Hunting Season (9 page)

In 1896, Rose Mazzotti, born in Terranova di Sibari, was brought to the United States in the first of three transatlantic journeys her family made over ten years before settling permanently in the United States. The Mazzotti family came to Long Island because an uncle of Rose’s mother, Louis Lotito, had sent for them. Lotito, the earliest Italian to reside in Patchogue, was a caretaker at a farm that needed more laborers, and Rose and her parents joined him.

In their seminal work
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America,
first published in 1927, William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki explain this process of transoceanic migration to America from Europe almost the same way that Rumbaut and Portes would eighty years later. “When many members of a community are settled in America and keep contact with their home, America appears almost as an extension of the community,” they observe. “When a member prepares to leave, though he may travel alone, he goes at the invitation of another member and goes to him; from the standpoint of his group, it is not so very different from going to a Polish city to visit a friend and earn there some money.”
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One of the families to follow Lotito was the Romeo family. Frank Romeo had met and fallen in love with Rose in Italy during one of her trips home. Because she was still so young, her parents regarded Frank’s interest as a premature infatuation. In 1902 Frank arrived in New York City with no money, family, or employment, but he quickly found a job as a contractor’s helper finishing sidewalks. After learning that Rose had returned to Patchogue with her family, Frank resumed his courtship, riding sixty miles on weekends on his bicycle from New York City to Patchogue and then sixty miles back. He soon moved to Patchogue, however, and started working as a mason and a bricklayer, crafts he had learned in Italy from his father. On January 16, 1910,
when he was twenty-five and she was sixteen, Frank and Rose were married. Frank started a road construction business, Romeo Construction Company, and the couple went on to have seven children.
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One of them, Marguerite, would one day become the mother of Paul Pontieri, the town’s first Italian American mayor.

For thousands of years Patchogue was inhabited by Native Americans who spoke an Algonquian dialect. The name “Patchogue” is derived from “Pochaug,” which means a turning place or “where two streams separate.” The area was first settled by the Dutch and eventually became part of New England, but it remained undeveloped by European settlers for decades. In the eighteenth century, because of its abundant lakes, rivers, and extensive shoreline, Patchogue became a mill town—producing paper, twine, cloth, wool, carpet, lumber, leather, and iron products—an irresistible draw for many immigrants, including Italians.
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By the turn of the twentieth century, Patchogue, incorporated as a village since 1893, had a thriving fishing industry and had made a name for itself as a tourist town that attracted the moneyed class from New York City seeking a respite in the hot summers. A new railroad in 1869 had made it easier for city residents to reach Patchogue. Large hotels were built on or near the shoreline that could accommodate over 1,600 guests. The twenties—the golden age of the silent era of Hollywood movies—brought stars, including Gloria Swanson, to Patchogue’s theaters for opening nights. Because of its privileged location and buoyant economy, the town grew as a commercial and shopping hub for central and eastern Long Island. With the advent of the car, however, came greater choices for travel and shopping. The heyday of the grand resorts on Long Island started to fade as the automobile gave city dwellers a wider choice for travel.
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The proliferation of the car also made it easier for people to move to suburbia, even towns as far away from the city as Patchogue, which remained a good place to raise a family. In her book
Gangs in Garden City,
Sarah Garland explains how “by the 1940s, 17 percent of the country lived in the outer rings of cities.” Some suburbs of New York, where the growth was particularly notable, grew even more than the city.
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Those who moved to suburbia—a concept that originated in Great Britain and the United States around 1815—were not like the original residents of Patchogue.
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They were middle-class families who felt they had paid their dues after years of toiling in the city and were hoping to reach their own version of the American dream in the promised land of suburbia: a backyard with fragrant trees and an immaculate lawn with clipped grass, a barbecue with like-minded neighbors on the weekends, and good schools that children could walk to and where they would be shielded from the grittier dimensions of urban life.
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Despite the influx of newcomers, after the postwar baby boom Patchogue suffered another setback: strip malls began to pull shoppers away from the downtown area in the late 1960s, leading to several decades of decline on Main Street.
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The one theater left became a ruin, as the big department stores moved elsewhere and small shops struggled to survive in a changing economy and rapidly evolving demographics. It was precisely because of that decline that newly arrived immigrants were able to move from the city to Patchogue. They could afford the rents.

Mayor Pontieri’s life neatly fits the narrative of the 1950s and the growth and changes of suburbia in the postwar years. Born in 1947, he was the second child—and the only boy—of four children born to Marguerite Romeo and Paul Pontieri, who were high school sweethearts. (Paul was the president of his junior class and Marguerite was the secretary.) Paul, who didn’t attend college, worked a variety of jobs. For a while he was a salesman for Sunshine Biscuits, a company that manufactured and sold cookies, crackers, and biscuits. Then he opened and operated a luncheonette next to the movie theater on South Ocean Avenue.
Later he drove an oil truck. His wife stayed home, taking care of the children.

The Patchogue that the mayor remembers, seemingly without nostalgia, was a great place to be a kid. From Cedar Avenue, where he grew up, a kid in possession of a bike could go anywhere, from the park to the movies, and from school to the shore. Everything was three to five blocks away—ball fields, theaters, and the bay. More important, they had what he calls “a real neighborhood,” one where parents didn’t have to make play dates for their children. The children simply stepped outside looking for company, and they would always find another child ready to play.

There were dozens of stores on Main Street, including J. C. Penney and Woolworth, and three movie theaters: Granada, Plaza, and Rialto. Pontieri and a friend would often steal posters of films such as
Moby Dick, Davy Crockett,
and
The War of the Worlds
and keep them inside the pages of a large Peter Pan book. (Pontieri still has some of the posters; at least two are framed in his home now.) Riding his bicycle down Main Street, it wasn’t difficult for young Pontieri to imagine that Patchogue was all his.

The Pontieris and the Romeos were large families. Growing up, Pontieri had seven aunts and uncles, all within a few blocks. He could have breakfast at home, lunch with an aunt, and dinner with an uncle. Christmas Eves were always huge events that would begin mid-afternoon and end with midnight Mass.

The idyll of Pontieri’s childhood was altered when his father died of a heart attack at forty-one while pulling a heavy oil hose down a driveway. Pontieri, who was coming downstairs from the second floor of the house when a police officer and a priest were delivering the terrible news to the family, sat on the steps, deaf and blind to the world. He was fourteen years old. Everything was a blur after that but Pontieri clearly remembers feeling a mantle of responsibility descending over his already broad shoulders: he was now the man of the house. Much would be expected from him.

Soon after the funeral, the mayor of Patchogue called the
house offering the family not only his condolence but also jobs as lifeguards in the village pool for Pontieri and his oldest sister. It was a gesture that Pontieri treasured and that one day would put him on the path to the mayoral seat: politics, he thought then, was about taking care of people when they need it the most. His mother too went to work, as a secretary, but Pontieri remained pampered by the family. Aunts and uncles, particularly the uncles, looked after him. Each uncle took on a different role. One would take him fishing, one would lecture him on the importance of being a good man, and yet another would explain to him why he always needed to put family first. All kept him on the straight path.

When time came for college, Pontieri, at two hundred pounds and five foot ten, with a strong back and large hands, won a football scholarship to Hofstra University. But he was not sure what he would do with the rest of his life other than play football and protect and help his family.

Then, in the summer after his freshman year, fate intervened. One morning, on his way to work, he left the house in a rush, wearing only swimming trunks and flip-flops. Less than half a block from his house, he lost control of his motorcycle and crashed against a parked car, breaking his right leg. He stayed in the hospital for fifteen days while doctors pieced his leg together with pins and placed it in a full cast, then a brace that he had to wear for months. Because he now walked with a slight limp and always in pain, football was no longer an option. He transferred to the State University of New York at Buffalo and got serious about school.

In 1971, the former athlete graduated with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education, with a specialization in the education of physically disabled children. Three years later he got a master’s degree to work with children who have learning and behavioral disorders. Along the way Pontieri met and married Mary Bilan, who was from Ashland, Ohio, but visited Patchogue with a friend one summer and never left. They went on to have
three children, while Pontieri developed a career working with emotionally disturbed children.

In 1984, Pontieri left the classroom and bought a courier business. He grew it to just over $5 million in sales annually and 125 employees, but he stayed as low-key as always, seldom leaving Patchogue, a place he found so enchanting that he took few vacations. He couldn’t imagine a better place to be in the summer than his own town, with its public pool, bay views, and easy access to the beaches on Fire Island.

He entered politics in 1986, when a neighbor who was chatting with him while he mowed the lawn suggested he run for village trustee. Pontieri, who had never forgotten the way the mayor had helped him after his father’s death, didn’t have to ponder the idea for long. He won that first election and continued in politics until he lost his seat in 1994.

Two years later he sold the business and returned to education, working as an assistant principal at Bellport High School. In 2001 he reclaimed his trustee seat, and three years later he ran for mayor and won, becoming the first Italian American mayor of Patchogue one hundred years after his grandfather Romeo came to America. In November 2008, when tragedy struck and the village became the focus of national attention, Pontieri had been mayor for exactly four years.

Pontieri does not recall a day when he suddenly noticed that 30 percent of the residents were Latinos. To him Patchogue had always been a magnet for immigrants, and though technically Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, to him Ecuadorians did not look that different from the Puerto Ricans who had once been the only Latinos in the village. In fact, Ecuadorians, he thought, did not look that different from his grandfather Romeo and the men who had helped build his town.

Sure, they had different customs, they spoke a language he didn’t understand, and they ate different foods. But Pontieri saw
no reason why they couldn’t coexist with the more established residents of the village. He valued their entrepreneurial spirit and was pleased to see that, along with the renovated theater on Main Street, their small businesses were breathing new life into the moribund downtown area. Where there had been boarded-up storefronts or nearly defunct, dusty stores, the new immigrants were opening up restaurants, cafés, travel agencies, boutiques, and video stores. One such businessman, José Bonilla, went to Pontieri’s office to ask for permits for a new supermarket that would sell the products Ecuadorian immigrants couldn’t get elsewhere.

Fine, Pontieri said, but he issued a warning: along with the Goya cans, keep the Progresso products.

Pontieri wanted to make sure that his mother wouldn’t be “intimidated” by products she did not recognize. He wanted her to feel that even if she didn’t understand the murmuring of the stock boys or the accent of the young women at the cashier, she wouldn’t feel like a stranger in her own town.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pontieri was feeling good about life in his village. He took pride in Patchogue’s ordered civility, in its old stately homes and proximity to the sea, in the library, which was large and modern, and in the Italian bistros that coexisted with Greek eateries and Colombian and Peruvian restaurants. If there was turmoil and ill will, he didn’t know it. If Hispanics were being harassed, he hadn’t noticed. If teenagers were going around attacking men at night because they thought them to be “illegal Mexicans,” Pontieri hadn’t been told. He wasn’t even sure he knew the difference between an Ecuadorian and a Mexican. And he didn’t much care for legal status. The way he saw it, his job was to make sure the village worked for all. Immigration, as he likes to put it, was a few notches “above his pay rate.” It was a federal issue, not a village concern.

He was aware, though, that elsewhere, in towns that surrounded Patchogue like a string of pearls, trouble had been brewing
for a long time.