July 21, 2011
[ed. note: This just arrived from Larry; it is in reference to the entry on Lucky Luciano]

Jeff,

Great story that brought me back to Napoli and 1959, as a barely nineteen-year-old who had arrived fresh from a year of US Navy electronic and instructor schools for a posting to Naval Air Facility Capodichino. I have told you about my instant fascination with Napoli and making the transition from speaking Spanish to Italian facilitated by my taking a tiny apartment on Cupa Carbone, a stone's throw literally across a wooden fence from the American base which in a fenced off area just down from the Italian civilian airport facilities.

A large gray Mercedes bus shuttled us between the Capodichino air base and Piazza Municipio which was a central hangout with the enlisted Bluebird Club, and all sorts of other bars and even a huge pizzaria on the second floor of a large building on the corner of Via Medina and Piazza Municipio above where the entrance to Monte Dei Paschi di Siena bank is today.

Across the piazza roughly around where via Verdi comes into the piazza from Via Santa Brigida there was the California Bar which attracted lots of American sailors as well as locals. I was having a great time trying to communicate, learning Italian and, unwittingly, mimicking the strong local Neapolitan accent and vernacular. I had developed a friendly repartee with a waiter in the California Bar and he found it a novelty that an American was trying so hard to learn to speak Italian. 

One afternoon I stopped in the California Bar and there was just one other person, an older man sitting alone at a table. As I bantered with the barrista, the man at the table smiled and motioned me over. He was nicely dressed, very friendly and he complimented me on my Italian. Really a nice old guy. I asked him how he learned his English so well and he allowed as how he "had lived in the states" and that he always liked meeting "you young fellows stationed here." Sort of like talking to a favorite old uncle.

I saw him a couple of more times and wrote my parents that I had met the nicest interesting old man, an Italian who had lived in the USA, a Mr. Luciano, but everyone called him "Lucky." I got a stern almost screaming letter from my father who told me to stay away from the man and not to talk to him ever again because he was a notorious gangster.

I was sure father had bad information, but after mentioning this to one of the guys who had been stationed there a couple of years he told me that Lucky Luciano did indeed hang out at the California Bar and that he had been deported by the US government and that it was best not to even be seen with him. So I quit going to the California Bar and never saw my friend "Lucky" again.

A few months before I was was discharged, ready to return to Texas and enter the University of Texas, all the newspapers had a photo of a well dressed man sprawled on the pavement at the entrance to Capodichino airport where the US Naval Air Facility was located . . . and, incidentally,  just across the fence from Cupa Carbone and not far from my little apartment. In the photo he was being lifted into a plain wooden coffin. Someone had taken what looked like a cushion from a chair inside the airport lobby and thoughtfully placed it under the head and shoulders of the man who had collapsed and died. He was sixty-five years old.

As a gangly kid from Aransas Pass, Texas who knew nothing at all about gangster mobs, or for that matter, not about much of anything at all outside South Texas, it was one of many real life history lessons I got while living in bella Napoli.          

---

Aug. 9, 2011

"...I have not picked up either my alto or tenor saxes or my flute in a long time. When I quit playing second tenor with a local 16-piece big band in the late 1990's, I finally stopped playing for the first time since high school days in the 1950's. Played all the way through 4 years in the Navy including the almost three years in Napoli with our little six- piece pop band, "I Saraceni," with my Italian buddies including Corrado Cimmino whose family had a music and record store on Via Santa Brigida across from the entrance to the Galleria. I bought a tenor sax there, met Corrado who is my age and we formed the band and played gigs at the Circolo Calabrese, and spot gigged at the Sombrero Club which you may remember at Piazza Vittoria. It was a cozy walk-down piano bar in a corner building that fronted on the bay. Romano Mussolini was a regular and we all played together and even joined Romano playing at a private party in an incredible private apartment in one of the buildings at Piazza Bovio.

"Those connections greatly helped me learn decent Italian and ultimately I was emcee for a NATO variety act broadcast live on Silvio Noto's "Punto Contro Punto" out of the RAI studios in the Mostra d'Oltremare. That was really well received and we were asked to do a repeat performance as a fund raiser for the Vigili Urbani retirement fund which we did at the Teatro Politeama. This was the time Chubby Checker's "Twist" was the rage. We had a Country & Western segment with American kids square dancing with the cowboy garb and girls in long red dresses and I, skinny as a rail, wearing a fancy white Western style shirt and red bandanna around my neck, was a real novelty speaking in Italian, all carefully rehearsed show biz lines prepared by one of the friends in a group of intellectual young locals who had adopted me as their mascot... Orazio Orlando, who became a famous actor and died early in his life in the 1980's..."

---

Nov 21, 2011
"...This kind of weather brings back some powerful memories of moments in Napoli when I was 19 years old.

"Do they still have the street vendors with the caldarroste being toasted over a barrel with hot coals in it and a wok-like steel bowl on top full of the red hot chestnuts with their shells starting to crack open?  I remember a thick piece of wet burlap over the top, and a pile of newspaper on the sidewalk that was used to create a large cone into which the red hot delights would be placed for customers.

"The Fall weather was quite chilly in the evenings in 1959. I had just gotten paid, and taken a ride into town on the big gray US Navy Mercedes bus from the Naval Air Facility on the airport at Capodichino down to the central Piazza Municipio. The large sized Italian paper money was still being used and I had exchanged my dollars for a huge roll of the ornate and almost cloth-like bills that measured about seven inches high and eleven inches long.

"Walking up to Piazza Trieste and Trento, I was delighted with a little old man, not much taller than the steel barrel that he was using as a stove, burning strips of wood all set up on a sidewalk. He was so engaging and almost gnome-like as he touted his caldarroste, or "hot roasteds" (that is what it sounded like, not sure of the spelling in dialect) all heaped in a large circular pan atop the coals in the barrel and covered with a damp square of burlap.

"I wasn't quite sure what was in the pan but I told him I wanted some in my halting Italian, already with a Neapolitan accent. With a well practiced flourish, he, like a magician, pulled out a sheet of newspaper and in what seemed only one or two moves, produced the nice paper cone, filled it with lots of hot roasted chestnuts and rolled over the top to seal them in. He gestured that I should put the steamy packet inside my coat to keep me warm. I understood immediately and I gestured back pulling my coat tightly to me with my two forearms atop one another indicating "keeping warm." So much of daily communication in Naples is done without a word being spoken.

"I whipped out a large cinquemila lire bill the size of half a tabloid newspaper sheet, which was a lot of dough I guess in 1959, rolled it into a cone and paid him with it thanking him, again in my halting Italian. He radiated such genuine surprise, happiness and gratitude for my largesse and a sense of exchanging mutual humor with this unusual tall, skinny American kid. This was among the early personal moments that lured me deeper and deeper into the heart and soul of Napoli."