Repost: East Coast Fran

Sadly, my dear cousin Fran (Gallo) Quintiliani, from Plymouth,  Massachusetts passed away this week. I am flying to Boston tomorrow to attend her Memorial Service. I return to Seattle on Sunday evening and resume teaching my full schedule starting Monday, October 30. I wanted to share this blog post I wrote 13 years ago. RIP dear cousin Fran.

The blog post below was WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED on AUGUST 29, 2010 (further edited on November 5, 2023, after Fran’s brother John made some corrections on some facts below):

Last Thursday evening, we enjoyed a magical afternoon and evening with my cousin from Boston, Fran, and her husband Dan! Rick and I took them to Kubota Garden which is exquisitely beautiful.  It is one of those out-of-the-way hidden places I rarely go to located at 9817 55th Avenue South in Seattle.  It is also the place where my sole Seattle cousin, John Gallo, who died last Thanksgiving at age 39, loved to go and walk.  It is my understanding that his ashes will be spread here in this garden whenever his parents have the courage to come from Boston to Seattle to do the ceremony.  Fran and I kept thinking about John the whole time we walked the garden.  His gentle spirit was definitely present that day! Below are some photos taken at the Kubota Garden:

Here I am with Fran and her husband Dan:

West Coast Fran Gallo and East Coast Fran (Gallo) Quintiliani

After visiting the garden, we went out for dinner downtown on the waterfront. We really loved our time with Dan and Fran who were just about to go on an Alaskan cruise  (the cruise ships leave the Seattle port) to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. Around 9:30 pm, just as we were driving up a hill at 2nd and Lenora downtown on our way to take Dan and Fran back to their hotel, right in the middle of traffic, our car died!  Volvos aren’t supposed to stall! They are sturdy and dependable, or so I thought!  Safest car in the world and we were in a bad spot for this to happen.  Luckily we had a cop right behind us when the stall occurred.  He couldn’t give us a push to get us off the road because the gears were stuck, but he did put his lights on and redirected traffic around us. And later he set up flares (see flares below!!) as we waited for Triple A to come to our rescue. Fran and Dan are AAA members and we made use their membership benefits.  Diagnosis?  Dead battery.  Oh well, it added to the overall adventure and gave us time for more story sharing!!

So story sharing is what we did most of our day together.  Fran is a fascinating story teller.  She is a retired school teacher, a mother of two, and a grandmother of three.  She has experienced her share of pain. She survived the loss of her firstborn child, is a breast cancer survivor, and she survived an arterial cerebral hemorrhage, her survival requiring two brain surgeries.  At 65 years old, she is lovely and very much full of life.  Being with her was like being with a part of my father.  There is a feeling I get being around Fran that I am not sure can be put into words. It is the same kind of comfort that I got from being in my dad’s presence, a kind of an all embracing love, a kind of adoration and assurance of an unconditional love that flowed from him to me, and from me to him.  This, in fact, is what I miss most about my dad: unconditional love and a sense of security that was as sure and solid as a rock.   And with my cousin, Fran,  I feel the exact same feelings being around her.

When my mom and dad and sisters first came to America by ship, Fran’s father, my Uncle Joe, went to New Jersey to pick them up and brought everyone to his house in Boston.  He really wanted his little brother and family to make their new home right next to him.  I came very close to being born in Boston!  I could have been saying “my fathah” like my cousin does instead of  “my father”!!  If I had grown up in Boston, I would have grown up with my lovely Gallo cousins. But instead, Aunt Lily, dad’s little sister, who was childless and living in Gary, Indiana, begged my dad to settle in the Midwest, claiming that her husband would help my dad get a good paying job (so my dad’s first job in Gary, Indiana was bartending at Aunt Lily and Uncle Sam’s restaurant!).

Fran’s father, my Uncle Joe (Giuseppe Gallo), and my father, Charlie (Calogero Gallo), were brothers.  Uncle Joe was born in 1903 during my Grandpa Gallo’s first marriage to the Sicilian blond, blue-eyed beauty, Francesca. My dad was born during my Grandpa Gallo’s third marriage to Onofria, known to us as Mamma ‘No.  My dad and Uncle Joe were 19 years apart!  They shared the same father and had different mothers, though they never referred to each other as being “half-brothers”.  Such an expression or thought did not exist for them.

Below: A very young Grandpa Gallo with his first wife, Francesca di Maggio (East Coast Fran’s grandmother whose name we both inherited!) I know, she doesn’t look blond to me either.

An older, more worn-out Grandpa Gallo, twice widowed and now with his third wife, my stern-looking grandmother, Onofria Terrana (Mamma ‘No):

Stories from cousin Fran (East Coast Fran)

After Grandmother Francesca died of breast cancer, Grandpa was left with two children.  Uncle Joe is the only one who made it to adulthood.  Tradition  in Sicily was that a widower could marry his deceased wife’s sister, only if possible and if small children were left behind after a mother’s premature death, because “who better to take care of your children than the kids’ maternal aunt?”.  This second wife, Francesca’s sister, Calogera, died soon after  marriage, leaving Grandpa Gallo widowed yet again.  He finally married my Mamma ‘No and from that third marriage came my Aunt Francesca, my dad (Calogero), and my Aunt Lily (Calogera).  As was the custom in Sicily, if you were a widower and remarried, you would honor your deceased wife/wives by naming your future child after her/them. Therefore, the two daughters, born during Grandpa’s third marriage were given the names of his previous deceased wives.

Uncle Joe’s mother died when he was just a child of 6 and the only thing she left him was a blanket that she always threw around her shoulders.   He was very attached to that blanket and carried it everywhere with him. He was still very attached to that blanket until he was almost 13, until Grandpa remarried the third time to the woman who became my paternal grandmother, Mamma ‘No!  Well, Mamma ‘No, was very mean to her stepson, Joe. The first thing Mamma ‘No did was take that blanket away from my Uncle Joe, claiming that he was too big to be so attached to something as trivial as a blanket!  He never saw the blanket again and he never forgot her cruelty.  He talked about it his whole life.  And, after that terrible blow, he couldn’t wait to get the heck out of his father’s house!

Uncle Joe had to get away from his cruel stepmother. He became obsessed with the thought of going to America! He was only 13.  He asked his father if he could go and his father (my grandpa) said, “NO!”.  So Uncle Joe STOLE his father’s savings which were hidden in a secret spot in the house and took off to Palermo!!  Once in Palermo, he was refused passage because of his age and the lack of parental consent.  Uncle Joe promptly made the best of a bad situation by spending all the stolen money, and then bravely went back to his father’s house to receive his punishment.

Uncle Joe was such a handful at home, and the fights between him and his stepmother so terrible, that when he turned 15, Grandpa Gallo said, “GO!!  Go to America!” and helped him by paying the entire passage fare.  So in 1918, Uncle Joe, three years before my father’s birth, East Coast Fran’s dad/my dad’s brother, came to America all by himself!  He worked in the Boston shipyard where he was exposed to the asbestos that attributed, along with the help of three packets of cigarettes a day, to the eventual development of lung cancer, which took his life at the age of 62.

Unlike my dad who was quiet and shy, Uncle Joe was a legend of sorts. He had a BIG personality and he seemed to know EVERYONE.  He loved to gamble, play poker, and go to horse races and dog races. Uncle Joe was tall and thin whereas my father was average height and broadly built. But like my dad, Uncle Joe had a heart of gold and loved his family deeply.

Uncle Joe had never met his little brother (my dad) because Uncle Joe had left for America before my dad was born.  However, Uncle Joe faithfully and regularly sent home huge packages of gifts, which included new outfits for my dad.  Much to my dad’s horror, the clothing sent from America was outdated. Always ahead in the world of fashion, Italians had long shed themselves of bloomers, but Mamma ‘No made my dad wear the old fashioned bloomer pants to school!  “Listen to me!  We are poor!  These are brand new from America. Your brother sent these to you and you ARE wearing them!”  There was no arguing with Mamma ‘No.  This was around 1926. My dad was forced to wear the outdated bloomers to school, a shy child facing the mockery of his schoolmates. (This story was told to me by my dad.)

Uncle Joe remained a bachelor for a long time. He eventually met Fran’s mom, Maria.  Uncle Joe dated Maria for 7 years before marrying her. Maria was from Naples and she was the youngest of 12 children.  She was not interested in having children because of how hard she worked helping her older siblings raise their many younger children.  There were always babies being born, diapers to change, bottoms to clean…. and she had had enough of raising kids without even having had her own.   After 7 years of dating, when Maria was 32 and Uncle Joe was 40, they finally decided that they wanted children after all, so they got married.

So in 1943, when Uncle Joe was 40 years old and newly married, and on his honeymoon in New York City, he was drafted by the US Army!  He was TERRIFIED. He knew my dad was already a soldier in the Italian army.  “My God,” he thought, “what if I’m sent to Italy and have to SHOOT my own BROTHER?”  He was terribly depressed and very worried.  A few weeks later, a very distraught Joe Gallo reported for his physical exam.  The doctor (yes, miracles DO happen), after giving Joe a thorough physical exam, said, “With all your ulcers and given your age of 40, I hate to tell you this, but you would not be an asset to the US Army.  I’m sorry, but I am going to have to deny you induction.”  Uncle Joe may have fainted at that point!  Just like that, Joe didn’t have to go fight in a war where he risked killing his beloved brother, other relatives, and friends he knew from his childhood.

My dad:

Uncle Joe:

Uncle Joe and Aunt Maria with their son John:

When Dad came to America with my mom and sisters, he finally met his brother Joe, Joe’s wife Maria, and their kids, John and Fran, for the first time in his life.  My dad was in his late 30s and his brother was in his late 50s. My dad told me once that seeing his brother for the first time was one of the happiest days of his life.  Five years later, Uncle Joe died, but my dad got to enjoy his brother for 5 years.

Above: from left to right: Francesca Cimino, Fran Gallo (me), Aunt Lily, Fran (Gallo) Quintiliani, and Joanne Cimino. Three Francescas, all cousins to each other, all named after my paternal Grandfather Gallo’s first wife Francesca