Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [36]
If you really want to know about Johnny Basilone, though, you start with a small town in New Jersey.
PART TWO
HOMETOWN
Basilone in his service uniform.
10
John Basilone’s family boasted no martial tradition, and John was a fairly unruly kid, not overly given to discipline, so he had no reason to believe, not then, that he just might have been born to soldier.
In fact, his boyhood was unremarkable small-town stuff. According to Bruce Doorly: “Basilone’s mother Dora Bengivenga grew up in Raritan, born in 1889 to parents Carlo and Catrina, who had recently emigrated to America from Naples, Italy. Carlo was a mill worker. In 1901 Dora’s parents purchased a house in Raritan at 113 First Avenue for $500. This would later be where John Basilone grew up. The house was built in 1858 and in 1901 was a single family home, but later additions would [make] it a two-family house. John’s father, Salvatore Basilone, had come to America from just outside Naples in 1903 when he was 19. He went to work in Raritan and made friends among the other Italian Americans.”
There were church parties and neighborhood gatherings, and it was at one of these that Salvatore met Dora. They dated for three years, saved some money, got married, and moved in with Dora’s parents on First Avenue. Salvatore worked as a tailor’s assistant, and their first five children were born in the family home. Looking for more work than Raritan offered, they moved north to Buffalo, New York, where young John, sixth of the Basilone children, was born not in a proper hospital but at home, very much in the family tradition, on November 4, 1916. But the Buffalo interlude was brief. Whether it was the long winters or a slump in the tailoring trade, the family returned to Raritan in 1918. By now Salvatore had a tailor shop of his own, and they were living in one-half of the two-family house. There was one bedroom downstairs for the parents, and two more upstairs, one for the girls, the other for the boys. There were usually several kids to a bed and the house had a single bathroom. The Basilones certainly weren’t living grandly.
Growing up, John enjoyed the usual scrapes, black eyes, tossing rotten tomatoes, swimming “bare-ass” in the Raritan River, silent movies, later talkies, mostly westerns and serials, in a local movie theater kids called the “Madhouse” for its boisterous matinees punctuated by loud boos, hisses, cheers, and thrown popcorn. Half a dozen sources recall one Basilone caper that was hardly ordinary. At age seven and eager for adventure, he climbed a pasture fence and was promptly chased and knocked over by a bull. No damage was done to either boy or bull.
Doorly reports that St. Bernard’s parochial school yearbook described John as “the most talkative boy in the class” and that “conduct was always his lowest mark.” His sister Phyllis admitted the boy had difficulty in grammar school, couldn’t seem to “buckle down” to his studies. When he graduated, at age fifteen (most graduated at thirteen or fourteen), Basilone opted to drop out, not to go on to high school. He confessed, apparently to his adviser, Father Amadeo Russo, that he might be a “misfit,” that school just wasn’t for him. John’s father objected strongly to the idea of working at the local country club, but the boy assured him he could make a little money caddying at the club, shrewdly pointing out he’d be outdoors getting exercise and plenty of fresh air. At the Raritan Valley Country Club, according to the Cutter and Proser book, it was while caddying for a Japanese foursome that young John had one of his early “premonitions,” of a war one day when the United States would have to fight the Japanese. No one else in Raritan can recall Basilone’s ever having spoken of such a premonition. “He wasn’t that sort of fellow,” one said. On rainy days or when