When Pride Still Mattered

by David Maraniss

  Large Italian families were not uncommon then in Sheepshead Bay, but the Izzos stood out from the rest. The Brooklyn Eagle sent a reporter to a family gathering one Sunday in September 1924, and he came back with a story that ran on the front page with the understated headline: “IZZO FAMILY OF SHEEPSHEAD IS INTERESTING.” The reporter found it especially interesting that for all of their Italian tradition, the thirteen siblings, who had been instructed by Antonio and Laura to speak only English at home, were now energetically merging with other ethnic groups in the community. “Father and mother Izzo are impartial to nationalities,” the story noted. “One daughter married a son of Italy [Matty and Harry], another a son of Old Erin, another has married into an old Gravesend Yankee family; one of the boys married a Belgian miss,” and yet another wed “a German butcher’s daughter, pretty Molly Grenau; one of the younger sons expects to take unto himself a young girl from France.” Still to come were spouses of Swedish, Polish and Scots heritage.

  Grandpa Antonio Izzo was known by his identifying nickname: Tony the Barber. For more than three decades he had been the proprietor of Izzo’s Barber Shop, a Sheepshead Bay landmark renowned for its close shaves and haircuts (one glowing account described Tony as a “tonsorial artist”) and, even more irresistibly, as the place to go for inside information on the racing scene. During the Izzo Barber Shop’s first twenty years of operation, from 1890 through 1910, Sheepshead Bay was a thoroughbred racing town, its mile and a furlong oval among the most popular on the East Coast. Jockeys, touts, trainers, owners, bookies—all found their way to the barbershop at the corner of East Sixteenth and Sheepshead Bay Road.

  Inside Tony the Barber’s, the saying went, “you not only got a shave, but you gave a tip and got a tip.” If there was anything important to learn about an overnight starter, Tony’s place got the dope and quietly passed it along to the right folks while lathering their chins. When the white-mustachioed Tony was preoccupied, you could deal with his able assistants along the seven-chair corridor of barbers, walking tip sheets all. Skeats the shoeshine man also had the news. Tony’s clientele was a who’s who of sporting figures: Snapper Garrison, Humming Bird Tyler, Cannonball Bald, Tom Sharkey, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien and Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons. Long after the Sheepshead Bay track closed, Tony maintained his line of steady customers and his sporting reputation, and passed the tradition along to another generation of Izzos: sons Frank, Louie and Pete all became barbers. It was not uncommon for customers to become family friends or even relatives. Frank Izzo, the oldest son, clipped Harry Lombardi’s hair, introduced him to his sister Matty, served in their wedding party in September 1912 and settled down the block from them on East Fourteenth Street.

  THE TRINITY of Vince Lombardi’s early years was religion, family and sports. They seemed intertwined, as inseparable to him as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The church was not some distant institution to be visited once a week, but part of the rhythm of daily life. When his mother baked bread, it was one for the Lombardis, one for the priests, with Vince shuttling down the block between his house and the St. Mark’s Rectory delivering food and tendering invitations. Father Daniel McCarthy took Vince and his best friend, Joe Goettisheim, to ball games in Flatbush and Coney Island. Harry Lombardi was not particularly devout then, but enjoyed swapping stories, eating and drinking with men of the cloth. Matty was a regular communicant. From an early age her son Vince revealed an equally strong affinity to Catholicism’s routine. He accompanied his mother in prayers to St. Jude and St. Anthony, the family’s patron saints, and toted his own prayer book to church for seven o’clock mass.

  His mother’s favorite picture of Vinnie as a child shows him standing in front of the house on confirmation day, resplendent in buffed black shoes, kneesocks, dark knickers, white shirt, striped tie and double-breasted suit coat, with a boutonniere pinned to his left lapel. The faint glimmer of a shy smile appears on his scrubbed face. His own clearest memory of his religious youth was the Easter Sunday when he and Joe Goettisheim, both twelve, served as altar boys. It was while standing there amid the color and pageantry, scarlet and white vestments, golden cross, scepters, the wafers and wine, body and blood, the obedient flock coming forward, that the inspiration came to him that he should become a priest. As an altar boy, he never wanted to be just another candle bearer, but up front in the procession, bearing the cross.

  Vinnie was sponsored at church by Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, a horse trainer and family friend who lived in the neighborhood and took a liking to Tony the Barber’s grandson. Despite his nickname, Sunny Jim could appear stern, but to Vince it just seemed that he was taking his vocation seriously. The racing sheets were his catechism; he was a daily communicant at early morning workouts. Accessorized with hardboots, walking stick and stopwatch, he headed out to the training tracks on muddy spring mornings, often taking Vinnie along for the ride, godson and talisman. One August they went to Saratoga together for a spell of the upstate racing season. Horses had an esoteric appeal to Vince, but he was too heavy to be a jockey and never imagined amassing the wealth of an owner. He played basketball, but was too stiff to excel. In baseball, he was a rough-and-ready outfielder and catcher, but poor eyesight limited his skills with the bat. Football was his sport. He joined his first team when he was twelve, a sandlot outfit that represented Sheepshead Bay in a Brooklyn league. They wore helmets and shoulder pads and green and white uniforms, and though the games were organized, parents were blessedly absent; the SHB boys coached themselves. Vince played fullback and helped design the offensive plays.

  “From the first contact on, football fascinated me,” he said years later. Contact, controlled violence, a game where the mission was to hit someone harder, punish him, knees up, elbows out, challenge your body, mind and spirit, exhaust yourself and seek redemption through fatigue, such were the rewards an altar boy found in his favorite game.

  Contact and pain were not things from which the Lombardi family seemed to shy away. In later years Vince explained his own occasionally violent outbursts by portraying his father as a harsh disciplinarian who would “hit you as soon as talk to you.” There was some truth to this if it described Harry’s relationship with his eldest son, decidedly not with the younger Lombardi children. Harry showed a gruff exterior and talked tough about pain. “No one’s ever hurt,” he proclaimed when Vince came home from football practice with a bruised rib. “Hurt is in your mind!” When he had been drinking too much wine or his preferred scotch, Harry could alternate between verbal hectoring and didactic posturing: he sometimes lectured Vince and the others on his triangle of success—sense of duty, respect for authority and strong mental discipline. But behind his bluster and philosophical musings hid a soft touch who wanted to have a good time and knew that rules could be broken.

  There was in Harry still a bit of the wiseacre Moon who marauded through the streets of lower Manhattan. One of his favorite stories was how he and his pals rumbled into restaurants in Chinatown and taunted chefs; one, he said, chased after them with a meat cleaver. And Harry was a prankster still. In Scrabble games with his wife, he invented words, many off-color. Nothing gave him more pleasure than his trick wine flask. After using it to fill his glass at Sunday dinner, he passed it around the table and laughed when it reached a first-time guest, who poured and poured with nothing coming out, unaware of a secret button that needed to be pushed. On Thursday nights, spaghetti night in the Lombardi house, Harry piled his plate high with noodles, smothered them with hot red peppers and dug in. A smile creased his moonface as he fanned himself, his mouth burning, and exclaimed in his throaty Brooklynese: “Hey, Matty! Matty! Whoa! Dis sure is good!”

  Harry believed that his kids should not be deprived of the fun he was enjoying. Sometimes he came home late at night with Matty’s brothers Mike and Pete, cooked a juicy steak and awakened the children to share in the midnight meal. Tell us a story, they implored him, and Harry invariably repeated the same one, about a man who got into a fight with an Indian and twis
ted the Indian’s nose upside down and it rained and the Indian drowned. No, they would say, not that one: Tell us another one! Harry’s effect on his first son was profound in many ways, but the image of him as a humorless autocrat pounding character into young Vince with his fists is mistaken, the first Lombardi myth, created later as part of a larger Lombardi mythology, which was steeped in patriarchy and needed a stern original father figure.

  When a painful lesson was to be inflicted in the Lombardi house, more often it came from the back of the mother’s hand. Matty was taller and more refined than her husband, with a taste for clothes and a manner that some relatives considered haughty, hence her nickname, the Duchess. She was nervous and domineering, barking out orders. Her family creed was that there was no time for lolling around. She assigned children the most menial tasks: one was responsible for polishing the base of her dining room table every day. Everything with her “had to be this way, the straight and narrow, all according to Hoyle; she had to make sure it was just right, even dessert, not a little whipped cream out of place,” according to Joe, the youngest brother. Harold, the middle brother, was late arriving home once and got smacked before he could offer an excuse. “She would hit first and ask questions later,” recalled Madeline, who was responsible for washing the dishes. Madeline remembered that her big brother Vince, as the oldest son, “which is a position next to God in an Italian family,” had the fewest chores. But those he did have were strictly enforced. “If I didn’t do them, I was rebuked,” he said later of his mother’s discipline. “And not orally, I might add.”

  By the time Vince became a teenager, his parents had transferred many disciplinary duties to him. He was foreman of the younger siblings. Madeline did the babysitting, but Vince was the enforcer, punishing them if they misbehaved when Mother was not around. Madeline’s lingering memory of her brother during those years was that he was “mean.” And though he was generally well behaved, his siblings knew that he was not the choirboy that he pretended to be. When he was fourteen, Madeline caught him sneaking a smoke behind the garage and informed her father. After being scolded by Harry, Vince set out to punish his little sister for snitching. “He chased me and caught me and let me have it but good,” Madeline recalled. “I wasn’t fast enough to get away from him.” Meting out discipline was a role that he took to naturally and extended beyond the family, bossing around cousins and friends as well. Sometimes he could seem a bit much, more like an adult than one of them. But the older people loved him. Long before the outside world saw anything extraordinary in him, the family regarded Vinnie as the favorite son. He was the prized nephew of Izzo aunts and uncles; they saw in him Matty’s intense perfectionism and the rustic physical features of Grandfather Tony: the distinct jawbone, dark and deep-set eyes, shining smile, piercing voice.

  Harry and Matty worshiped their first son more year by year. He was given his own bedroom. His family stressed to him that being average was not enough, that he was better than the rest. They played to win, from Grandma Izzo at cards to Father Harry at Scrabble. You could see it in their eyes: beat Harry in Scrabble and his eyelids blinked violently, a trait passed on to Vince, whose buddies noticed it when they stuck him with the queen of spades in a game of hearts. He also had the churning stomach of his mother, which was one reason they both prayed to St. Anthony of Padua. Anthony was the patron saint of the poor, travelers and those who had lost property, but also, for the Izzos, the saint to turn to when overwrought with worries about the future. No one wanted Vince to spend his life cutting meat.

  EVERY WEEKDAY MORNING at four-thirty, Harry Lombardi rose to make an hour-long commute through Brooklyn and across Manhattan to his place of business near the Hudson River waterfront at 23 Hewitt Avenue on the Lower West Side. There, down the block from the bustling Washington Market, he and his older brother Eddie ran Lombardi Bros. wholesalers, a variation of the classic immigrant success story. Family legend held that their father, Vincenzo Lombardi, had been a silk merchant in a village between Naples and Salerno and had come to the United States in pursuit of an associate who had stolen from him. The story was hazy and there were no records to substantiate it. The Lombardis, in any case, started over in America, in the commotion of a tenement house on Mott Street in Little Italy. Vincenzo hauled goods in a horse wagon before dying in early middle age, leaving his widow, Michelina, with four children. Eddie and Harry, the two oldest, had dropped out of elementary school and begun working in their early teens, holding jobs as haulers and delicatessen butchers before opening a market of their own.

  Raw strength and street smarts were two qualities most useful in the wholesale meat business, both of which the Lombardi brothers had in abundance. Uncle Eddie was an intimidating hulk, well over 250 pounds, so massive, relatives said, that when he died they had to remove a door to get the casket out. He walked around with black olives in his pockets and dispensed them to customers and children as tokens of friendship. Whether Eddie was an entirely friendly sort is uncertain; family stories offer suspicions of connections to black marketeering. Harry was a miniature version of his brother, though his dealings seemed more benign. Eddie and Harry flexed their muscles all day, hoisting 225-pound half-steers from delivery trucks, placing the slabs on rail hooks outside the market, and taking them down again to be weighed and cut inside the refrigerator room, which was large and cold with sawdust on the floor. When Vince and his brothers and cousins were big enough, the heavy lifting was passed on to them. The two football-playing Lombardis, Vince and little brother Joe, could only laugh years later when asked if they had lifted weights. Never touched a barbell, they said. Only slabs of dead meat.

  Bull meat was the Lombardi specialty, below top-grade fare that was sold to downscale chophouses and public institutions in the New York area for use as ground beef. Every Monday and Wednesday, Harry traveled to slaughterhouses in Secaucus, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, stamping LB into his selections with the company ring. The meat was soft and warm when it arrived at loading dock, and the trick was to get it inside, weighed, boned out and refrigerated quickly, so the blood would congeal. Lost blood diminished the weight, and the sale price. Although all the Lombardis knew their way around a side of beef, stories of accidents suffered by father and sons were part of the family lore. Working at the meat table one day, Harry cut his thigh when the knife slipped. Many years later the same misfortune befell Joe. Vince once got caught on one of the belt hooks and vowed never to work at the meathouse again.

  The Lombardi boys were repelled and fascinated by their father’s trade, as they were by the waterfront scene, a New York workingman’s pasticcio of the ugly and the exotic: rats scampering behind crates in the wharf shadows, black-market jewelers hustling wares on the sidewalks, mob lieutenants stalking the corners, cops on the take, short-weighting con artists; and there, in the middle of Washington Market, anything one could imagine, a magnificent cornucopia of pheasants from New Jersey, colored birds from Manchuria, mallard ducks and Canadian geese, wild turkeys from Wisconsin, grouse direct from J. P. Morgan’s private shooting preserve in Scotland, venison from Pennsylvania, reindeer meat from Alaska.

  Harry, the grade school dropout, could read and write and showed sharp business sense. His transactions with wholesale customers were in pennies: half-cent, quarter-cent, seven and a half cents off here, a nickel there. He could check the scale and do the arithmetic in his head. No one tested his IQ, but anyone who encountered him knew he was no easy mark. He was financially conservative. His motto: If you can’t pay for it, don’t buy it. He instructed his family never to buy on credit, a directive that Matty followed, but not their daughter Madeline. As a teenager, Madeline enjoyed a few prodigious shopping sprees at Abraham and Straus department store, incurring debts that her doting father paid off for her. The imperatives of the industry required him to run the wholesale meat business on credit, but he hated to do so, especially after 1929, when many of the restaurants that bought from him collapsed in the Depression. He fumed when custo
mers declared bankruptcy and reopened under different names. When President Franklin Roosevelt came along with programs to ease the way for debtors, Harry blamed the mess on him.

  The tattooed butcher had created a comfortable life for himself and his family, and he had acquired the tastes of a middle-class self-made man. All through the Depression years he drove a black sedan. He registered as a Republican. After work he settled at the dining room table for a snack of sliced apples and toasted Italian bread, sipped a tumbler of scotch and read the New York Evening Journal, a step up from the sensationalist tabloids, chockablock with sports and columns. To ensure that his children would rise higher, he helped pay for almost everything they wanted, including private educations, and regaled them with aphorisms about freedom and responsibility.

  • •

  IN THE SUMMER of 1928, after Vince had finished eighth grade at P.S. 206 in Sheepshead Bay, he faced the first critical decision of his life. Where should he continue his education? The choice he made, Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, a diocesan preparatory seminary, reflected not only what he wanted to study but also whom he hoped to become. He thought he was on his way to being Father Lombardi. Pursuing the priesthood was not an unusual calling for a studious Catholic boy then, not for an altar boy so earnest that he appeared at church an hour before mass, but it was out of the ordinary within his family. When Father McCarthy accompanied him to Cathedral’s offices on Atlantic Avenue at St. James Place to register for the six-year high school and college program, Vinnie became the first among the Izzo and Lombardi clans to prepare for a religious life; not a priest or nun in the lot. There was one other curious aspect to the decision: the school had no football team.