Richard Avanzini, as a young man and today (Photo by Melissa Scott Sinclair)
“It’s a lot of small stuff that seemed important to me at the time.”
That’s what Richard Avanzini says when I ask him about his life.
I think we all will say the same, one day. I think the small stuff is important.
Avanzini was born in 1922, at the end of New York City. Past 114th Street and 42nd Avenue in Corona, Queens, where the Grand Central Parkway runs now, there was nothing. Just empty lots, with some train sheds and a marsh. The neighborhood kids caught snakes, played stickball and climbed on a Long Island Rail Road steam engine that was rusting in the grass.
Sometimes they explored the local dump, where they threw rocks at the rats and sifted for treasure. Once, Avanzini pulled a five-dollar bill from a heap of coal ash. It was a small miracle. Back then, it only took a penny to buy four jumbo gumdrops from the candy shop.
Maybe that — the discovery of the five dollars — was when Avanzini became a collector. A finder. Once he found a pearl ring someone had lost. He collected stamps all his life, tucking into albums some 330,000 little oblongs. “All different,” he says. Later in life, he took up metal detecting. He still wears a watch he pulled from the sand.
Avanzini lives in a studio apartment now, a neat room with no space for collections, so he amasses facts instead. Every time I see him, he’s searching a new topic on Wikipedia or YouTube, and assiduously copying out lists into spiral-bound black notebooks with a blue Bic pen.
“What’s your latest list?” I ask.
“Oh, this is all disasters,” he says. “Earthquakes. Famines. Impact events: people hit by meteors.”
In another notebook, already filled, are movies of the 1930s. Paintings by Tintoretto. Cathedrals of the United States. Phobias. He has stacks of these notebooks. He is an inquisitive man.
Avanzini’s parents had beautiful names. His father was Achille. His mother was Giustina. You have to say them with your hands: Ah-kee-lay. Gee-you-stee-na. Both were immigrants from Northern Italy.
Achille was a chef. Northern Italians aren’t “spaghetti eaters,” Avanzini says with a hint of disdain. He grew up on cotechino salami, zucchini-stuffed onions and pasta shuta, made with the merest hint of tomato sauce and mushrooms. On New Year’s Eve, there was bagna cauda, a warm dipping sauce made with olive oil, garlic and anchovies. “Smell that garlic,” he says, remembering. “Smell the house up!”
As a kid, he helped his father make wine. Every fall, Achille would order a hundred boxes of grapes. In the basement was a five-foot trough poured from concrete. The grapes were ground up and left there to ferment. It was Avanzini’s job to go down and check it — just taste a spoonful — when he came home from school. When the fermentation was done, they’d strain it, let the sediment settle and siphon the wine into bottles.
“I wish I could go back and taste that wine,” I say.
He shrugs. “I was never much for wine.”
Avanzini enlisted in the Navy in December 1942, eager for action. He became one of the very first Seabees, with the 25th Naval Construction Battalion. The Seabees were a new kind of sailor: engineers who were trained to fight.
He was sent to the Pacific: American Samoa, New Zealand, Guadalcanal and Guam. He built tank fields and airstrips and eight-seat latrines. He never saw combat, but came under fire a few times. “The closest I came to being killed,” he says, “was when we were going up to Guam.” He was standing on the deck of a ship, shoulder to shoulder with a buddy who was reading the news of the day. “All of a sudden, I hear a ping. … [My friend] looks at his paper; there’s a hole in the middle between his two hands. And on the floor, there’s a piece of shrapnel from the shells.”
His only injury was this: a Dear John letter received from his girlfriend while he was on Guadalcanal. It was OK, though. He just needed a new pen pal. “Why don’t you write Norma a letter?” his cousin suggested. Norma was an acquaintance from the neighborhood. “I’m sure she’d like to hear from you.”
Thus began a two-year exchange of letters. The notes weren’t gushy; they didn’t know each other well. And the system of V-mail — small sheets of paper that were shrunk onto microfilm and then re-enlarged — confined their words inside red borders, with lines blacked out by censors. But he could tell she was smart. And she cared. And that mattered.
In July 1945, when his train home to New York City finally arrived, Norma was waiting for him at the station. They married and had two sons, Michael and Richard. Avanzini became a grocer, working 27 years for A&P. After that, he bought a little food truck and sold coffee and snacks to factory workers in Long Beach. Norma died three years ago, and he moved to Richmond. He’s proud of his five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
“Looking back on your life, what are your favorite memories?” I ask.
“I didn’t have a life that was so exciting and all, like some people, you know,” he says. “It was an everyday life, to people like me.”
But his mind turns back to his service in the Pacific, 75 years ago now, and to the small sun-splashes of joy. There was the time a farmer gave him pineapple cut fresh from the field: “I tell ya, I ate so much pineapple. You know that pinch you get on your tongue? Oh! But boy, we ate pineapple.”
And there was the Sunday in British Samoa when he heard, far away, people singing in a church. “And we went over there. Their voices were beautiful. Like hearing angels sing, you know?”
On YouTube, he has searched for those island hymns, and written them down. (He can sing the first lines of “How Great Thou Art” in Samoan.)
He found many that were beautiful. But none that matched his memory.
Never miss a Sunday Story: Sign up for the newsletter, and we’ll drop a fresh read into your inbox at the start of each week. To keep up with the latest posts, search for the hashtag #SundayStory on Twitter and Facebook.
