"Politics, Poetry and Unsung Heroes," at the Cornelia Street Café May 9 featured three founding members of the Vito Marcantonio Forum (VMF).
The event was convened by the Italian American Writers Association who were gracious in allowing their evening to become a piece of Marcantoniana. Cameraman Sam Moree recorded the proceedings reproduced here.
The performances corresponding to the snapshots at top are, from left to right, LuLu LoLo who was followed by Gil Fagiani, and finally, the scribe behind this blog, Stephen Siciliano reading from his manuscript novel of Marcantonio's life, "The Goodfather."
Earlier in May, Professor Gerald Meyer, co-chair of the VMF, gave a talk on the American Labor Party at the Mulberry Street Library. Roberto Ragone rendered Marc's eulogy of Fiorello La Guardia.
The VMF will finish up a month of activity with a panel presentation at the New Left Forum entitled, "Vito Marcantonio: Champion For Civil Rights." The panel will feature Professor Meyer, Roberto Ragone and Gil Fagiani.
Saturday May 30, 12 p.m. - 01:50 p.m. at John Jay College, 524 W. 9th St.(10th Ave.), New York City, Room 1.105. Register at leftforum@leftforum.org
The Vito Marcantonio Forum (VMF) is having a book party, dramatic reading and discussion of Leonard Covello's "The Heart is The Teacher on February 22 (2014) at the Mulberry Street Branch of the New York Public Library.
The occasion is a reissuing of the book by the John D. Calandra Institute.
Professor Gerald Meyer wrote the afterword and will speak on the reform educator's pedagogical relevance in today's multi-cultural society.
LuLu LoLo will dramatize passages from the book. Roberto Ragone will "take on Vito Marcantonio's perspective as the seven-time elected congressman from East Harlem was a close friend to Covello," according to a VMF flyer for the event.
The branch library is located at 10 Jersey Street, corner of Mulberry and Prince streets. The event will begin at 2 p.m. and run approximately two hours.
Below are reviews of the "The Heart is the Teacher" and "Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School."
"The Heart is the Teacher" reads as clear-headed and purposeful as the man it describes.
Its string of anecdotes are rendered in a straight-ahead, clean prose, chronologically scripted from educator Leonard Covello's earliest days in the Italian village of Avigliano, to his retirement from the New York City school system.
It is a narrative which deals only in the essential and does the good job of conveying his ideas.
"The Heart," does a marvelous mapping of the disconnect endured by those who left pre-industrial, rural Italy to settle in urban ghettoes like Manhattan's Lower East Side or East Harlem.
There is much pathos in Covello's story. His mother expired from depression born of that chasm between old world and new, which she could not find it in herself to bridge. "Cara Mamma!" he cries
to the reader when recounting her departure.
Similarly, his first love died in the opening phases of their well-suited marriage.
And, of course, as an educator, he bore certain students' failures as fully as he permitted the success of others to fill his sails with wind.
The early chapters fully divulge the difficulties of the Italian-American experience: the gulf between foreign-born parents and their United States-born children; the gap between success Italian-style, via family loyalty, and the American promise of independent self-realization.
And "The Heart..." is also a possible prescription for a particular kind of American success. Covello did not become a wealthy industrialist, but his academic commitment, first as a student and later as teacher, carved out a significant niche as intellectual and policy wonk.
Himself the subject of certain books on education, Covello's approach was hardly rocket science. Socialist of bent, his approach to kids was strictly old school:
"A child," he wrote, "cannot be left to his own devices. He must have discipline, must be given responsibilities. He is a part of the family and the community and must be made to feel from the beginning that he has a duty toward that family and that community."
The start of World War II stunted his efforts at making Benjamin Franklin High School an engine for change in the surrounding East Harlem neighborhood. It convinced him that such violence, however far away, fed his young charges with the same unfortunate inclinations.
Covello's autobiography is terribly understated so that it suffers somewhat from a lack of drama, although his life was hardly devoid of it. But through the narrative's calmness, the reader may be sensing the affect the educator had on those he spent his life trying to help.
"Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School: Education As If Citizenship Mattered"
dissects American society's move away from the public commons and towards the individualistic principles and private sphere championed in the conservative canon, through the experience of one man at one New York City high school.
The authors Michael Johanek and John Puckett recap their effort with the closing question: "How does Covello's theory and practice of community school speak meaningfully to the problem of American's hastening retreat from the public sphere?"
"Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School" is a tough academic slog covering the first days of the community school movement, as envisioned by the education theorist John Dewey, and the way it dovetailed with the early 20th Century reform movement in the United States.
It discusses, in adequate detail, certain preliminary thrusts at integrating a school's efforts into the goals of the surrounding community, and their varying degrees of success.
But mostly, and as the title suggests, the book returns to Leonard Covello, an Italian immigrant convinced of education's value to any newcomer's development, and his efforts at applying community school principles in the well-defined terminus of East Harlem, New York City.
The book demonstrates the verity of Emerson's platitude that, "An institution is the shadow of one man," by tracing Covello's efforts at opening a school for the underserved area, teaching Italian to the children of immigrants from Italy, and grooming enough students to generate at least one formidable star - Vito Marcantonio.
Marcantonio gave Covello the nickname by which two generations of high school boys would come to know him - "Pop."
More importantly, he helped his old mentor construct a new public high school on the banks of the East River, secured countless employees from the Depression-era Works Progress Administration to staff it, and stood guard when the experiment came in for conservative attacks.
The meat of the book covers the very specific work Covello and his team did implicating Franklin into the troubled neighborhood's affairs.
These included a sociological mapping of immigrant focal points, exhaustive surveys of area businesses, clean-up campaigns, storefront community centers, communal gardens, parades, dances, and conferences on racial tolerance crucial in a neighborhood where Italians, Puerto Ricans, Blacks, and slivers of other groups cohabitated uneasily.
The book makes clear that putting these ideas in play turned out to be a lot harder in practice than they were to write about in theory.
There is admiration for Covello and his dream, but no whitewashing of his shortcomings nor the fact that the Franklin experiment was largely over even before he retired in 1956.
There is fair analysis of the political winds buffeting attempts at improving East Harlem through the direction of a scholastic hub.
As the progressive '30s gave way to the World War, the ensuing conservative era, and Marcantonio's unseating in Congress, the very idea of "community school" carried the unpopular baggage of socialism and Covello's wings were clipped accordingly.
Finally, the authors draw conclusions about how the failure speaks to education in America today and suggest the circumstances of Covello's time prevailed over principles which were not only sound, but of enduring value.
In between First and Second avenues in East Harlem stands a street
sign marking the intersection of Pete Pascale Place and 116th
Street.
The nearby corner at Second Avenue, Pete Pascale's daughter Lois
told documentarist Zenobia Pintora, very special meetings once occurred.
“I'm crossing the street at the corner of 116th
Street and Second Avenue to Sandy's Restaurant, which used to be
Cinciotti's Pastry Shop, holding my father's hand. And in the
distance I see Vito Marcantonio approaching us and I remember
groaning to myself, 'Oh noooooo! Now we are going to have to stand on
this corner and my father and Marcantonio are going to talk for a
very long time.' And being a good little Italian girl, I knew I had
to stand there quietly and not interrupt them.
“I wish I could remember what they were talking about.”
Pete Pascale was born in East Harlem in 1914. Like Vito
Marcantonio, his grandparents emigrated from Basilicata in southern
Italy. Like Marcantonio, he never left the neighborhood, which is one
way to get a street sign posted in your honor.
Another way is to help people in that neighborhood. According to
Lois - the performance artist LuLu LoLo - Pascale walked into
Haarlem House (“spelled the Dutch way, with two As)” one day to
see what was going on at the center for neighborhood social work,
“and it changed his life.”
He stayed on to volunteer, coached basketball and acted in plays
until he resigned as executive director of the settlement house 50
years later.
Marcantonio's wife, LuLu remembers, worked there. “Miss
Sanders, as we called her, was the nursery school teacher.” The
future congressman from East Harlem worked alongside Miriam Sanders
before marrying her.
“Marc's charisma made an impression on me even as a little
girl,” LuLu told a conference of the Vito Marcantonio Forum
discussing the East Harlem representative's impact on the Puerto
Rican people.
"My father always considered Marc his mentor and talked to me
about Marc with deep admiration and love, but also with outrage at
the way Marc was treated by those who opposed him, including the
Catholic Church which refused to give Marc a funeral at our Lady of
Mount Carmel Church.”
(drawing by Vince Evans, LuLu's son)
"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be purchased here: MARC LIVES!
