her mother.

Vinnie's showmanship surfaced very early. He auditioned for parts in all school plays and other events in elementary, middle school, and high school. God had seen to it that Lucy had been well trained in her factory working experience, so she made his costumes whenever the need called for it. In one play, he was Pinocchio, and she made the costume. It was preserved and became a trophy in the family. I remember seeing it.

Vinnie graduated from Ben Franklin High School in East Harlem. He won many awards throughout his years there for coordinating, producing, and directing plays and musical events. It was there he also learned to play the standup bass fiddle and did musical gigs in the high school orchestra and in professional orchestras and bands. He joined the musicians' union, Local 802, and did fairly well as a bassist. Musicians' jobs were hard to come by during the Depression.

With two younger sisters still in school, Vinnie needed a steady paying job to help out with expenses. So he went to work in a lamp factory. We believed that God's intervention was responsible for that job! Here is where he learned the electronic techniques that would serve him very well as a recording engineer much later in life, a profession he had no idea that he would pursue at that time and that would become his greatest success. It seems that hard times are a training ground for what's in the future and nothing is wasted. I refer to these evidences of God's unseen ordinances as close encounters with angels. There were quite a few of them in both of our lives that seemed to be leading us toward each other.

Vinnie also worked in burlesque for a short while. He was a good dancer, too, so he sang and danced in theaters. In burlesque, he was known as Vince Dragna. He would be center stage singing A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody while a chorus line of naked women paraded behind him. It wasn't the ideal job, but he met a lot of people who helped him make some good connections in the music business. Jazz singer Lena Horne was one of them.

According to Vinnie, Mama Lucy was a gypsy; she liked to move around a lot, so the four of them went to California to visit other Sicilian relatives who had settled in San Francisco and the San Fernando Valley. Annette fell in love with the west coast. She had graduated high school and had a good job with the Railway Express. But when it was time to go home, she chose to stay in California, so her job transferred her there, and there she stayed. Giugi had gotten into modeling and wanted to stay, too, but her mother didn't think it was a good idea because she was too young and had not finished high school. One of Vinnie's friends, Gus Weinstein, agreed with her.

Gus is a midget; he and Vinnie went through high school together, and they were very close. It was said that whenever there was a fight in the school yard, while the guys were duking it out, Gus would hold their coats for them! Little Gus, of course, was in The Wizard of Oz, but he also starred in another film under a different name. It's a western The Terror of Tiny Town (a great movie for children); all of the actors are midgets who fly across the screen on Shetland ponies; Gus is the heavy (villain) in the film. To my surprise, he showed himself to be quite a horseman!

Gus was pretty brassy himself, so he had no qualms about telling Giugi not to be stupid, and to go home and stay with her mother until she grew up! According to Giugi, Gus cornered her in a Hollywood hotel lobby with a loud scolding that brought her to tears. To the surprise of onlookers and because Gus looked like a child instead of a grown man, he yelled, It is not safe or moral for a young beautiful girl to be unaccompanied by a family member in Hollywood! You are just asking for trouble, young lady. Go home with your mother, where you belong!

Giugi had been traveling in the company of fashion giants, like Oleg Cassini, so she was thoroughly crushed by Gus's outburst. She was also embarrassed by people watching who probably thought this little boy was telling off a grown woman. She told me about another incident where she embarrassed herself while having breakfast with the famous designer by the hotel swimming pool. Giugi became a very outgoing and friendly person, and since Cassini was in a melancholy mood, she took it upon herself to cheer him up with some Christian advice. As she was preaching, she was trying to cut into a piece of bacon; it slipped from under the knife, flew up in the air, and landed in the pool. She claims they both ignored it, but she probably did succeed in cheering him up at that.

Lucy returned home to New York because she was only on vacation from her job in the sewing factory, and Giugi had to go with her. Vinnie stayed a little longer and auditioned for the lead role in the movie Valentino. He didn't get the part, but he certainly was better looking than the actor who did. However, I thank God that he did not succeed in this endeavor, which brought him right back to the east coast, or I would have never met him. It certainly wasn't his lack of talent that lost him that role; I believe that, again, it was divine intervention. At any rate, everybody in the family was working then, so life was getting a lot easier.

Except for one thing… Vinnie had begun suffering with duodenal ulcers at age sixteen. Not too much was known about ulcers or how to treat them at that time, so for the most part, diet was of the utmost importance. His main diet consisted of Gerber's baby food. It seemed like every two years he suffered from bleeding ulcers. In spite of this problem, he continued to work in the entertainment field.

However, it was believed at that time that stress was the major cause of ulcers and only a bland diet controlled them. Therefore, nobody was allowed to cause Vinnie any stress so as not to irritate his ulcers. How anybody can live any kind of a life without stress is beyond me, but Mama Lucy and her girls believed it, and so naturally, they spoiled him rotten. As a result, he was a very picky eater, so he had the first choice of food. For example, he only liked the white meat of the chicken and turkey; therefore, everybody else had to eat the dark meat whether they liked it or not. Annette used to complain that the roast beef always had to be cooked to death and tasted like leather (she liked it very rare) and the vegetables had to be all but mush (she liked them on the crisp side). The rest of the family liked all kinds of fish, but Vinnie only liked tuna with no mayonnaise or vinegar on anything, only oil and lemon. He also liked shrimp, but that was it. He dictated the menu, and they all had to eat it.

Grace was said at every meal. Mama Lucy always reminded the girls of the times when they had very little and could afford to squander nothing. God had brought them all safely through the hard times, so the least they could do was sacrifice a little for their brother. They could eat what they liked when they went out to eat at a restaurant on their own or on a date.

In spite of his illness, Vinnie continued to pursue and work in the entertainment field. He met and was befriended by Ernie Fiorito (songwriter, arranger, conductor, and transcriber); all his gifts and talents he taught to Vinnie, who made very good money as a transcriber for many years. Ernie always passed all his overflow to Vinnie, and through Ernie, he became very well connected in the music field. Vinnie also learned to write scripts for half-hour television shows. A popular one, The Armchair Theater was one of his accomplishments.

Vinnie was doing well financially in his early thirties, so he married Patricia Hill Fowler; in 1950, he had a daughter he named after his mother: Lucia. Meanwhile, Vinnie's baby sister met and married a West Point graduate, whom she had been dating while he was a cadet, so the wedding was at West Point and Vinnie, acting in the place of their father, gave his sister away to Lieutenant Robert L. Johnson. It was a December wedding so there was snow on the ground. When the service ended, the gorgeous bride in her beautiful wedding gown and veil lost her footing on the ice, and with both feet in the air, landed flat on her keister! Much to Giugi's chagrin, it was an event that kept all who were in attendance (and are still living) laughing and retelling it to keep the memory alive. After that, they went to Fort Bragg, the Eighty-Second Airborne and Bob was deployed to the war in Korea.

Vinnie's marriage ended when Lucia was 18 months old, and he was awarded complete custody of her, so he needed help to raise her. He was sick, and his only income was not a steady or reliable paycheck since it came from transcribing music arrangements every so often. Meanwhile, dear little Gus came to his aid with a steady job offer.

Gus had landed a job with the Philip Morris Company doing commercials as one of the Philip Morris Johnny's, the little bellhop who went through hotel lobbies yelling, Caaall forrr Philip Morrreees. Gus had commitments all over the country and wanted Vinnie to be his road manager which, for one thing, meant driving him to all his appearances (divine intervention). So, once again, like the biblical woman who gave all she had, Mama Lucy gave up her pension and quit her job in the garment factory to raise her granddaughter so her son could work and go on tour with Gus. He was like a family member. Gus would call the house to talk to Vin, and he would say, This is Gus; and if Mama Lucy answered the phone, she would say, Guess who. and he would say, Gus, Gus, and she would say, Yes, but guess who. It became a comedy routine between them that lasted many years.

Since Bob was in Korea and wounded, a very pregnant Giugi had gone back to California to wait for her husband's return; so Lucy went there, too, with Lucia, to be with her two daughters since Vinnie was on the road with Gus.

Vinnie had to get a chauffeur's license for the job; but the company, of course, provided the car: a little sports car, the tiny MG. He and Gus had a great time together traveling all over, meeting new people (especially girls) and smoking cigarettes! They had to smoke; no smoking, no paycheck, not that they minded. Almost everybody smoked in those days. They also stood on street corners all over the country giving out complimentary cigarettes, four per pack, in cute little mini cardboard cigarette boxes. Gus did radio shows as well as personal appearances and his friend, Vinnie, was always right there with him.

Sometimes, when Gus was busy with personal stuff, Vinnie would take the MG and go sightseeing alone. Since his marriage broke up, he was even more of a loner and enjoyed time away from everybody and everything. On one of his sightseeing trips, his car was forced off the road by an eighteen-wheeler semi. The MG turned over, more than once, and Vinnie's back was broken, but he was alive, praise God! The nearest town was White Deer, Texas; it's not even on the map. It's one of those towns in which there is only a gas station on one side of the road, a country store and small restaurant on the other side, and a stop sign on both sides of the two-lane highway to make sure that motorists won't fly by and miss the three business establishments. Since it is a sparsely traveled road, help did not come for several hours.

In a rural Texas hospital, Vinnie was put in a cast from his skull to his hip and flown back to New York City. He stayed with his cousin, Joe Gulotta, until his mom returned from California. Joe was the son of Carlo, Lucy's brother, whom she lived with when she first arrived in New York.

One more time, Mama Lucy was facing Murphy's Law: Giugi had just given birth to her first child, a daughter, Fabienne, when she got the news that Bob had been badly wounded at Little Gibraltar and was being sent home. It was then she got the call from Joe, her cousin, about Vinnie's accident. Further developments had occurred: Vinnie was back in the hospital with a profusely bleeding ulcer. Joe said that he fainted from loss of blood, and it was pouring out of his mouth. When he was falling, Joe didn't know where to grab him because of the huge cast he had recently acquired.

Where to run was not an easy decision for Mama Lucy, but she decided on the east coast. Giugi's husband, Bob, had lost his leg. He'd caught a piece of shrapnel in his left leg, and the medic had put a tourniquet on him so he wouldn't bleed to death, but he was too long in the field before reaching hospital facilities. Gangrene had already set in, and the amputation was necessary to save his life. However, Annette was still working on the west coast, so she could look after her sister. Therefore, back to New York Lucy went on the train, a three-day trip, with little Lucia on her lap.

Lucy stayed in New York to take care of her son and his daughter. Because of these events in Vinnie's life, the entire family was thoroughly convinced that stress, beyond a shadow of a doubt, definitely caused ulcers. The divorce, the accident, and ultimately the loss of his job with Philip Morris were proof positive that stress was to blame.

Vinnie recovered and went back to work with his old friend, Ernie, transcribing music scores and arrangements. Cigarette companies were beginning to feel the heat from cancer researchers and were starting to cool it with their commercials. Gus was getting too old to play Johnny anymore, anyway, so the two friends had to part company and go their separate ways. We later learned that Gus married Olive Brasno, also