My great grandfather immigrated to the U.S. as a boy from Foggia, a town near Bari on the Adriatic coast. He came over alone and settled into a community not far from the docks. His wife hailed from the Mediterranean, a small town in Campania called, Caposele. It wasn’t until I met an Italian who moored his boat there that I understood the true name of the town as Caposele. To transcribe the dialect, I might have written, “Cahbootzale”. My great grandmother was a teenager when she married and never mastered English. I spent childhood days tailing her around, but I don’t recall speaking with her much. I remember watching her peel a pear, peel a grape. Talk about knife skills. She could unravel fruit in a single peel, left-handed, while petting a cat. Her name was Marianna but we called her Nanny. I think the nickname was a fusion of ‘Anna’ and ‘nonna’ (Italian, for grandmother). All the family names were Anglified: Pellegrino was called, James; Raffaello was Ray; Giuseppina, Jo. Then there was Betty, Mill…the intention was not just to fit in, it was to blend in.
Then, my mom threw a wrench in the system and named me Adria. I’m not sure why or how she pulled that one off. She was a bit of a maverick. She said I was conceived in Venice; that as a child she had played with a toy boat of that name; that she wanted to call me Ria…. She never called me Ria. She called me Frank. Don’t know where she came up with that one either.
Suffice it to say the boiling pot sentiment only went so far. In terms of lifestyle, we Italian peasantry had our green ways of doing things well before sustainability became an elite trend. Nanny had no formal education but knew fundamentals for survival. How to deplume the pigeons that Grandpa killed with his hands while taking his afternoon walks, for example. Nanny kept an urban garden with fruit trees and grew every vegetable under the sun. She preserved the bounty in mason jars that she stored in a cavernous shed near the basement. She strung up cheese in another cave-like area. No way would I hide in the smelly, creepy, cheese cellar when we played hide and seek. It was understood that that place was off-limits. At the shore house Nanny caught eels in the lagoon. Trapped them in a cage. She showed me how the heart kept beating on the newspaper after it had been cut from the body. I wish that I had learned more from her. I lack the self-reliance that she had.
Recently I took my great grandfather’s nickname, Pappy as my own; to summon his fortitude. I have no beef about being named Adria, but I wanted a nickname so I chose one: Poppy. Not sure that it suits me. I might revert to Frank. So far, I’m the only one using it. Friends don’t just start calling you by a nickname.
My mom, her brother and cousin in the row boat on the inlet, Belmar, N.J., circa 1952
Nanny and Pappy built the shore house in the late 1930s. Literally, built it. The extended family shared the home. We went to the beach nearby, played bocce on the lawn. Weekends, we sat twenty-five at two dinner tables. We ate the eels. But, also flounder, bluefish, crabs, and clams. We dug up the clams with our feet in the lagoon. There was a delicious rice casserole and sweet summertime sauces for macaroni (our term for pasta) like ‘peas and carrots’ and ‘filetto di pomodoro’. The latter had the salty taste of prosciutto mixed with the peppery taste of fresh basil. After the meal, we passed a wooden fruit bowl around. It was full of nectarines, plums, and grapes. I would gladly turn down dinner at a fine restaurant to enjoy one of these home-cooked meals again.
Grandma ate the same breakfast every day: Thomas English muffin toasted with Welch’s Concord grape jelly and a cup of Sanka. She listened to a hand-held AM/FM radio at the kitchen table. Noticing one day that the battery deck was broken and the radio was duct-taped together, a considerate cousin gave her a new radio. She knew to give the same model. But grandma kept using the old battered one. She would use it until it didn’t work anymore, then move onto the new one. Not sure if she ever got around to using the replacement. The family’s sense of sustainability manifested a frugality that was not mindfully adopted, but ingrained in character. Nanny and Grandma wore the same cardigans every day. (My dad did that too and he hailed from another family.) I do the same thing. I have ‘my’ sweater. (For a while after her passing, it was Nanny’s!). Grandma favored use of the possessive pronoun. “Do you want your sang-wich now?” she would ask. [I had a professor at Skidmore who decoded the origins of the sang-wich dialect. Chuck Wachtel. I wish I could remember it.] Until my sweater unravels at the seams, it will remain my daily go-to garment.
The shore house décor hardly changed over the decades. Art Deco furniture from the 1930s and 40s; Venetian glass mirrors; cold war era appliances. They maintained utility over the ages because they were not manufactured to self-destruct and they had been properly taken care of. Entering the home in the 1980s, one had the sense of going back in time. Like the time capsule experience that I experienced in the East Berlin cafeteria during college. There were two stoves in the kitchen, because let’s face it: dinners were an operation. One stove had a broken broiler. The oven and stove top still worked so we used the broiler as a drawer in which to store the lids of pots. (Separating the lids from the pots allowed for stacking of the pots to maximize storage in the cabinet. There was never an easy fit to store the drain pots, so those hung on hooks in the pantry.)
When I moved to Chicago as a graduate student, initially I took up renting a prewar flat near the north shore lake where the Air Show takes place. It was a studio apartment; one room with a Murphy bed. The kitchen was small and had an old stove, just like the one we had at the shore. I brought $500 cash with me and had yet to set up a bank account. It was a lot of cash (or so it seemed to me at the time). I was hesitant to carry it on my person as I had been robbed twice as an undergraduate in Paris. I looked around the apartment. With the bed flipped up against the wall, there was nothing much to look at other than my guitar. “Not the right place to stash cash,” I thought. Then, it came to me. I recalled there was a drawer at the base of the stove. I hid the money there.
You see where this is going? Yes, I used the broil setting to make toast in the oven. Not realizing that it turned on what was a functional broiler in what I had regarded to be a drawer when I hid the money there. I am arguably the only person dumb enough to burn $500 and smart enough to know how to get it back. Yes, I got my money back.
At first, when I realized what I had done, I was beside myself, stupefied. Then, I realized the bills were only paper, promissory notes. They had no intrinsic value but were an index to value stored elsewhere, maybe in a vault. There might be a way to detect serial numbers, to forensically establish that the bills were not counterfeit. If so, theoretically additional notes might be issued? The bills were charcoal black and crumbled at the edges. After trying to examine them, I thought it better not to handle them. I wrapped the fragile papers in a protective envelope and put them in a Zip-lock bag. I headed downtown to the Federal Reserve Bank. A month later, I deposited a Treasury check for a $500 refund.
The Bailey’s welcome the Martini’s to home ownership in Frank Capra’s, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” 1946
One of my favorite movies is Frank Capra’s 1946 film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It explores the meaning of life relative to the virtues of faith, love, and charity. It does this by means of holding a man’s life in assessment and by pitting altruism against selfishness, giving against usury, generosity against greed. The story is a reworking of “A Christmas Carol,” and used to be a regular feature on TV during my childhood in the 1970s when the movie’s copyright entered public domain.
The hero is a family man and benefactor whose bank provides loans to foster the American Dream of home ownership. The business assumes high-risk mortgages, investing in working class people. An Italian immigrant himself, Capra featured an Italian peasant family in the plot (the Martini’s are subjects of the hero’s charitable business). The villain is a decrepit robber-baron keen to force the savings and loan into default in order to purloin the properties.
A market-crash produces a run on the bank, and its stress is exacerbated by misplaced funds while the savings and loan is under audit by the IRS. The hero’s youngest daughter becomes bedridden, having caught cold at school while unsupervised by the teacher to whom her care had been entrusted. The hero is cast into crisis and driven to suicidal ideation. At the nadir of despair, he is granted the wish of never having been born. A Twilight Zone tour ensues in which the protagonist is escorted by a guardian angel through a virtual reality, a fantastical present bereft of his having existed. The surreal experience reveals to the protagonist how his benevolence had impacted the lives of others, how it had allowed the community to flourish. He had not appreciated the value and influence of his life. He gains self-esteem and boosted by enthusiasm, resumes his travails, returning to reality with a sheer joy for life, irrespective of whatever ill fate may befall him. He discovers that during his time adrift in contemplation his friends had rallied to his aid and crowd sourced the funds that the bank owed to the tax collector. The film concludes with his brother—a war hero—toasting him, “the richest man in town.” Has anyone made it through that ending without shedding a tear? Orson Welles said something like, “There’s no way of hating that movie.”
Frank Capra, It’s A Wonderful Life, 1946, Official Trailer
And yet, perhaps Welles was mistaken. Apparently, following a losing Oscar season in May 1947, the FBI accused Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” of wielding communist ideology by maligning the upper-class and discrediting bankers as scrooge-type gluttons. While the accusation might seem extreme for a picture that celebrates altruism at the expense of self-interest, it is more understandable in consideration of its correspondence with a film that Capra made approximately a decade earlier.
The cast of the comedy, “You Can’t Take It With You,” (1938) is anchored by the same lead actors, James Stewart and Lionel Barrymore. (The pet raven made his debut here.) It prefigures the theme of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” that wealth is not constituted by material possessions but by loving relationships. It shares a story of the eccentric individual and the American Dream of home ownership at odds with plutocrats and the IRS. To my thinking, neither film disparages capitalism or celebrates collectivism at the expense of the individual. To the contrary, the ‘capra-corn’ kitsch recipe of these comedies focuses on the under-dog: the everyman and his ability to inspire and impact the community. Both films criticize greed and suggest the plight of common people at the hands of monopolies and state power. “You Can’t Take It With You,” directly broaches resentment of the upper class, big banks and big government.
Barrymore portrays the villain in “Life.” In contrast, in “Can’t,” he plays a benevolent widower who argues with an IRS agent against the requirement of average people to pay a federal income tax. [I had not realized that until the 16th amendment was upheld by the Wilson administration, that the Constitution didn’t require federal income tax of citizens beyond District of Columbia residents.] There are so many zany scenes in this film; it’s easy to see how it earned the Best Picture Academy Award. A particular quote resonated as relevant today:
Lincoln said, “With malice toward none and charity to all.” Nowadays they say, “Think the way I do or I’ll bonk the daylight’s out of you.”
Frank Capra, You Can’t Take It With You,1938, the jail scene
Wilson had run for office as a non-interventionist. Once installed, he reneged and enlisted the nation in World War I, presiding over a fierce campaign to quell dissent. Actors—including three of the four founders of United Artists picture studios—were enlisted as propagandists to sell war bonds. After World War I, the public remained critical of American involvement.
When “It’s A Wonderful Life,” debuted Christmas time 1946 it failed to compete with another classic that swept the Academy Awards. An insightful 2019 essay by James Perloff provides an intriguing analysis of a pivotal scene in the winning picture, “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Perloff deconstructs the scene to expose an embedded message warning that criticism of American involvement in World War II would not be tolerated. According to Perloff, a public relations campaign to squash criticism of the war was wielded by The Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations, “the highest echelons of oligarchical policy-making.”
It is perhaps ironic that “Life,” lost ground to a patriotic feature, as Capra and his lead actor, Stewart were both dedicated to the war effort. Stewart had just served in the conflict as a decorated pilot and would remain in the Air Force Reserve for several decades. Capra had just produced one of the most renowned series of American propaganda films for the U.S. Department of Defense, “Why We Fight,” 1942-45. Realizing that he could not outdo the propaganda of Hippler and Reifenstahl, Capra decided to appropriate and recontextualize the original Nazi footage.
In 1994, NBC Universal purchased exclusive broadcast rights to “It’s A Wonderful Life” and since then, it has aired infrequently. Some speculate the restricted circulation is due to the company’s reluctance to promote a Christian message out of concern to respect diverse belief systems during the holidays in an increasingly multicultural and secular society.
NBC broadcasts from its headquarters at Rockefeller Center, the nation’s first mass-entertainment complex and shopping mall. It was erected during the Great Depression by the namesake son of Standard Oil mogul, John D. Rockefeller. Apart from being home to National Broadcasting Company, it houses Radio City Music Hall. A massive venture inspired by the construction of the Empire State Building in the 1930s, its urban plan was derided while under construction. When the failed economy initially rendered commercial plans unviable, Rockefeller pivoted. Instead of shops, he installed a skating rink – a picturesque seasonal pass-time. Eventually, the mall capitalized on the Christmas ritual of gift-giving and holiday tourism. Its mammoth Christmas tree is installed at the skating rink opposite the holiday windows at Saks Fifth Avenue and buttressed by toy store, FAO Schwartz. The lighting of the tree signals the start of the shopping season, equating the Center with Christmas in the national imagination. As Gershwin’s song goes, “Ha-Ha-Ha! Who’s got the last laugh now?”
I associate Saturday Night Live, a program broadcast from “The Rock,” with my favorite comedian, George Carlin. He hosted the show’s debut episode Oct 11, 1975. So much of what Carlin ranted about seems relevant messaging for our times. A particular routine, “Life is Worth Losing,” seems to harken back to themes in “It’s A Wonderful Life”. Carlin critiques the elite whom he calls, “the owners of the truth”. He admonishes, “It’s called the American Dream ‘cause you have to be asleep to believe it.”
George Carlin, “Life is Worth Losing,” Beacon Theater, New York City, 2005
Thank you for reading.
Please feel free to comment and share.
Peace and love,
Poppy