Please visit the Mystery Topic Challenge Blog to view all of the other entries. Once you've read them all, please be sure to vote HERE for your favorite.The Capotosto Tour of Chicago
Mr. and Mrs. Capotosto took me in when they didn’t have to. I was very green when I became their house guest in 1979.
Rick, the junior, and I had four years previous been college mates in San Antonio, and he thought we should try our fortune in Chicago. Roger’s Park was as foreign a place could be. It turned out, I was an ignoble innocent from Houston. I soon got the most valuable education a post-collegiate will ever receive, the Capotosto tour of Chicago.
From the day I arrived, the Capotosto's gracefully showed me generosity and thus they are a special influence on me. When I think back the past 35 years, I am often returning in my memories of my sojourn to the north, and good things I do now because of Mr. and Mrs. Capotosto.
Memories from that era are always high-resolution memories of Ohio Street, City Products, Rush Street, Howard Street, Des Plaines, Gas Light lounge, Union League, Chicago architecture and other incorporated thoughts. You see, one has to be checked-out for color to be anywhere near Dick Capotosto. He was self-made lithographer coming out of WWII and he knew everything about the printing industry: let me reiterate -- everything! Imagine, if you can, colorful moments and laughter, and sincerity that came from my association with the entire Capotosto clan, led by Dick and Mary, at my evolution from carpenter to engineer.
So, this morning with very mixed emotions, I write to the family. I am governed in the thoughts and memories of Dick and his ways, as much as I am influenced by my own father. I cherish all the success that comes to others from their association with him. Mr. Capotosto is always going to be the dean of my school of hard knocks. I just wish I could've told him myself, he would've just shrugged, looked me in the eye, smiling and say: "Eh."
PD
2 comments:
PHD may occasionally overstate his case and remember others favorably beyond their actual merits. But in this case I smile even if he did. The Mary Potmaker will not grasp 1/3 of what is written in this blog (and hasn't the least clue what a blog is anyway). Yet, it will lengthen her days and make each one fuller to know that she and her Palikar are remembered by such as past their way many years ago. Agreed, Dick Capotosto was one of the Might Men of Yore and would (could) never give those of us in the spoiled generation the sentimental strokes we all received in excess from our moms and craved from our pops. Now grown, we don't do so good at this either, truth be told.
Still, he loved the most honored guest from Texas and always considered him an adopted son while he sojourned up north. He fully expected (still expects) to be required to give account to the Palikar father of PHD himself for how he cared for his son. He knew that his son was well cared-for in Texas by the Darnell clan on several occasions.
So it is! Let the record show APPRECIATION HAS BEEN POSTED. WE ALL WILL PAY IT FORWARD. MEN WILL BE MEN. SONS WILL BE SONS.
And finally it can be said that Chicago was changed by the prescence of both the Capotosto's and Patrick Hines Darnell.
Compostholestoy
I am a sentimental old fool, aren't I?
Full Agreement:
So it is! Let the record show APPRECIATION HAS BEEN POSTED. WE ALL WILL PAY IT FORWARD. MEN WILL BE MEN. SONS WILL BE SONS.
No more apology for wonder.
pd/mpw
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