AP writing honors to Romano
Tom Romano, a professor of teacher education who teaches English methods and writing in Miami’s School of Education and Allied Professions, won first place honors in the 2007 Associated Press competition for best broadcast writing.
His essay “My Father’s Voice” aired on Miami’s radio station, WMUB, NPR@88.5. Go here to listen to the award-winning piece.
In addition to teaching at Miami, Romano speaks at National Writing Project sites, schools and literacy conferences across the country. He also teaches in the summer Reading and Writing Institute at the University of New Hampshire.
Here is the text of “My Father’s Voice,” Romano’s tribute to his immigrant father:
I remember my father calling my name on summer evenings in the late 1950s when I was a boy in northeastern Ohio. As night fell, I played whiffle ball with neighbor kids in the yard behind Doc Stires’ office. We’d all promised to be home before dark, but no one was willing to break the spell. Our play was summer and friendship and a tad of rebellion to be outside in the descending night, beyond the time our parents said to be home.
Then came my father’s voice, short, booming, unmistakable, calling my name.
My father’s voice. No trace in it of an Italian accent. He had been in America since 1914 when he left Nola, a village near Naples, he then just a boy of nine.
My father’s voice still strong at 54-years-old, though he would be dead at 59, the victim of two drag racers roaring down a public road, smashing head-on into his car.
My father’s voice calling from behind the screen door of our apartment over his tavern and bowling alleys. He had owned those businesses since 1940, after years of working in the brickyards that had drawn Italian immigrants to Malvern, Ohio.
My father’s voice rising into the night sky, carrying over rooftops, alley, and neighbors’ yards to land in my ears where I played with friends in the yard behind Doc Stires’ office.
I ran all the way home, toward the warm yellow light emanating from our apartment. My father had worked hard to be successful in America. And like the Italian accent he naturally left behind when he learned English, he also left behind his ethnicity.
There’s a photograph in an oval frame of my father and two of his brothers taken after the family arrived in America: Giuseppe, Antonio, and Felice, my father, all dressed in soft caps with short bills, belted waist coats, white shirts buttoned to their necks, knickers, and sturdy leather shoes laced over their ankles. “Look,” says the photo, a print of which was surely sent to relatives in Italy. “Look how well we are doing in America.”
I heard my father speak Italian only to immigrants who had come to America when they were adults and never learned English with the ease and facility their children did. Otherwise, my father spoke no Italian. The old country was a distant memory that had little to do with the identity he had forged for himself. He was an American business man. He valued decorum, disliked clannishness, discouraged talk in his tavern about politics and religion. Those led to loud arguments, which were bad for business.
I once asked an uncle of mine—Gigi Chiavari—my father’s brother-in-law who lived to be 93, why he had come to America. “Why I come ‘cross?” Uncle Gigi said. “Same reason everybody come ‘cross. You make a better living, a better home, a better life.”
That’s what my father had done. Forty-two years now since his death when I was fifteen. Forty-two years since I have heard his voice. But writing this, I hear it now: My father’s voice at twilight on a summer evening in small town America. My father’s voice calling me home.