Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Real Florida

Life is sweet, and then you play clarinet

For years, Joe Guggino, 95, crossed the state as a railroad man. Now he has his stories, his music and the secret to a long life (eat well, work hard and "stick around").

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published August 28, 2005

TAMPA - A lot of people, this time of year, absolutely hate Florida. Joe Guggino is not one of them. Even when it is hot and muggy, Joe never minds too much. He tends his roses.

"Where I'm going is going to be much hotter than here," he says.

Thinking about the afterlife makes sense when you are 95. But Joe is probably being hard on himself. For most of his life he has behaved. When it's time for him to go, most likely he will end up shaking the hand of the Big Fisherman rather than exchanging unpleasantries with the Dark Archangel.

Speaking of heaven, want to know Joe's vision of Paradise?

A place where you water your roses in the morning and tell old railroad stories in the afternoon. Heaven is a place where a man can spend the early evening repairing something in his neatly kept workshop and eat pasta, perhaps a guava pastry, with the family at supper. A resident of heaven can play the clarinet before bedtime, perhaps engage in a duet with Gabriel.

Heaven might prove a little anticlimactic for Joe.

It has been a sweet life right here.

La Dolce Vita!

Both of his parents were born in Sicily. In the 19th century they moved to Tampa and worked in the cigar factories of Ybor. His dad, Giacomo, developed an affection for the grape that was his undoing. He was only 46 when he died of a bad liver.

His mother, Rosaria, had to support their six children. There were few luxuries and few entertainments, though Joe learned the clarinet when he was 12. His uncle Antonio was the maestro. The maestro believed in discipline, slapping Joe above the ear whenever he played a sour note.

Joe left home before he developed a brain injury. Actually, he quit school and left home after eighth grade so he could help pay the bills.

At first he painted houses. Eventually, he got a job on the railroad, painting stations and signs throughout Florida. It was the Depression, and he felt fortunate to be making 30 cents an hour.

He would leave Tampa on Monday and get home on Saturday. On Saturday he liked to go the beach in a friend's Model T. He met a girl, Giovannina at Clearwater Beach. Later he'd run into her at dances. She could never remember his name, but eventually she did, and they got married. He called her Jennie.

"She was a very good wife. She never wasted anything," Joe says, in that old-time Tampa accent that is part Italian, part Spanish, part Florida Cracker.

Joe was always looking for ways to save money, too. The advantage of working on the railroad was the scenery, mainly farmers, who were generous with handouts.

"All of them knew me. They liked me. They said, "Look, it's Joe the Wop.' Well, that's how people talked back then. I didn't take it personally. Down near Fort Myers, they'd give me tomatoes. Up near Sanford, I'd get banana peppers. They gave me celery near Sarasota. Oranges you could get anywhere. Down at Boca Grande, I'd be talkin' to fishermen, and I'd end up with a package of mangrove snapper. You didn't go hungry on the railroad."

La Dolce Vita!

He loves talking about working on the railroad. He loved going up and down the tracks talking to people, to farmers, to conductors, to engineers. It took awhile, but he learned the language of the railroad.

"We talked different. At lunch you had swamp seed to eat. Swamp seed was rice. Somebody would say, "pass the grease.' Grease was butter. "Sand' was sugar. Somebody would say something about "sky juice.' I'd say, "What the hell is sky juice?' Sky juice is rain."

Joe's neck and arms are as grizzled as the pate of a gopher tortoise. That's what happens to a man who spends life outside. He remembers days so hot the creosote on the railroad ties began melting. He remembers seeing a ball of lightning roll across the tracks.

Black men, called Gandy Dancers, laid rail and shifted track with giant crowbars made by the Gandy Manufacturing Co. of Chicago. As they worked they sang and chanted in rhythm. White bosses habitually insulted ethnic laborers.

"I just tried to do my work," Joe says. "I tried to get along." Some workers drank too much, lost control, attacked with knives and guns, and ended up dead or in jail. The son of an alcoholic, Joe never was tempted by fire water.

"I didn't smoke either. Somebody tried to get me to try a cigarette and I said, "What's this bull----!' Women? I didn't need a woman. I had a wonderful wife. It's chasing women that will kill a man."

Joe built camps all over the state. He slept in boxcars left on sidetracks. His boxcars were legendary for their comfort. His camps had showers with hot water, kitchens and floors painted to look like carpeting.

On the weekend, he'd go home to his wife and children, Giacomo and Rosann. He made sure that both got to college. Rosann is a teacher and leads historic tours of Tampa. Giacomo is a well-known doctor in Hillsborough County.

Joe's wife, Jennie, got sick in 1997. In and out of the hospital for five years, she died at home, in bed, next to Joe. They had been married 65 years.

Joe had the house built in 1956 and refused to move even after his wife was gone. His daughter cooks for him a couple times a week. Sunday is Joe's favorite supper, spaghetti and meatballs. Joe always performs the task of hand-grating pecorino Romano cheese on his own pasta and also on the pasta of his guests.

There are a lot of memories in the house, in the walls, though when Joe talks about the house he talks about the epic battles with incompetent plumbers and electricians whose inadequate work he had to correct.

A photo of the Pope hangs from one wall. A statue of the Madonna - the old Madonna, not the postmodern material girl Madonna - prays over him as he sleeps. Sometimes, even in the middle of the night, he hears a train whistle blow. Sometimes the whistle is in his imagination, but more often it is coming from the clock above the kitchen sink. The clock doesn't chime or toll or cuckoo. It whistles like the Orange Blossom Special approaching Union Station in Tampa a half century ago.

Passenger trains no longer visit Tampa. Joe says, "That's a dirty shame. I can't believe we don't have a train now. You got to go to Orlando to catch a train to New York."

Muttering, he hobbles into the back yard. In the carport is his prized 2000 Dodge Ram pickup. His birth year, 1910, is painted on the cab. Joe has promised his children he will stay off the interstate, just stick to the neighborhood.

He likes driving around and finding old broken vacuum cleaners, repairing them, and giving them away. Recently someone gave him an old key-making machine that was supposedly beyond repair. He has it up and running and always asks visitors "Do you need extra keys made?"

Of course, he is always ready to do a little painting; the brushes in his workshop are four decades old but look new. Take care of your brushes and they will take care of you. That was always his credo.

What is the secret of a long and productive life?

Because he is 95 and remains active, Joe is asked the question frequently.

"Just stick around," is what he tells people.

"Really, it's simple. Eat well. Not too much meat. I had all these friends who bragged that they were eating meat every day when I was eating beans. Now they're dead.

"The other thing is work hard. Did I already say that working hard never killed anybody? Well, it doesn't. I sometimes think people today, they don't know what hard work is."

It is also important to play.

Some nights he goes over to the Kate Jackson Community Recreation Center in Old Hyde Park and brings his clarinet. For the past 16 years he has played for the Tampa Community Band, which performs throughout Hillsborough County to benefit charity.

Nobody has ever heard Joe play Orange Blossom Special on clarinet and never will. Even though it's a song about a famous Florida train, it's a country song. Joe is more of a classics guy. Toscanini. He is more of an opera guy. La Traviata. If he has to play popular music at all, it will be melodies from The Sound of Music or My Fair Lady, or perhaps something that Perry Como, the singing barber, made famous. Perry Como, like Joe Guggino, was a nice Italian boy.

In Old Hyde Park, on South Rome Avenue, stop on the sidewalk and look in the window at the Jackson Center some night and watch a practice by the Tampa Community Band. There are oboes and French horns and saxophones and trumpets. In the back row sit the second clarinets. On the end seat is an old man with gray hair and leathery skin and many stories he could tell if asked.

He leans forward, fingering the notes, sweating heavily through his shirt. The notes come out clear, so nobody has to smack him.

It's Arrivederci Roma, the old Perry Como tune.

St. Catherine of Siena, another Italian, once said:

"All the way to Heaven is Heaven."

- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 25, 2005, 14:58:03]