Pete left a big footprint Friday, March 02, 2012
Teddy was wrong when he told me ten years ago at my mother’s
funeral that we were the last two of the Sarti clan.
I was wrong for thinking when Ted died in 2010 that I was
the last.
But now I am truly the last of the clan now that Uncle Pete
(Big Pete) is gone.
He died Monday of complications from cancer – a cancer that
should have killed him in the late 1990s, when doctors predicted he had only a
few months to live.
He fooled them, he lived another dozen years.
Big Pete wasn’t really a Sarti. But he married so early into
the clan he might as well have been the sixth son my grandfather never had,
marrying Alice who was special to all of us.
His house became a center of family social activities, especially
after my grandfather passed away in 1966. But he had already become deeply
enmeshed in family functions from when he married
Big Pete was part of that 1950s vision of a bright new
modern world and seemed to get his fingers around the bottom rung of success in
a way none of the others of my family ever could, someone who lived out the
full potential the post war
A first generation Italian immigrant, Pet came to
By the time
I didn’t know until last night that Big Pete met my aunt,
Alice at Curtis Wright in
Little Peter at the wake laughed about the meeting, saying
that the boss did not want to upset Alice, so instead of laying Big Pete off as
originally planned, the boss offered Pete a position in another department
where he would work with computers.
The boss didn’t want to hurt
The transfer put Big Pete on the road to success.
Like Michael Bloomberg, Peter would be learning to work with
computers in the mid-1950s decades before computer technology became common
item, and he would transfer those skills to Wall Street where he would rise in
status to executive vice president of Kidder Peabody & Co. Inc. – though unlike Bloomberg, Pete never lost
touch with his humanity or his dedication to family.
I once compared
Pete and Alice to the characters in the Dick Van Dyke Show, living in a world
that was then an exact picture of the American Dream.
Last night at
the funeral home with the hundreds of people coming into to pay tribute to Big
Pete, I was reminded of Alice’s funeral and the line of cards that stretched
behind the hearse as it made its way from the Fairfield church to the Paterson
grave yard – today, I saw a repeat of that, a stunning ride that had police
cars holding up traffic as if we were part of a presidential motorcade.
Little Pete at
the wake said his father had left “a big footprint,” a phrase he would use
again today at the church.
He said his father had had numerous brushes with death over
his 80-year life sp, staring back when as a very young boy, he fell off a hay
wagon he wasn’t supposed to be on, and did not tell anyone until an infection
settled into his ear and took him years to recover.
Raised in the
“It was as if our family had taken over
Once successful, Big Pete purchased a shore house down in
Big Pete’s granddaughter said he loved listening to Frank
Sinatra and Tony Bennett, smoking cigars
and sitting on the beach looking out at the sat.
But he also rode a bicycle and had a nasty habit of falling
off. One time, he ran into a car door that was flung open in front of him.
Little Pete got a call from Big Pete who said, “We got a problem,” a standard
phase for when one of his schemes when haywire.
His granddaughter said Big Pete was completely honest, and
recalled her efforts to learn how to cook. She said she liked his honesty
because when he gave praise he really meant it.
One of the elderly priests at the funeral recalled the day
Big Pete told him he was leaving the seminary – one of those life decisions
that led eventually to his marrying my aunt, a kind of marriage that seems as
mythical to me as a tale from King Arthur’s Court.
Little Peter said a lot of dogs passed through Big Pete’s
life, all of them with the same name, “King.”
Another priest, who became a close friend of Big Pete’s ,
recalled when Big Pete and the kids took him into their home. This was after
Big Pete’s mistaken second marriage, when his four kids from
I briefly visited them at that house, hearing their tale of
woe, heard that the priest was living there, but never met him.
The priest, however, recalled Pete’s rituals, putting on the
coffee in the morning, getting the kids ready for school, before making his way
to
His granddaughter recalled a regular routine called “bagels
and buns” and the trip to the store during which Big Pete sat one of them in
his lap and let them steer. When they passed a police car, she was sure they
would get pulled over, but Big Pete only laughed and said, “Don’t worry about
it.”
Big Pet worried about very little, even though other people
might have seen the pain his life – the loss of
The elderly priest remembered when he took his sister to
“Six months
ago, my sister died,” the priest said. “Now Pete is gone.”
But Little
Peter said Pete’s legacy was in the people he left behind, his family and
friends. He recalled Big Pete taking him to the office from time to time, but
only realized later how the people in the office were like a second family to
him, some of whom had come to the wake or the funeral.
Little Pete
also recalled his father’s legendary pocket games with men from the neighborhood
full of cigar smoke and healthy conversations. Now Little Pete continued those
poker games with the sons of some of the same men his father had played with.
Big Pete’s
granddaughter choked up before she could finish her tribute, which in that emotional
moment was a tribute bigger than words, big enough even for Big Pete.
As I drove
behind the hearse along the highway, as the police made way for us to pull into
the cemetery where Big Pete would be reunited with Alice, the love of his life,
I realized that nearly everybody who had ever helped me as a young boy were
living in that same grave stone resort, people of the Sarti clan that had
stepped up to the plate to help fill the space left by my lack of father, each
taking their turn with me, each become a father for me, and in that role, Big
Pete certainly played his part, and though I didn’t see him often, I had to see
him at the last, to say good bye to a man whose life was bigger than life, and
yet at the same time, never out of touch with the ordinary, small things having
great meaning, his footprint big indeed, especially in my heart.
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