In America, Grandpa Charlie worked hard and rose to be foreman of one of the Irish run construction crews that built Newark during its heyday in the 1920s. Losing his job in the Depression, he labored by day as a brickmason and by night as a watchman at Newark's Budweiser brewery. He remained in building construction the rest of his life.
Grandpa Charlie's only child, my father, was born in Newark's First Ward in 1931 and baptized at St. Lucy's Catholic Church, the community's spiritual center. The church is but a few hundred yards from the start of Bloomfield Avenue as it departs Newark. In the early 1940s, Grandpa Charlie followed the avenue to its first stop, Bloomfield Township, where he purchased a newly constructed, two-story, wood-frame house along with the adjoining lot. There he planted tomato plants and fig and cherry trees. He was satisfied in that house and never lived anywhere else.
Grandpa Charlie exemplified hard work, honesty, and no bullshit. He was a bit rough, but straightforward and loving. He was constant and clear where he stood. He didn't say a lot, but what he said was right. In his mind, a person does what he has to do without complaining or expecting a leg up.
My father, born Ettore Giancarlo, was far more ambitious. His gaze was much farther up the road. He and my grandmother spent his first years in the provincial town of Sora, Italy, with her prosperous parents and younger siblings. My father was the first grandchild and enjoyed attentive affection. He returned to New Jersey with my grandmother before the Second World War, when he changed his name to its English translation, Hector. As the war ended, he was a high school cadet at La Salle Military Academy, a boarding school on Long Island. He developed into an excellent rifleman and a concert quality violinist. He had good looks and charm and craved excitement, especially the thrill of fast cars that he hoped to afford one day. His marksmanship made him popular, his musical virtuosity got him a college scholarship, and his smile and vitality enthralled more than a few girls, including my (very attractive) mother.
My mother's sights were also set up the road, much farther along Bloomfield Avenue. She was born Ella Jane Schwarz, the year after my father was born. Like him, her ancestors were immigrants, but of a more educated class. Her paternal grandparents were upright and Germanized Poles, who immigrated to Berlin in the 1800s. Her great-grandfather, Josef Alfons Schwarz, taught pharmacology in the 1850s at the city's renowned Humboldt University. His son Wladyslaw, called Walter, emigrated first to Brooklyn and then Jersey City, where he opened a pharmacy. His first child, Berthold, was born in 1898. Four years later, Walter graduated as a physician from Eclectic Medical College of New York City and saw the birth of his second son, Henry, my grandfather.
Both Schwarz brothers followed their father into medicine. In the case of my grandfather Henry, it was by way of Fordham University and Eclectic Medical College, in Cincinnati, Ohio. There in the 1920s, Henry met and married my grandmother, Florence Klinkenberg, the daughter of a prosperous Ohio building supplier and his Irish-born wife, Ella. The couple soon returned to New Jersey, living in the apartment above his suburban medical practice on what was then called Hudson Boulevard. There, he and Florence had two children, Henry Jr. and my mother, Ella Jane. Like my grandfather Charlie, Henry was hardworking, modest, and content.
Meanwhile, Henry's older brother Berthold established his office in the center of Journal Square, Jersey City's fashionable downtown. Alongside his medical practice, Berthold served as a part-time health director for Bankers National Life Insurance Company, then one of the largest American health and accident insurers. In time, he rose to be executive vice president. Although somewhat unmindful of his medical practice, Berthold Schwarz turned out to be a brilliant financial investor and portfolio manager. His family became one of New Jersey's most prominent, with a box at New York's Metropolitan Opera House and a sprawling home in tony Upper Montclair that my mother would sometimes visit and admire. It was a far distance up Bloomfield Avenue.
While different in means, the Schwarz brothers were alike in patriotism. After Pearl Harbor, Berthold's two sons left medical school to enlist in the US military. Not long after deployment near Bastogne, Belgium, Berthold's younger son died fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.
My grandfather Henry, just turned 40, enlisted in the US Army Air Corps. He had been a teenager during the First World War and recalled his father treating American doughboys in quarantine for the Spanish Influenza before shipping out of Jersey City. Now, as a new World War began, Henry was an experienced physician, familiar with the infectious diseases that plagued city residents. He was eventually commissioned a captain and appointed medical commandant at a series of North American training bases, overseeing health conditions. He served a year at Daniel Field near Augusta, Georgia, and was then assigned to Fort Thomas, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. He brought with him his wife and children and installed them in great-grandma Ella's spacious house in the suburb of Hyde Park, where he visited on weekends. As the war ended, Henry returned to New Jersey with his family, having retired from the Corps with the rank of Major, an honor he held with pride the rest of his life.
My mother and father were introduced by high school friends a few years after the war. Hector was young and brash, heading to Manhattan College and thinking about medical school. Ella was determined and set on nursing. She would go on to Columbia Teacher's College to receive her bachelor's degree in nursing. The couple dated throughout college.
Hector took advantage of his language fluency and the post-war strength of the US dollar to enroll in Italy's fine but inexpensive medical school at the University of Padua, one of the world's oldest. In December 1954, while returning home for Christmas, his flight from Rome descended into New York's Idlewild Airport, rammed into a pier, burst into flames, and hurtled into the waters of Jamaica Bay. Twenty-six passengers died. Miraculously, my father escaped the submerging aircraft and swam to shore, one of only six survivors, His carefree days were at an end.
Soon my parents were married, taking up residence in Italy. During school breaks they skied in Cortina, saw the follies in Paris, stood in the stalls at La Scala, and visited my father's cousins in Terracina, on the Mediterranean. They acquired a series of European sports cars and survived my father's participation in the famous Italian auto rally, the Mille Miglia.
In 1957, their first child was born, Charles Henry, named after our two grandfathers. Hector graduated from medical school the following spring and returned to New Jersey. There, in 1959, I was born.
My father's medical career thrived. He did his residency in general surgery and otolaryngology at the renowned New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. He was inquisitive about everyone and everything, ideal for the halcyon days of the early 1960s in New York, when the city was a global center for medical innovation. He created operating room procedures that had never been done before. He experimented with new medical technologies. He introduced ultrasound, which he had encountered in Italy, into American surgical practice. He was fearless, engrossed, energetic, and brilliant. He relished being a doctor.
On the west side of the Hudson, Hector first joined and then took over Uncle Berthold's Jersey City medical practice. Like his father and father-in-law, he was self-employed and entrepreneurial. His surgical innovations attracted attention, his practice boomed, and, in the late 1960s, he and my mother launched a successful skilled nursing facility in northern New Jersey in a new building constructed by my grandfather, Charlie.
My parents then moved up the metaphorical road—though not literally, west on Bloomfield Avenue this time. That would have taken them too far from the buzz of Manhattan. Instead, they headed north along the Hudson river to a town a lot like Upper Montclair, the East Hill neighborhood of Englewood.
While my father was building his medical practice and with my brother and me as preschoolers, my mother returned to Columbia University to earn a master's degree. After bearing two more sons, Michael and Timothy, she ran the burgeoning private nursing home facility. Still, she always seemed to have time for her four boys. On Monday through Friday, she was up early in pumps and pearls. Yet on Saturdays she'd teach us to
