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By Root 426 0

but his brother Carlo was better.” I’d also read that the young Basilone had premonitions, that he foresaw things, including his own death in war. And that when he was caddying for a foursome of Japanese businessmen in the 1930s, he had one of his premonitions. Because the men were taking snapshots, Basilone sensed there was going to be a war one of these days and America would have to fight Japan. “Ever hear any of that stuff?” I asked. No one I spoke to in Raritan was buying it.

Nor did they see anything sinister about the golfers. “Johnson and Johnson [of nearby New Brunswick] was just getting started off the ground and they built here. That’s why there were Japanese here then. They were okay.” Vitelli interrupted. “Tony Farese was the pro back then so he might know about premonitions, but he died recently at ninety-five. There was also a story Basilone once caddied for David Niven when he played Raritan. Niven told that to Pete, the bartender at P.J. Clarke’s, and Pete told it to me. Niven was supposed to have said it might have happened, but he couldn’t swear to it. Raritan was a very social club. A lot of people played here.”

The Basilone house at 605 First Avenue (Basilone’s Marine service records insist 113 First Avenue) in Raritan is now a small office building housing a fire alarm company, All-Out Fire Protection. What kind of house was it then? I asked. “Just a normal up-and-down house.” How did they fit ten kids in there? My guides shrugged. It was Depression time, people made out somehow. We looked over the house and drove past sister Mary’s home and where brother Alphonse used to live over there on the right, on to Gaburo’s Laundry, the outfit that canned young Basilone from a delivery job for crapping out on the job, literally napping atop some piled-up laundry bags. Our next stop was at Basilone Place, a short residential street with small, neat houses on each side and carefully tended lawns, all of them very green in winter. This was where Joe Pinto still lived, and we were going to see Joe.

My guides had phoned ahead and Mr. Pinto came to the door and welcomed us. He is a slender, very small man bent nearly double at the waist, and very old. In the old days, I was told, he owned the Raritan Liquor Store.

We all took chairs and Mr. Pinto began to talk. “I grew up with him, more or less,” he said of Basilone. “I’m ninety-nine years old now, and there couldn’t have been a better guy. When he came home from Guadalcanal there was a parade here. He wore his uniform and he went all around town, and I was one of the guys he hung out with, his father and Chief Rossi of the police, Rocky Calabrese whose family had the department store.” I asked what Basilone drank. “Beer, soda, not so much wine, but he’d drink anything. We went up to Villa Firenze one night, a regular night, John and me and two girls, and I was driving a car I’d just bought [probably used, since wartime Detroit wasn’t making any new automobiles] and we had a flat up front. No jack, no lights, and two in the morning after a night of drinking. We’re standing around there, lighting matches so he could see, and John’s pumping the front tire with a hand pump, and we got going again. He was a regular guy, he’d do anything. A happy-go-lucky guy, about twenty-six years old.

“He left to go back [to the war] and got married out in California. He never brought his wife back.”

What was it like when you heard he was dead? I asked the old gentleman.

“It was as if everyone in town went to hell. Everyone knew him, from his time as a laundry deliveryman,” he said. “I had a business, ran a liquor store, came up here in thirty-six. So I knew him, a happy guy, always razzing with the kids.” When I asked, Joe said, “No, he didn’t find the laundry job demeaning.” I asked other questions, about John’s boxing, reports that Madison Square Garden wanted him, that a promoter wanted him to go pro, did he and Pinto ever box? I asked again about his supposed premonitions. For a man his age, Pinto was very crisp in his responses.

“I never sparred with him, and don’t think