Frigoletto, Robert 2-1 Transcription
In: CIC Frigoletto, Robert 2-1 - Final.pdf
Part five of an interview with Robert and Joanne Frigoletto. Topics include: His father's dental practice. How dentistry changed between Robert and his father's time. Dentistry and insurance. How Robert got into pediatric dentistry. What it means to Robert and Joanne to be Italian. What it was like when Robert and Joanne moved to Leominster, MA. Finding a church to join. Italian cooking. Discrimination and derogatory ethnic terms. ; 1 ROBERT: How is it different? I guess, I don't know. LINDA: Oh, I guess I'll just give a hint. I remember last time… SPEAKER 1: Yeah, I'm just gonna -- not saying anything different. LINDA: I guess remember last time you had mentioned… ROBERT: Two generations? LINDA: Well, more, more that they established more of a relationship you had thought, your father and his, his customer. Or the patients or whatever. ROBERT: The patients, yeah. LINDA: And by the time you came along it was more a business relationship. SPEAKER 1: Yes, that's what I was gonna say. ROBERT: Yeah, I think the culture changed then, the insurance changed then. SPEAKER 1: Exactly. ROBERT: You know, they weren't paying the bill all the time anymore, I guess. But then I get… SPEAKER 1: It was on a professional level more than… ROBERT: Yeah, it was more of a professional level. LINDA: But can you give me some examples of your father… again, last time you had mentioned that some, some of these people just couldn't afford the bill. ROBERT: Sometimes they bring in the eggs and the, from the chickens, and they'll bring in the chickens. SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] ROBERT: Then they couldn't bring in the eggs. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] ROBERT: Really, my life, we had eggs for the rest of our lives here, really. SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] ROBERT: But right. My, my dad used to do a lot of work for these -- 50 cents and some dollars. And I remember coming from dental school in '63, when I got out, and I thought I had a hard time 2 learning the fees, they were the same as we were charging in the clinic in Chicago, and that was like three and four dollars a filling. My father had the same fees then. SPEAKER 1: He had clinic fees instead of Boston [buttons]. ROBERT: Instead of Boston places. Yeah, certainly now Boston places and places around here about the same. SPEAKER 1: They're the same because it's all covered by insurance. ROBERT: Yeah, well, different class. So I guess he had a lot of people who are paying him on time, and those people really appreciated the doctor and patient relationship. And a lot of them are friends, and my father used to use a lot of his patients to do work, and… SPEAKER 1: Yeah, I think that was more prevalent then… ROBERT: It was more prevalent in those days where people used to use… SPEAKER 1: And you kind of… ROBERT: … their own group back and forth. But my father used to say -- there's a great quote, "If you keep spending money in town it'll eventually get back to you." That was probably a good -- he always used to tell me that. Keep using the local people in town, and it'll eventually get back to you. LINDA: That sounds good. ROBERT: Yeah, I think that's -- that's a quote that's gonna make the CD. SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] LINDA: Well, if you don't pay extra, I don't know. ROBERT: … out of all the quotes. LINDA: I don't even know about… SPEAKER 1: Yeah, right. We… LINDA: You know, we don't know. ROBERT: Right. We don't know what that means. LINDA: We don't know. ROBERT: Hidden information or whatever, that's the one or two phrase out of all of this.3 LINDA: Oh, but don't be discouraged because, again, I think… ROBERT: Oh, I'm not discouraged. LINDA: … there are more… ROBERT: I'm just talking about it, you know. SPEAKER 1: I think it's just wonderful that it's written down, and especially, and I think I mentioned this last time, in the book that we've done called City in the River, that was one of Fitchburg, the section on the Italian, the Italian section in the book, left out his father. They mentioned the other brothers, the other brother and sisters, but his father was left out. So it's nice that he's gonna be in some archives. ROBERT: I think that was a political… SPEAKER 1: Yeah, there was a … ROBERT: … it was -- for my father being involved in politics a little bit, there was some stuff. But what was… SPEAKER 1: But the Jewish section they mentioned him. There's two doctors… ROBERT: Well, that's because of my mother… SPEAKER 1: … that's Dr. Van and Dr. Phil, they mentioned Dr. Frigoletto in the Jewish part of the book. ROBERT: My mother was such a social being. SPEAKER 1: Well, they mentioned that, that's why she came here. Now… ROBERT: Everybody loved her. She was just huggy. SPEAKER 1: No, but they mentioned her because of your father's instrument on the incumbency, so it was mentioned in that part of the book. ROBERT: [Brilliant] thing. SPEAKER 1: But it's nice to have this in history. Like I say, who knows, great, great, great grandchildren, someday, may wanna find out. ROBERT: Yeah. LINDA: Oh, but it's not -- certainly that, but it's the people that wanna learn about, let's say, the history of Italians or the history of Leominster and Fitchburg. It's really for our reviewing.4 SPEAKER 1: Absolutely. And that's important, I mean, I think the more of us ought to be a little more connected with history somehow. This generation sometimes is not too interested; they're only interested in here and now. ROBERT: And the only -- the other thing that may be interesting was he had a brother and sister that came here from Grandpa, lived here for a while, Lee Marie. SPEAKER 1: Louise… Louise Frigoletto. Grandpa Frigoletto came here from Italy. ROBERT: Grandpa Frigoletto had a brother and sister from Italy who came to Fitchburg for a year or two. SPEAKER 1: A year. Didn't… ROBERT: … and that both of them ended up in California. The last time I was still there, we got to meet them about 15 years ago for the first time. They came out to my daughter's wedding, and we still talk and write letters, and [unintelligible - 00:05:11] see each other probably 'til we die. We found them too late. Wonderful Italian family. SPEAKER 1: Yes. They -- now, his parents have gone off to visit them. I never… ROBERT: The never talked much about it. I knew they went, but, you know, they came home with some pictures and by the end of the week that was it, and I never remember them calling or doing -- and yet we, you know, we went up there and struck up a nice relationship, and to this day we're constantly in touch. But somehow they didn't like they didn't like the area, and what's interestingly, culturally, I think, is that the brother, so I understand, didn't like it here and saw an ad in the Boston Paper from California saying come out and work in our produce farm, and if you spend a year with us and you work hard, we'll give you an acre of land. For five years or three years or some time, and that's what this brother 5 did, and kept getting acres of land, and now -- out in [Los Baños] you'd look like this, as far as you can see, hundreds of acres of produce that he produces… SPEAKER 1: Yeah. LINDA: Mm-hmm. SPEAKER 1: Well, now, do they have Frigoletto, or are they… ROBERT: No, they're Frigolettis… SPEAKER 1: They kept the old… ROBERT: They're the Frigolettis. SPEAKER 1: Frigoletti, right. ROBERT: Hmm. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. LINDA: Oh, yeah, but they would be, right…? SPEAKER 1: Right. LINDA: …. because… ROBERT: Because they left a year or two after Grandpa. My father might've been, you know, five years old or born recently or something like that when they left. And the… SPEAKER 1: But there's a family resemblance. LINDA: Is that…? ROBERT: Oh, I wish. I walked… SPEAKER 1: Watch. He walked like him. ROBERT: I walked into the room in California, and one of the daughters turned around and said, "You look just like Uncle…" SPEAKER 1: Tony. ROBERT: Uncle Tony, who used to be her -- Uncle Tony had died recently just before we got there, right? Showed me pictures of Tony… SPEAKER 1: They're your father's first cousin. ROBERT: My father's first cousin. I looked at the pictures and go, "Wow!" SPEAKER 1: Yeah.6 ROBERT: And I guess one of us, one of the daughters, one of the daughters' daughters who came to the wedding, yeah, and met me for the first time. This Tony used to send her money when she was going to college, was her favorite uncle, you know, always slipping the -- never met me. When she met me she took a breath because she thought Tony came back to her. And she told me that after, just for a second, because you turn around they introduced you, she says, "I took a deep breath because that was my favorite uncle. And he -- and for a second there he was again." So we knew we were the right relatives. SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] LINDA: [Laughter] ROBERT: So that's -- I don't know if that's be of interest to anybody at all. But I think the produce going and being -- and now, doing very well. He says most of the lettuce you get back East comes from us. SPEAKER 1: They made… ROBERT: … big bucks. SPEAKER 1: Big money. LINDA: Wow. SPEAKER 1: They really value the land. ROBERT: Yeah, they'd really lorded it then. LINDA: So getting back to dentistry, how did insurance change the practice? ROBERT: He didn't have that 50 cents and a dollar a week, come and get in do free work as much because all of these poor—and there are poor people who are now on welfare, which is some kind of insurance, right? And insurance paid now some of the things that were deductibles and back pays, but it separated the trust factor, and now we weren't doing so many things for free or discounts or 15 kinds of people, because we don't have to, we would get it from the insurance. But you'd always get less with the insurance with 7 all these complaints about the things you would choose to do and put doubt in people's minds. So now the relationship with the doctor who could do no wrong, which sometimes I guess he did, and insurance company always looking for their stockholders, and they have different goals, so you've got -- poor consumer was in the middle, and the relationships are more business than personal, aren't they now? So that's what happened to medicine. When I heard that medicine sometimes -- a lot of times the insurance companies would figure out the price of an appendectomy, say, and they get this from the auto insurance business. I heard this, and I think it's true that most doctors can do an appendix in 33 minutes, and it'll cost the hospital X amount of dollars, and they figure it out. And that's what you do when you got a big car fix. They say it takes 34 minutes to do this and this is the price you get for it. It doesn't matter if it's complicated or not. Because a car is not a person and doesn't have the history of diabetes or cardiac or whatnot, you know, you replace a windshield in a car, it usually goes pretty much the same way every time, not true with people. So this insurance really got kind of crazy. Now they've come up -- well, this is not even cultural -- well, this is cultural. They've come up with a new thing now, evidence-based medicine that will be coming through -- it's starting to trickle in. If you don't perform, if you don't -- say you come to me with a certain disease, certain problem, and I don't solve it in one of the three or maybe one of the only ways that most people would solve that, the insurance won't pay for it because it's not evidence-based. It has to be proven that that particular way of solving the problem is the way that most people solve it. So that's gonna take all of the 8 entrepreneur out of this. And just what they've done with the drug companies, they stifle some of the research because the people, the drug companies can't get back their dollars. So all the medicines that didn't work out and all the lawsuits they got, so they'd stopped doing a lot of extra research and the progression, and the speed of new things coming out is slower. And the same thing is gonna happen in medicine, I would guess, with evidence-based medicine there's gonna be a stifling. On the other hand the protection of crazy medicine, so you get both sides, don't you? LINDA: You hear much of that…? ROBERT: You get a protection… LINDA: Crazy medicine? ROBERT: I don't know. LINDA: Let's keep it at dentistry. ROBERT: Yeah, at dentistry? Yeah, this is people of all levels, but less and less now. Most dentists are pretty proficient. Yeah, I think in my father's day there was some bad ones around, less skilled ones around. But I don't know of any now, everybody's pretty good. LINDA: So did your father determine procedures as much in the same way you did, or was it, was insurance even determining that for you? ROBERT: Ah, no. I would not let insurance determine that. I would tell the patient the best thing, give them their choices, tell them what the insurance would pay, and if they didn't pick the worst one I'd kinda go along and do it. If they picked the worst procedure I'd tell them go someplace else. I think in my father's day, my father would pick the procedure that he thought the person could afford. That's what you're looking for, remember we said that. LINDA: Mm-hmm. ROBERT: And then give them that procedure rather than letting the patient make up their mind, because I have found that some of the poor 9 people want the best medicine, and some of the richer people don't always want the best medicine. LINDA: How did the instruments change between your father's day…? ROBERT: Surprisingly a lot of the same stuff, but two things that changed the most were the high-speed drill. Let's see, just about in the early '60s when I was getting out of school, they had this air rotor, you know, air-driven turbine rather than the old mechanical thing you saw the string going around turning the pulley. Krrrr-krrrr. SPEAKER 1: Grinding away. [Laughter] ROBERT: Right, and now it's like painting, little brush. I mean, it's really air… air-quick-caning. As you can remember now, going to the dentist, you don't feel the pressure anymore. You just hear the sound. If you forget the sound that'll be all set. The other thing is the plastics, all of the adhesives and the kinds of plastics and fiberglass materials. That was always a boring subject, dental materials, is now the hot subject, because every six months they're improving all of these white fillings, so to speak, which they haven't got yet perfected but they're getting closer every year. LINDA: Oh, wow. SPEAKER 1: And the other thing besides the material, I mean, the procedures they do, the procedures that you do that your father didn't do with children? ROBERT: Ah, yeah, the specialties of -- but that's true in medicine in general, the specialties have become more important and accepted, except you can't get this under the specialist now if you're in an HMO. [Laughter] LINDA: True. True. ROBERT: You might be going back to the generalist because it's less costly. But now we -- my brother and I would say the same thing, we 10 would get referrals from general doctors for problem cases that, to us, were not really problems because we dealt with them every day. And he used to say the same thing, he used to get problem cases that were routine. But we had extra training, and that's what specialists are for. I mean some percentage sometime of his work. LINDA: Did your father deal mostly with problems or maintenance? ROBERT: Father dealt mostly with problems, because a lot of people would come only when they had a problem. Although he was -- he would deal with a lot of six-monthers that were on maintenance. SPEAKER 1: I think it was pretty evenly divided. ROBERT: Yeah. But certainly, for a time in my dental career, maintenance and prevention became really most of my practice. As a pediatric dentist that was -- prevention was really strong, stronger than most practices. And then, now the insurance companies are in now trying to dilute a lot of the preventive things that we're doing in medicine. And the -- what do you call it? SPEAKER 1: Pendulum. ROBERT: The pendulum will swung back because they're gonna get caught ten years down the line with more expensive diseases because they didn't wanna pay for the prevention. SPEAKER 1: I think there wasn't much education when your father was practicing, so people wouldn't… ROBERT: People -- yeah, less television, less news, less -- now you can't do anything because it's out in the news, they tell you every week something new. SPEAKER 1: So a lot of his patients were problems. ROBERT: Yeah, now the drug companies are advertising directly to the consumer. The hospitals are advertising directly to the consumer – never had that 25 years ago. Looked like the doctor make the choice, which hospital to go to, which medicine to use. Now, 11 people go into doctor and say, "I wanna go to hospital A, and I want you to use pill B." SPEAKER 1: I just thought of something that might be important. Your father, Scott, is the… first of all… ROBERT: The dental staff at the Burbank Hospital. SPEAKER 1: Burbank Hospital. That's what you… ROBERT: That's right, yeah. He and Dr. Beckman were… SPEAKER 1: There were no oral surgeon in town… ROBERT: Well, no. SPEAKER 1: … they used to do the oral surgery. ROBERT: My father was -- yeah. My father was [unintelligible - 00:18:01] surgery. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. I think in his other life he would come back as an… ROBERT: Back as an oral surgeon. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. ROBERT: Yeah, I learned a lot of oral surgery from my dad. SPEAKER 1: Uh-huh. ROBERT: And I think he learned by the gut of his -- how do you say that? SPEAKER 1: Pleat of his pants. ROBERT: Pleat of his pants. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. ROBERT: Right. You read about it and then you practice it, huh? LINDA: Then you can just… SPEAKER 1: Confident. ROBERT: Yeah, they were no -- oh, very good. Very good at tooth extractions, and a lot of people would come in. They didn't have root canals in those days, right, so you'd end up taking out the tooth. SPEAKER 1: He wasn't doing major facial surgery. We're talking of… ROBERT: No. Doing internal, oral… SPEAKER 1: Yeah, root canals…12 ROBERT: Yeah. SPEAKER 1: … extractions, yeah. LINDA: Well, I was going to ask you about pulling teeth. It seems as though people back then would just have their tooth pulled… ROBERT: Tooth pulled out and not saved, and nowadays, people are saving their teeth. Maybe years -- in his early practice, how that 70 percent of the people had full dentures, huh. Population maybe over 50 percent certainly… SPEAKER 1: Really? ROBERT: … had full dentures, and now it's down to like 25 percent. And I can remember teenagers coming into his practice when I was there the first few years and saying, "I want all my teeth out," 16, 17 years old, and my father would refuse to do it. And two months later he would tell me he would see them with dentures. LINDA: Now, why would they do that? ROBERT: Because they were here to have it made, they had money to fix them, and someone told them just get them all out of teeth and get dentures, and what a terrible thing. And my father wouldn't do it, and a number of people wouldn't do it, but I guess there were two or three dentists around who would do it. My father says he'd always see those people six months later with dentures. He used to kick them out, "Hang on to these." They'd come in and ask that [unintelligible - 00:19:51]. SPEAKER 1: Again, it's… ROBERT: But I know I used to see a lot of 16-year old kids taking out one tooth at a time, and 8 months later taking out the other one, and a year later another one would go. And I know a couple of people today that are running like that. [Laughter] LINDA: Right. SPEAKER 1: Well, as long as it's a couple that…13 ROBERT: Yeah. Well, see, I'm seeing it now in Florida when I volunteered at an indigent clinic, in Florida, during the winter. Seeing the same thing now with all of the immigrants that have come in over the past 10 years and the minorities. They're really back to the '50s dental education-wise, because these minorities they go and have a toothache and have it taken out, and I see the same thing happening as what's happening back in my early days. LINDA: Now, is that because they don't have the money or the education or both? ROBERT: Both. Both. They come from third world countries, and… you know, we had a couple of dentists in town, they go every year, over to -- where do they go, Bangladesh or something? SPEAKER 1: No, no, no. They go to El Salvador. ROBERT: El Salvador? SPEAKER 1: I think. ROBERT: And he'd see people standing in the line. They walk all night for six, eight hours to be at the clinic early in the morning at the tent to have teeth taken out because they had been suffering with toothaches for months. And there's -- every morning there's a line of people, he would say. SPEAKER 1: Or Colton tells a… ROBERT: He says over there that's all we can do. And I think I mentioned to you last time, you know, people in Colombia who said, "Let's get… let's pool some dollars and get some old equipment and get it over there to the clinic in Colombia, and the Colombian doctor who was working with us in Miami said, "Don't bother, they'll get stolen within 24 hours." LINDA: Hmm. I don't remember you mentioning that. ROBERT: Oh, didn't I? LINDA: I do remember you mentioning Florida. ROBERT: Oh. So you never know.14 LINDA: See? So it's coming back to you. ROBERT: Yeah. We're trying to get a grant passed now. I sent her the stuff, a lady has the clinic, and see if we can get Rotary and Kiwanis and all of those groups involved in helping out some of the poor people in Florida. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. No one wants to do it down there. LINDA: No one wants to… SPEAKER 1: The other day, the dentist don't want to… ROBERT: No, no difference in this, with the county. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. ROBERT: You know, the welfare system is so screwed up, and the fees are so low and the people don't show for appointments. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. ROBERT: And the only way you can do it is if you had a clinic. In fact, tomorrow night there's gonna be a meeting locally in town, and the local dentist society is gonna talk about that with some of the politicians. And I think the only answer is to develop a clinic every so often and have us guys in private practice go volunteer half a day, a week, and have some kind of tax incentive. LINDA: Trying to get people to volunteer is a problem. ROBERT: Well, you gotta give them -- you gotta give them a tax incentive… LINDA: Yeah. ROBERT: … a couple of hundred bucks of a day or something like that, you know. And then -- see, years ago, my father was -- and I just finished the rest of it, I'm doing it all, the school examiner… SPEAKER 1: He asked you. Yeah. You and your father both were school dentists. ROBERT: Right. Yeah. My father was the -- well, they didn't have school dentists anymore; he would just examine teeth. But the program started with a guy named [Bumgardner] who's a living legend. The patient that used to come into my office shaking like this 15 because they were afraid of the dentist. I used to go to Dr. Bumgardner. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] I actually hear some people say that to this day. ROBERT: To this day. "My parents used to go to Bumgardner." Oh, he must have been… SPEAKER 1: He must have been horrible. [Laughter] ROBERT: So he'd say -- he was the school dentist. He used to take out teeth without Novocainee and did things like that, you know, and just -- I mean, a kid could come in with a sore tooth and just yank it out. LINDA: I can remember you telling me -- I think you told me that you were known as to be more gentle than your father? SPEAKER 1: Yes. ROBERT: Oh, that story, too, yeah. SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] ROBERT: He was pretty rough. [Laughter] But people loved him. SPEAKER 1: Well, he was quick. ROBERT: Yes. If you said ouch he'd say, "Oh, shut up." SPEAKER 1: Well, yeah. Your father worked on me once. And when I said ow, he said, "That doesn't hurt." LINDA: [Laughter] ROBERT: [Laughter] That doesn't hurt. LINDA: You [unintelligible - 00:24:04] went to him once? SPEAKER 1: Once? [Laughter] ROBERT: Well, I told you a story about the first toothache ago was the nearest from the hospital, I guess. SPEAKER 1: That was a story. ROBERT: That was a story, yeah. And I gave him a Novocainee and she said, "Ouch," and I said, "I'm sorry." She said, "Your father would've told me to shut up." I said, "Well, shut up." She says, "Good! I feel more at home now." [Laughter] 16 Then the other guy was Bill Botta, who used to be the head of United Fund here and played tennis with him. He says, "I never found out there was Novocaine until I left your father." Went to another dentist, he said, "Do you want Novocaine?" He says, "What's that?" [Laughter] He says, "Your father, decided -- " he was a big, overweight, burly guy, and I'm sure my dad decided he was strong enough not to take, that he could take the pain, why give him a Novocaine. [Laughter] He says he grew up without Novocaine, and he's well with that, you know. I don't know if it was terrible, but -- actually I don't take Novocaine now. I grew up the same way. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: And I don't understand that. I cannot imagine not having Novocaine. ROBERT: Well, I used to study how it felt. It would help me practice, really, because I kinda knew what happens. Dang it. SPEAKER 1: I just hope… [laughter] yeah, well, before the war. ROBERT: It wasn't part of my education, but it really is not bad. LINDA: [Laughter] So tell me about… ROBERT: All right. LINDA: Tell me more about your father's connection to Burbank Hospital. ROBERT: He and Dr. Beckman, this other dentist, had decided -- I guess because my father liked these surgeries so much. He's taken out a lot of teeth, people would demand that. Started the dental department, really, the dental staff at Burbank Hospital, and which became… SPEAKER 1: So they had… ROBERT: And to mingle with the medical staff eventually as we, dentists, became accepted as doctors as the years went on. SPEAKER 1: So then they had hospital privileges in the OR. ROBERT: And we had hospital privileges in the OR, right? And I remember when I first got out of school going up with him and he was so 17 good at taking out teeth and so fast. He used to just toss them, and the girls would be running around trying to catch them with a can. [Laughter] And he caught [unintelligible - 00:26:20] mouth extractions on elderly people and senior citizens and then put the dentures right in immediately, and they'd walk out with a full set of teeth. SPEAKER 1: There was a time when both father and son were on the staff together. ROBERT: Together. Right. SPEAKER 1: Yeah, well… ROBERT: We did cases together. And it was part of my training, really, going into pediatric dentistry because I ended up dealing with retarded adults. Probably one of the few pediatric dentists that had six years of general dentistry experience, and then took a lot of retarded people to the hospital, and did fillings and their special equipment to make sure you did rehab in the hospital, at least special, and some medically compromised people. SPEAKER 1: That's what you did. ROBERT: And some apprehensively compromised people, that were adults that we took into the -- or young kids under three or four. In fact, well they're starting to change, to pass the bill in town now, in the state, been at it for three years, I think they'll get it through this year, 23 States out of… SPEAKER 1: Fifty. ROBERT: The 50 that passed it to force the insurance companies to pay for hospital costs for serious dental problems for kids under five years old. LINDA: Oh, good. SPEAKER 1: About time. ROBERT: Which we used to have years ago, and in fact, that's one of the few things Medicaid still covers. But then the insurance companies 18 dropped it. As we hear they dropped circumcision, because that's not treating a disease but preventing. SPEAKER 1: Really. ROBERT: Pennsylvania they had started it and a few states picked it up. The insurance companies are so under the wire now they think of everything they can think of to not, not to pay. Because the dollars are so tight. SPEAKER 1: Don't get sick. Stay healthy. LINDA: [Unintelligible - 00:28:25]. ROBERT: Yeah. Well, they've… they've prepared, they're doing this evidence-based medicine, and some of the insurance companies now want to allow only one clean and fluoride a year for children instead of two, every six months. LINDA: And how long does it take them to make a change like that? Typically speaking. ROBERT: I don't know. I mean, when the change comes out and there's some noise about it, because when they come out with a change they won't pay for it. SPEAKER 1: No, but does it take years, months? ROBERT: I don't know. I started reading about it a year and a half ago, and I hear some insurance companies now are just trickling in. SPEAKER 1: So probably about a year… ROBERT: A couple of years. Yeah, a year or two. LINDA: So there's really no public discourse; it's just immediate, but it comes down… SPEAKER 1: Yeah, they just do it and tell you about it. ROBERT: The public comes when they get hurt later and they wanna make a noise about it. SPEAKER 1: When they found out they're not covered. ROBERT: Like what happened with the HMOs. Many years nothing happened until a few people died. Actually, a few senators' 19 daughters, kids got involved and said, "Dad, you know, this isn't government." Dad said, "Gee, my insurance is still okay, [laughter] I got the big stuff up here in Washington." You know, and then word started to trickle through, and then they started to get after the HMOs. And here's the big thing now about passing a law whether you could sue an HMO or not. What is negligence, what isn't? LINDA: What's going on with the doctors and all of those insurance changes? ROBERT: To clarify with the patient, the pros and cons of both sides and letting the patient know what they want to do, what's available for them and how much money they will get from it, pros and cons of each kind of treatment, what will happen if they don't get treated. And some people say, "Hey, I ain't got any money. Do the treatment that they will pay for, even if it's second class." And the doctor then has to decide -- and a lot of second class, second steps are okay, as long as it's average, good. You don't have to buy a Cadillac every day, right? You can buy a Ford, still get there, but you don't wanna buy last year's junk. LINDA: Well, what if, let's say, the Dentists Association or whatever you call the professional organization, what if they felt very strongly that children should have their teeth cleaned twice a year? And the insurance companies says… ROBERT: We're not strong enough. That would take a decade to change, and we'd need a lot of public support behind it. Unfortunately, the children don't vote, so that's not gonna happen. Now, if it has something to do with adults, like if they took away, maybe root canals, maybe the adults would get it done faster. But things to do with kids don't change too quickly. SPEAKER 1: Not just quick.20 ROBERT: It's the kids they're taking advantage of, what can I say? When you wanna get cheers, who gets -- used to be the kids and the senior citizens got it. Now, the senior citizens, there's so many of us that vote, we're now getting listened to. Especially now with the next group of baby boomers that come along. SPEAKER 1: Very vocal. ROBERT: Very vocal. Runs and goes, gonna vote… SPEAKER 1: My feeling is that somehow in this society we children like they're commodities, aren't people, they're just things, are just -- they have it real tough, children. ROBERT: Yeah, it's terrible. There's a story of a little girl I tried to tickle once, dirty clothes and dirty… and when Medicaid is out, "How many brothers and sisters do you have?" How many sisters or whatever I asked her, and her answer, in two words, told me, the answer was, "Too many." And I couldn't get her to laugh, tickling her, that's how -- she could've been four and a half years old, pretty face, you know, worn out clothes. You could see. And those kinds of kids you just wanna give them a hug and help them out as much as you can. Every week in our office we would, I would say, "We should do something for nothing and we should tell the girls," and it gets me to the end of the week. And we then find someone, you know, we wanna do something for and remind me, and so Fridays we can do it, because they would know a lot about the people sometimes more than I did, in busy days. SPEAKER 1: That sounds more. We just don't like the insurance company… ROBERT: We don't like someone telling me what we can do for nothing. That's one we choose ourselves. But that was always a good exercise. Or if we charge someone some money, they'd come back, they'd say, "Wait a minute," and they'd come back and say, "These people really can't afford it." That's okay. [Unintelligible - 00:33:14] work out something.21 LINDA: Mm-hmm. ROBERT: I always had that nice relationship with my best friend so that we could, so that we could really be helpful to people when we could, on those who needed it. And on the other side of the story where someone comes in, you know, a little kid who came with us with an interpreter, Spanish kid with a toothache, and I said, "How did she get on Medicaid so quickly? She's only been here two weeks, you tell me?" and the interpreter told me, "Oh, we got her on Medicaid before she even left Puerto Rico. She had a toothache in Puerto Rico. And we paid for the flight over." SPEAKER 1: That annoys me. And we don't… ROBERT: So there's, you know, there's two sides to every story. And being a doctor or politician or anybody, a judge, lawyer, boy, you're in the middle of some of this ethical stuff. It's tough to make a decision sometimes. Gotta go with your heart. And sometimes you get in trouble though, with your heart. So sometimes you just pull back and don't do anything; that's not good. SPEAKER 1: It's not good for people. ROBERT: Because what's happening to a lot of medicine now; they're pulling back and not doing it because they're afraid to make the right suggestion. They have a poor doctor in Boston with a basketball player, with Madge… SPEAKER 1: Dr. Madge. ROBERT: Dr. Madge, it's my cardiologist. SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] LINDA: Wow. SPEAKER 1: So I said to him when I… ROBERT: I asked Dr. Madge, "If I had a little irregular heartbeat when I'm playing tennis, what should I do?" He said, "Just play through it." [Laughter] I said, "Thanks a lot, that's pretty…" SPEAKER 1: … before we asked her.22 ROBERT: No, even now. LINDA: Even now? ROBERT: Why are you telling me that? But I'm not sure. He said, "You have to make your decision." LINDA: Uh-huh. ROBERT: It's tough. SPEAKER 1: He lost that case to… ROBERT: No, no, he won it, but two years later. Two years of misery. LINDA: I thought that we're now… SPEAKER 1: … but they took him again. ROBERT: But it's civil. SPEAKER 1: Oh, civil. ROBERT: He still made it. He won the case. I don't know what happened with the civil case. SPEAKER 1: No, I don't know what happened. ROBERT: She wanted the big bucks. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. ROBERT: You know, he said, if she were alive now he would have earned four trillion dollars… LINDA: You know what, I think… ROBERT: … so I don't want part of that. Because you said that if he played basketball he wouldn't die. It's like bringing the [unintelligible - 00:35:40] in and saying if you could change the distributor the car will work. Probably. If you changed the guy's heart, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Look at the guy who just got in trouble and he had an artificial heart, and stroke, blood clots. SPEAKER 1: I printed that, Reggie Lewis, I think she was gonna start a third suit, but I haven't heard anything about that. ROBERT: Is that right? LINDA: Haven't heard anything.23 ROBERT: Well, her lawyer keeps going, going and going. He wants to get -- he probably started the case and said, "I won't take anything until we're winning." He's just gonna keep coming up with stuff until they win. LINDA: They had a big negative backlash last time, which I'm sure they weren't prepared for. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. LINDA: So I can imagine they'd keep going now. ROBERT: Me neither. I thought he was finally done. For 12 months he had at least -- remember the first year? He had to take off two months because he had plenty of phone calls from his family, and his life and everything from people, and he just left the city, upside down. SPEAKER 1: You know you can see… I mean, you can see people thinking, "Oh, it's his fault," because you don't get all the information on TV, so… ROBERT: No, you got just what the media wants you to get. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. Yeah. ROBERT: So we wonder how much of this stuff we're hearing about the war is true. We hear only about all our successes, we don't hear about the failures. LINDA: It seems that anytime we do hear about a failure, it's always a mechanical… ROBERT: Brought it down, mechanical, right. Oh yeah, they were there on a training mission. SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. ROBERT: Anyways. Boom. Well, here we are spending two hours again. We gotta… LINDA: I know, I'm sorry. ROBERT: This is terrible. SPEAKER 1: No. ROBERT: Look. What other questions you got?24 LINDA: Oh, I want just to cover with the information about your starting your practice, and I seem to remember that you went into the pediatrics floor in [unintelligible - 00:37:26]. SPEAKER 1: He practiced with his dad first. ROBERT: I practiced general dentistry with my dad for six years and found myself doing more and more of the younger population of the practice, and enjoying it, and being successful at it. Probably enjoying it is the main word. Oh, I just enjoy the kids. SPEAKER 1: IE, he is the kid here. ROBERT: IE, I am a kid still. SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] ROBERT: Well, they are the next leaders of the world, and it feels [unintelligible - 00:37:58] time thinking about what they're thinking about, it keeps you young. The body doesn't like that, but the mind that's -- you know the story, "I just got my mind together and now my body is falling apart." And it took 60, 65 years to get to here. [Laughter] LINDA: [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: Anyway, that's when he… ROBERT: So all the parents used to say, you know, I guess -- well, last time the parents used to tell my father, "I don't want go over to your son. He just got out of dental school. But I don't mind if my kids go to your son." So I guess that's why I got the younger population and enjoyed it and did well with them. Because I have magic, it's a hobby, and sleight of hands, so I was always -- to this day, I think, would keep thimbles and cards next to my chair. LINDA: How did you learn that? ROBERT: This 91-year old Sylvia here that we're talking about started me in as a hobby as a kid, and puppets and all that stuff. I think I broke my leg at one point, and that's when I got introduced because I was in a cast for some weeks and nothing to do, and she brought the 25 stuff and happened to like it. But the… you know, one of the many stories of kids is the kid had been to three dentists and with a toothache, four-year old, and screaming and yelling at me and kicking, and me, the dentist, could handle him and finally made their way to pediatric dentist office, my office. And so I looked in the mouth as the kid was screaming and produced a red thimble from his mouth, and the kid stopped crying right away, put his hand to his head, scratched his head and said, "No wonder why that damn thing was hurting." [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] ROBERT: And I had him then, right? [Laughter] Yeah, I said, "Lemme look around some more. You got any more of those in there? Ah, over here," and goes, "Why not. Well, go get rid of that," you know. "I can do that magically, you know. Boom, I got that." [Laughter] LINDA: He's a cute… ROBERT: So probably he said, "No wonder why that damn thing was hurting." [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: They really do… ROBERT: Oh, I've got some great stories, yeah. [Laughter] And sometimes, also, when I used to lecture, I used to tell that story, and nobody would laugh. And I'd look and I'd say, "Come on, guys, wake up. Get a life. Do any of you have any kids, anybody, I mean, kids at all? That's a funny story." LINDA: Even if you don't have kids I think that was… SPEAKER 1: Right. ROBERT: That's a funny story. Because you guys are too serious. I used to tell adults that and get nothing out of it. I tell you, these guys are really too serious. It's like golfers rather than tennis players with dentists. We have a good time. In golf everybody's, "Don't make a sound. Be serious." And I'm throwing clubs around [unintelligible - 00:40:40] I can't understand.26 SPEAKER 1: He used to talk… ROBERT: I can't understand why they take this game so serious. LINDA: So can both of you talk a little bit about being Italian, what it means to you? ROBERT: Other than being proud I'm Italian -- I grew up not knowing there was much difference 'til recently. I got interested in the history of all of this, and yet I think my wife has a different story. SPEAKER 1: That's very recent to him. He just thought of himself as American [laughter] more recently, I think… ROBERT: Yeah, I mean I didn't know there was any difference to… many years SPEAKER 1: We were always -- our family was very into the history of being an Italian, very proud, you know, really proud of everything connected with being Italian, whether it was, you know, where you came from, or the country… ROBERT: Oh, yeah, I was smart enough to marry an Italian. LINDA: … the history. Thank you. The history, the architecture, I mean, we were all -- our family was always -- there were some parts of it. Some were more into the food, some were more into the history, but there was always, you know, you're an Italian American, you know, it's great to be an Italian. So it was just -- although, living where I lived, where we were, talk about a minority, we were really a minority. In the school I went to we were also a minority. And I do remember -- but just in that neighborhood, I don't remember while I was in anywhere else, but there were people who -- now, we were… ROBERT: Who thought you were second-class citizens, right? SPEAKER 1: … we were third generation, and we had some people who were first generation but spoke English thinking that we were second-class citizens because we had those funny-sounding names. ROBERT: First generation of another group, another ethnic group.27 SPEAKER 1: Yeah, of another -- yeah, they're not Italian. Right. And I thought, "Excuse me?" you know, I was born here, my parents were born here… ROBERT: So she experienced some prejudices that I don't remember. SPEAKER 1: Yeah, and in school, too. LINDA: Now, where was this? SPEAKER 1: Boston. The suburb of Boston but it was a very, very predominant Irish, Catholic neighborhood. I went to an Irish Catholic school, so while the nuns were Irish… ROBERT: Irish Catholics… SPEAKER 1: … so the nuns couldn't quite… ROBERT: Well they were Catholics, that's the… SPEAKER 1: You know, they couldn't quite understand, you know, anything. And then we had, maybe, like, two Polish kids, maybe three Italian kids. So we did feel different, but only in that, you know, instance then we were in the rest of the, you know, with my relatives who lived in all over suburban Boston, [unintelligible - 00:43:23], whatever, you know, lived with the -- it wasn't a problem… ROBERT: Which brings up my story, which you're probably waiting for, again, because I must've… SPEAKER 1: That was when I was -- then we moved to another neighborhood in Newton, I don't live there now. ROBERT: When I was in this progressive school and my parents were -- we were family members of a local country club that was limited in the acceptance of people, of members, and I took home a black friend of mine from school for the weekend, grabbed my neighbor, who was Jewish and took him up to play golf and get kicked off of golf course with a black and a Jewish guy. That was in the early '50s. LINDA: And where was this? SPEAKER 1: At the local…28 ROBERT: At a local country club. SPEAKER 1: He was too dumb to even know… ROBERT: I was too dumb to even know that they had restrictions. Right. SPEAKER 1: Sorry, I didn't mean dumb. LINDA: What kind of -- what did they tell you? Was this before you got on the course, or did somebody…? ROBERT: No, no, we were right just -- took him out on the course. Apparently we were coming back close to the clubhouse again on the third hole… SPEAKER 1: Someone saw him. ROBERT: … and the manager came out and told me I had to get off the course. LINDA: Did you ask why? SPEAKER 1: He didn't tell you? ROBERT: I don't remember. Yeah, we left… LINDA: And then? ROBERT: He was the boss, he said, "Get off," I got off. LINDA: But was it clear that he was doing because it was…? ROBERT: Yeah, I guess I knew that -- I figured it out once I was in the car and got home, I guess. I didn't figure it out right on the spot, but I think once I got in the car I figured it out. I didn't even think of checking on it when it went up, because I did the same thing recently, I took a lady on men's day who had Levi's, and you never have to have Levi's up there, same club. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: Well, they were happy [laughter]. If you knew who was Wednesday… ROBERT: [Laughter] I forgot. I thought Wednesday morning was men's day and then Wednesday afternoon was okay. SPEAKER 1: They don't want pants with Levi's anywhere. LINDA: So it was key to double win.29 ROBERT: There was a double, so-- I got permission… I did get permission to go out on men's day in the afternoon. They said, "If nobody complains, just go out." When I get back in, head of the pro comes up to me and says, "And I heard you want Levi's, too." SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] ROBERT: I said, "I didn't even think to look at that so much." [Laughter] LINDA: All right. What's our next question? How did you feel coming here? I know we talked a lot more about this last time, but how did you feel coming to Leominster after living in -- was it Newton? SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I thought this was the end of the earth, [laughter] I thought this was… ROBERT: She said this was the on the other side of orange. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: No. I thought it was real country. ROBERT: Out there an echo. SPEAKER 1: And I thought when I first came here, well it was late fall, so it was winter by the time we moved in our house and no one welcomed us, and I thought what an unfriendly place. And the ward of the dentist who welcomed us, the one nearest our age was 15 years older than we were, so I thought, "Oh, Lord, there was no one my age." I don't even know if there are any neighbors here. I never saw a face, and it didn't dawn on me that, well number one, it was winter, so people were kind of [unintelligible - 00:47:09] down. Number two was this is a real family community, generations are born and married and stayed here, so they have all extended families living right here. It's not that you're all spread out though… ROBERT: But the lights kept going on in the houses around us. You didn't see any people, but the lights kept going on at night. SPEAKER 1: And there was -- not Leominster, and I told him I thought the city had these houses wired up and they just flipped the switch at night [laughter].30 ROBERT: And the lights used to go because there were no people around us. SPEAKER 1: I thought there were no people. LINDA: And what year was this? SPEAKER 1: I thought it was '63. And then I realized after that, well, number one, it was winter and people weren't so ready, you know, to welcome you. Number two, his name was known in town, so they assumed, I guess that he had tons of friends and family, whereas, he really didn't because he was all the way to school, and his family -- well, because his parents were in Florida, so we had the one aunt and uncle who lived here in town. So I think people just assumed, "Well, we have our huge extended family. They must have theirs," so it was mainly lonely and I thought unfriendly. So it took -- it took a while, then when the thaw came, the neighbors… ROBERT: Spring came and we started raking leaves and we see people around. SPEAKER 1: … come. And then I found out it was a nice neighborhood, and the neighbors were nice, because the snow melted and out they came. But it took a while. I was really thinking, "Oh, boy. What a -- this is awful." ROBERT: There was like about -- we moved up here, right? We were like -- there were three houses up here in this hill, three of four houses, right here the top of the hill, and these people built houses and moved in, I always bring a bottle of wine and welcome them, maybe from the experience that we had. And it was all fine, that's great, whatnot, and then we decided after -- well, never, never heard from them after that. SPEAKER 1: Hmmm. No. People aren't as friendly as they are in the Midwest. Well, I worked… ROBERT: Then we finally said -- oh, great people, Midwest. SPEAKER 1: … people are different.31 ROBERT: Different. Then we decided we're gonna throw a street party. So we opened up our house and we sent a letter out to everybody with the old farm road address, 95 percent of the people showed, right? SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. ROBERT: Never heard from them since. That was 15 years ago. Other than the, other than the people who are touching us [unintelligible - 00:49:31] land here. LINDA: Mm-hmm. SPEAKER 1: Well, people are busy. It is different. People -- it's not like when we were kids. I think people are just so busy. ROBERT: When I grew up in the street where we had everybody, had each other's keys and everything when I was in grammar school, high school and whatnot. That street was close. SPEAKER 1: Well, those were your high school, what, home high school friends. ROBERT: Those were my home high school friends, right. But I mean, geez, you know. SPEAKER 1: But I have… ROBERT: We were in each other's houses all the time. Streets were… SPEAKER 1: I don't think… I learned to like the area, but it took a while. It really did. Took quite a while. Probably it was better when my children learns… ROBERT: When we saw the kids enjoying it, then we got to like it better. SPEAKER 1: … yeah, I probably -- great place for children because there was so much available that was close by, where on the city you really had to travel, you know. Here they could do everything within the, you know… ROBERT: Yeah, five-minute ride. Then it wasn't -- it was easy to go to wherever you want to go. Now, if you ever decide to go from Leominster to Fitchburg or across our city. LINDA: I just did.32 ROBERT: 3:30 to 5:30, it'd take you an hour and a half to get from one city to the other. If you're going north, then the south isn't too bad. But we come off the highway, we – every… well Route 13, Route 12, every one of those going north is loaded. SPEAKER 1: Well, I laughed. He told me 30 years ago, "Oh, you just wait," because I complain, I still miss the city. I didn't miss living there, but I wanna be a little bit closer so that I could just run in and take advantage of everything, I missed that. And he kept saying to me thirty years ago, "Oh, just wait. This Leominster is just gonna be a bedroom community to Boston," and I would just laugh hysterically and said, "Oh, my God, no one is coming past Concorde." And… ROBERT: And here we are. SPEAKER 1: Here we are. Yeah. ROBERT: Build the highway and they will come. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: Yeah. LINDA: So which church did you join? SPEAKER 1: Ah, that's something… ROBERT: She remember one of the… SPEAKER 1: I wasn't used to that. We were in North Leominster and there was a knock at door, and there was this priest standing there and I went, "Well, I've never seen this in my life." No one -- no priest ever knocked on my door before. And it was the pastor from the Italian church in Fitchburg trying to convince me to join his church. My [unintelligible - 00:51:54], "Oh, that's fine, that's…" ROBERT: And we were living in… SPEAKER 1: North Leominster. ROBERT: Leominster. SPEAKER 1: Yeah, and, of course, I came from Boston where you went to church, and whatever neighborhood you lived there and whatever, 33 you know. He wasn't surprised when he came home. He said, "Oh, yeah," you know, but I didn't join that church… ROBERT: No, I said, "But you don't have to feel you have to join." SPEAKER 1: The one that was dear in my life, Lady of the Lake, we lived in North Leominster, that was there, so that was the church I joined. But then when we moved here, my daughter was in public school in first grade, we just moved, and I thought, "Well, yeah, I have to sign her up to CCD classes." So this house had been St. Leo's Parish, which was the Irish church. Well, I thought, well, that's obviously where I have to send her to… ROBERT: Closest church. SPEAKER 1: Well, again, didn't dawn on me that's where, you know, but if I had known, I mean, Saint Ana's was just hop, skip and a jump down the road, I could've signed her up there. But it -- still, it was the '70s now, and I still wasn't thinking, "Oh, well, this is different." And I called the secretary of the church who answered it and asked who it was, and she signed up my daughter, and I thought, "Well, don't you want -- aren't you gonna ask me my name? I haven't been -- don't you want us to join the church?" I never heard of a church that would take a child to CCD if the parents didn't belong to it. And she said, "Well…" in her accent, "… um, well, I thought you might… you might wanna join Saint Ana's church." ROBERT: -Which is the Italian church down the road. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: I didn't know, this is 1970 whatever, and I said… ROBERT: "What?" SPEAKER 1: Yeah. I said, "What?" ROBERT: Why? SPEAKER 1: I was so befuddled. And I said to him, "I wish I had thought fast enough," I probably would've said, "Well, I'm Protestant anyway, so I don't wanna join any church." [Laughter] My sister was so 34 overwhelmed by that. So I thought, well change comes very slowly out here. [Laughter] ROBERT: Did you know we have the largest Finnish population in the world. LINDA: In the world? SPEAKER 1: No, no. In the United States. ROBERT: In the United States that's -- yeah, that's a Finnish group and we have a sister city in Finland. LINDA: Hmm. I didn't know that there were so many Finns around here. ROBERT: A lot of Finns. They're great people. LINDA: Just like my grandfather is Finnish. ROBERT: Is that right? SPEAKER 1: Oh, really? ROBERT: Oh, I remember in my dad's practice, and then I was… SPEAKER 1: Well, still. ROBERT: Great Finnish people. Wonderful people. SPEAKER 1: They have this pact, signed a pact in Fitchburg, and they still have big gatherings, Finnish gatherings and so forth. Yeah. LINDA: So would you like to speak about anything else? ROBERT: No, I need to have lunch. LINDA: Lunch? SPEAKER 1: Oh, poor dear. LINDA: It's dinner. I don't know… ROBERT: Put something in my tummy before I go play tennis at dinnertime. SPEAKER 1: Every Friday he has to play tennis. Yeah, still have fun. ROBERT: Fun time. SPEAKER 1: What else? What else? I guess just my Italian experiences are a little bit different from his. I think… ROBERT: Yeah, well you grew up in a different place. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. Well, and our family might have been different. We had more traditional meals and we did the traditional Christmas Eve dinner. We did the traditional…35 ROBERT: This reminds me, my mother made homemade raviolis every Thanksgiving and Christmas. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. That wasn't Christmas Eve in an Italian household; you have all fish Christmas Eve… ROBERT: Yeah, if you're like -- there aren't any fish out here. SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] No, that's true. ROBERT: Years ago, but I said the fish was four days old… SPEAKER 1: … when I found that out… found that out… ROBERT: … by the time it swam up the national river. ROBERT: That was true. The first time I bought a fish here I threw it out. I couldn't even eat it. I thought, no wonder he doesn't likes fish. ROBERT: It was after the… SPEAKER 1: He was used to getting it live from the… ROBERT: Oh, that's when I got the live fishes, this meeting with her relatives. They had fresh fish and wow, what a difference. SPEAKER 1: We did have… ROBERT: But we didn't have fish houses around here until, maybe, like three, four or five years after we're married. It moved… SPEAKER 1: Yeah, at least. Yeah. ROBERT: It took the… late '60s. SPEAKER 1: I know your mother. I don't remember your mother ever doing -- she did -- I mean, she baked great pies but never did Italian cookies, Italian version. We did all that Italian stuff at the holidays so we were more… ROBERT: The lady next door did, Vermonti. SPEAKER 1: Oh, wow. You were lucky. ROBERT: She used to bring them over. SPEAKER 1: Oh, wow. The stuff you do with this… ROBERT: With all the onion on them and stuff like that, there were ribbon things? Yeah. Yeah?36 SPEAKER 1: I think they have someone I'm looking for a recipe for that because only our -- a distant relative on the other side made those, and we only had it when we went to her house, not… LINDA: Often you don't… SPEAKER 1: Oh, I would love that. That's the one I'm trying to… ROBERT: Yeah, you've been looking for fill-ins. SPEAKER 1: My children are so into this. ROBERT: We make [unintelligible - 00:56:38], we're the intersect. We have her grandmother's, her mother's… SPEAKER 1: [Unintelligible - 00:56:45]. Yeah. ROBERT: [Unintelligible - 00:56:45]. And we get her up all nights and mix us the stuff and… SPEAKER 1: My father's family were great cooks, and my mother actually cooked like my father's side of the family. There were two different sides, and you could tell the difference. My mother's side cooked one way and my father's side cooked the other way… LINDA: Why? They're from different regions? SPEAKER 1: No. ROBERT: No? SPEAKER 1: From the exact same place, but it seems like the Fridocelli cooked with a little bit more… LINDA: Cooked cuisine. SPEAKER 1: You know, a little more fancy. And then my mother's side, they were a little more peasant, plain… ROBERT: You mean there was merit having both grandma and grandpa from the same city. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: Well, my four grandparents came from the same… ROBERT: Oh, is that right? SPEAKER 1: Same province. ROBERT: Same province. Yeah. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. But still the cooking was a little different.37 LINDA: Wow. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. And that was it. It was important, and I'm glad my kids still think it's important. It's very important for them to -- and often the Italian are important to them. Even though… LINDA: Now, they didn't marry Italians? SPEAKER 1: My daughter married someone who's half Italian. LINDA: What is her last name? SPEAKER 1: Well, she goes by Frigoletto. Yeah, she kept her name. LINDA: But who did she marry? SPEAKER 1: Peter De Feo. D-E capital F-E-O. And then my son, really, broke with tradition. He married Tamara Taylor. [Laughter] ROBERT: Oh, yeah, but he was going with an Italian. SPEAKER 1: He was going with an Italian… ROBERT: Italian, but she turned out to be too strong for us… SPEAKER 1: [Laughter] LINDA: Oh. SPEAKER 1: So Tamara Taylor… ROBERT: Direct battleship. SPEAKER 1: Actually now… she's a redhead, but delightful. She's Norwegian and Scottish. I thought Taylor was English, but she said Scottish was her blood. And her family, they have traced her family back to the first two boats that came over the Mayflower and the next one. What was the other one? Two names, I forget what it is. ROBERT: I don't know. SPEAKER 1: So they're into the history, too. So now the two of them… ROBERT: Has it anything to do with the Minnon, the Tintin, the Sta. Maria? [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: No. But she's had -- but she's very much into Italian… ROBERT: Wrong group, right? SPEAKER 1: … go back. She was trying to learn the language. LINDA: Mm-hmm.38 SPEAKER 1: She was trying to learn to speak it. LINDA: Oh. ROBERT: She's in [unintelligible - 00:58:57]? That daughter-in law? SPEAKER 1: Boy, no. I forget. Yeah, we were trying to learn all this… ROBERT: New Ireland, I think… I forget. No memory anymore. Kinda learn all these Italian words… SPEAKER 1: The word for parent is genatori. ROBERT: Genatori which is… should be -- parenti's relatives. SPEAKER 1: Right. Yeah, that's… ROBERT: Parents genatoris. SPEAKER 1: Yeah, I can't figure that one out. Right. ROBERT: Yeah. SPEAKER 1: Now you are part Italian? LINDA: My grandmother was Italian, my maternal grandmother. Then she married a Finn. SPEAKER 1: Oh. LINDA: And then my mother married a Yankee, then I married a Swede. SPEAKER 1: So you're all that? ROBERT: Did you watch the Hall of Fame last night? LINDA: No. SPEAKER 1: Oh. ROBERT: There was a cute love story in the war, early '40s… SPEAKER 1: Based on a true story. LINDA: Oh, my goodness… ROBERT: In Italy. LINDA: … need to tell me but… ROBERT: Yeah. And a lot of Italians. They spoke too fast, though. SPEAKER 1: You know, I'm not -- and that was the first time I said that's… ROBERT: But a lot of sceneries were filmed entirely in Italy, and it was about this guy that… SPEAKER 1: But you can buy the tape. It's a Hallmark story, though.39 ROBERT: Yeah. LINDA: It was Love and War. Thank you. SPEAKER 1: Love and War, yeah. ROBERT: Love and War But it was an interest of -- the thing I thought was cute, that I hadn't learn or forgotten, I guess, is that a British soldier, it might be British saying, when he falls in love with this Italian girl that they took him in and saved his life, he says, "We, growing up, we used to call you macaroni heads," from British, from the -- derogatory thing, you know, those Italians, they're macaroni head. He says, "Now I found out how wonderful you people are." [Laughter] He says, "I feel guilty." That was kind of a cute part of the story. LINDA: I think that's sort of true. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. LINDA: In any culture, if you just open yourself up and… ROBERT: Sure. SPEAKER 1: But I -- actually, you must've -- I can remember, in Boston… ROBERT: I don't remember. SPEAKER 1: … he had a lot of this derogatory terms. ROBERT: Well, dego, I remember but I didn't hear -- macaroni I thought was just English, that was an English that was the… SPEAKER 1: Yeah, that was it. What I'm saying is that you did hear -- but then, again, you would hear it for the Irish, you would hear it for the Jewish, you always would hear about derogatory terms for -- at least in the city we get through all the ethnic… LINDA: So tell me what some of them are, you know, what's so politically correct now that you don't really…? At least my children don't know any of the… SPEAKER 1: You know, I don't really… LINDA: … Italian being derogatory… SPEAKER 1: No. Dego, wop…40 ROBERT: Dego, wop. And when in Chicago we used to -- we used to walk back East to look at the watch and, "Watch the dego by," [laughter] and used the word "dego." LINDA: Oh, dego. Where did that come from? SPEAKER 1: I don't know either. ROBERT: I don't know. SPEAKER 1: I don't know either. LINDA: I've never heard dego. SPEAKER 1: I don't either. ROBERT: Like, what? Pollack is Polish? SPEAKER 1: Pollack would be for… ROBERT: Be Polish and… SPEAKER 1: Mic are half… ROBERT: Mic were half for Irish. Right. And we were dego and the wops. So I would be French… SPEAKER 1: No. I don't know where they… ROBERT: Don't know the origins of all of those things… be interesting, which my uncle would've mind. He was such a [unintelligible - 01:01:51]. He was doing the history of words. SPEAKER 1: He was so… ROBERT: After he retired that was his… LINDA: Did he keep his information? ROBERT: Yeah, he's kept it going, and when he died I tried to get it from my aunt. SPEAKER 1: And when he couldn't… ROBERT: I guess she gave it to one his younger teachers. I don't know where it is now. SPEAKER 1: He gave it to another elderly person… ROBERT: Another elderly person and got lost or something. SPEAKER 1: Right, it's gotta be… ROBERT: We even offered to pay her for it.41 SPEAKER 1: Yeah. ROBERT: It was -- yeah, it was just so interesting. SPEAKER 1: He was the professor of Roman languages, so he's doing the… ROBERT: He knew the different languages. SPEAKER 1: … words, whether it came from France… ROBERT: France or Italian or whatnot. SPEAKER 1: We desperately want… ROBERT: I wanted to get a hold of that. SPEAKER 1: We couldn't, we tried. ROBERT: Every time we'd see him, which is like twice a year, that it's, "Oh, I got, you know, twenty… twenty more words…" LINDA: What's his name? ROBERT: Merlino. My mother's name, Merlino. SPEAKER 1: Camillo Merlino. ROBERT: Camillo Merlino. How's that? SPEAKER 1: Yeah. He was the… ROBERT: Protestant Italian. SPEAKER 1: … head of the department at BU… ROBERT: Head of the Roman's languages at BU. And still I didn't get the language. SPEAKER 1: No, he did not inherit that. No, my kids took after my part of the family. We have an air for languages, he struggles so with it. Doing better than I ever… ROBERT: I got so frustrated last night watching that… SPEAKER 1: That was tough, I had… ROBERT: But you said you had a tough time, too. Two years trying to learn words, just to recognize [unintelligible - 01:03:12]. SPEAKER 1: I mean, I think you're doing well… ROBERT: It's got nothing. SPEAKER 1: … trying for all these years. LINDA: I think you have to be immersed in it.42 SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm. That's true. ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good idea, let's go. [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: That's my mother. ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for a month, that's her way of saying we gotta go. SPEAKER 1: But that is no close. ROBERT: [Laughter] SPEAKER 1: Well, before we let you on, could you take another picture of us? LINDA: Oh, yes. I have central… SPEAKER 1: I'd love that. LINDA: … because I almost forgot the camera, too. SPEAKER 1: Oh. LINDA: This was supposed to go over real low. SPEAKER 1: No, we wouldn't hold you to it. I just thought -- I didn't like my plaid shirt, I looked like the… the fire hand. LINDA: He said you'd say amazing things. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. Well, I may -- well, I was that day. Well, I was today, too, but… ROBERT: Guess what? It's four o'clock. SPEAKER 1: It's now four o'clock in the middle of a family interview./AT/jf/jc/es