There’s a treasure waiting for Arthur Massolo’s great grandson, Zachary. Some day, when the little fellow is old enough to read and understand them, he’ll have Massolo’s memoirs.
Massolo, 92 years old, has had a full and interesting life. Born and raised in Brooklyn, who rubbed elbows with and worked for New York and national politicians and covered international diplomats at the United Nations. He and his wife Gloria moved to East Lyme in 1999 to be closer to his daughter, Laurie Deredita, director of special collections at Connecticut College. Gloria passed away in 2007.
“I would define my century as the darkest and the brightest ,including the two great World Wars, the Holocaust and man’s walk on the moon,” wrote Massolo.
He started writing his memoir on January 1, 2001. Forty pages, double-spaced, he recounts family and personal history, starting with his Italian and American ancestors.
Massolo remembers a warm, caring family that struggled through the Great Depression. His father, Arturo Massolo, came to America to find freedom denied in his native Italy. Friends called him “il Professore.” Active in anti-fascist activities, the man was barred by the Italian consulate from selling in this country.
Stella Vazzoler Massolo, born in Brooklyn, had family blood lines from Northern Italy. An early family custody decision cut her out of a significant inheritance. Massola remembers her as “la donna di casa,” a great cook and running the domestic front.
His older brother, Sylvio, always looked out for him. Silvio studied law, so Arthur went into pre-law. But early on, a terrifying day in court when a judge lectured Massolo for testifying about a suspect bankrupt fish market he’d never seen, he lost all interest in the field. So, he went to the New York Post where Silvio worked as a statistician. Arthur started out opening envelopes in the contest department.
“I wrote God-awful poetry as a young man,” Massolo remembered. He learned his journalistic writing style on the job, working his way up to head copyboy, where he prepared filler for the back pages of the paper, to reporter.
“That was my secret to success – learn from others who know more than you know,” Massolo mused.
He recalls getting information from Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, called “the little flower,” about the sabotage fire that almost destroyed the Normandy, the luxury liner, as it was being refitted as a troop carrier for the impending World War II.
In 1941, he married Gloria Bou. She came from different circles, as he put it. Her family moved here from Puerto Rico in 1928 after their farm was wiped out by a hurricane. She was one of thirteen children, and fluent in Spanish and English. They met at a friend’s wedding. She was on the fencing team at Hunter College and he was working on his Master’s degree at New York University.
A young man with a low draft number, Massolo opposed the war. He became associate editor of a paper published by the War Resisters’ League.
“I was strongly opposed to sending our men to Europe to fight another war,” he wrote. But, over time, learning of Hitler’s atrocities, his views shifted.
Drafted for limited service, excused from going to the field because of his myopia, and one of the few with a master’s degree, he ended up based at Camp Ellis in Illinois, writing for the Camp Ellis News. Gloria was able to come out to the Midwest with him, and taught Spanish at the officers wives’ club. Their first child, Laurie, was born in 1945.
Returning to New York after the war years, Massolo went back to the New York Post and sought to cover the newly-formed United Nations. He tailed Soviet Ambassador Andre Gromyko. He also reported on and supported the formation of the new state of Israel.
As night editor, he put together the paper’s coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings to ferret out alleged communists in America.
Soon, he was a political correspondent, interviewing Nixon, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater as they ran for president. He also covered Albany and the administration of Governor Averill Harriman.
Massolo was on a first name basis with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who later ran for president and was appointed Vice President by Gerald Ford. He turned down a job with the new governor’s administration, saying he viewed political work as worse than taking graft. Years later, he would work for the Governor in a different capacity.
Massolo recounts a family cross-country driving vacation in 1958 out to California, camping in national parks. One night, Gloria, the designated night-time driver, witnessed a blinding light in the sky. Newspapers the next day reported that it was a testing of the atom bomb.
There was the family vacation to Europe in 1959, where he met relatives in Italy. His cousin Piero Massolo, became one of his dearest life-long friends. It also was by chance that he met Phil Holmes, a British painter. The family gave Holmes, who was studying with the now acclaimed British painter David Bombert, a bumpy ride to a local town festival. Holmes recently passed away, but his paintings have been gracing the walls of Massolo’s home for years.
When President Kennedy created the Peace Corps in the early 1960s, it inspired the world. Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, personally asked Massolo to run the first Central American offices of the Peace Corps, overseeing the new program in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala. The job was based in San Salvador.
The writing wasn’t all pleasant reminiscing for Massolo. He recounted how his one son, Richard, three years younger than Laurie, took his own life at a young age. Richard was bitter over not having full credits to complete doctoral studies in psychology at Central Michigan University, which cancelled a promising job at Dow Chemical, helping employees with addiction problems.
Massolo still has the 44-page suicide note his son left. In 1981, Arthur and Gloria established a library endowment fund for the Everett Cash Library in Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. Each of the books bears a book plate with the name of Richard Massolo.
In 1977, retired from government service, looking for something to do, Massolo became a consultant in public relations. Gloria retired in 1981 after working as a Spanish and French teacher for 21 years at a junior high school.
In 1981, Massolo started on the career that continues to this day. Edward McGowan, a man of some wealth, had built St. George’s University School of Medicine, a medical school for American students, where they could study in English, in 1976. It was based on the island of Grenada.
The first class graduated in 1981, about the time Massolo became director of public affairs. He was based in Bay Shore, New York, the school’s U.S. headquarters. Meanwhile, Communists were taking control of Grenada, uncomfortably closes to the United States. He recalled how Governor Maurice Bishop, who led the Communist coup, made a little history by speaking to the graduating class, declaring “God Bless St. George’s University.”
The U.S. invaded Grenada in 1983, at the request of other Caribbean nations, putting down a coup by led by Bishop, who was assassinated. Massolo recounts how 1,000 Americans, mostly students, hunkered down in their rooms, awaiting attacks from Grenadian armed forces or Cuban forces, which he estimated to be about 600. The students were flown to the U.S., where they continued studies in New York and New Jersey.
Today, Massolo points out, the school has become the largest global institution, training and graduating 750 medical doctors a year. It also has a veterinary school, public health and liberal arts degrees, as well.
After completing his staff position, the school appointed Massolo a life-time trustee of the school. Although he no longer travels to board meetings, he still gets calls and stays involved in school matters.