This month, the Syracuse city schools hold their annual commencement celebrations. There’s a time-honored national tradition of recognizing community elders who for reasons of struggle or sacrifice never received formal diplomas when they were young, and the Spadaro brothers certainly epitomize those standards.
Somehow — either by ceremony or proclamation — this would be a perfect time for the school district or City Hall to spotlight everything the brothers represent. That gesture would offer profound affirmation to the longtime quest of Sam Spadaro, a great-grandfather whose electric presence provides a staggering 21st century lesson in devotion for every child in Syracuse.
His daily quest, since 1944, has been guaranteeing larger memory of the life and sacrifice of Vincenzo “Jimmy” Spadaro, Sam’s older brother, who was born 100 years ago this month, on Flag Day.
As for Sam, he turns 99 this summer. He is warm, wry and reflective, a two-time widower who wears double wedding bands honoring both wives he lost. He spent much of his adult life in Eastwood before moving to Clay, where the walls of his home hold photos and mementoes that are a constant reminder of the big brother he last saw more than 80 years ago.
Jimmy and Sam, born 13 months apart, were among the four children of Joseph and Josephine Spadaro, Italian immigrants who settled in Syracuse. The oldest, Rose — who worked for 44 years at the now-closed Aunt Josie’s Restaurant — died 17 years ago. Then came Jimmy and Sam, followed by Josephine, who’s 93 and lives out west.
“We were inseparable,” Sam said of his bond with Jimmy. From the days when they were babies, the brothers shared a room. Their mother, to save money during the Great Depression, would buy so many matching outfits for her sons that many people assumed the boys were twins.
“There isn’t a day when I don’t think of him,” Sam said of his brother. “I’m always wondering what he would have done, who he would have married, the grandchildren he’d have now.”
In that way, he is emblematic of the 2,700 Central New Yorkers lost in World War II, which ended 80 years ago this summer.
Jimmy died, as Sam often says, when he was 19 and one day.
During the war, he was 17 when he enlisted in the Navy. Assigned to Naval convoys, he was thrown into fierce combat. The tone changed in Jimmy’s letters home. He told his younger brother not to enlist and to instead remain in Syracuse as long as possible — to hold off, at the least, until Sam was drafted into military service.
After seeing what it truly meant, Jimmy wanted to spare his younger brother from the horror of the war.
Sam didn’t listen. Wherever Jimmy was, he intended to follow. In July 1944, at 17, Sam packed a small bag and prepared to go downtown to the Armory — now the Museum of Science and Technology — to take his physical and then leave town, taking the same step as his brother by serving in the Navy.
His worried parents held a small farewell party, in their back yard. The Spadaros were all gathered near the vegetable garden his folks maintained, when the doorbell rang. Sam’s father asked him to answer it. A woman and a man were standing side-by-side, with a telegram. They were there to tell the family: Jimmy was missing in action. His LST — a landing vessel that brought troops to the shore — had struck a land mine, during the early weeks of the Normandy invasion.
Sam’s goodbye gathering transformed into an eruption of shared grief.
“My mother and father were going crazy,” Sam said. In the middle of it all, he had no choice: He still had to leave. It was wartime. He was scheduled to enlist that day. To learn his brother was missing did not buy him any time.
His mom embraced him. She said she did not want to lose another son. Sam understood, but he was already focused on what he needed to do. He told himself Jimmy wasn’t dead, that somewhere out there — maybe in a military hospital — he would find his brother.
“You’re 17,” Sam said of his younger self. “You’ve got all these ideas.”
More than 80 years later, what he wanted in that instant doesn’t fade.
Sam went downtown. He took his mandatory medical tests, then stood in a line with dozens of other enlistees, waiting for what he expected would be automatic approval. A physician looked at his papers and told him to go home. A disbelieving Sam tried to argue. The doctor said: “You need to see a lung specialist.”
The tests revealed a shadow on Sam’s lung. He returned to the family home on Highland Street, where his grieving parents were tested once again. Even now, Sam sees the look on his dad’s face. Joe Spadaro, as a young immigrant, fought for the American Army in World War I. He was gassed on a battlefield. His lungs damaged, he was sent to a Tupper Lake sanitarium, to recover.
Sam’s father understood what a “spot on the lung” could mean. Within hours of learning one son was missing in the war, he learned his other son had a life-threatening lung disease.
Eighty-one years ago, in July, Sam was sent to the Onondaga Sanitorium, a tuberculosis hospital on the hill where the Van Duyn Center for Rehabilitation is located now. He remembers seeing sheet-covered bodies of other patients, as they were wheeled out. This teenage newcomer wondered if — before long — that would be him.
He said the doctors never told him, point-blank, that he had tuberculosis, though he took part in such treatments as sleeping on an outdoor porch, on frigid evenings. Not every memory is dire: He laughs about the night when some older patients convinced him to join them in sneaking out for a few hours of reveling at Garzone’s, a legendary South Avenue restaurant and tavern.
After about a year, he was released. By that time, the war was almost over, and his family had been officially informed that Jimmy — his body never recovered — was assumed to be dead. Sam, still mourning, went to work at Thom McAn’s, a downtown shoe store. A friend who sold shoes at another shop put together a little North Side gathering with one main goal: Introducing Sam to his buddy’s sister-in-law.
Her name was Esther Caruso. Walking home that night, Sam told himself, “I’m going to marry that girl.”
When she said yes, he said, “I felt like the richest person in the country.”
They raised three children — Deborah, Sam and Jamie. In 1996, about a half-century after the couple met, Esther died of complications from a liver transplant. Sam— a great-grandfather — would eventually remarry. Ida Dorschel Spadaro was also widowed and a fellow parishioner at Our Lady of Pompei. They had 16 years of marriage before Ida’s death, in 2014.
At 98, sharp and vibrant with plenty of time to think, Sam often contemplates the impact of all these central figures in his life. That includes daily visits to a small downstairs room dedicated to his brother, a room whose centerpiece is Jimmy’s medals — which Sam spent years making the family received, in full.
Sam wonders if Jimmy’s postwar life would have paralleled his own, a mosaic of Syracuse history. Sam took classes to earn a high school equivalency diploma. He worked for a while for New Process Gear, in factory buildings later transformed into Franklin Square, before he took a job for Carrier in its old works on South Geddes Street. Laid off there, he owned a barbershop for many years at the old Midtown Plaza. Sam liked the daily conversations with loyal customers, but cutting hair did not pay enough to get ahead.
One day, he cashed a check for a guy who worked at Carrier. Sam took one look at what this customer was taking home — far more than Sam was making as a barber — and that did it. He was rehired by Carrier, where he again started with the toughest work. He began by “shoveling steel grindings,” a job so dirty and tiring that Sam came home “more dead than alive.”
But the money was good. He was relentless. Promotions happened fast.
He stayed for 24 years, until he retired. He has time these days to show off photos of all these great-grandchildren he loves, and watching the way the kids play brings him back 90 years.
To Jimmy.
He remembers how a legion of Italian-American families on the North side, in the 1930s, had fruit trees and grape vines in their back yards. Sometimes Jimmy, Sam and their buddies, hopping fences like maniacs, would go on nighttime missions to swipe apples and pears. He laughs about it now, though there was a deeper truth to “going raiding” in the Great Depression: Those were hard times, and the boys were hungry.
Last week, with a scrapbook on his lap in the living room of his Clay home, Sam recalled a day when the brothers were goofing around in the city on a moving railroad car, and Jimmy fell off — straight into traffic on Lodi Street. A Greyhound bus, passing by, barely missed him. Sam lost sight of Jimmy, and for an instant he experienced terror that now feels almost like premonition.
“I’m surprised,” Sam said, “that he didn’t die.”
Beyond all else, when Sam thinks of Jimmy, he thinks of work. On snowy winter mornings, streetlights on, their dad would wake them at 4 a.m. This was long before plows cleared most city roads. They would make a single trail of footsteps in the street — Jimmy following his dad, Sam following Jimmy — pushing step-by-step through deep snow to Sedgwick, where their father made a little extra cash by shoveling the driveway and sidewalks for a wealthy family on Brattle Road.
From there, pants soaked from melting snow, the boys still had to go to school. Their father would head to Crouse-Hinds for a long day in the factory. In the spring, summer and fall they would help their dad change the storm and screen windows or cut the grass, for that Sedgwick family. Sometimes they would wait quietly for their father in the garage, where the household help would occasionally smuggle them a plate of cookies.
Amid the Depression, the cookies felt like an impossibly grand gift. The little boys, side by side, would eat them in disbelief.
Closing in on 99, Sam can still put himself there.
“I don’t remember not working,” he said.
The boys did those tasks alongside their dad, and they helped each other with early morning and afternoon newspaper routes. They were kids, doing multiple jobs from hours before the dawn and then into the night, and something had to give. In junior high, they both decided to leave school to help their family. The upset principal at the old Prescott School warned Jimmy he would be “a bum” if he walked away, but the brothers were too busy to look back.
They immediately worked together as bus boys at the old Brass Rail on Warren Street — a famous tavern where Syracuse ballplayers hung around — and they spent a reluctant day or two each week, by law, at the old downtown Continuation School, a building that’s still standing.
They took any job they could find until Jimmy left for the Navy, at 17. Sam remembers when his brother came home on leave, how Jimmy put on his uniform and asked Sam to come with him, how they went to see the principal who warned Jimmy against leaving school.
They shook hands. The point was made. The kid was anything but a bum.
World War II ended eighty years ago this summer. It has been 81 years this month since Jimmy died, and because he was lost in action, there was never a grave for him in Syracuse: You can find his name on the “wall of the missing” at Normandy. While living memory swiftly fades of what that generation endured, the little brother who followed Jimmy’s footsteps in deep snow doesn’t forget, even as he closes in on 99.
The brothers left school out of necessity, when they were barely teenagers, to do any work they could find to help their immigrant parents survive, from week to week. If the entire focus of education is to reinforce and sustain the purest elements of true community — qualities intertwined with love, courage and diligence — then the Spadaro brothers achieved the highest grades, with honor.
They were so close that Sam will always feel like he is missing a part of himself. Right now — a century to the month after Jimmy’s birth — seems to be the perfect moment for school or city officials to make a statement on everything that matters by finding a way to honor all these brothers gave, a tribute to reflect how they saw themselves since they both toddled:
However it happens, we say their names, together.
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