Dr. Nicolo Vencenzo Alessi
A Chronology...
I Remember...
In the late 1880's, Georgio and Giovanna Alessi boarded a ship in the port of Palermo with their 8 children, never to return to their native land. Some weeks later they arrived in the port of New Orleans. In 1892, their last child, Nicolo Vencenzo Alessi, my grandfather, was born in Woodside, Louisiana. He became the first student of Italian ancestry to graduate from Independence, La. High School. He went on to higher education, eventually graduating from the University of Tennessee with a medical degree. He began his medical practice in Hammond Louisiana. During WWI he was stationed at Camp Perry J. Jones near Douglas Arizona. He met his future bride, a nurse there, and after the war, they never left Douglas.
I hope to believe in everyone's memory stands someone far above anyone else. Such as it is in my memory... and that person is my mother's father, to me, Grandpa Alessi. I was his oldest grandson, and he never ever let me forget it. 'My oldest grandson', he would say... because after two girls born to my aunt, and then my older sister was born, he had the fear he wouldn't have a grandson. Well, he did... and living up to his expectation was a looming fear in my life. After all, besides him reminding me that I was his 'oldest grandson', there were times when he would lecture me... I MEAN... lecture me. After draining a bottle of Jim Beam in hi-ball after hi-ball, he would look at me with his watery, glassy eyes, point his amputated stub of a finger at me, and drawl, 'Joughnnnny'..... time and eternity stood still when there was not a sound to be heard but his dentures clicking, while he began to deliver the lecture that I had heard so often before, 'If you don't apply yourself.................' and again, silence, in order highlight the point, 'you're not my grandson!'
Notwithstanding that dreadful memory, he has been the one 'bigger than life' person for me.
So no matter that I am by birth only 1/4th Italian, it's the blood that cries the loudest in me, which may account for my love for arte d'Italia. My first trip to Italy was in 1995, then again in 1997, 1999 and 2003. Hmmm... just isn't fair that I cannot go every year. Well, with this love of Italy, somewhere in the picture, it was inevitable... entrare... Terra Vecchio !!
