Grandpa was laid to rest with Grandma Grace on December 20, 2019.  In spite of the fact that he has left us, the walls of his apartment are a testament to the life he lived and the legacy he left. Grandpa's walls are covered in framed collages of our shared family history.  His parents and grandparents, his siblings and his two wives, his three children, 6 grandchildren and great-granddaughter.   We are all there.  He has left me the legacy to tell his story and share him.  He shared his joys, his angsts, and the dreams he lost along the way.  What I will miss most was the way he talked about my Grandma Rose.  She’s been gone all of these years, and yet, the glint in his eyes as he saw her walk by him for the first time in his mind’s eye, would make the heart of any romantic burst.  May he rest in peace with all of them who made up his story and all those he spent decades missing.  


In his last years, Grandpa had to bury all of his siblings and all of his friends.  When his best friend, Johnny, died in April 2019, he kept saying he had no more friends.  He was so resilient though.  He said, “they’re all gone, but I carry on!”  He carried on too when Super Storm Sandy devastated Baldwin in 2012 and did not spare his home in its destructive wake.  He refused to leave and come to stay with me…he weathered the storm like everything else.  I was exasperated with him for that, but his stubbornness is what helped him to live into his 90s.
	In his last years, I decided that his life must be recorded and that I was going to write his story.  Over countless hours, he relived it all….the streets of Brooklyn, his father’s grocery store, the war, antics with his friends, and the loves of his life.  On his 92nd birthday, all he wanted was to get a frankfurter off of the truck and play with his great-granddaughter.  Who knew it would be their last time.  When he went to the hospital for the first time on September 30th, it was inconceivable that in retrospect it was the beginning of the end.  He was invincible and would be a minor setback.  But, after four hospitalizations, he went to the hospital for the last time on November 22nd and his body grew tired and a cure was not to be.  On December 16, 2019, six days before the 69th anniversary of the death of his first wife and two months before the 26th anniversary of his second, Grandpa went home to be reunited with them and all of the Franzese’s at the age of 92.
	

I never knew my grandfather as well as a child as in the year that followed his widowhood.  I was 16 and he had agreed to teach me how to drive.  Unlike my father who didn’t like getting up to learn when he was a teenager, I was ready every Saturday morning in 1995 to go.  “Don’t get too close to the gutter curb.  Watch your mirrors.  Don’t pull too close to the Johnny pump.”  I can still hear all his admonitions, but I also remember that is when he started telling me his stories.  Rose would live again, the legendary grandmother that no one else knew but him, and Grandma Grace and the stories of their youth together…. the struggles he had in his courtships of both.
	In his retirement years, he did things that he never had time for when he was young…. being an active part in the lives of the children of his family.  Especially Grace, David and Joseph, who got to see their “Papu” live with them, and be another parent helping them in every way.  He became a well-known fixture in Baldwin as he walked them to school and picked them up from school daily.  At the age of 85, he got to live to see something else he never imagined, the birth of his great-grandchild, Victoria Rose.  It seems that no one understands the very young like the very old…and the younger kids got to have him as a treasure in their lives. 


	Following a major operation to repair the ulcers in 1952 and the death of his father, Pete, in 1954, Pat finally healed and went on a blind double date with his friend, Patty Boy, with a girl from Boerum Street.  A beauty with bright red hair of Irish-Scotch and German descent and seven and a half years his junior, they were from different nationalities, religions, and ages.  He had been married and had a child.  She was a secretary not more than a year out of high school.  Despite her parents’ objections and his mother’s disappointment in the difference of religion, Grace MacFall, would become his second wife, with the support of her Pastor Klopf, on January 14, 1956.
	Grandpa Pat and and Grandma Grace lived in Brooklyn and then Richmond Hill, where their favorite pastime together was going to Florida.  Pat loved to fish and the joke was that instead of getting a boat, they had a baby.  After eleven and a half years of marriage, they became parents with the birth of  Michele in 1967 and Paul in 1969.  Grandpa had his second chance at happiness with the woman he loved and having a family together, all that had eluded him in his first marriage due to tragedy.
	After twenty-two years in Richmond Hill, Grandpa Pat and Grandma Grace and Michele and Paul moved to Island Park.  In the meantime, they became grandparents to me in 1978 and my brother, Robert, in 1998, and saw their children get married in 1991.  And then, in 1993, Grandma Grace was diagnosed with colon cancer.  When she died on February 11, 1994, after the cancer had metastasized to the brain at the age of 58, and she was buried in a snowstorm as had his first wife, Rose, Pat was lost once again.  After thirty-eight years of marriage, he had to find his way again.


On his off time, Grandpa Pat was with his best friend, Johnny Morena, running around the city, going on double dates, the fights, the Freeport auto races, and trips upstate to Fort Montgomery, New York.  When he came out of the service in December 1946, he returned to work for his brother, Carmine, and became a foreman at the age of 19.
	Carmine taught Grandpa how to drive and his passion became his green 1946 Hudson.  It was the car he took on dates, to impress the girls, and was his chick magnet.  It was while sitting on his friend, Johnny Morena’s stoop during the summer of 1948 that a beautiful Sicilian brunette walked diagonally across the street in front of him on Richardson Street, took his breath away, and changed his life forever.  The following night, he had his Hudson there to whisk her away to Coney Island, only to find out that she was engaged to be married.  Following a tempestuous courtship, she broke her engagement, and the young woman, Rose Porti, would become his girl.
	Rose was the oldest of seven kids in a family that did not have a lot and Pat was determined to have her see the world.  They were married a year after they met, on September 18, 1949, and a year later, had a child on Pat’s 23rd birthday, my father, Peter.  
	Grandpa was soon after hospitalized by bleeding ulcers and Rose’s heart condition from childhood became serious.  When my father was only three months old, his mother, Rose, died at the age of 22 on December 22, 1950.  After a marriage of only 15 months, Pat was a widower at the age of 23, sick with bleeding ulcers, the city was taking their home because it was in the path of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and his son was going to be entrusted to his brother, Sam and wife, Josephine. 


The youngest of the seven children born to Pietro Franzese, an Italian-American grocer from Palma Campania, Italy, who came to the United States in 1903, and his second wife, Lorenzina Nunziata, Pasquale was born on September 5, 1927, in the living quarters of his father’s grocery store at 501 Humboldt Street in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.  Spoiled by his sister, Margie, ruled by the firm hand of his mother, and in the shadow of three older brothers, Pat grew up playing stickball in the streets, going to the movies to see his childhood hero, Errol Flynn, and unsuccessfully trying to outwit his mother to stay home from school.
	Grandpa Pat became of age because of the outbreak of World War II.  No longer such a carefree kid, two of his brothers went off to Europe to fight, and it was now him by his oldest brother’s side left behind to run the family business, Brooklyn Box Toe, a shoe manufacturing factory.  Leaving school at the age of 16, after having graduated William J. Gaynor Junior High School in the 9th grade, the same school where in 1942 he had survived a school shooting that saw the murder of his math teacher, Pat went to work instead of finishing his education.  “You’ll be a donkey for the rest of your life,” his angry father said to him when he left school.  Grandpa would always laugh and say his father was a smart man…but the war made the boy into a man.  When the war took the life of the brother he idolized, the handsome and charismatic Sal, and was followed by his other brother, Sammy, being shot, his being drafted in December of 1945 made it a very unsettling proposition to be sent overseas.  After basic training in Little Rock, Arkansas, Grandpa went to Germany where he served for six months for police action, stationed at the gate of a military hospital in Frankfurt.  He served the last six months of his service back at Fort Dix in the dispensary as the assistant to a doctor and giving out vaccinations.  

Ninety-two years, three months, and eleven days….no, it wasn’t long enough.  He has always had that Dick Clark kind of persona in that he was ageless both in appearance and in spirit.  And while he loved to reminisce about the past, he was very much about living in the present.  Over glasses of Carlo Rossi burgundy, he shared the highs and lows of nearly a  century of working hard, loving much, suffering great losses, and rising up.  Our car rides took us on walks through the streets of his youth in Greenpoint, Brooklyn…car rides to see long lost relatives in Manhattan…drives to reunite with people from his past on the East End of Long Island…and many laughs as we teased one another along the way.
	I am Pat’s oldest grandchild and his biographer.  He was “The Giver” and I was the “Receiver of Memory.”  Through his uncanny gift for total recall, he brought the long dead back to life with his unparalleled gift of storytelling.


Developing his own unique relationship with each of them as he did with the rest of us.  When Ruth, an elderly woman in the neighborhood, moved in with us while her house was being repaired from Hurricane Sandy, he embraced that friendship, as well, and spent each day sharing meals and stories with her.  My mom shared the grandparent role with him which caused them to build a special bond over the years laughing and talking and worrying about all of us.  She was dedicatedly by his bedside for the past two months, caring for him, making demands of the nurses, and arguing with him to eat.  

As time passed, so did each of his friends and siblings, which deeply saddened him.  Being a survivor of 2 wives, 5 siblings, and multiple friends is not easy and can take its toll on you but Dad lived each day grateful for his life and what it had to offer.  He fought to live right to the very end.  Today he is rejoicing as he is rejoined with all of his friends and family once again.  Now we must lean on each other to try to fill the void that he has left.  


Michele still remembers what a hard worker her daddy was and how he was always working with Uncle Ronnie doing cement work in Richmond Hill and then treating themselves to a Piels beer.  She remembers his affection toward her mom, Grace, as he would always come up and put his arms around her and say, “Wanna go mush it up” and kiss her on the cheek.  His strong work ethic and dedication to his family was passed on to Paul as he watched everything his dad did and soaked it up like a sponge.  Both believe strongly in working hard to earn what you want and never trying to get something for nothing.  Honesty, Integrity, Loyalty, and Compassion are traits that Paul carries with him from his dad and are some of the things that I love most about him.  We had the blessing of having dad live with us for the past 26 years and watching how he developed friendships, enjoyed walking Grace all over the neighborhood in her stroller, established his routines, and told his stories.  He loved to tell me how his wife, Grace, raised the kids while he worked but she would report to Dad when he got home from work if Paul had not behaved and he would have to take him for a ride in the car and talk to him.  He had a more gentle approach to discipline.  I am grateful Paul listened to the advice his dad gave to him when they pulled up at this very church 34 years ago and Paul pointed at me and told his dad, “that’s the girl I like” and dad said, “What are you waiting for! Get out of the car and go talk to her!” And he did.  I had a unique relationship with dad and he often said to me as I was stating things that he needed to do “Was I on the altar with you or my son!”  My response was, “You were close enough!” and then I would remind him that he couldn’t complain about me because he was the one who told Paul to go ask me out.  Many teens have come and gone through our house over the years and he was “Papu” to them all.  

Pasquale, Pat, Papu, Grandpa, PaPat, Skinny Ginny, Daddy, Dad- Jack of all Trades- Different persona for each unique role- Different relationship with each of us- This is why we all have such varying memories of the impact he has had on each of us individually.  Cowboy Shows.  Game Shows. Family Feud. Steve Harvey. Spaghetti with Garlic and Oil.  Carlo Rossi.  Sunflower Seeds.  Mail.  Blackberry Brandy.  Driving Instructor.  Stuffed Peppers.  Ice Cream.  Slippers. Blinking Light.  Hot Tub.  Ice Pops. Italian Salami with Italian Bread.  Sunday Sauce and Pasta.  Abbott and Costello.  Morning Cup of Coffee.  Sandy.  All of these words so meaningful in so many different ways to so many different people.  Each of us making personal connections to some if not all of those words because of the impact he has had on us and those things forever being a symbolic representation of him.  All of us learning life lessons that we will never forget. He became iconic at Meadow Elementary school as parents, the crossing guard, children, and school staff witnessed his dedication and love for his grandchildren as each one had them as his personal escort throughout elementary school.  He was there for Grace, David, and Joseph when we couldn’t be.  Preparing their breakfast and making sure they each arrived safely at school each day along with checking out all the ladies every morning, as well.  He made friends along his daily travels but Jimmy became his best buddy as they both proudly walked to school together each day with their grandchildren- Jimmy, of course, outdoing Pat by carrying his grandson on his shoulders each day.  Grace still remembers specific neighbors he always stopped to say hello to along the way.  When Uncle Dave became sick and lived with us for his final year, Pat embraced him as another friend and they spent the days together starting with breakfast and coffee every morning and talking about things that could probably never be repeated.  

My condolences to Peter and family. Pat will be in my prayers. Sorry I was not able to attend  the wake.

Heaven has another Angel.  My heart is broken but knowing he is with his family and friends brings some peace to me.  Please watch over our families.
I know you are with my family so kindly give My Dad, Mom and Brother a hug and kiss for me.  God bless you and Rest In Peace .



AVIS DE DÉCÈS

Pasquale Franzese

5 septembre 1927 – 16 décembre 2019

Claude R. Boyd–Spencer Funeral Home

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