The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project ROBERT LAGAMMA Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: August 6, 2008 Copyright 2014 ADST [Note: This interview was not edited by Mr. LaGamma.] Q: This is tape one, side one with Robert R. LaGamma. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Do you go by Bob? LAGAMMA: I go by Bob. Q: Bob. Ok we will start at this point. Let’s start at the beginning. Where and when were you born? LAGAMMA: 1939 in New York City. I grew up in the Bronx. Q: OK, tell me a little something about the LaGamma side of your family? Where do they come from and your grandparents and all. What line of work were they in and education and so on. LAGAMMA: My grandparents came to the United States at the turn of the century from Italy, Calabria, a little town called Castrovillari in the mountains. Very poor, to this day very poor. I visited it a couple of times, and can hardly imagine how they managed to get to the coast and to the nearest port which probably was Naples. Going through those mountains in the days before railroads and cars. Q: By foot probably. LAGAMMA: Only by foot and a great distance. Q: Well did they go to New York I assume? LAGAMMA: Yeah, the whole family went to New York. Q: And what did you say your grandparents or so, what sort of activity was he involved in? 1 LAGAMMA: Well he was a land agent. My grandfather worked for a wealthy landholder in that part of the country. He didn’t have much in the way of skills when he came to the United States. Q: Do you know what they were doing or what he did? LAGAMMA: Well he did a number of different things. He was never very successful at any of them. He did some carpentry and did some tailoring. He had some basic skills he put to work to scrape out a living. It was especially tough during the depression where he didn’t have very much to do at all. Q: What about your father? LAGAMMA: My father was born in New York. He didn’t speak very much Italian. They weaned him away from his language. He actually went to the same high school I went to, Stuyvesant High School in New York, as did my uncle. Then he went off to the navy during the war. He was a naval carpenter and participated in most of the island invasions and saw a lot of very bloody combat in the South Pacific. Q: Then what happened when he came back? LAGAMMA: He came back. Q: Of course he was married. LAGAMMA: I was born in 1939, and when he came back I was six years old, ’45. He settled in as a carpenter and he did that for a number of years and then he eventually went to work for the New York Transit Authority. Q: I take it he didn’t have more than a high school education. LAGAMMA: He started college but didn’t go very far before the war broke out, and never picked up on it. Q: What about on your mother’s side? Where did her family come from? LAGAMMA: They came from near Naples. They came over about the same time. Q: So you grew up in an Italian neighborhood. LAGAMMA: Well actually I grew up on the edge of an Italian neighborhood in a very cosmopolitan working class neighborhood, with Jews, Italians, Poles, Irish, even some African Americans. It was really quite a mixed neighborhood. Q: What did they call the area? 2 LAGAMMA: Well right now it would be called the edge of the South Bronx. Q: Did you live in an area where you had extended family? LAGAMMA: Yes. My father had three sisters, my aunts, and two brothers, so that was the major part of my extended family. My aunts were never married, so I spent a great deal of time growing up with them including during the war. I spent a little lesser time with my aunts on my mother’s side. Q: Did you get much, in a way Italian is probably not the word for it, I imagine they spoke a dialect. LAGAMMA: Sure. I didn’t have any exposure to Italian whatsoever. It was a banned language. My grandparents spoke it only to each other. Q: I used to get this from the German, not in front of the children. LAGAMMA: That’s right. And so it wasn’t until I studied Italian in the foreign service and was assigned to Italy that I learned Italian. Q: Well now in your area, in the first place I assume your family was Catholic, but were they very Catholic or not particularly? How did this go? LAGAMMA: Not rigorous, no. I mean we went to mass; we had all the sacraments. We went to church once in awhile. Not necessarily on a regular basis. We grew up within the framework of the church, local parish, but I guess some of us became more religious than others and some drifted away. Q: Was there a cohesive Italian community as a kid or were you pretty much in a mixed? LAGAMMA: Pretty much, I grew up in the midst of other ethnic groups. It was a very strong Jewish population in my neighborhood. A lesser number of Irish and some Italians, not many, and other nationalities. Q: I was interviewing quite recently a woman, Beverly Zweiben who said, I grew up in the Bronx and she didn’t meet a protestant until she went away to get her masters. She went away to I think the University of Indiana. Until that time I mean she had Jewish friends, mostly Jewish friends. She was Jewish, but Italian or Irish. But they were all either that. There wasn’t … LAGAMMA: Yeah. Well I played on the Lutheran basketball team as well as a Catholic one. Q: Were you much of a reader or did this sort of thing go on? 3 LAGAMMA: Oh yeah. Reading was my salvation. It was kind of the entryway to higher education and interest in the wider world, and the thing that filled up many hours while I was growing up which otherwise would have been very lonely hours. Q: Where did you go to get your books? LAGAMMA: The Arthur Avenue Library. About ten blocks from where we lived. Q: How good was the librarian or the librarians? Would you call them to help you get the right book. LAGAMMA: No, they pointed me in the direction of the shelves, and that is about it. Not too helpful. Q: Do you recall some of your earlier books when you got into reading that influenced you or you enjoyed? LAGAMMA: Oh yeah. When I was seven, eight, nine, I fell into reading about the American frontier, the west, the heroes of the American frontier, the Kit Carsons and the Daniel Boones and Davy Crocketts. I remember reading biographies of each of them. And about the discoverers in the age of discovery. Christopher Columbus and the great navigators at the beginning of the age of discovery. Those sort of filled my imagination with ideas of adventure. Q: In school, let’s take elementary school. How did you mesh with the school system? LAGAMMA: I liked school. I liked learning, but I wasn’t very disciplined. My father encouraged me to be a good student, but didn’t keep after me very much or didn’t have much in the way of influence on my studies. I went to an elementary school within easy walking distance, four or five blocks from my house. One of the elementary teachers I had was Samuel Richewski. I had him for the fifth grade, and he was a grand master in chess. I learned how to play chess there. So that was quite inspiring. Q: Were you a good student? LAGAMMA: Pretty good, yeah. I was usually in the most advanced class. Q: Did you get involved with sports at all? LAGAMMA: Yeah, I played everything, lots of street games. You know we played all the games like football and basketball and baseball, but most of the time we played stickball, street games. Stick ball, punch ball, up the river, down the river, hundreds of games that we would invent on the sidewalks. Q: How were the streets in those days? 4 LAGAMMA: Not as crowded as they are now. There were actually parking spaces and room to move around. Q: Were there gangs? LAGAMMA: Oh yeah, there were gangs. There were gangs in my area. I was in a rather tough neighborhood. We had one gang that was known as the Fordham Baldies. If they decided they didn’t like you and had something against you, they would cut all your hair off. Q: Did you ever run afoul of them? LAGAMMA: Not so that I couldn’t run away fast enough. But it was a tough neighborhood. We talked about going to the library. At one point when I was about 10 or 12 years old, I acquired a pocket knife because I wanted to defend myself when I crossed some difficult terrain in the park on the way to the library. Q: Did you get into a gang? LAGAMMA: No, I never belonged to a gang.