by Kitty Kelley
“The whole family had run-ins with the police at some time or other, but Babe was the real bad boy of the family,” said Rose Bucino Carrier, a Hoboken neighbor who baby-sat for young Frank when she was twelve years old. “Babe was the youngest of all the Garavantes and the only one born in this country, but he was the one who got in the most trouble.”
In 1921, Babe was arrested on a charge of murder in connection with the killing of a driver of a Railway Express Company truck. While he was not charged with the shooting, Babe was identified by a witness as the driver of the getaway car carrying the five men who had attempted the robbery. He was arrested a few hours later and held in the county jail without bail because he was thought to know the identity and whereabouts of his five friends, who were eventually captured.
Even before the news of the murder charge was published in The Jersey Observer, people were whispering that Dolly’s brother was going to be locked up forever or sent to the gallows. Dolly left Frankie with her mother and went to court every day of the trial. Pretending to be Babe’s wife, she walked into the courtroom holding a baby she had borrowed just for the occasion. Babe was not married at the time, nor did he have any children, but Dolly wanted to do all she could to engender sympathy for her brother. She wept loudly and cried out that the baby needed his father to take care of him.
The judge was unimpressed by Dolly’s tears. He sentenced Babe to ten to fifteen years at hard labor, fined him one thousand dollars, and ordered him to share the costs of the trial with the other defendants.
Outside the courtroom, Dolly called the judge a “son of a bitch bastard” and shed real tears when she saw the bailiffs hauling Babe off in handcuffs. She called to him, promising to visit every week, and she kept the promise over the more than ten years her brother was in prison.
The costs of Babe’s defense almost bankrupted the Garavante family. None of them was making much money, but everyone contributed something to pay the lawyer. Dolly’s share came mostly from her earnings as a midwife.
Until the turn of the century, most babies in the United States were delivered by midwives. They were not qualified as physicians but were trained to assist women in childbirth.
Dolly began her work as a midwife shortly after Frank was born by accompanying several doctors on home-birth calls. Soon she learned enough from watching them to do it herself.
Dolly’s black bag became a familiar sight in Hoboken even when she was not helping with a birth.
“I remember when Dolly took up midwifery,” said Rose Carrier. “She used it as an excuse to get out of the house at night when there was a party she wanted to go to. She’d take her black bag with her whether she was going on a call or not. It was the excuse she gave Marty to get out, and he never knew the difference.”
Dolly’s son was frequently seen dressed up like a little girl. “I wanted a girl so I bought a lot of pink clothes,” she said many years later. “When Frankie was born, I didn’t care. I dressed him in pink anyway. Later I had my mother make him Little Lord Fauntleroy suits.”
Every day before leaving for City Hall to make her rounds, Dolly took Frankie to the two-family house on Madison Street that her mother shared with Dolly’s sister and brother-in-law, Josephine and Frank Monaco.
Dolly made no secret of the fact that she disliked her older sister, Josie, who was pretty, petite, and refined, in direct contrast to the loudly profane Dolly. Rosa Garavante, a sweet elderly woman, ignored the rivalry between her two daughters and concentrated her loving attention on her grandson, Frankie, nursing him through all his childhood diseases. She prayed fervently when he had to have a mastoid operation, which left a massive scar behind his left ear and caused him partial deafness. Despite the ugly gash and the permanent loss of hearing, Grandmother Garavante felt her prayers had been answered when Frankie did not develop meningitis, as often happened when the mastoid bone was not drained in time. She worried about his catching tuberculosis, which had been the chief cause of death throughout the world during her childhood and which still claimed the lives of thousands of children subjected to crowded living and inadequate diets. So every time Frankie coughed, his grandmother fed him, and soon he grew fat on Rosa Garavante’s pasta. But he was not a happy child.
“I used to see Frankie sitting forlornly on his tricycle on the sidewalk outside his house, waiting quietly for his parents to come home,” said Thomas Fowler, a Monroe Street neighbor.
“I remember Frankie as a very lonely child—no brothers or sisters and no little friends to play with. He was quiet and shy,” said Beatrice Sadler, a family friend.
“I’ll never forget that kid leaning against his grandmother’s front door, staring into space,” recalled another.
When Frank started elementary school, he went to his grandmother’s house every day for lunch. “Afterwards, he would hang around here until Dolly came home at night,” his Aunt Josie said.
Dolly was not so lenient and loving with Frankie as his grandmother was.
“Dolly really made him toe the line,” said Rose Carrier, who baby-sat for Frank on the weekends. “I remember when he said ‘the bad word’ once. It came out when Dolly least expected it, and she was so shocked that she grabbed him and dragged him to the sink to wash his mouth out with soap. Frank screamed and yelled, but Dolly didn’t care. She jammed that soap right in his mouth. Even though she used that kind of language all the time, she wanted to teach her son not to say bad words, especially that one.”
On Saturdays, after Dolly turned her household over to Rose’s care, she went to work in the backroom of Cochone’s Ice Cream Parlor as a chocolate dipper.
“That was the only soda store in Hoboken,” Rose said. “It was owned by a Greek, and I had to take Frankie there every Saturday afternoon because Dolly wanted to see him. We watched her dipping almonds and niggertoes in chocolate. I guess I shouldn’t call them niggertoes anymore, but that’s what we called them way back then. They were Brazil nuts, and Dolly would dip them in chocolate and put them on a tray to chill. She hand-dipped everything with two fingers. It was a production line.
“After I took Frankie in there, we would go to the movies to see the Pearl White serials. Dolly didn’t pay me much, but she always gave me lots of candy. She’d just take it right off the tray and give it to me and Frankie.
“Frankie liked going to the movies, but the poor kid didn’t have much choice in the matter because that’s where I was going and he had to be with me. The movie houses didn’t have any air-conditioning in those days, so when it got hot, they’d leave the side doors open and me and Frankie would sneak under the screen door and not pay the nickel admission price. We spent it on popcorn instead.”
Dolly had taken the weekend job as a chocolate dipper because Marty was out of work. After breaking both wrists boxing, he retired from the ring in 1926 and took a job on the docks as a boilermaker, but because of his racking asthma attacks, he was laid off.
“When Marty was out of work, I would go to Grandma Sinatra’s grocery store on Jackson Street every week with a list from Dolly, and Marty’s mom would send over a week’s worth of food for them,” said Rose Carrier. “It was hard because Marty’s cousin, Vincent Mazolla, had come from Italy. They called him Chit-U, but I don’t know why. He didn’t have any people except for Dolly and Marty, so he lived with them on Monroe Street, and he didn’t have a job either.”
Once Dolly had firmly established her base of power and could be counted on to deliver six hundred votes from the third ward at election time, she wasted no time in using her influence. Beginning with Chit-U, she marched him down to the docks and demanded that he be hired as a steward’s assistant.
“She made Chit-U hand her his pay every week,” said Doris Corrado, “but he didn’t seem to mind because he always said, ‘She good to me. She give me money for shoes when I need it.’ Then Dolly took out a life insurance policy on Chit-U and made herself the beneficiary.”
Next, Dolly headed for City Hall and banged on th
e mayor’s door, telling his assistant, James J. Rutherford, that she wanted her husband to be appointed to the Hoboken fire department.
“But Dolly, we don’t have an opening,” he said.
“Make an opening,” she demanded.
On August 1, 1927, Marty Sinatra was appointed to the Hoboken fire department. Because of his wife’s political connections, he was spared the embarrassment of taking a written test.
Having established her husband in the Irish-dominated fire department, in a position which paid two thousand a year and provided a pension, Dolly was now ready to make her move uptown. She found a three-bedroom apartment at 703 Park Avenue. Only ten blocks from their Monroe Street tenement, the Sinatras’ new home might as well have been a thousand miles away, for it was completely removed from the noisy street vendors of Little Italy and much closer to the Hudson River in the part of town reserved for those with money and power.
Dolly outfitted herself splendidly for this move and bought loads of new clothes for twelve-year-old Frankie, who had become extremely thin following an emergency appendectomy. She insisted that her husband dress up as well. Throwing out his worn overalls, she sent him off with one of the neighbor boys to buy some gabardine pants.
“I still remember when Dolly made my brother take Marty shopping for those pants,” said Doris Corrado. “He kept saying, ‘I want “gardenia” pants.’
“I also remember the traveling merchants who would come to our doors selling Chantilly lace and chenille bedspreads and organdy doilies, things like that. Dolly would buy and buy and buy, and then never pay. She was always a dollar down and a dollar when you catch me. One lady who sold her loads of stuff came to collect but Dolly hid and sent Chit-U, the general mop, to answer the door.” (Doris coined the description “general mop” for Chit-U, because, as Dolly’s gofer, he not only ran her errands and fetched her beer but mopped her floors and cleaned her house.) “Chit-U said, ‘No here. She no here.’ So the lady came to my mother’s house and called Dolly on the phone. Dolly answered. ‘Oh, what a surprise,’ she said. ‘I just walked in the door.’ The lady yelled at her. ‘Stay there. I’m coming over for my money.’ But when she got to the apartment, Dolly was gone and ‘the mop’ was hiding.”
No one else living on Park Avenue had “gardenia” pants or Chantilly lace or an only child with a closet full of new clothes, so the Sinatras, or O’Briens, as they frequently called themselves, appeared prosperous to their new neighbors.
“Frank’s people was rich,” recalled Tony Macagnano, a boyhood friend from the Park Avenue Athletic Club. “I was a poor guy. My dad died in 1925. My sister died of tuberculosis the same year. We had five kids, which was the average number.”
“I used to play with Frankie when we was kids,” said Adam Sciaria, another childhood friend from Hoboken. “His uncles were always coming around and giving him candy and picking him up. They weren’t married then, so they really spoiled Frankie. They were fighters, so no one laid a hand on him. They always gave him money. He was flush. I was one of thirteen kids, and we was beggars.”
“Being an only child made all the difference,” said Bob Anthony, a Hoboken neighbor who grew up with Frank. “Frank had more. He didn’t have to share with brothers or sisters. He even had his own bedroom. None of the rest of us had half of what he had. He wore brand-new black-and whites that his mother bought him, while the rest of us wore old oxfords that were hand-me-downs. He even had his own charge account at Geismer’s department store. He had so many pairs of fancy pants from that store that we called him ‘Slacksy O’Brien.’ No question about it. Frank was the richest kid on the block.”
“He was the best-dressed kid in the neighborhood and he always had the newest toys and gadgets,” said Rose Carrier. “He had bicycle after bicycle, and later on his folks would take him on vacations to the Catskills or maybe to the shore in Long Branch for two or three weeks each summer. That was unheard of for anyone in Little Italy.”
But those vacations were not so happy for Frank as his envious Hoboken friends imagined.
“I remember in 1929 when my folks and I went with the Sinatras on a summer vacation to the Catskill Mountains in Cairo, New York,” said Kathryn Buhan, a Hoboken neighbor. “Frankie, who was thirteen then, seemed happy. His parents had been much too busy for him in Hoboken, and he thought that now they’d spend some time with him. But one morning, both our parents set off on a driving trip, leaving Frankie and me at the boardinghouse where we were staying. Frankie threw an awful tantrum.
“The boardinghouse owner tried to calm him down, but Frankie ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom, screaming bloody murder.
“A few hours later, I had to visit the bathroom, but Frankie wouldn’t let me in. I pounded on the door. But he wouldn’t come out until his parents came back.”
Kathryn Buhan also remembers photographs from that vacation that show Frankie holding a doll in every shot. “He was kind of a mama’s boy,” she said. “A little bit of a sissy.”
On another vacation, Frank was so embarrassed by his mother’s antics that he went to his room and wouldn’t come out for hours.
“Frankie had to do whatever Dolly said, and she would do anything to get a laugh,” said Joan Crocco Schook, who ran Mae’s Shoppe in Hoboken and knew both Dolly and Frank well. “One day she dressed up as a baby in a bonnet with a bottle and a frilly dress and made Frankie push her down the boardwalk in Long Branch in a big cart that was supposed to be a baby carriage. He was so humiliated, he wouldn’t come around for hours afterward.”
The kids on the block were the best excuse Frank had to get out of the house, and his mother liked to see him play with the neighborhood boys. She always gave him extra money to treat his friends to ice cream and sodas. When they started a club called the Turk’s Palace, which was half secret handshakes and half baseball, they needed uniforms. Dolly bought them the flashy orange and black outfits they picked out with a half moon and dagger on the back, thereby ensuring that Frank was made manager of the team as well as pitcher.
Reflecting on Frank’s childhood largesse many years later, some of the boys felt they had been bought, while others appreciated the generosity of a frail little boy trying to make friends.
“He used to buy friendship from the other kids,” said schoolmate Joe Romano. “Frank always had money, and he would share it with anybody who’d promise to be his friend.”
“If we were going to the movies and I couldn’t afford it, I was never left out,” said Tony Mac. “Frankie always paid for me. He treated me like a brother.”
In return, Tony Mac and some of the other boys from the Park Avenue Athletic Club became Frank’s protectors.
“Frank wasn’t much of an athlete, and even though his dad and his uncles tried to teach him how to box, he couldn’t fight at all. I guess he was just too little,” Tony Mac recalled.
“He was a mischievous guy, but he couldn’t defend himself when he got in trouble. He was a real good kid and never gave anyone any trouble. Just mischief, like when we used to go to the movies. If a bald-headed guy was sitting in front of us, Frank would throw his popcorn box at him and hit him in the head. That’s the kind of trouble Frank got into as a kid.
“Other times, Frank and me would be walking along and Frank would tap a guy on the shoulder, jump back, and point to me as if I’d done it. The guy would start chasing us, but we’d always get away. Getting chased was a big deal in those days.”
“Tony Mac always had to save Frank from his scraps,” said Agnes Carney Hannigan, who grew up in the Irish section of Hoboken. “Frank couldn’t fight at all. He was an arrogant kid, though, and would go looking for trouble. Then he couldn’t defend himself, so Tony would have to do it for him.”
By this time, people in Hoboken were listening to the radio for accounts of Babe Ruth’s home runs and Jack Dempsey’s boxing triumphs. The most thrilling event of the time had been Charles Lindbergh’s dramatic nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic from New Yo
rk to Paris in May 1927. “Lucky Lindy” had become every American boy’s hero, and youngsters throughout the country dreamed of becoming pilots and built models of Lindbergh’s plane, “The Spirit of St. Louis.” In Hoboken the theater chain owners held contests to see who could build the best model Piper Cub.
“Billy Roemer always came in first in those contests because he was the most mechanical of all the boys,” said Agnes Hannigan. “But one year Frank wanted to win the prize, so Billy, who was his best friend, built his plane for him and let him take first place, which was an airplane ride over New York City.”
Thrilled with his rigged victory, Frank ran home to tell his mother, who recalled several years later: “He came in all excited and said, ‘You be sure to look up, Mama. I’ll wave to you.’ And, do you know, I was just as ignorant about flying as he was. I went outdoors and craned my neck, expecting that I’d be able to see him.”
After school, Frank spent most of his time at Billy Roemer’s apartment at Sixth and Park, where he soon developed his first crush. Billy’s sister, Marie, was six months older than Frank. A pretty, blond German girl, and extremely precocious, she was not very impressed with her young Italian admirer. So Frank turned to Lee Bartletta for help. Lee was a Hoboken friend whose parents were very close to Dolly and Marty.
“I was a bit older and inclined to feel like Frank’s big sister, so he asked me how to win Marie’s attention,” she said. “I tried to help him out to the best of my sixteen-year-old knowledge. When we got around Marie to the extent that she accepted a birthstone ring he bought her for St. Valentine’s Day, you’d have thought she had handed Frank the world on a silver platter just by agreeing to go steady.”
Frank followed the birthstone ring with a crystal bead necklace and earrings, two pairs of shoes, four sweaters, a swimming suit, a purse, and, for her sixteenth birthday, a sheer black negligee.
Marie’s sweet-sixteen party was so important to Frank that he bought a three-piece sharkskin suit, which cost him twenty-nine dollars, and he told everyone to “dress sharp” for the occasion.