A South Kingstown writer has raced her father\u2019s aging memory to get an 80-year-old family story into print as time eclipses details and the lives who has held them treasured for decades.<\/p>\n
Kim Hanson was in her 30s when she first heard the story of a chance meeting of a close family friend, and an Italian relative, in a war-torn field in Italy. Her father had kept it to himself for decades, then began telling it at holidays, a little more each year, as it revealed the interweaving of the two families.<\/p>\n
She has now written it down, and the deadline was her father himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was on the clock with this one; my Dad, Poppi, is now 93 years old,\u201d Hanson said about her father, Ralph Monaco, who has become forgetful in his advanced age. Hanson the writer wanted him to see and read her book, \u201cThe Bridgeport Story,\u201d about his tale often told at family events.<\/p>\n
The story itself belongs to the last weeks of World War II. Aldo Canapetti, an Italian-American soldier from Bridgeport, Connecticut, had been in Europe three years. His battalion camped in an open field near Caserta, outside Naples.<\/p>\n
A farm woman named Orsola Gallo was waiting there. As the columns marched past, she ran alongside them shouting one word, over and over, as a question: \u201cBridgeport,\u201d so goes the story.<\/p>\n
Someone in the ranks remembered that Aldo Canapetti was from a town called Bridgeport and that he spoke Italian.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What followed defied belief. Orsola was the sister of Louisa Gallo Monaco, the back-fence neighbor and closest friend of Aldo\u2019s mother, Vita, in Bridgeport\u2019s Italian-American North End. She\u2019s also the aunt of the author\u2019s father, Ralph Monaco.<\/p>\n
Hanson says the gamble made sense in a world built on shared language. Immigrant women in that neighborhood traded news over their back-fence clotheslines. Orsola knew Italian-Americans were serving in the U.S. Army and took her chance.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was remarkable that the connection with Aldo was made \u2014 a one in a million chance, like lightning striking,\u201d Hanson said.<\/p>\n
Neither family had heard from their Italian relatives in years because Italy was an enemy state and no mail could pass. Aldo ate with Orsola\u2019s family the afternoon they met, then faced a problem. He wanted to share the news with people back home, but military censors could read his letters, and his battalion\u2019s location should not be disclosed.<\/p>\n
He wrote his mother anyway, disguising the Italian relatives of her best friend as guests at a remembered dinner party back in Connecticut. The two women read between the lines. That quiet act of rule-breaking cemented the connection.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe took quite a risk,\u201d Hanson said, adding that this memoir has its limits of what she could verify. Aldo died in his early 40s and never told the story himself, so his perspective is lost.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is possible that Aldo told the story differently; unfortunately, he never told it to us,\u201d Hanson said.<\/p>\n