TOWNSHIP OF WASHINGTON—The peanut gallery at David’s Bagels on Pascack Road ebbs and flows but this morning’s lineup is typical: WCTV-NJ’s Larry Lifreri holds comfortable court at the front tables, retirees and others ranged around him; Bob Stickel of LifeSavers Inc. and his son, James, home from college; Dennis McDine; in for coffee and hellos are Police Chief Richard Skinner and Capt. John Calamari.
On the agenda: kibbitzing about election results, high school football, and old business. Yellowed newspaper clips on the wall, and photos looking on, feature the late, luminous Vito “Pal” Trause, a war hero.
This paper’s editor ambles in from the morning chill. Lifreri, out of his chair, grabs him. “John, how ya doing; look, I got someone for you to meet, we’re gonna have him on [air] around Thanksgiving. (This week, we got football.) He’s Vince Crocitto; his birthday is Nov. 11, Veterans Day! He’s turning 99, if you can believe that. We’re gonna have a party for him, some of his friends, at Bellissimo the next day. Great guy! Vince, this is John from Pascack Press!”
For the next hour I’m sitting with Crocitto, of Coolidge Avenue, enjoying his company over bagels, cream cheese, jam, and coffee. Both of us are from Brooklyn, both of us are vets. I was an Air Force airborne radar technician, Gulf War era; he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, 1943–1946, as a flight engineer on B-17s.
“I did a lot of flying but I never went overseas. Most of my time in the service was in Florida. Miami Beach. It wasn’t my fault,” he says.
He adds that 400 fellows from his neighborhood, Dyker Heights, joined up after Pearl Harbor. His sortie had him facilitating weapons exercises, live fire with .50 cal machine guns at air-towed targets. And his airframe would shake: “Brabrabrabrabra…”
When he wasn’t flying, there was dancing—young ladies happily at hand (sure, why not, we were young)—under sway of Big Band icons.
Eventually he was deployed to Amarillo, Texas, then Fort Meyers, Fla., and the service replaced his
B-17 Flying Fortress with a B-24 Liberator (pilot, co-pilot, bombardier, navigator, radio operator, flight engineer, ball turret gunner, tail gunner and two waist gunners; eleven .50 cal. machine guns dealing damage).
An upgrade, yes, but Crocitto preferred the B-17. “It was a good plane. I never had any problems.”
And he recalls ruefully how much land in Florida he could have bought, “even at my pay. But who was thinking at my age—young guys!—I would’ve been a millionaire by now. Well, what the hell.”
He has many more postwar stories—principally from an up-by-your-own-bootstraps career in sales—than wartime stories.
Lifreri comes by, working the room, spreading cheer. After, I venture of the popular, knowledgeable TV interviewer, “He’s kind of like the mayor around here.”
“Oh? I like the mayor we have,” Crocitto says, meaning Republican Peter Calamari. “He was here about three or four days ago. He stops in and talks to us.” That leads to a chat about the recent changeover in management of the surrounding Washington Town Center, and the livability of our township generally.
“My big hope is they don’t do to this town what they did in Park Ridge and Emerson. How the hell could they do that [approve outsized mixed-use redevelopment projects] for the sake of money? How can you build something like that in these nice suburban towns? You’re trying to make a little city of out of it? Come on.”
He says he looks forward to his party at Bellissimo, which his friend Dennis McDine, who is doing very well, has set in motion. Some 40 folks are expected so far.
Crocitto says of starting out on his last year as a ninety-something, “I don’t know how I got here, but here I am. It pays to consider clean living. I quit smoking in 1959, one of the best things I ever did. I’ve seen too many of my friends… they’re gone! One of my best friends, the last year of his life was horrible. Why would you want to go through that.”
He adds that he’s a life member of the American Legion and Westwood Elks, but no longer active. “There’s nobody that I know. They’re all gone. My uncles, my cousins, they all belonged. And friends. All gone! There was about a half a dozen of us, Elks, we used to go to lunch every Wednesday, and they liked to travel… I guess that’s the price you pay if you live too long.”
So he fell in with the David’s Bagels crowd. “I started coming, little by little, and now I know all these people. I have met so many good people here. It’s something else.”
Crocitto moved to the township in 1959. He says his aunt and uncle lived in Westwood. “My sister and I used to come in from Brooklyn. The Red and Tan bus would drop us off right in front of their house. My uncle owned Westwood Fuel Oil; my aunt was my mother’s sister. They came originally from Hoboken.
“My uncle used to walk across Broadway, into the woods where that shopping center is now, the Kmart. He would shoot pheasant. I liked it better then—it was more room.”
He met his wife, the former Elizabeth Wedekind, in Westwood, at Pine Lake. (One of her sisters had introduced them.) Sadly, he lost Betty 10 years ago this August, to dementia. She worked in personnel at Stern’s Department Store in Paramus.
“I used to bring her here. I miss her. What are you going to do. Good girl. But that’s the way it is, John.”
They had one child, Michael, a professional, who never married. “He’s been living with this one girl for the past 26, 27 years. No kids. Nothing you can do about that.”
Here, Crocitto probes more about my job, and my job satisfaction. I absolutely love what I do, I say. I enjoy meeting interesting people.
“Good for you. That’s half the battle,” he says. We shake hands.