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concerns a new automobile he purchased when my father was about sixteen. He took the family to New York City in the car to see his brother Joseph, who lived on Long Island and broadcast a radio show from Radio City Music Hall. While negotiating the streets in New York, my grandfather’s new car stalled in the middle of an intersection. Traffic was being directed by a large barrel-chested Irish policeman who ordered that he move the car. My grandfather tried to start the engine and failed, the policeman bellowed, and the scene repeated itself. Finally, my grandfather, exasperated and unused to being yelled at, told my father to take “the women”—that is, his mother and sisters—to the sidewalk nearby. When he turned back around at the curb, my father saw this short, well-dressed Italian man, his own father, opening the hand of the policeman who towered over him, slamming the keys into his hand, and stomping off, yelling over his shoulder, “You move it. It’s your car now.”
    After a year at the University of Pittsburgh, my father got the long-sought-after appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. At six feet three inches, he had broad shoulders accentuated by the navy blue uniform, and with his mother’s thick black hair and his father’s soft eyes, he was a model of a robust young American. He stayed that way even when he started losing enough hair that his classmates called him Baldie. When I was in seventh grade and living at the Naval Academy, I went to the library and looked up my father’s placement in his graduating class. I was disappointed that it wasn’t high. But that was just his academic placement; he was made a commander in his company when he was a first-classman, which is a senior; he was a more than reliable football player and an All-American lacrosse player in a world where athletic success was valued at least as much as academic success; and he was—and remains to this day—beloved by those men who graduated above and those few who graduated below him in the Class of 1945, which because of World War II graduated in three years, in 1944.
    When he graduated from the Naval Academy, his orders came to report immediately to the USS
Quincy,
a heavy cruiser, “the biggest ship you could ever imagine seeing,” as he wrote home. On January 23, 1945, when the
Quincy
and my father set sail from Newport News, Virginia, President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself was aboard, destined for the Black Sea in the Soviet Crimea, where Roosevelt met with Churchill and Stalin at what became known as the Yalta Conference.
    In early March 1945, after the President had been returned home, the
Quincy
and my father sailed for the Pacific theater, to fight the war with Japan. The
Quincy
took part in the first bombardments of the Japanese mainland at Kamaishi, north of Tokyo, and survived a severe typhoon that flooded my father’s bunkroom and swept, he complained, his gray worsted trousers out to sea. His letters home were censored, of course, so after the
Quincy
bombed a factory in Hamamatsu, he wrote about how thrilled he was to hear that his older sister had finally become serious with a boy. “Hope she will be leaving home soon,” he wrote. “At last, more room for me. Besides, she always stayed in the bathroom too long.” After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he wrote his mother that “life out here is still wonderful. Thanks for the brownies. They were very good, though a little hard by the time they reached us. One boy asked if they were left over from my high school graduation party.” World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, he was in those places, but he always talked as he did in his censored letters home, keeping everything cheery. He lived through a terrible great war, and two more to follow, but you would never know it from talking to him.
    In October 1945, after Germany was defeated and Japan had surrendered, my father returned home. He went to Navy flight school,