Dear readers,
The many Italian connections in March continue:
Judge John J. Sirica was born on March 23, 1904, in Waterbury, Connecticut. He was the US district court judge whose search for the truth about the 1972 Watergate break-in was the first step leading to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Sirica was raised in poverty in several eastern American cities and, after supporting his studies by boxing, he received his law degree from Georgetown University (1926). He was an assistant United States Attorney (1930-34), then he was active in private practice. In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him a district judge for the District of Columbia. By 1971, his seniority made him the court’s chief judge. At the trial of the seven Watergate burglars in 1973, Judge Sirica’s questioning of witnesses led to defendant McCord implicating officials of the Nixon administration in the crime. In two years of Watergate trials that Sirica heard, his most significant ruling was that Nixon was obligated to deliver evidence, including White House tape recordings, in response to a subpoena from the prosecution. The United States Court of Appeals later upheld Sirica. He ordered the Grand Jury’s report on Nixon to be delivered to the US House of Representatives impeachment investigation, and he presided over the trials of Nixon’s closest assistants, including John Mitchell, H.R. Haldemann, and John Ehrlichman. He died on August 14, 1992, in Washington DC.
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, on March 24, 1919. In 1953 he co-founded City Light Bookshop in san Francisco and published his Pocket Poet Series in 1955. In the 1990s, Ferlinghetti served as the official San Francisco Poet Laureate.
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Arturo Toscanini was born on March 25, 1867, in Parma. He became New York’s chief conductor at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1909. He died in 1957.
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Fr. Juan Crespi, a Spanish missionary with Italian parents, put his foot on the soil of the San Francisco Bay area, together with a party led by explorer Gasper DePortola, in March 1722.
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Fr. Marco de Niza died in March 1558. He had led an expedition with Coronado into New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona and helped build a small school there.
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Silvio Berlusconi, the right-wing media tycoon, won the general election in Italy on March 28, 1994. But the honeymoon did not last very long.
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An Italian Army defeat in Adowa (Ethiopia) in March 1896 left 7,000 dead. Under the elderly general Barateri, the Italian advance was chaotic, orders were misunderstood, and brigades were separated. Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi gambled on a quick foreign conquest and lost.
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Frankie Laine was born Frank Paul LoVecchio on March 30, 1913, in Chicago. His father was a barber and had many of Chicago’s more notorious names among his clients. He attended Catholic school and was singing in the choir by the time he was 7.
He drove to California in 1943 and went to work at Pacific Screw products, a defense plant in South Gate (some 32 miles from Hollywood). Whenever he had time off, he made the rounds of the Jazz Clubs, filling in when needed. At Billy Berg’s in Hollywood, Laine sang his version of Rockin’ Chair. One member of the audience — Hoagy Carmichael, author of the song — applauded wildly and persuaded the club owner to hire Frankie on a paying basis. One of his numbers was a song called That’s My Desire, which he sang one night when a record executive was present, who suggested he recorded it for Mercury Records. He did, and his fortune was made.
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Joe Di Maggio, Italian American baseball legend, died in March 1999, at the age of 84. He was born in November 1914. His father, a fisherman, was born on Isola delle Femmine, along the northern coast of Sicily. Joe joined the New York Yankees in 1936. He was born in Martinez, California. A children’s hospital wing in Hollywood, Florida, carries his name.
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Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence, Italy, on March 9, 1451. He was the third son of Ser Nastagio and Lisabetta Mini. In 1505, he became a naturalized citizen of Spain and, later, he was awarded the office of piloto mayor, master navigator, of Spain, Vespucci died in Seville, Spain, of malaria, in 1512.
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Antonio Vivaldi, baroque composer, musician, and teacher, was born on March 4, 1678. He wrote The Four Seasons in 1725, each of the four concertos representing a season of the year. Written for solo violin and a small orchestra, each concerto is further divided into three movements: the first, an allegro, or fast, section; the second, a slow section called adagio or largo; and the third, a concluding allegro, or presto finale. When Vivaldi published The Four Seasons, he included four sonnets with the manuscript, laying out the impression he was trying to give with each season.
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