Dedication
This book is for anyone who was raised in an orphanage or in the foster care system, and for anyone who has ever been orphaned and abandoned by their family. It’s for anyone who ended up on the streets like I did—and for those people who feel that life will never get any better. It will if you believe that something better will come along and keep looking for it.
I dedicate this book to my brother, who, unlike me, gave up on life.
“There is no education like adversity.” - Benjamin Disraeli
chapter one born abandoned
“Jim! Get out of that god-damned tree now!” my grandmother screamed in broken Italian. I was halfway up one of her cherry trees that she used to harvest cherries for moonshine. She came outside after me, raging like a bull, yanking me out of the tree onto the ground. Without offering me a hand to pick me up, she continued back into the house, mumbling in Italian under her breath. I don’t know what she was saying, but I could feel the intention. I moved on to find something else to do, out of her sight. Like most kids, I needed to move, to be in action. I was a bit hyper, but I wasn’t any different than most little boys under the age of five.
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My grandmother yelled at me a lot, which seems like a normal thing for Italian grandmothers to do if you go by what you see in the movies. But this was different. Her yelling at me came from a place of regret and loathing. There was something deep within it that bellowed how much she wished things were just different. It wasn’t that she hated me, but everything she did and said made it pretty clear that she regretted having me around.
It was like that most of the time for me. “Dammit, Jim, get out of that! Jim! Stop touching those! Sit down! Stop it, dammit!” I might have thought my name was Dammit had I not known any better.
I didn’t know better about a lot of things growing up. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal to get the crap smacked out of me for the smallest bit of mischief. I didn’t know that there were some kids who never had to cope with being tossed from one home to another, not knowing who their mother was or what it felt like to have a stable home. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal to never be hugged. My normal was being
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screamed at, pushed around and abandoned over and over again without any real clue as to why it was happening or when it would stop.
I didn’t even know that I was in a situation that a lot of people today would look at and say, “Wow, Jim, you had it pretty rough.” Some people had it a lot rougher, and I can appreciate that, but it didn’t take away from the fact that I was given away three times. The only thing I knew for sure growing up was that each day was a new day, and that each day, whether I was five or fifteen, I would wake up and make the best out of it. Even if that meant living in the back of a grocery store because I needed a place to stay, and there I could have a sleeping place in exchange for keeping the floor clean--which, believe me, is a good offer and one I took more than once.
My brother Frankie and I were a part of the system, abandoned and tossed from family to orphanage to foster care in the span of our first eleven years. Every person handles that sort of thing differently. We tell ourselves things to make ourselves feel better. While I was telling
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myself that each day was a new day and I knew that I had something better coming to me, my brother, Frankie, didn’t have that same inner dialogue. Although we started out much the same, we ended up on opposite sides of the spectrum with regard to our views toward our lives and their purpose.
I was born in 1948, at St. Mary’s Maternity Hospital and Children’s Home in Lyncourt, New York, just outside of Syracuse. The hospital was known, at that time, for taking care of unwed mothers. It was also a hospital in which mothers could leave or abandon a child that they could not take care of. In my case, so I was told, I had both a mother and father who abandoned me. So, I remained in the hospital with other babies being taken care of by the nuns. Supposedly my father’s mother, my grandmother, was the only one who came to visit me. I was too young to remember.
The only memory I have of the place was being placed in tube, sliding down a long way and being taken out by the nuns at the bottom. Somehow, I’ve remembered that story for nearly
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seventy years, and I was not even two years old at the time. I returned many years later to find that the hospital is still there, but it is no longer a place for abandoned children. And there, on the side of the building, remained the long tube which was used for getting babies and young children out of the building safely in the event of a fire. As it turns out, there had been a fire while I was there as a very small child. I smiled when I saw it, because now I knew for sure it wasn’t something I imagined.
As I got a little older, I learned a lot about my family. Apparently, my grandmother and grandfather immigrated to America from the southern part of Italy back in 1929. Like so many immigrants, they made their way by boat to Ellis Island. They settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with thousands of immigrants from all over the world. It was an overcrowded working-class neighborhood, but the people coming to the United States were just happy to be in a country with so many possibilities. I have no idea how long they stayed in New York City, or how they got to Syracuse, but that’s
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where they ended up. They had four children— two boys, Frank, who was my father, and my uncle Paul. There were also two daughters, my aunts Rose and Jeannette.
My father was never really much of a “father”, so to speak. He was just one of those uneducated guys who got married and, due to the circumstances in which he found himself, happened to have kids. Instead of working, he was into gambling, drinking and acting like a tough guy. In his mind, he thought that was work. He was basically a gangster wannabe. He married my mother, Virginia Caruso, whom I never met, when they were both pretty young.
I was told that they had a daughter that died of pneumonia because he had no money to pay the heating bill. They then had my brother in 1946, and two years later, I came along.
For some reason unbeknownst to me, maybe to make him sound important or glorify him in some way, my aunts, Rose and Jeannette, used to tell me that my dad worked for the CIA. Once I got to know my dad, I knew that he didn’t have
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the education to work for the CIA. In fact, he probably couldn’t even spell CIA. But I remember when they first told me about the CIA, I couldn’t stop laughing. Maybe it was meant to be a joke, since you have to be educated, ethical and sober to work for an intelligence organization, and he was not any of those things.
As for my Uncle Paul, he was the most likable of the whole bunch of them. He was a happy, fun loving wino who didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was always jolly and laughing about something. Paul was the kind of guy you never had to worry about saying the wrong thing around. He kept things lighthearted and he didn’t seem to have a care in the world. He was the nicest person anyone could meet—and because of these attributes, probably one of the reasons everyone else in the family seemed to treat my brother and I so coldly. By comparison to Uncle Paul, just about any other attitude was cold. That was the family, and the one thing they all had in common was that none of them had any vested interest in my brother or me. What
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I would later learn was that real “family” does not have to be blood relatives. I found this out at the age of two when I was lucky enough to become part of a terrific family.
Since we were Italian, my brother and I were taken from the orphanage into the home of an Italian couple, Carmella and Joseph Grande— two of the nicest people anyone could hope to meet. They were going to adopt us, raise us, and give us a good home. At last, after my long stay in the hospital of unwanted children, I was going to have a real life.
The Grandes had apparently visited me often in the hospital, and I was told that they were going to be my mother and father. I was very young, so I probably didn’t know what that truly meant. Most babies are held by their mothers as infants, so they know who their mothers are. Even though they can’t understand what that means, babies that are only a few months old can recognize the face and voice of their mothers. I had no idea what that was like, so when Carmella Grande would visit me and pick me up, I must have thought it was terrific. I
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didn’t know any differently. As for my brother, he knew our parents. He was with them for two years, so he was a lot more confused and screwed up when he suddenly went from living with mom and dad to the Grande’s home, who he had to accept as his new mom and dad.
The Grandes lived in Liverpool, New York, about six miles away from Syracuse. They had a nice house, although it was small, maybe 1,200 square feet. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and bathroom. In the house right behind theirs was Carmella’s sister and her family. They also had a nice house and we would go back and forth along a path to and from their house. I felt like I was part of one big family. This had become my home and I was a happy little boy.
Joseph Grande, who I called dad, worked at a washing machine manufacturer that made the old-fashioned machines. These were the ones where you’d put the cloth through a wringer and it went from one tub to the other and then into a pool of clear water. The company was called Easy Washer and, at the time, their
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machines were quite innovative. Meanwhile, Carmella, my mom, stayed home and took care of my brother and me. I was one happy kid. I became friends with the boy across the street— we played all sorts of games and ran wild in the backyard. It was a good life for a little kid.
I remember proudly walking to school with my mom. I was going to kindergarten and my brother was in second grade. I also remember when I’d get home from school there would always be snacks waiting on the table. I made a lot of friends in school, but my brother did not. He spent a lot of time in his room. We usually got along just fine, but there was one time when I stuck something sharp in his ear. I don’t remember if I was mad at him or just trying to be annoying, but his ear started bleeding and my dad, Joe, got very mad at me. But it didn’t last long—Joe knew how to be a father. He may have been mad and made sure I knew I was in trouble, but it was part of being a kid. The Grandes liked having us in their home, and we were glad to be there.
We were well-fed, had clean clothes to wear
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