Semeraro Memories

Recently I was discussing some memories with my distant cousin, Robert Perry, who had posted about going trick-or-treating and that one of the neighbors he visited was my Aunt Vi and Uncle Tony on Midwood Ave in Wolcott. That brought back to my mind some of the interactions that I had with them over the years that I thought I would reminisce about.

Aunt Vi (Violet Pierpont) was the youngest of five children from my mother’s parents. She was born two days after Christmas in 1929 and was 5-1/2 years younger than my mother. Because WWII disrupted life so much, many people didn’t get married until after the war was over, so most of the siblings got married in the few years right after the war (my uncle Dick in June 1946 (age 20), my mom in September 1946 (age 22), my uncle Zeke in February 1948 (age 27), and my aunt Vi in June 1949 (age 19)). Here is a picture of the Semeraro wedding – my mother is the matron-of-honor, the best man was one of Uncle Tony’s brothers, and the ushers were my Uncle Dick and some of Uncle Tony’s other brothers.

[Semeraro Wedding Party]

 

Uncle Tony (Anthony Semeraro) was the 7th of 8 children from a family of Italian immigrants (from Sicily). He was 7 years older than my Aunt Vi. It was a unique marriage – he from a thoroughly Sicilian family where the mom only spoke Italian, and she from an entirely English background with 300+ years of deep roots in New England. They bought a small cottage near Hitchcock Lake that had originally been just a summer cottage. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, an eat-in kitchen, and a storage room off the kitchen (all rooms quite small). It also had an enclosed porch that ran the length of the living room. It had been built in 1938, probably for just seasonal use, but had been converted to year-round living. It also had a garage where Uncle Tony kept the WWII surplus jeep that he had purchased (more on that below).

The siblings used to visit with each other quite frequently, and for holidays used to all get together, rotating between the various houses.

[Pierpont siblings and spouses]

In later years, when they all began having children, there would be a separate gathering for all the grandchildren at my grandparents’ house, but the parents/grandparents continued to have their “adult” gathering. In the years when there were only a few of us grandchildren, my parents would take myself and my sister along on visits to the Semeraro home. We would be put to bed early – either in the second bedroom, or on a couch/day-bed on the porch.

In 1953 our family took our first family vacation (only two children at the time as the next sibling didn’t come along until late 1954). We rented a small cottage in Dennisport on Cape Cod (small bedroom, eat-in kitchen, and screened in porch). My sister was only 3-1/2 and so slept with my parents. I (at the ripe old age of 5) got to sleep on the screened-in porch. Cape Cod back then was not the overbuilt, pricy tourist place that it has since become. The beach was one block away. Uncle Tony and Aunt Vi rented another small cottage next door to us for the week. Since they had no children, my parents were more than willing to share!

[Aunt Vi next to cottage in Dennisport]

 

The two of them loved children, but they had none of their own for many years. So, they chose to enjoy all their nieces and nephews – of which they had many with 16 on her side of the family and many more on his side. Aunt Vi played the piano and organ and they had a piano in their house where she gave piano lessons to many of the next generation – both family members and other children in the neighborhood. I was not among them as I had chosen to play the flute instead. But when she had her annual piano recital for all her students to perform (to a packed living room), we nieces/nephews who played other instruments were also invited to play a piece to break up the monotony. Aunt Vi was also the organist in my church where she played the requisite three hymns and accompanied the soloist each week. But she was not a member, preferring to stay with Mill Plain Union church, so during the main part of the service she just sat on a chair back in the little organ room reading until being needed again.

Uncle Tony had two great loves that I recall. One was fishing. That is what he had done when we had our joint family vacation on Cape Cod. He also had access to Hitchcock Lake and had use of a property which he could walk to where he could indulge in his sport. But his other interest was his beloved WWII Jeep. He spent hours and hours working on it – taking it apart to fix this or replace that as it got older and older. In the end I don’t think there were any original parts left! My father constantly kidded him about it that it spent more time in the garage than it spent in a running condition. Uncle Tony once showed up in our driveway in it just to show my father that it could drive the 5-6 miles each way from his house to ours and back.

[Uncle Tony with fish]

As I got older and began riding my bicycle all over town, Midwood Ave became a frequent destination. I could always count on a warm welcome. I think all of us enjoyed our times with them because they were so other-focused as they did not have children of their own. In my mid-teen years, that finally changed when they adopted and began their own family – first Donna in 1963, then Roger two years later. By then most of we cousins were getting older and more responsible, so Donna especially was this little baby doll that the girl cousins could dote upon. So just as my parents had shared their children with them, they shared their children with us.

[Donna and Roger]

 

Uncle Tony was pretty handy with things and he did much of the work to add on to their house. This first involved removing the wall between the living room and the enclosed porch, raising the floor level in the porch (there was a step up between the two), and effectively doubling the size of the living room. He also built an addition with larger bedrooms, a larger bathroom, and a basement. The house had been built on a rock ledge, so one of the rather delicate tasks was setting off dynamite under the house to break up the ledge without having the charge so large as to damage the existing house. I’m not sure I would have tried that, but he pulled it off without a hitch. He also expanded the garage to have more space for his tools to work on his beloved Jeep.

I left for college 800 miles away in 1966, and was only home for the summer and occasional breaks, so I didn’t get to experience the growing up years of either my younger siblings or my younger cousins. But Aunt Vi and Uncle Tony were still given the “favorite aunt and uncle” status when I was home. When I got married in 1971 and lived in the next town for 4 years my wife and I would often stop by to “say hi”. And when we moved to PA in 1975, we still maintained a close relationship and would stop to see them each time we visited CT.

Uncle Tony had a massive stroke that left him wheelchair bound and unable to speak. His hello when we came was a wiggle of his fingers. But he remained at home with Aunt Vi taking care of him to the end. He passed away in 2005 at the age of 82. Aunt Vi lived until 2016 and passed away at the age of 86.

I’d like to relate one final story.

One Christmas we were visiting CT over the Christmas holidays and staying with my parents. Aunt Vi’s church, Mill Plain Union, was having a Christmas Eve service and she invited our entire family to go along with her. And since our entire family were singers, she asked us to go early and practice so we could be part of the choir for the service. As it turned out, if we had not then the choir would have been practically non-existent!

My wife only sings soprano. My mother (who also grew up in that church) knows how to sing alto. My father, like myself, sings bass. But there were no tenors among us. I have a wide enough range that I can sing tenor if needed (although if I do it too much I can’t speak the rest of the evening), and Aunt Vi also has a versatile voice and could sing most of the tenor range. So, I moved up in range, she moved down, and we got to sing together for the only time in my life. There were only three other people besides our family in the choir that night (another soprano, another alto, and another bass) so we essentially had an extended Pierpont family choir for the Christmas Eve service as we faced the magnificent Pierpont window at the opposite end of the church. It was such a pleasure to sing with my favorite aunt!

[Pierpont window]

 

My wife and I got to visit Aunt Vi for the last time when we attended my 50^th high school reunion in September 2016. She was, as always, her cheerful self and happy to see us. But she was obviously aging. So, it was not a surprise that she passed away just a month later. She was the youngest of the five siblings, all of whom lived into their eighties, and she was the last of them to pass away.

[Happy Aunt Vi]

 

Thanks for all the memories!