My father — the King of Father’s Day, who had a tinfoil crown to prove it — grew up in a Lower Eastside Manhattan neighborhood called Little Sicily. He was eight or nine when he met Jack Dempsey — the former heavyweight champion of the world, who had a belt to prove it — at the local Boys Club.
It was 1937ish and Dempsey was shaking urchins’ hands and giving out autographs all around. But little Tony Grillo had another idea: Instead of an autograph, would the champ pop him one in the kisser, soft like, just so he could tell everyone he got punched by Jack “The Manassa Mauler” Dempsey?
The champ complied, nicked my old man in the cleft, and Dad had his story. Dad always had a story.
He was too young to serve during World War II, though it wasn’t from a lack of trying. Two of Dad’s older brothers, Carl and Frankie, were already serving — Carl seeing combat as a paratrooper. After turning 16 in January 1945, Dad quit school, secured a fake ID, and tried to enlist in the Navy. An officer saw through the ruse and told him to come back in a year.
He did, but first he opened a sign shop. Unbeknownst to 16-year-old Tony, the shop was a front for an illegal bookie operation — literally, a storefront that he rented from two shifty guys who ran a gambling business in the back room.
When Dad realized what was happening, he told the local beat cop. The gamblers responded by wrecking the sign shop, then leaving a dead pigeon in Dad’s desk drawer. Now 17, he joined the Navy with his mother’s approval — the war was over, but a peacetime hitch seemed a whole lot better than whatever comes after a dead pigeon.
After a few years on a ship in the Atlantic, Dad returned to New York, worked at a series of different jobs, voted for Harry Truman, and met my mother (another hero for another column). They got married and started having kids, all five of us born in New York.
But in June of 1967, we moved South to Florida. Dad, my big brother Steve, and me drove down together ahead of Mom and the other three kids, who were going to fly into Miami. Somewhere in North Carolina we stopped for lunch at a truck stop. Dad led us to a booth in the diner. A man, maybe the proprietor, came along in a few minutes and told us we weren’t supposed sit there. He asked us to follow him to another part of the restaurant.
That’s when Dad noticed the sign.
We’d been sitting in the “colored” section. Rather than follow the man to the “whites only” section, Dad grabbed our hands and said, “come on, boys, let’s get out of here.” And we did.
I’d be lying if I said the incident left a warm, inner glow of high-minded principles at the time. I was six years old and still hungry. What the heck did I know from principles? Well, I knew that my daddy, a champion of fair play and good sportsmanship, always did the right thing. But it would take a few more years before I was able to fully understand how he’d also done the righteous thing.
Jerry Grillo is editor and publisher of the White County News.