Like many others, today I am honoring those who served and those who died 76 years ago on D-Day and the entire Normandy Invasion. Special thanks to the Allied troops - American, Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand, Free French, Free Dutch, et al. - who made it happen and rescued Europe and the world.
My father's brother - my Uncle Vic - was one of those young men who was there that fateful day. He was a paratrooper - 82nd Airborne - who made a nighttime jump into France. He survived that one, and 48 other jumps over Europe.
Thank you! And a special thanks to the French people, still so welcoming and appreciative lo these many years!
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Giovanni Pellegrino Campana would have been 106 today.
That name is on his birth certificate, but we knew my father as John Pilgrim Campana. Born on 6 June 1914, he was the son of Italian immigrants Consiglia and Domenico Campana, who arrived on these shores from Naples, Italy, in the late 1890s.
The family settled in Boston, where my father grew up working, playing baseball, ice hockey, 
but most of all, studying. He vaguely recalled the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. He attended Boston Latin School, the oldest and arguably still the best high school in the USA.
After that, it was off to the oldest college in the USA, Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude with a degree in history in 1936. In those days, Harvard was not a hospitable place for Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, or Jews; forget about Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, or African-Americans! It was the bastion of WASPs - White (or Wealthy) Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
He loved playing hockey - he was a right winger - but didn't play for Harvard after his freshman year. He told me that the rich kids on the team would rent one of the indoor arenas for practices that were restricted to themselves and their friends. So while he worked, they practiced and his skills fell behind. When he told me this, there was nary a trace of bitterness in his voice. That's just the way it was.
But his true sports love was baseball. He played shortstop athlete (traditionally the position reserved for the bast athlete) and pitched on
He married 'Southern belle' (North Carolina) Ruth Ellen Emerson in 1943 and they had three children. They first lived in Manhattan, then moved out to Queens, and finally, headed to the Long Island suburbs in December 1951, where they remained until 1978, retiring to Mooresville, North Carolina.
He started teaching in the New York City school system in 1938, a career that spanned 36 years, 26 of which were spent at Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School, the nation's second-oldest high school. He taught history and political science. He recalls EHHS students Barbra Streisand, chess champion Bobby Fischer, Neil Diamond, Billy Cunningham, and Lainie Kazan. Don't ask him about the first two. In those days, EHHS was one of the nation's best. Its top students won scholarships to the USA's finest universities. Even the top Jewish students, who for years could not get into the Ivy League schools, routinely made Princeton, Yale, and Harvard starting in the mid-1950s; African-Americans (few in number at EHHS in those days) and others soon followed. As I grew up, I remember many visits from former students who would drop by to thank him for all he had done. They told me what a remarkable teacher and man he was and how much he had helped them.
He left EHHS in 1964 to help open Canarsie High School in Brooklyn. He was the Assistant Principal, a position that earned him more money but meant no more teaching. That was a tough call for him.
His time at CHS was difficult - an unreasonable boss and trouble from the 
start. In those days, the races and ethnicities mixed far worse than they do today. On some days scores of NYPD officers patrolled the halls and grounds. When a chair whizzed by his ear during a cafeteria free-for-all, he knew it was time to retire. That was 1974. This photo was taken a few years before he left CHS.
My father was an inveterate and prolific letter-writer. He would write letters to all kinds of people: political leaders, heads of state, CEOs, editors, sports figures, et al. At the time of his death he was working on a book titled, One Small Voice, a collection of his letters. His favorite target was Tom Yawkey, then the owner of his beloved but then-incompetent Boston Red Sox. He would instruct Yawkey on whom to trade, whom to release, etc. It was a futile exercise, of course, but he enjoyed it. One of my big regrets in life was seeing him die in 1984, before the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018. But at least he did not witness the 1986 debacle. That surely would have killed him. My father's devotion to the Sox and their history still have an impression on me: although I am a Yankees fan, there is a soft spot in my heart for the Red Sox.
I often wonder how the Internet would have appeared to him. Given his love for writing and commentary, would he have become a blogger? Somehow I doubt it. He was committed to letters.
He was a student of history, languages (five), politics, sports, chess, and more. He was small in stature and an unlikely athlete. Baseball, hockey, golf, bowling, and tennis were his games. He was a Democrat who was not overly fond of John F. Kennedy and the Kennedy clan. He remembered too much from his early days in Boston and also never forgave patriarch Joe for being an early Hitler supporter. But he voted for JFK over Richard Nixon in 1960; that was a no-brainer.
My late younger sister Ann and he would have some epic confrontations; they were too much alike. One of his unbreakable rules was, 'Never drive the car into Manhattan.' I recall an incident where Ann was to drive his precious Mustang into Queens to catch the subway into Manhattan. Well, she sort of forgot about the rule, and drove into the city. Next morning as he got up to go to work, he saw a note from Ann that said, 'Sorry - it was the g-d [god-damned] bus!' He did not understand the note till he went out for his morning drive into Brooklyn. That's when he noticed a huge crease running the length of the driver's side of the Mustang. Seems that Ann had had an encounter with a city bus. She left the note and was spending the day at the beach. Lucky for that, too - she had been partying with friends in Manhattan and was in no shape to face my father.
I am glad he did not have to witness her death at the hands of terrorists.
I loved listening to him discuss history, especially American history, his forte. He actually 'rescued' my interest in history, because my high-school history teachers were generally pretty pathetic. They often emphasized rote memorization with little dicussion of what the events meant. That's where my father came in. He provided the big picture.
I shudder to think of his assessment of our national leadership these days - not just the President but the others as well. He would be dismayed to see that we could do no better. He would be appalled at the neo-Nazi 'patriots' who have become the darlings of some politicians. Have the latter forgotten the monster named Hitler? No way - not in JPC's country!
Although he suffered the stings of discrimination - even as an adult - he would never equate his experiences with those visited upon African-Americans and other people of color. I am glad he did not have to witness the horror of 'I can't breathe!'.
Whatever my skills are in teaching and education, I owe to him. He was so proud when I received my PhD. He had an ABD ('all but dissertation' - half done, on Stephen Decatur and the Barbary Pirates) from Fordham - marriage and a family intervened - and he never finished. He would have made quite a professor!
His beloved Red Sox will not win this year, if MLB can figure out how to play. The Bruins might win the Stanley Cup if the NHL decides upon a schedule. Oh, how he loved watching Bobby Orr! Some of my fondest memories of our time together are of watching the then-inept New York Rangers play at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. They usually lost, as did the Bruins, who were equally inept. Those were the days of a six-team ('original 6') NHL: Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Montreal, Boston and New York.
I miss you, Dad; I think of you each day. You're my role model.
And I'm wearing a mask.
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” ― G.K. Chesterton
"Democracy is like a raft; you're safe, but your feet get wet." -- John P. Campana
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