His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [16]
“I used to play with Frankie when we was kids,” said Adam Sciaria, another childhood friend from Hoboken. “His uncles were always coming around and giving him candy and picking him up. They weren’t married then, so they really spoiled Frankie. They were fighters, so no one laid a hand on him. They always gave him money. He was flush. I was one of thirteen kids, and we was beggars.”
“Being an only child made all the difference,” said Bob Anthony, a Hoboken neighbor who grew up with Frank. “Frank had more. He didn’t have to share with brothers or sisters. He even had his own bedroom. None of the rest of us had half of what he had. He wore brand-new black-and whites that his mother bought him, while the rest of us wore old oxfords that were hand-me-downs. He even had his own charge account at Geismer’s department store. He had so many pairs of fancy pants from that store that we called him ‘Slacksy O’Brien.’ No question about it. Frank was the richest kid on the block.”
“He was the best-dressed kid in the neighborhood and he always had the newest toys and gadgets,” said Rose Carrier. “He had bicycle after bicycle, and later on his folks would take him on vacations to the Catskills or maybe to the shore in Long Branch for two or three weeks each summer. That was unheard of for anyone in Little Italy.”
But those vacations were not so happy for Frank as his envious Hoboken friends imagined.
“I remember in 1929 when my folks and I went with the Sinatras on a summer vacation to the Catskill Mountains in Cairo, New York,” said Kathryn Buhan, a Hoboken neighbor. “Frankie, who was thirteen then, seemed happy. His parents had been much too busy for him in Hoboken, and he thought that now they’d spend some time with him. But one morning, both our parents set off on a driving trip, leaving Frankie and me at the boardinghouse where we were staying. Frankie threw an awful tantrum.
“The boardinghouse owner tried to calm him down, but Frankie ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom, screaming bloody murder.
“A few hours later, I had to visit the bathroom, but Frankie wouldn’t let me in. I pounded on the door. But he wouldn’t come out until his parents came back.”
Kathryn Buhan also remembers photographs from that vacation that show Frankie holding a doll in every shot. “He was kind of a mama’s boy,” she said. “A little bit of a sissy.”
On another vacation, Frank was so embarrassed by his mother’s antics that he went to his room and wouldn’t come out for hours.
“Frankie had to do whatever Dolly said, and she would do anything to get a laugh,” said Joan Crocco Schook, who ran Mae’s Shoppe in Hoboken and knew both Dolly and Frank well. “One day she dressed up as a baby in a bonnet with a bottle and a frilly dress and made Frankie push her down the boardwalk in Long Branch in a big cart that was supposed to be a baby carriage. He was so humiliated, he wouldn’t come around for hours afterward.”
The kids on the block were the best excuse Frank had to get out of the house, and his mother liked to see him play with the neighborhood boys. She always gave him extra money to treat his friends to ice cream and sodas. When they started a club called the Turk’s Palace, which was half secret handshakes and half baseball, they needed uniforms. Dolly bought them the flashy orange and black outfits they picked out with a half moon and dagger on the back, thereby ensuring that Frank was made manager of the team as well as pitcher.
Reflecting on Frank’s childhood largesse many years later, some of the boys felt they had been bought, while others appreciated the generosity of a frail little boy trying to make friends.
“He used to buy friendship from the other kids,” said schoolmate Joe Romano. “Frank always had money, and he would share it with anybody who’d promise to be his friend.”
“If we were going to the movies and I couldn’t afford it,