(Editor’s note: The following was written by Dr. Corinne Scalzitti and delivered to the Lakeway, Lake Travis Rotary Club earlier this month. Each week, a Rotarian will explain why they are members of the club at the beginning of each meeting.) 

I was born in Jeannette, Pa., a town of 10,000 people about 40 miles east of Pittsburgh.  The men worked in factories or steel mills or coal mines and the women were housewives.  Everybody knew everybody else, and strangers could recognize you because they saw the resemblance to your aunt or uncle or grandmother. Everybody also knew everybody else’s business because the housewives spent time talking on the telephone or drinking coffee together and talking about whomever wasn’t there.  That’s when they weren’t busy watching soap operas.

The men worked hard at manual labor and many supplemented their income with small-time Mafia activities. My great uncle Danny was in mid-management in the numbers and sports betting business.  Uncle Danny didn’t have a job like the other men. He drove a green panel truck with a Model Laundry sign on the side.  He had several decoy pieces of laundry hanging in the back of the truck — the same pieces stayed there for years. Uncle Danny was very short and very fat. In order to drive the truck, he had to get real close to the steering wheel so his feet could reach the pedals.  He would drive with a tea towel between his trousers and the steering wheel so the steering wheel wouldn’t wear out his pants.  Uncle Danny was rich, and when you visited him, you could get rich, too.  If you could spell opossum you got a quarter.  If you answered the telephone and Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck had numbers for the Fat Man and you wrote them down correctly and didn’t tell anybody, you got another quarter.

In case you don’t understand numbers, it was (and still is) an illegal lottery where the number for the day was the last three numbers of the New York Stock Exchange close. You could play a number straight or pay more to box it.  Boxing it would let you win on any sequence of the numbers. A lot of breakfast conversation was what numbers people dreamed the night before and how to play them.  There was a little excitement in town when the mayor and chief of police were hauled off to prison for taking bribe money from the bookies and the informant was put into Jeannnette’s version of the witness protection program – they checked him into the local hospital until the dust settled.

Our version of a country club was Punzo’s Pool Hall where the men gathered at night. My dad didn’t drink, but a lot of the other men did. When Dad woke us in the morning and threw dollar bills into the air for us to catch we knew he had cleaned up at poker.

My dad was the greatest guy of the greatest generation. When I read Tom Brokaw’s book of these people, I couldn’t believe that Dad’s story wasn’t there.  My dad’s adolescence was halted at age 19 when he was drafted into the infantry.  He spoke of the war only once with me.  He talked about how terrified he was when the boats that brought the troops to land would get close to the land and the men would have to climb down the ropes and swim to shore. Moving targets, he called it.  He was wounded.  He helped save two of his buddies and they were all bandaged and put into the hold of a boat for 10 days before they received any meaningful medical care.  He was sent to a VA hospital in Philadelphia for 18 months.  His mother was able to visit him only once when Uncle Danny drove her there.  My father’s major wound was a shattered mandible.  Bone grafting was in its infancy, so they wired his jaws shut and fed him through a straw until they were able to graft bone from his hip.  Needless to say, his teeth didn’t fare well.  The one dentist in town didn’t want to treat him until he was in enough pain to pull the tooth, and did so with his foot on the chair to help.  Nevertheless, my dad always had a grin that was ear-to-ear.  Many people would allow the war experience to make them bitter.  Not Dad.  I think that his early years made him so much more thankful for all the good he was able to create in his life.

I was the first child, the first grandchild on my mother’s side with 6 siblings and the second on my father’s with 4 siblings.  All the family lived close and were close.  

My dad had wanted for me to be a boy. When I wasn’t, he took it in stride. He took me everywhere, taught me every make and model of car, and called me boy all my life.

My dad and I had many automobile adventures.  I first drove at age 3.  Dad was picking up or delivering numbers money and he left me in the car on top of a hill to run in and collect.  When he came out of the house, I had pushed the little button with my little finger and was driving down the hill. He chased the car and got in. My father spanked me twice. This was one of the times he did.

For as long as I can remember, I had three burning desires:Number 1 — to get out of Jeannette as soon as I could; Number 2 — was to not go to college at Seton Hill, the girls’  school that was full of nuns where my mother would threaten to send me every time she was upset with me; and number 3 — never to be a housewife.

I figured out very early that all freedom came from financial freedom and I would need to work hard to escape life in Jeannette. My first job was at age 7 delivering the TV Guide and collecting subscription money. I also cut my Uncle Danny’s lawn and helped his wife with housework.  I had regular babysitting jobs, which is how I got my first career break. One of the men whose children I babysat was in charge of the laboratory at the local hospital and asked if I wanted to work for the summer washing test tubes. I was 16 and was thrilled to have a real job instead of babysitting my sister and brothers. I even learned to do urine tests and had the privilege of emptying and washing about 80 pee bottles a day.  It was very exciting work for me.  Over many summers, I was trained to do all of the work in the lab and became an autopsy assistant and EKG technician.  My father was thrilled that I got to work in a nice air-conditioned place. This training served me well during college and dental school because I was always able to find a job.

I wanted to learn everything about medicine that I could.  One evening I was to take an EKG on a man. He had an abscess of the groin.  Of course, I knew where the groin was — somewhere near your calf.  When he asked me if I had ever seen an abscess, I said no.  He asked if I wanted to see his. Of course I did.  When he opened his hospital gown to show me his groin, I ran from the room and left my EKG machine there.  I’ll never know who retrieved the EKG machine.

I was educated by nuns. They are their own breed.  They have names like Sister Aloysius, Sister Philomena, Sister Raymond, Sister Herman Joseph, Sister Aldegondes, and the meanest of all, Sister Mary Joy.  Sister Aldegondes died in front of her students in my sister’s 6th grade class. The children were laughing and cheering when the death was discovered.  The nuns were low in sensitivity, but high in academic training and I do thank them.  I spent a few years at the local parish school, then was sent to a private convent school.   We had boys and girls in grade school, but only girls in high school.  I won a half scholarship for high school.

When colleges came to recruit us, some girls from St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame’s sister school, arrived. They told us that the ratio of boys at Notre Dame to girls at St. Mary’s was 7:1. That was all I needed to hear. Out of Jeannette, and nobody was lonely on Saturday night.  I applied for and received many scholarships.

My father had little formal education, but he was a very smart man. He put three of his four children through college on a factory worker’s income.  The fourth child said he was smarter than the professors, and he was.

Dad would work at anything.  All of his children learned many of the lessons he taught us but one that stands out for us is his lesson about how you can never say that you can’t do something. He would tell us that when his boss asked him if he could work a machine that paid better than another he would say, “sure, I can do that.” He would tell us how he would just stand back and watch another guy for a few minutes and then do it himself. He would get that job and now we do the same.  He sure did teach all of us to try and to not be afraid of those things that we haven’t learned and all the lessons that life has yet to teach us.

When I was in college my dad would send me the same letter over and over.  It was very simple.  It had a dollar bill folded into a piece of paper and the paper said, “You are my racehorse and I’m betting all my money on you. Love, Dad.”  He was always on my shoulder and still is my first and favorite inspiration.

When I was accepted to dental school, I was thrilled.  There was the small problem of figuring out how to pay for it.  I was called into the dean’s office in the first few weeks of school and told that I was to receive a minority scholarship that covered not only tuition, but books and all of the very expensive supplies. When I called my mother to tell her the news, she said   “I didn’t know Italians were still minorities.  I told her Ma, it’s because I’m a girl”.

During my first year of dental school, I took my father to see what could be done about his poor dental condition.   My dad’s teeth were so awful that I cried when I saw their condition.  This visit led us on the path to have a full-mouth reconstruction on my Dad’s teeth and to have him grin even bigger.

So, why am I in Rotary, and why will I stay no matter what?

Because I have been very lucky and very blessed.  Much of my education was made possible because of the hard work and charity of others.  I am in a field that is constantly changing and growing and I love learning and enjoy my patients and the wonderful ladies with whom I work. So, for as long as we all work to provide scholarships and change the lives of young people, I’ll be hawking those tickets.

By Dr. Corinne Scalzitti, guest column