There’s an old expression that says: “cats have nine lives.” What about people? Can people have nine lives? Many stories have been told about people who have survived through numerous life-threatening accidents and mishaps, and they lived to tell the stories. One Hollywood producer decided that this was a good subject to make a movie about. The movie (Unbreakable) starred Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. While watching this movie, I found myself nodding my head, and saying: “These things do happen in real life.”
Now that I am semi-retired from working in the building trade, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect back on my so-called “storied” life, and to recall several incidents where I came as close to death and dying as anyone can--or would want to. With my long-term memory kicked in and the use of the many notes I’ve accumulated over the years of this story being a “work-in-progress;” I believe that what I’ve written here is a very accurate account of those incidents.
In the (9) chapters that follow, I will tell these stories in the chronological order in which they occurred. These incidents occurred over the course of my life, from childhood to the present. As unbelievable and horrific as you may find some of the vivid details to be, they are true --to the best of my recollections. This is nonfiction, not fiction! Each chapter is a short-story in itself, with a beginning, middle, and an end.
(Chapter 1)
THE STEEL DOOR
My father was an Italian immigrant who came from Italy as a teenager, aboard a refugee immigrant boat, prior to WWII, in an effort to escape from being drafted into the Fascist army there. After a short stay in the bustling metropolis of Manhattan, living with his aunt Rose, he decided to join his Uncle George and cousin Vito in the bakery business, in the industrialized village of Poughkeepsie on the banks of the Hudson River in upstate New York. He arrived one clear and sunny spring day, on the historic, paddle-wheeled, Day-liner,excursion boat the Alexander Hamilton; and he never returned to the big city again.
During those early years, he met and married my mother Angelina, whom shortly thereafter gave birth to Danny and then me. MY father decided to name me as his junior (John). We were living in a two story house on Dean Place, in the heart of the city, which we shared with my uncle Vito and his family. The house was only a block or so away from Vassar Hospital--the main hospital for the area at that time.
Gasparro’s Bakery became a family affair, with many of the close relatives and their children working in the bakery shop. My father and my uncle Vito formed a working partnership—-a partnership that wasn’t always amiable. Those were the war years in Europe and the Pacific. Just prior to the D-Day invasion in Europe, my father enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the (Spearhead-1 Tank Division) fighting in Italy and Germany. He was severely wounded from shrapnel, and awarded the Purple Heart and other distinguished medals. Uncle Vito enlisted in the Army too, and he was sent to battle in the Pacific islands. They were both married with children at the time. When my father returned home after being discharged, he resumed his work in the bakery shop—-at that time, I was around two years old.
As a child, I was frail and prone to many illnesses along the way to adolescence. I was so skinny that my parents worried that I might have some disease. They even took me to see a doctor about this condition! As it turned out, I was declared healthy and normal. The kids in the neighborhood would taunt me, saying: “If you turned sideways, you would disappear!” No matter how much I ate, I would never put on body weight or muscle mass. However, the doctors said that I had strong muscle sinew and that was more important than bulk. That prognosis was put to the test in the back yard of our first home on Dean Place, when I was about four years of age.
I had one of those metal, fire-engine-red, toy cars; the kind that had rubber pedals to move the car forward and backwards and a functional steering wheel to drive it. My brother Danny and I were playing in the back yard. There was a crumbling, old garage in the backyard that had this huge, thick steel door leaning up against it to prevent kids from entering. This door was about three inches thick, it had a steel casing around it, and it measured about five feet wide by eight feet tall. It looked like it weighed a ton! I think it was taken from the old bakery shop storage area that my grandfather’s brother George built, when he first built the original bakery shop on Mill Street, after his coming here from Italy in the early thirties. Those Italians had a habit of over-building things back then.
On this particular sunny afternoon, while we were playing in the backyard; my brother Danny was at one end of that huge steel door and it looked like he was using a stick to try and push the door over onto the ground, so that he could get inside the garage. The door was leaning on a very slight angle, and we were told to stay away from it many times. I got out of the toy car and walked over towards Danny. As I came across the front of the door, I heard him yell something, and then everything went silent and “blackout!”--That split-second between here and eternity. (Looking back in retrospect; that near-death experience would prove to be a fore-shadow of other life threatening events that would occur later on in my life.)
When I awoke, I was in a hospital bed; in the same hospital where I had come into the world (Vassar Hospital), wrapped in a snow white, plaster cast over most of my upper body. My brother Danny was there crying up a storm because my mother kept warning him: “You’re gonna get it when your father gets home!”-- a threat that I had heard myself, many times. The priest from St.Peter’s church, who lived in the attic, was there too; he was praying in an undertone and making the sign of the cross, over me. I had to be fed baby-food by spoon, through an opening in the cast, and drink from a straw for a while, until I was released and returned home to recover.
Later on, my mother told me what had happened. She said: “Your brother Danny pushed the door over and it fell on you….” She said she could see this from the back window, while she was washing dishes. When it happened she came out screaming and called for the neighbors to help. She said it took a few men to move the door off of me because “It was soooo heavy,” she said. She also said that when the door was slid off of me, that I looked like a “cripple” lying there on the dirt with my arms and legs going in all the wrong directions.
Looking back; I don’t understand how any fragile, young four-year-old child could have survived, having a steel door, weighing hundreds of pounds, being smashed on to his body, and not having crushed his ribs and causing massive internal bleeding. I assume that I must have instinctively used my arms and legs to protect my head and chest from being completely crushed. As my mother told me: “The door was so heavy that the men couldn’t lift it up, so they struggled to slide it off of you.”
I managed to survive the steel door event, however life had another surprise in store for me at the house on Dean Place. About two years later, I was playing kick-ball in the front yard of the house, with a couple of other boys. One of the boys kicked the ball towards me and it went out into the street. I immediately ran out after it, from behind a parked car. In an instant, everything went black and silent. The next thing I remember, I was waking up in Vassar Hospital, again, with another body-cast. This time the pain was unbearable and I recall having a difficult time breathing. Just as before, the priest from St. Peter's church was doing his ritual over me.
It turned out that I had a couple of broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and numerous other bruises throughout my body. My mother told me that a delivery car from Murphy's florist shop, located a few houses up the street, ran over me because the driver didn't see me quick enough to stop. On returning home, the healing process took a little longer this time. My father and mother decided that it would be best if we moved out of that house and out of that neighborhood. We moved into an apartment over the bakery shop on Mill Street. This apartment was very cramped and it was located right over top of the huge brick oven in the bakery shop below us. This area of Poughkeepsie was known as "Little Italy."
The following years, leading up to my teenage years, were pretty much non life-threatening, aside from the usual calamities and shenanigans of a mischievous youth. There were the usual cuts and bruises, resulting from local gang-wars between the Irish gangs of Clover Street and the Italian "roughians" (a title that my mother bestowed upon us) of Mill Street. The bakery shop would prove to be my safe-haven during those years; my father saw to that!
Good to see you posting your autobiography. It's a little bit flat reading at times and you seem to be overdoing the Italian heritage part with a bit of repetition. All in all, easy to read, though.
You certainly started off your life with perilous situations. Both of those accidents certainly could have killed you. Almost all kids who are left to play by themselves have accidents, but yours were extraordinary. You didn't mention the diseases, except in passing. My experience with diseases was quite the same as yours. And, skinny… I was right up until college. No amount of eating seem to add any fat. And, after I was paralyzed and my arms and hands atrophy I gave a skinny appearance even though I wasn't.
A book for every Muslim and everyone wishing to know about their way of life. The Diary of the Camp Manager at Mundihar following the South Asian Earthquake - October 2005. An account of life after the Earthquake in one of the largest of the 161 camp
AVAILABLE TODAY 2012!
PRESS RELEASE, June 1, 2009
A True Story of My Life and My Experience with United States Immigration
I was an Abducted Alien by Department of Homeland Security...
Startling memoir is about a woman
AVAILABLE TODAY 2012!
PRESS RELEASE, June 1, 2009
A True Story of My Life and My Experience with United States Immigration
I was an Abducted Alien by Department of Homeland Security...
Startling memoir is about a woman
Copyright © 2017 by John Gasparro Jr.
