Angelo John Cutrone

May 18, 1926 - February 9, 2017

My dad passed away peacefully not long past midnight, the 9th of February, after a brief illness. He was 90 years old. We all got to spend some time with him that night, my mom, my sister, and Seth and me. We each got to kiss him goodnight, we each got to say I love you, and he told us he loved us and he thanked us. He said the words “thank you” so often in his last weeks, to us, to the rest of his family, to friends who visited, and to all the nurses and therapists who cared for him. They called him their favorite patient and we figure this was one of the last great things he did on this earth, was bring light and joy to all these people. Three hours after we left him, while he was sleeping, his heart stopped beating, and so he left this world.

Dad was born in Brooklyn on May 18, 1926; the accent stuck with him all his life. He was the son of Lazzaro Cutrone and Maria Porzia, both immigrants from Palo del Colle, Italy. His siblings were Alexander, Ignatius (Dick), Mary, and Francis (Frank). As a boy, he played marbles and stickball, and he attended Brooklyn public schools. In high school he focused on vocational studies, specifically automotive repair. He also helped his dad with the family business, delivering ice, coal, and oil. He began helping when he was 13 years old, which I think was the year he drove Grandpa's truck into a building (no one was hurt, except maybe for Dad once his mom found out). He kept on working all the way through most of his 90 years. He retired from his most recent career––Supervisor of Grounds & Transportation at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton––only recently, in the Spring of 2016. He began in that department at FAU in 1987. Prior to that, he worked for a while as an auto mechanic at Richway, and he ran the post office at The Flower Cart, a card and gift shop that the family owned in Boca Raton. The store was located on Camino Real in the Winn Dixie plaza just west of Dixie Highway. Dad ran that post office from the time he moved the family to Florida in 1978, but work behind a postal counter never did suit him, and we sold the store in 1982 so he could get back to his automotive roots.

Those automotive roots ran deep. In Brooklyn, he owned an automobile repair shop with his brother Al: Cutrone Service Station on Nostrand Avenue. They opened the shop in 1946. During World War II, Dad served in the US Army. His honorable discharge papers list him as "Carburetor Specialist." He led a charmed life in many ways, and perhaps the first manifestation of this was during the War: His unit was on a train from Fort Dix, shipping off to Europe, but Dad fell ill. The officers on the train thought he was drunk, but actually he had pneumonia. He was hospitalized here in the States and as a result never did go to Europe. Instead, he was later stationed in the Caribbean, in Trinidad and in Puerto Rico.

He returned home when the war ended, and after he opened his shop, met my mom, Carmela DeLuca. It was a blind date set up by a mutual friend, and they both tried to get out of it. But they did finally get together; Dad picked Mom up in a 1941 Packard Clipper and took her to a nightclub. After, Mom says, she couldn’t get rid of him. Which was all right by her. The friend who tried to get them together, Phyllis Caputo, had driven out to Yellowstone with her husband Benny for a vacation. When they got back, she saw my mom and dad sitting together on the stoop outside of Mom’s house on East New York Avenue. “Thank God,” she said. Her matchmaking had worked.

Mom and Dad got married on May 29, 1949, at St. Blaise Church in Brooklyn. The reception afterward was a football wedding, which doesn’t actually involve football but might involve folks tossing sandwiches across the room (“Hey, send me a capocollo sandwich!” someone might call, and then someone would toss them one) with a live band and trays of cream puffs and Italian cookies. The wedding almost didn’t happen because of mustard. Mom and Dad had a big fight the night before the wedding because someone forgot to buy the mustard. But mustard couldn’t keep these two apart. For their 60th anniversary, we held a surprise mock renewal of wedding vows ceremony at the house. We had bridesmaids and groomsmen and a bouquet of carrots and more sandwiches. We also celebrated that anniversary in more formal style at Rhythm Cafe in West Palm Beach, where our server, Karen, asked Dad what it was like to be married to this wonderful woman for 60 years. “Oh, it seems like it’s been 60 seconds,” he said. “Underwater.” It’s a joke Karen remembers to this day. That was Dad’s sense of humor, though. We all loved it. The Rhythm Cafe tradition continued each year after, and we were there last May 29 to celebrate their 67th anniversary together. If Mom will let us, I think we should return again next May 29. I think Dad would want us to.

My sister Marietta was born in 1953 in Brooklyn and soon after was pushing wheel barrows full of bricks as Dad and my grandfather Arturo built our home in Valley Stream, New York. I was born there in 1964. Dad was known there as the man with the impeccable lawn who polished his stainless steel gutters. The other men on the block often told him, “John, you’re making us look bad.” My maternal grandparents, Assunta and Arturo, lived with us. Dad would sometimes joke about selling the shop and moving to Florida, and then one day he did it. We all moved to Lighthouse Point, Florida, in 1978, and then in 1984, to Boca Raton, to the house that still is our family home.

As for his two kids, Marietta married Brian Gabrielsen in 1974 and they had two sons, Nicholas and John. Nicholas in turn married Brooke Pickard and they have three sons, Dad’s first great grandchildren: Joseph (9), Christian (5), and John Parker (3). John married Stephanie Hecht and they have two children: Joy (2) and James (3 months). Me, I’m married to Seth Thompson. One of the things I am most proud about when it comes to my dad is that he loved Seth as his own son. He was a lucky man who had all that he wanted, but nothing meant more to him than his family. My father entered this world in peace and he left it in peace, and who can ask for more than this; this and the blessing of love and understanding at home. Home and family were everything to him, the greatest riches, and Dad, by this standard, was one of the richest men anywhere.

John Cutrone