His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [12]
Taking her first step uptown, she selected for her son an Irish godfather, Frank Garrick, circulation manager of The Jersey Observer. Garrick and Marty were very good friends: they played baseball together, drank together. But it was the fact that Garrick’s uncle, Thomas Garrick, was a Hoboken police captain that appealed to Dolly. She knew that the gloss reflected from that association would give her child more standing than any Italian godfather could ever bestow.
On April 2, 1916, Martin Sinatra carried the four-month-old boy who was to be his namesake into St. Francis Church and handed him to his godmother, Anna Gatto, a good friend of Dolly’s, for the christening.
“We were standing in the front hall of the church, where the font is,” Frank Garrick recalled many years later. “The priest came in and asked my name, and I said, ‘Francis.’ He then started the baptism, saying, ‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.’ I knew the boy was to be named after his dad, so I didn’t pay much attention. Afterward, when we were walking out of the church, Marty turned to me and said, ‘Guess what the kid’s name is?’
“ ‘Martin,’ I said.
“ ‘Nope. It’s now Francis. The priest forgot and named him after you instead of me.’
“I never heard the priest say Francis, but Marty did, only he never said a word. Marty wouldn’t, of course, and Dolly wasn’t there. She was at home in bed still recovering from the birth. If she’d been there, she would have thundered and raised hell all over the place.”
Dolly never challenged the absentminded cleric. She accepted his mistake as a good omen, a way of further cementing the relationship between her Italian son and his Irish godfather. Already Francis Albert Sinatra had a fighting edge in Hoboken.
2
On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called for a declaration of war against Germany. Immediately, he made Hoboken a principal port of embarkation for American troops and ordered all two hundred thirty-seven waterfront saloons closed, making the city the first in the nation to experience federal prohibition.
The Germans who had ruled the town for so many years found themselves ostracized after German spies were discovered placing a time bomb aboard a steamship carrying sugar from New York to France. Throughout America, Germans became suspect, but wartime hysteria over imagined German espionage was especially high in Hoboken. German newspapers were banned and German beer gardens closed. The German part of the city was put under martial law, and military police rounded up “enemy aliens” and shipped them off to Ellis Island without even the semblance of a hearing. Panic swept through the German community, and thousands fled after being told to vacate their luxury apartments or face arrest.
The Irish now ascended to the ruling class, but the city became more Italian in character as thousands of immigrants moved into the downtown area. Their natural distrust of authority became heightened when the President insisted that everyone in the United States subscribe to “the simple and loyal motto: America for Americans.” A few days later, the chairman of the Iowa Council of Defense received national attention with his announcement, “We are going to love every foreigner who really becomes an American, and all others we are going to ship back home.”
Fearing deportation, the immigrants in Little Italy rarely ventured off their own blocks and seldom went uptown for anything. Some even tried to stop speaking Italian except in their own homes, and encouraged their children to learn English and become “Americanized.”
Around that time, Dolly Sinatra was summoned to the mayor’s office where, in addition to her duties as ward heeler, she was given the title of official interpreter to the municipal court. This meant that she was paid to accompany the immigrants whenever they had to appear before a judge.
“She told wonderful stories about