Education Got Them Across The Tracks

The long, hard road from Italy leads to the mayor’s office in Nutley.

The first thing you notice about the house on Hunt Place in Nutley is that it has two front doors. One opens onto the street. The other—clearly the older of the two—is at the side of the house, facing a concrete auto body shop. You get the feeling that it’s opening out to some invisible past. And when you trace the genealogy of the old Dutch colonial, the mystery resolves itself.

It was built in 1921 by Generoso Cocchiola, a 38-year-old immigrant from Torella dei Lombardi in the Italian province of Avellino. Cocchiola had chosen the site because it abutted the garage—that same concrete building—where he ran a modest business repairing cars and bicycles. The old front door gave Generoso direct access to his personal version of the American dream.

Eighty-eight years after Generoso built that home with his own hands, his granddaughter Joanne Cocchiola sits in the Nutley mayor’s office—about one mile away—facing her brother Frank across a long, well-used conference table. A petite blonde with a forceful personality that amplifies her presence, Joanne is the two-term mayor of Nutley, an Essex County town of some 30,000 residents, 40 percent of whom trace their lineage back to Italy.

Cocchiola and her brother—here today to tease a family history from old stories, personal memories, and a fan of dog-eared papers spread out on the table between them—hail from a family distinguished for its public service: Their father, Frank Cocchiola Sr., served as Nutley commissioner for 28 years; their cousin Carmen Orechio is a former Nutley mayor and commissioner and the one-time president of the New Jersey senate; Al Restaino, another cousin, was chief of staff to State Senator Gary Furnari.

Like so many immigrant tales, the family’s history in New Jersey is rooted in the rocky soil of hope and hardship.

It took 16 years—and two transatlantic voyages—for Generoso to find his way to Nutley, where he would remain for the rest of his life. After coming through Ellis Island in 1899 at the age of 16, he lived in Brooklyn for several years, then returned to Italy to serve in the army. After his second trip from Naples to New York (a passage, he told his son years later, that was marked by “unheard-of discomfort”), he bounced around from Long Island to Connecticut, eventually moving to Newark, where he would have encountered a bustling community of paisani from Avellino in the city’s First Ward. In 1911, he married Anna Restaino of Belleville; four years later the couple moved to Nutley—another magnet for Italians from Avellino.

He and Anna raised five children in the Hunt Place house. It was tiny by today’s standards: a bedroom, a small living room, and a kitchen in the basement so cramped that Joanne remembers her grandmother laying out ravioli on the bed to dry. In spite of its size, the house “was a fantastic place on Christmas Eve,” says Joanne.

Once grown, all five siblings and their families would gather for the Cocchiola version of the traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes: calamari, squid, flounder, shrimp, mussels, clams, and the salted cod known as baccala, all from her uncle’s fish store. On Good Friday, her grandmother and aunt would meet at the house in the morning to prepare pizza gain, the traditional Italian Easter bread also known as pizzagaina. After the aunts passed away, her father took over the job, assisted by Joanne and her siblings. Frank Sr. died in 2005, but, Joanne says, “my brothers and I still make it, and now we’re starting to bring our own children into it.”

The old house was filled with music as well as food, much of it issuing from Generoso’s homemade accordions. “He’d make us all play and sing—and those things are hard to play, especially the homemade ones,” Joanne remembers.

But life was not all music and feasting. “My dad often told us about what they went through growing up in that area of Nutley,” says Frank Jr. He’s talking about the overt prejudice Generoso, and even his children, encountered in the town, where entire neighborhoods were off limits to people of Italian descent. (Nutley was hardly alone in its bias; in 1897 the august New York Times described 11 Italian-American lynching victims as “sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins.”)

The Hunt Place house was very much on the other side of the tracks, literally and figuratively. “There were areas of the town my father couldn’t even walk through,” Frank says. “When we used to go to social events and activities, he would often say, ‘You see this house? I couldn’t come into this house 50 years ago. I couldn’t even walk down the sidewalk.”

Although Nutley’s Italian population continued to expand throughout much of the last century, no Italian-American held public office in the town until 1956. That was the year that Joanne and Frank Jr.’s cousin Carl Orechio was elected to the Nutley board of commissioners. His victory paved the way for Frank Sr.’s successful run for commissioner in 1972. Even before then, he had been engaged in Nutley’s civic life, especially in Italian-American organizations like Unico and Knights of Columbus. He was also an active member of Nutley Optimists and the Lions Club, ran the Catholic Youth Organization at Holy Family Church, served on the Nutley board of education, and became exalted ruler of the Nutley Elks. “When I was a kid,” remembers Frank, “my father was out at one of those organizations every night, and that’s what he taught us—the value of service.”

Service and, with it, education: Though Generoso never finished high school and Frank Sr.—a graduate of Nutley High—never made it to college, many in the third generation did, including Joanne (a graduate of Douglass College and Seton Hall Law), Frank Jr., (Seton Hall, with a doctorate from Fordham), their brother Tommy (Villanova), and brother Jerry (Mitchell College in Connecticut). And nearly as many went on to careers in education. Frank Jr. is superintendent of schools in Wallington, and his cousins Mario and Joe, both retired, were, respectively, a high school principal and vice principal. Joanne’s daughter Allyson is a senior at Rutgers working toward a degree in elementary education, and her son, Matthew, attends Monmouth University. Frank Jr., whose daughters Gina and Nicole (both at Monmouth University) are also planning to teach, calls education “a family tradition.”

In fact, says Joanne, the important traditions in the Cocchiola family—beyond food and feast days—are education and public service. Frank and Joanne are convinced that both were direct responses to the anti-Italian bias encountered by the first and second generations. “My father and Carl,” she says, “really did build a legacy for the rest of us.”

In 2000, when Joanne told her father, newly retired from politics, that she was planning to run for commissioner, he looked at her and said, “Jeez, do you know what you’re getting into?” Later, when he learned that she had won the election, there were tears in his eyes. “He worked harder than anyone,” Frank Jr. says of his father. “And then”—he looks across the pile of ragged papers at his sister—“she carried the ball.”

Leslie Garisto Pfaff is a frequent contributor. She lives in Nutley.

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