4th and Goal

by Monte Burke

  John frequently used physical means to get his message across. Back then, the beatings he administered to his children (mainly the older boys, Joe and Johnny) would have been considered somewhere on the extreme edge of normal. Today, they’d probably be over the line. John O’Leary, a family friend, remembers John Moglia once scolding Johnny for some transgression. “Johnny stared his old man right in the face and said ‘You ain’t so bad,’” says O’Leary. John hit him. Johnny pulled himself back up and repeated his defiant line. His father hit him again. Johnny got back to his feet and said it again. “Finally Joe stepped in and said, ‘Johnny, just shut up or he’s going to kill you,’” says O’Leary.

  Another time, Joe was napping in his bedroom when Johnny came in and told him that their father wanted to see him. Joe walked into the living room and his father started hitting him. “What did I do? What did I do?” asked Joe. His father said: “I told you never to go down to the river.”

  “I had no idea what he was talking about,” says Joe. Later, Johnny explained to Joe that he had just told his father about the time he and Joe had saved a baby pigeon that had been stranded on the banks of the Hudson. “My father was pissed because he thought I had risked my life and Johnny’s to save a stupid bird,” says Joe. “The thing was that it had been a whole year since we did it.” Apparently his father’s rage had no statute of limitations.

  John’s work seemed to be the main source of his anger. “I think he felt financially stuck in a business he’d grown up in. He owned his own store. Relative to many of his peers, he was financially successful. But I think he felt even more pressure because of that,” says Paul. It didn’t help that he was a drinker, too. Not exactly an alcoholic at the time, but somewhere close to it.

  For the record, Joe has a slightly gentler view of his father than his siblings do. “Deep down, I really believe he was a good man,” says Joe. “He was just self-absorbed and so focused on providing for us. He was definitely a ‘glass half-empty’ guy.”

  Joe’s mother was the family’s counterbalance, the “glass half-full” parent, the velvet glove to their father’s iron fist. Frances was pretty, a stylish dresser who liked to sport flamboyant hats and big, dark sunglasses. “She was sort of like an Irish Jackie Onassis,” says Joe’s daughter, Kara. Says Hunt: “She was a knockout. In a neighborhood of somewhat plain and dowdy women, she really stood out. When she walked into a room, you knew it.”

  Her natural hair color was auburn, but she enjoyed changing that, dyeing it various different shades. (She would open her own beauty salon in the 1970s when she and John moved to Yonkers after Mary, their youngest, went off to college.) Frances was always humming or singing. The Moglias had a small piano in the apartment, and Frances played it daily. One of her favorite songs was “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.” Back in Ireland as a young girl she had sung the challenging Adeste Fideles solo in her church at the Christmas Mass. Always the first to dance at weddings, she was an animated woman who loved to tell jokes and laugh. She doted on her family and friends. “She had a way of making you feel like you were important,” says Johnny.

  She and her husband seemed to have little in common. They were not very affectionate. “They really didn’t know each other that well when they married,” says Paul. “But I never heard her complain about her marriage. The most she would ever say was, ‘Marriage is not always a bed of roses.’ But there was a lot of love and energy in the house and in the family, mainly due to her.”

  What Frances and John did have in common was a strong work ethic. While John spent his days and nights at the store, Frances occupied herself with raising her five children. She was fiercely protective of her brood, providing them shelter from both their tempestuous father and the world outside their doors, which, given their neighborhood, could sometimes be particularly tough on children who were as safeguarded as the Moglias were.

  Inwood was, in many ways, a great place for a kid to grow up. It’s bordered by the Hudson River on the west and the curling Harlem River to the north and east, and is home to two big wooded parks: Inwood Hill on the banks of the Hudson and Fort Tryon to the south. The parks and water give the neighborhood the feeling of being isolated from the rest of Manhattan. Inwood was loud and busy. On scalding-hot summer days, children swam in the rivers and families gathered on fire escapes to get away from the heat of their stuffy, un-air-conditioned apartments. In the winter kids went sledding on the steep slopes of Fort Tryon. “It felt like a small town to us when we were growing up,” says Hunt.

  But it was a small town with an inner-city edge, veined in concrete, menacingly shadowed by the elevated train tracks that ran right through the middle of the neighborhood and packed with tenement houses occupied by recent immigrants striving to find their way in the new world. The vibe on the pushy, busy streets was make-it-or-break-it. Some did. Others didn’t. Paul Moglia estimates that 60 percent of the kids they grew up with never made it out of Inwood and instead settled for lives as “cops or criminals,” amorphous demarcations in the neighborhood. While Inwood wasn’t exactly a crime-war zone, it wasn’t a place where you wanted to be on the streets at night, when trouble could be found in any darkened alley. (Jim Carroll, an Inwood native, wrote his bleak, drug-addled autobiographical book, The Basketball Diaries, about growing up in the neighborhood.)

  Frances wanted something better for her children. She pushed them to study hard. She also did all she could to stave off the dangerous influences of the neighborhood. She didn’t want her children to grow up too fast. For the most part she succeeded, sometimes only too well—especially in their younger years, when she managed to keep them in a state of innocence that might seem hard to imagine these days.

  When Joe was ten he asked his mother where babies came from. He had no concept of what sexual intercourse was; he was just curious. Frances told him that God came down and planted a seed behind a woman’s heart. That seed grew for nine months. Then the doctor took the baby out of her stomach. “That’s why we have belly buttons,” she explained.

  Good enough for Joe, who gave no further thought to the matter.

  By age thirteen, Joe was in a gang. While it wasn’t exactly the Crips and the Bloods, Joe’s gang, the Tiny Tots, did drink booze, commit minor acts of robbery and roll bums in the park. Some of them even carried knives. But mostly what they did was get into fistfights.

  Inwood was divided, socially and economically, by three Catholic church parishes: St. Jude’s (where Lew Alcindor went to school) was predominantly black and Hispanic. Good Shepherd (Jim Carroll’s parish) was populated by the neighborhood’s middle-class Irish. Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, the Moglias’ church and the site of Joe’s grammar school, was mostly lower-middle-class Irish.

  Each of the parish’s schools had its own “gang,” and each gang had its own respective territory, determined by borders (usually cross streets) known only to the gang members themselves and not the adult world. If a member of, say, the Good Shepherd crowd crossed into Our Lady Queen of Martyrs terrain, a fistfight was usually in the offing. But, as might be expected in a group of high-spirited, prepubescent boys, much of the fighting took place within their own gangs.

  Since most of the really bad stuff—the beat-downs that required hospitalization, the occasional stabbings—took place after school and at night, Joe didn’t have much exposure to that. Athletics kept him off the streets after school. At night he was usually working in his father’s store, and when he did have an occasional evening off, his parents held him to a very strict curfew.

  But Joe did get into some bad scrapes, including a particularly nasty beating that occurred when he was thirteen—an unintended consequence of his mother’s ardent desire to protect her son and his innocence. One afternoon as Joe and the Tiny Tots were leaving school, somebody in their group yelled the word fuck. The boys’ teacher, a hard-bitten, streetwise-by-necessity nun, yelled back: “You don’t even know what that word means.”

  The boys laughed as they ran to Fort
Tryon Park, one of their main hangouts. On their way over, Ray Gonzales, a member of the gang, did the sometimes cruel calculus that young boys do, and got the sense that Joe actually didn’t know what the word meant. He put Joe on the spot in front of the other boys. Joe said nothing. Gonzales told him: “It’s how babies are made, you dumbass.”

  Joe, initially embarrassed, believed then that he had gained the upper hand.

  “That’s not how babies are made,” he told Gonzales. Joe explained to the group what his mother had told him three years earlier, about God and seeds and belly buttons.

  The boys, led by Gonzales, howled with laughter. Then, as if set off by some secret signal, they jumped Joe. They didn’t put him in the hospital, but they gave him quite a beating. Blows to the face and the head were followed by kicks to the ribs and the crotch after he finally went down.

  When Frances opened the door to let Joe into the apartment that afternoon, she gasped. He had a swollen left eye and dried brown blood around his mouth. Fresh, bright red blood dripped from his nose. Frances loathed fighting. Luckily for Joe, his father, who also disapproved of fighting, was still at work.

  “Did you get into another fight?” she asked. She was visibly angry.

  “Ma, I have one question for you,” Joe said. His breaths whistled through his bloody nose. “Remember when you told me how babies are made? Remember? Was that true? Were you telling me the truth?”

  Frances pursed her lips and looked down at her hands as she wiped them on her apron and said nothing. That was all Joe needed to see. He ran into his bedroom and slammed the door. He was not punished for fighting.

  Joe may have lost that fight, but as he got older, the losses were few and far between. In his teenage years he was fairly big and strong, and very athletic. “He was a tough guy,” says Hunt. “If you got into a beef with him, you had your hands full. But he was never a bully.”

  In fact, Joe couldn’t stand bullies, and made a sport out of taking them down a notch. Hunt remembers one day walking up Academy Street toward Inwood Hill Park. He and Joe were going drinking (they began drinking at age eleven, and by thirteen Joe was drinking fairly regularly). Hunt was carrying a brown paper sack with a twelve-pack of beer in it. “For whatever reason, Joe was walking a block behind me,” says Hunt. “And this older kid in the neighborhood, a well-known bully, comes up and just rips the bag out of my hand. Beer cans flew all over the place. But the guy didn’t know that Joe was coming up behind me. When he saw him, his eyes got huge.”

  Joe chased down the bully and smacked him a few times. Then he made the kid get on his hands and knees and fetch all of the beer cans. “They were under cars, in the gutter,” says Hunt. “But that guy got every last one of them.”

  Joe and his brother Johnny were quite the formidable duo. Just fourteen months younger than Joe, Johnny matured early (“I was sent home from school in the seventh grade to shave,” he says) and was the bigger of the two. Both he and Joe suffered from a stutter, but Johnny’s was much worse. “Johnny would just sit there, in front of all these tough guys and just blubber,” says Joe. “It broke my heart every time I heard it.”

  But Johnny didn’t need any help standing up for himself. He let his fists do most of the talking. Those big knuckles never had a problem with being misunderstood or mocked. Joe and Johnny started to establish a reputation in the neighborhood as a duo you didn’t want to mess with. “We didn’t lose many fights,” says Johnny.

  Johnny was the more feared of the two, and didn’t mind putting a good licking on another guy. But Joe always held back a bit. Says Johnny: “Joe never crossed that line. He didn’t want to really hurt anybody.”

  Fran Perdisatt, a classmate of Joe’s at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, says: “Joe was probably a little more sheltered than the rest of us. Johnny hung out with a tougher crowd. Joe knew them all, was friendly with them, but he never went in that direction. He would always go up to the point when he was going to get in trouble, then he’d back off.”

  As the kids in the Inwood gangs grew older, the level of violence and malfeasance rose. Some of the kids fell deeper and deeper into a more hardcore gang life and never got out. Just a few years after Joe got beaten up for not knowing how babies were made, the stakes rose considerably. Ray Gonzales would die of a drug overdose. Another Tiny Tot, John Spaulding, was shot and killed by two cops as he walked a crowded street waving a gun. Seven members of Joe’s class of twenty boys at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs would not live to see the age of forty, due to drugs and violence.

  But Joe was on another path, held back from the edge not just by the fact that, as Johnny says, he didn’t really want to hurt anyone with his fists, but ultimately by his reluctance to do anything that would hurt his mother. Through two episodes during his eighth-grade year, Joe would learn this the hard way and, in the process, turn around a life that still hung in the balance.

  Getting busted for having a couple of bottles of booze on a school trip might not sound like something that would alter a person’s life. But because of what it did to his mother, it changed Joe’s.

  Every year Our Lady Queen of Martyrs hosted an annual school trip to Rye Beach outside of New York City for the kids and some of the parents. Anticipating the outing during their eighth-grade year, Joe and his friends “got the bright idea to bring some booze along,” as he recounts the episode, and to ask the girls, who were traveling on their own bus, to stash it for them. “We figured the nuns wouldn’t check their bags,” he says. They figured wrong. On the day of the trip, the nuns had all the boys open their bags. They found nothing. “We thought we were so clever,” says Joe. But fifteen minutes later, the nuns came barging onto the boys’ bus, holding bottles of liquor. They had checked the girls’ luggage, too. “I was dead,” says Joe.

  The principal, a nun named Sister Mary Margaret, called Joe into her office. Then she called Joe’s father at the fruit store. “My father did not like having to leave the store,” says Joe. With the two of them standing there looking at him, Joe made up a story about how the booze actually belonged to a boy named Tommy Robino, who had been kicked out of the school the year before and was now in public school. Joe told the story well, complete with tears. “My father actually looked at the nun and said he was inclined to believe me,” says Joe. Sister Mary Margaret knew better, though. She told John Moglia that the girls told her that Joe had given them the bottles.

  “Is that true?” John asked Joe.

  “I said ‘yes,’ and before I could get another word out of my mouth, he was smacking me all over the room,” says Joe. “I deserved this one.”

  Joe was forced to work in the fruit store that day as his friends made their way to the beach. “I just remember being so sad, being stuck at the store,” says Joe. It got worse for him when he went home and saw his mother. Much worse. She didn’t yell at him. She didn’t say anything, actually. She just cried. “She couldn’t stop crying,” says Joe. “I’d let her down. She knew she could count on me and I let her down.”

  Joe was not allowed to take part in the eighth-grade graduation ceremony. He worried that Fordham Prep, the Catholic high school he had worked so hard to get into, would find out and take away his admission. (Prep never found out.) The episode became the defining moment of his childhood, the turning point when he made the conscious decision to make something of his life. “It was the greatest single thing that made me grow up,” says Joe. “I let my mother down. I spent a good portion of my life trying to make her proud of me again, trying to earn back her trust. From that point on, I became really focused.”

  Making her proud, though, was only part of it. Later that year, his father came home from work and told him that his mother had to have some sort of surgery and would be in the hospital for a few days. His father didn’t tell him what kind of surgery it was (and to this day, Joe still doesn’t know). John didn’t betray any worry at that time, not that he was prone to showing his emotions, anyway. Joe shrugged it off. “Back then, I thought I
was one of the toughest guys in the neighborhood,” says Joe. “In fact, I was one of the toughest guys in the neighborhood.” And being tough meant never showing emotions around his family, never letting down that wall.

  But later that night, as Joe lay awake in bed, he heard a noise coming from his parents’ room. He tiptoed down the hallway. Light was coming from the cracked-open door. Joe looked in and saw his father kneeling at the foot of his bed. He couldn’t see his face. But his strong shoulders were heaving forward. He realized his father was silently sobbing. “I’d never seen my father cry before,” Joe says.

  He went back to his own bed and was suddenly wracked with fear about his mother. Then it hit him: though he’d made the pledge to make her proud, he’d been trying to be such a tough guy that he had never told this woman—whom he loved more than anyone in the world—how he felt about her. That night he prayed, asking God to save her so he could rectify his horrible mistake. He promised he would demonstrate his love for her every day, and would never take the love of others for granted.

  His mother eventually recovered from the operation. Joe never forgot that night.

  Joe and his siblings all made it out of Inwood and into solid professional careers. Johnny has had his ups and downs in business, but he has been the owner of restaurants, nightclubs, strip clubs, and liquor stores. Before she died, Bernadette was a manager at Citibank. Paul is a clinical psychologist in Long Island, and Mary is a portfolio strategist in Rochester, New York. Given the temptations and pitfalls of their childhood neighborhood, their professional success is remarkable, a testament to their parents’ strengths and their own ability to draw on those strengths. From John, they learned lessons about the ethic of work. And like Joe, they all desired to be worthy of their mother’s unconditional love.