Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [38]
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When the Raritan Valley local pulled into its last stop one January morning in 2008, the three local men were waiting for me out in the cold in a red Lincoln truck because the station’s waiting room was locked. We’d arranged for me to meet with some people in New Jersey who could tell me about John Basilone, his home and family, his roots. The men were John Pacifico, a Roman Catholic deacon for twenty-five years at St. Ann’s Church on Anderson Street; Herb Patullo, who was driving the truck and who owns a historic piece of high ground in the nearby Watchung Mountains on which Washington and the Continental Army once encamped in a blocking position to mask Philadelphia from the British; and Peter Vitelli, a large, talkative man who used to be in sales and marketing in Manhattan and recalls that at age six at St. Joseph’s parochial school in Raritan, he once shook Basilone’s hand when the nuns trooped the returning hero around to the classrooms to greet the children in 1943.
Pacifico, Vitelli, and Patullo, are members of the Basilone Parade Committee, three of those who tend to Basilone’s memory and reputation and still stage the march in his honor every September, commemorating the day he returned on leave from the Pacific wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor. Raritan erupted (no other word will do) in a spontaneous welcome as he took a jubilant stroll through the town, the kid who once delivered their laundry, carried their golf bags, and had now become an American folk hero.
The men saw to it that I got a place in the truck, and it turned out they knew me from the page I wrote every Sunday for Parade magazine, a sort of accreditation as a professional that gave them a small assurance that I wasn’t just another nosy parker but a reporter who might be trusted. I was hoping there would be a station coffee shop where I might get a wake-up cup of coffee, but no such luck. These men were focused, however, and they knew precisely why I was there, and so we drove on.
Our first stop was the Raritan Public Library, a small, trim white-framed building where on the second floor up the carpeted wooden staircase is the Basilone Room. It is nothing fancy, just a place where they collect and keep memorabilia about him. On a table were three white leather-covered photo albums filled with mostly black-and-white photographs: Basilone, in uniform and out, at various stages of youth (after all, he was still in his twenties when he died), pictures of his family, of friends, of the more or less famous movie stars who traveled the war bond sales route with him. I recognized John Garfield, who would play a Marine in a wartime picture, Eddie Bracken, Louise Allbritton. Vitelli leaned over my shoulder to identify people. He pointed out Virginia Grey. She was the woman who had caught Basilone’s eye, and he hers. There were casual shots set in a soda shop. Basilone, they said, was known to be “the biggest ice-cream soda drinker” in town, while his schoolboy hobby was “chewing gum,” and his ambition was “to be an opera singer”—if not a heavyweight boxing champ appearing in Madison Square Garden like his hero, a huge, strong, but awkward Italian fighter named Primo Carnera. There were pictures of Basilone in uniform, sometimes squared away and crisply tailored, or more casual on liberty with his “piss-cutter” overseas cap jauntily cocked or turned sideways. Beneath the uniform, there were two tattoos: “Death Before Dishonor” and a heart pierced by a sword.
We then took off in Patullo’s red truck for a tour of the place where Manila John Basilone grew up, crossing the John Basilone Veterans Memorial Bridge over the Raritan River. “That’s the Doris Duke estate over there,” someone said, indicating a smooth, grassy, handsomely treed lawn that seemed to go on and on without ever a house in view. The place was so large you could hide a mansion on it. It had been a relatively warm and damp winter, and for