Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases Read Online Free PDF Page B

in God was another thing Joe learned in his childhood home and it stayed with him.
    Joe met Rose in the early forties when they were both in their teens. They were soon dating exclusively and they made an extremely attractive couple. He was unabashedly handsome, with thick wavy dark hair, and dark-eyed Rose was very pretty. Her hairdo then was a faithful copy of the upswept, side-parted pompadour with the back tucked under into a pageboy that actresses Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth wore during the Second World War years. Photos of Joe and Rose in their youth remain in family archives: some photos obviously taken in photo booths, which offered four pictures for a dollar; others from school proms. There were shots of them together at Coney Island. Even sixty-five years later, their engagement photo is especially endearing.
    Rose and Joe seem frozen in time, grinning as he hugs her and they look forward to their future together.
    But they were opposites. Rose wasn’t Catholic, which could have been a huge obstacle for them, but they dealt with that. Rose was quiet and a little shy. When Joe took her home to meet his family for the first time, she wasshocked by the life force that ran through the elder Tarricones’ house. There were five Tarricones and they held nothing back. Rose was startled by the arguments that ended in hugs, and the clatter of unchecked emotions, shouting, and loud music.
    “But, you know,” their daughter Gypsy recalls, “my mother told me later that she enjoyed going to her in-laws’ house because she found it ‘exciting.’ She said it was probably because they were ‘so
nuts
!’ Even though Mom was a little overwhelmed at first, she loved her sisters-in-law a lot. If she had had her choice, she and my dad would never have moved away from New York.
    “My dad was outgoing and loud. They were so different, but they loved each other.”
    Joe had all kinds of jobs, spaced between three active-duty assignments in the armed services. He served in World War II in the army. Later, he was in the air force, and he was called up from his reserve status after that. He was a natural salesman, a studied pitchman, and it was difficult to keep up with his various careers—sometimes door-to-door, occasionally from the back of a truck, sometimes behind a desk.
    Joe Tarricone also had a wanderlust that surfaced often. Where Rose longed to live in one house in one place and to have her garden and her precious furniture around her, Joe often came home in an ebullient mood and called out, “Rose, pack up! We’re moving! We’re going to Florida!”
    Or New Mexico, or Texas, or the Pacific Northwest.
    During many of the early years of their marriage, Rose was pregnant or recovering from childbirth. Claire, theoldest, was born in 1947. Then came Aldo in November 1950, Joey two years later, and Gypsy in 1957. Gina came along in 1960, Rosemary in 1963, and Dean, the baby, in 1966.
    Coping with seven children and a peripatetic husband who always saw rainbows over the next horizon wasn’t easy for Rose.
    “She left so much furniture behind,” Gypsy remembers. “Sometimes she would cry over it, but she went where my dad wanted to go for so many years.”
    Joe Tarricone was thrilled with the birth of all of his children, and he was a loving and caring father, however bombastic his personality. He cherished each baby and took the time to walk the floor with them, tussle with them, hug them, and let them know that each was special.
    He became the Pied Piper for kids on the blocks where he lived. He liked nothing better than to gather up his children and a lot of the neighbor kids every Sunday. He’d take them all to a movie, a ball game, or the zoo. He often took a bunch of them to Disneyland, enjoying it as much as the children did.
    Joe cooked huge spaghetti feeds on Sundays and invited all the neighbors. Joe, Rose, and their youngsters probably lived longer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, than any other place. They