Linda A Nixon

Linda Nixon left this life in Tallahassee on October 18, 2015. Born Angelina Linda Crocco, June 16, 1921, in Lyndhurst, N.J., the first child of Carmine and Elizabeth Crocco. She was named Angelina after her maternal grandmother (who insisted on it) but always called Linda for a close friend of Elizabeth’s, quite possibly a Spanish girl.

She wanted to be a singer, she might have become a nun. In the middle of the Depression she was pulled out of school to tend to the house and the other Crocco children (eventually Joe, Terry, Marie, Carmen, Betty and Jimmy, aka Porky) so Elizabeth could get a job. At 21 she married a young man she met working in the same factory, a redhead from a few towns over, Frederick Carl Nixon, known then to family and friends as Jimmy. She thought him cocky and ridiculous when they first met, he thought she was a lot like his favorite actress, Barbara Stanwyck. They got married on a rainy day, without church or ceremony or disapproving parents, and had a reception for four people at his sister’s house, dancing to Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” They got together at a precarious time in history; there is a photo of them on a bench in Fort Dix, two young people looking out of sorts with where they found themselves—training for war, pregnant, broke.

She had a beautiful voice, not unlike Jo Stafford. She never realized it, at least not until she reached the age of lamenting her lost looks, but she was likely the prettiest of the four sisters, and at certain times, those rare opportunities when she fixed herself up and relaxed just enough to approach having a good time, you could imagine her as the star she once dreamed of being. She sang at every family wedding, anniversary, sweet sixteen party, always the same song, the Neopolitan ballad “Oi, Marie.” Around the house, however—cooking, scrubbing the toilet with too much bleach, obsessively washing the salt and pepper collection amassed for her by her bus driver husband—the song heard most often was Stafford’s “You Belong to Me,” released around the time of a brief separation from Jimmy.

They raised two boys, usually under difficult financial conditions, and moved frequently, back and forth through five towns in Northern New Jersey, to Minnesota briefly on a misguided whim, eventually to the Florida Panhandle where she stopped cursing in Italian and became the star alto in the Holy Name of Jesus Parish choir.

She cried often; made the best meatballs; could be harsh and unkind at all the wrong times and charming and delightful at all the right ones; kept a spotless home; liked Barack Obama, the old movie star Robert Taylor, Patsy Cline, and the singing trio Il Volo; got tipsy only twice, quite comically; enjoyed big family dinners and small card games with friends; never quite got the hang of pinochle or driving; seemed most at peace with a song on her lips; and was never sure how she felt about God and his plans. Some of her last words, in view of both living and dying, were “It just makes me so mad.”

She was preceded in death by her husband, sparring partner, and pal Fred Nixon (1920-2007), and their beloved grandson Frederick “Ricky” Nixon (1966-1986). She is survived by her sons Fred C. “Nick” Nixon and Robert Nixon and their spouses Laura Evans Nixon and Lanny Brewster of Tallahassee, her sisters Terry Mongiello and Betty Morrone of New Jersey and Marie McCormack of Texas, and numerous nieces and nephews.

“A fact of life: we're going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. ‘Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.’”