Dad Tales and Reflections

By Anthony Buccino

Your snippets of family history need not be formally recorded and typed out on the latest fancy computer. It is not, after all, a history assignment. But some day you'll thank yourself for making the time when you pull out that old videotape and find how cherished those rambling tales have become.

Dad in His Overalls, Me in Mine

It’s obvious that money talks – and he’s been silenced by decisions made light years above the clouds in penthouses by men unlike himself who he’s never met and most probably never will.

How Many Hammers Are Enough

Why did I decide I had to count a hundred screwdrivers and two dozen hammers, every size plane ever made, and toolboxes up the kazoo? Dad, how many hammers are enough?

A Father's Place

Enjoy the proud days, come what may, of “That's my dad!” Before you know it, you'll hear, “Who? Him? I don't know him.”

Dad Bought Back His Shoes as I Slept

I interrupted my sister as she tried to do homework. "Need to buy some shoes? You got to have shoes to go to school. It could be a long winter without a good pair of shoes. . ." She just chuckled from behind her thick school books.

Psyching Up for the Carpenter Bowl

Invoking his 40 years of woodwork, windows and framing, I channeled a sliver of Dad's ingenuity and got that door open. "Cancel the 9-1-1 call, Honey," I called, "I'm out!"

Do We Ever Stop Missing Our Folks?

When Mom was on the phone with Grandma it was a good time to ask for stuff she would tell me no to if she weren’t distracted. ... 6:15 to 6:30 was a good time to ask, “Can I have a pony?”

Grandma's House in the Country

'It was so bountiful and grandma was so loving and treated us real good,' my cousin Marie remembers. In those days, there was only one other house on Gless Avenue.

Coal Miner's Kids' Christmas

The coal miners' kids were appreciative to get an orange for Christmas. When the Salvation Army showed up with a basket of food, that was the miracle of Christmas.

Painting Lilies of the Valley

Sixteen Inches on Center

But these decades later I find
We talk more now
and I have a different view
of him and the twenty few years
we spent together.
I know he was winging it
and I was a whirling dervish

'... I wasn't more than five years old the night my father grabbed me with his vise-like hands on his jackhammer arms and swung me over the banister of our second story back porch.

Swinging me side to side 20 feet in the air above the concrete sidewalk, Dad and I were having fun. I was safe, safe from the world in his strong hands. Mother's screams of terror stilled my shrieks of joy.

That night, Dad and I bonded, though neither of us knew the lexicon. The image of that night dangles daily in the bittersweet memories my father left me.

After nearly 30 years, I can still feel the strength with which he safely held me over the precipice. Little did I know then there was more to a father's place.

Now, I have my own daughter, and though I don't tempt fate from a second floor porch, I realize how much there is to this father business. ...'

A Father's Place

WW2 Letters Home from the South Pacific by Angelo Buccino is one GI’s view of the war amid the heat, bugs, carnage and noise in an artillery battalion supporting First Marine Division at Guadalcanal and other islands that never get mentioned.

Buccino wrote these long-lost letters to his best friend back in the states asking about the old gang.

They turned up nearly sixty years after they were mailed, censored, read by his buddy and then found again in a forgotten footlocker in his old friend’s attic.

Along with a stack of Angelo’s photos from training and across the ocean, we’ve put together this collection in time for his 100^th birthday.

The war aged him, and he passed in his sixth decade. Here is a way to remember him, his sense of duty, his sense of humor, and the years he spent on hot bug-infested islands defending all he left at home.

WW2 Letters Home from the South Pacific

Cherry Blossom Press

A Father's Place - An Eclectic Collection

Sister Dressed Me Funny

Rambling Round - Inside and Outside at the Same Time

Retrieving Labrador Days dog tales in prose and verse

Greetings From Belleville, New Jersey collected writings

This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter

Nutley Notables, Volume One

Nutley Notables, Volume Two

Military History

WW2 Letters Home From The South Pacific

Nutley, NJ, Books

Belleville, NJ, Books

WW2 Letters Home From The South Pacific

American Boy: Pushing Sixty 

Canned

Retrieving Labrador Days

Sixteen Inches On Center

Sometimes I Swear In Italian

Voices on the Bus

Yountakah Country