In Memoriam

Joseph LaPlante
1921-2000

I wanted to make sure that the connected world heard about someone that was never online. While that may seem an odd thing, I feel it is important to make my uncle's story, at least as best as I can recall, available here in cyberspace. This is my recollections of my Uncle Joe.

He never spoke much about his younger days, at least to me, but he grew up, like most of my family, in Brooklyn NY. I remember him talking about fetching beer from the local saloon and bringing it home in bucket, or growler as they called them. I assume this was post-Prohibition days, the early 1930's.

By the time World War II had broken out, he had joined the US Marine Corps. The Marines fought almost exclusively in the Pacific theatre, in some of the most fierce battles and adverse conditions. He was one of the many Marines who landed at Guadalcanal and despite the tremendous odds against it, survived. There are two stories he told of those days that I can remember. First was about a time when one of his fellow Marines made some alcohol by distilling raisins. The results were so powerful, it left my uncle and a few others seriously ill for days. I think there may have been more to that brew than my uncle knew. The second story was also from after the island had been conquered. An important Marine general, name forgotten, who was inspecting the Marines on the island. My uncle had cultivated a mustache and this caught the general's eye as he looked down the line of men. He stopped in front of my uncle, slapped his riding crop against his leg, and ordered my uncle to shave it off immediately. I never saw my uncle other than clean-shaven ever, so it seems he took the order to heart.

My aunt and uncle met sometime near the end of the war. I know that they met while he was still in the Marines, because he had to leave the Brooklyn Navy Yard to get married. It was a quick wedding without a real honeymoon. But it was a real marriage, as they were to be together over 50 years.

As far as I know, my uncle began driving trucks from the beginning. I never heard him speak much of any other occupation. In the earliest days, he owned his own rig and drove long haul routes. At the time, they lived in an apartment near LaGuardia airport. Eventually though, the time away from home lost it's appeal, and by the late 50's he was driving for the Yale trucking company, mostly short haul. He was a Teamster, and a strong unionist, despite all the problems that the Teamsters had over the years. Following the demise of Yale, he would end up driving for Railway Express and then eventually Roadway. He retired from Roadway in the early 1980's.

When I was just a toddler, they purchased an old 1920's home in Mineola NY and commenced rebuilding it, a task that they completed only when they retired and sold the house. They were always working on something, either inside or outside, and since they never had children, it became a showplace. My aunt worked and their combined incomes allowed them to purchase quality materials and furniture. I still have the kitchen table and chairs they had, my best guess it the set is almost 40 years old.

My uncle was a great football fan, and followed the NY Football Giants from their days in the Polo Grounds. He was a long time season ticket holder, and I joined him in the next-to-last year they played in Yankee Stadium. Our seats were very good, only the 40 yard line on one side was blocked by a post. We were well underneath the upper deck and all we had to worry about was the wind up our backs. Amazingly enough, we actually parked the car on the streets of the Bronx, never once having any problems with break-ins or theft.

One factor in our favor, theft-wise, was my uncle's 1967 white Volkswagen Beetle. I was as basic a car as could be found, even then, and was not at all tempting to thieves (it would be now). He loved that car, and I did too. It carried him back and forth to work, and the two of us to the Yale Bowl in New Haven Connecticut, for years and years. One dark fall Sunday we were returning from a Giant game at the Yale Bowl in pouring rain. With the large number of fans heading home, and the frequency of toll booths, we were doing a lot of stopping and starting. At one point, while sitting it the back, I noticed my feet were getting wet when we moved forward. Water was getting in, and given the Volkswagen reputation for being sealed on the bottom, it was not draining out. I ended up having to keep my legs on the seat to keep dry. My uncle eventually had to cut a hole in the floorpan to let water drain, he never found where it was coming in. He drove that car until the late 70's. Eventually he received a ticket for an unsecured headlight, it was literally shaking it the fender. I learned a lot about working on cars from him, especially on how to change the exhaust systems on Volkswagens. For some reason, it burned through a couple a year and I was thin and limber enough to reach in and get my hands on the bolts that held it on.

On top of all the games we went to, we also used to attend the Giants summer training camps in Fairfield, New Jersey. He knew most of the veteran players by first name and we would talk to them as they went to a from the practice field. He befriended a number of them over the years, including Butch Wilson, a tight end. He even got one of Butch's game jerseys and I wore it a couple of times myself. This was before the days of replicas so it was especially exciting. I even received a pair of Puma athletic shoes, direct from the team trainer, one summer, as my uncle knew him as well. The players wore them, and for a while, so did I. They ended up stolen, though, and it was years before I owned expensive sneakers again.

Besides teaching me about cars, he taught me more about driving than my father or Driver's Ed ever did. His lessons were drawn from his many hours on the road and I still remember them to this day. He and my aunt also let me drive their 1968 Plymouth Fury in the parking lot at Roosevelt Field Mall on Sundays (it was closed Sundays back then), and I spent more time doing that than I did driving our family cars. My uncle also helped me buy my first car, a 1968 Plymouth Satellite, which was in such bad shape that I couldn't get it home without it stalling. It was so bad, I couldn't get it back to Rochester to go to school. He and my aunt paid to have it fixed, which cost about as much as it did to buy. He even helped tow it one time, when I had come home from school for a visit and it died.

My parents had always wanted me to go to Chaminade High School, a Catholic boys school in Mineola, and I managed to pass the qualification tests. My uncle had always hoped I would play football for them as well, but by then I was becoming more of an academic, and I never even tried out. Despite this, he and my aunt had a Chaminade decal in their car window for many years.

He had the gift of gab, and was well known to all the people he delivered to. He was able to get employee prices on lots of things, but his favorite, and mine, were the N-gauge model trains he bought from Aurora. I remember they were called Postage Stamp Trains, and we would set them up in his house and play with them. I even had them myself for a while but passed them on to a cousin as I got older. I now wish I had kept them.

When they were both finally retired, my aunt and uncle moved from Mineola to the Poconos in Pennsylvania, near my parents. But they seemed restless, and moved to Sun City West, near Phoenix in Arizona. It was there that my uncle first noticed some chest pain when playing softball. It was hardening of the coronary arteries, which was treated with a balloon angioplasty. He would end up having three of them, which is unusual, since normally a bypass is done if an angioplasty is ineffective.

Though they thought Arizona would be their permanent home, the heat got to both of them and they moved again, this time settling in western North Carolina. It was around this time that my uncle was diagnosed with diabetes, although he would never become insulin-dependent. Even this house would not be the last one, and they moved further inland in North Carolina. This time, it would be their last move together. They had spent considerable amounts of effort working on each of the houses that they lived in, though nothing like their house in Mineola. But finally, age and infirmity had caught up with them, and the house, smaller than the previous ones, saw much less of their handiwork.

He had always been a large man, over 6 foot and heavyset when I knew him, but the diet for the diabetes and the lack of physical labor made him as thin as he was as a Marine. He was balding, though you'd hardly notice, he always kept his head nearly shaven, it was cropped so closely, and I used to think he looked like Mr. Clean. His had a loud voice, and you always knew when he was around. But he grew smaller, in many ways, in his last years.

In late summer of this year, it was found that he had some fluid on the brain and it was expected that he would face a steady decline into an Alzheimer's-like dementia if something wasn't done. It was already affecting his speech and balance. The solution was an operation to place a drainage tube from the fluid area in the brain to his stomach. The doctors felt he had about a 60% chance of it relieving his symptoms. The operation went well enough, but he did not progress. A second operation was done, but it also did not have the desired effect. Despite treatment, he continued to decline, and 65 days after the first operation, suffering from pneumonia in both lungs, he slipped into a coma and died at 1:25 AM, Sunday, 3 December 2000. His final words to my aunt were "don't go", in response to her telling him she was going to head home for some sleep. She stayed and was with him when he journeyed through death to eternal life. He was cremated with the Marine Corps uniform he had worn when he got married.

I love you unc, and I miss you so much. Thanks for all you did for me, for being there when my mom died and all the other things that you gave me. I look forward to seeing you again when it's my time to take that journey.

Tommy.