I was a young boy when J.F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960. I discovered we had two things in common. We were both Roman Catholic and we both had family compounds.
The Kennedy compound was in Hyannisport, Massachusettes, where a complex of mansions sits on a lovely spot in the harbor next to Nantucket Sound. There three or four generations of Kennedys would gather, play touch football, sail yachts moored nearby and presumably talk money and politics, the family businesses.
Our family compound was different. The Lauricella family compound was located on Milbank Avenue in the center of Greenwich. We lived at 245 Milbank Avenue in an old Mead house which today is surrounded by Agnes Morley Senior Housing Complex, but in those days had large Victorian or Edwardian homes on either side with carriage houses and a five acre wood in the back. My grandparents Anthony and Elsie Lauricella lived one house away at 255 Milbank, my aunt and uncle Carl and Tina Dennis lived next door at 257 Milbank and in back of them another aunt and uncle Anthony Lauricella, known to us as Uncle Junior, lived in a contiguous property on Havemeyer Lane with his wife Virginia. Every Sunday the entire family would meet at my grandparents' house for spaghetti and "patty cakes" (a very tasty meatball). Like the Kennedy's place the Lauricella compound remains in the family.
My grandfather known as A. T. Lauricella was the family patriarch. Looking back I now realize he was something of a dandy, sporting a pencil-thin nineteen twenties style mustache (think Bud Abbott or Boston Blackie), who used to wear a fresh carnation as boutineer in his tailored suits as he drove around town in his cadillac. I saw him in his landlord days in the 50s and 60s. He had purchased and built several buildings on Greenwich Avenue in the 20s and 30s. As a young man he owned a fruit and vegetable store known as Greenwich Produce at 116 Greenwich Avenue and kept a horse and buggy in the carriage house in back which they rode down the Post Road from Greenwich to New Rochelle to visit the in-laws every Sunday. By the time my mother Marie Lauricella was born he had moved on to real estate with offices on Grigg Street(next to where Diane's Books is today).
As a boy my grandfather emigrated to America from the island of Salina, one of the Aeolian Islands like Stromboli and Lipari north of Sicily. As an Aeolian islander he did not identify with the Calabrians and Sicilians who populated Greenwich. He was an avid gardener, reputed to travel to botanical gardens with a paring knife for cuttings, and loved to sit smoking thin italian cigars in his greenhouse which was filled with lemon, fig and olives trees and a caper bush. Years later when I visited Salina the first time I was struck that the scent of the island was just like my grandfather's greenhouse. He had recreated the scents of his boyhood home in that oasis on Milbank Avenue.
I wonder if John F. Kennedy had his private spot in Hyannisport.
