Allan Appel Photo
Rosa and Luisa DeLauro.
The longest-serving alderman in the history of New Haven laid one of the 36 wreaths at the statue of Cristoforo Colombo in Wooster Square Park on Saturday morning in the annual ceremony in the run up to Sunday’s Columbus Day Parade.
Even as 96-year-old Luisa DeLauro (assisted by daughter Rosa, New Haven’s U.S. Congresswoman) and the old guard were praised, participants wondered where the young people were to carry on the old traditions.
Richard DePalma and Theresa Argento.
“We’re the exception,” said 29-year-old Richard DiPalma, Jr., who along with the redoubtable 86-year-old Theresa Argento,co-chairs the annual wreath presentation. The event drew 75 people to St. Michael’s Church for speeches and blessings and then a procession to the statue in the park.
DiPalma, who teaches Italian at North Haven Middle School, said getting younger generations to understand on whose shoulders they stand is an increasingly big job, and not only for Italian-Americans.
“It’s a challenge for any ethnic group to get kids involved,” he said as he and Argento deployed the wreath bearers for the service and the procession.
This year there were 36 wreaths, each representing one of the five Greater New Haven towns that now participate the parade, along with the social and religious societies and wreaths representing political entities like the Board of Aldermen, on which Wooster Square’s Luisa DeLauro served for 35 years.
Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson (left in photo, with New Haven State Sen. Majority Leader Martin Looney) helped lead the way as well since this year the parade is in his city.
The wreath ceremony in New Haven actually began in 2003 when, because of dwindling numbers at their individual parades, Italian leaders from New Haven, West Haven, East Haven, Hamden, and North Haven decided to rotate the parade among their five towns.
Theresa Argento devised the wreath ceremony that very year so as to have a regular parade or procession-like event in New Haven every year.
It developed from the laying of a single wreath, yes, by Luisa DeLauro, who carried that wreath the miles of the procession until she laid it at the foot of the Columbus statue.
On Saturday, DeLauro said she remembered it well. The carrying of the flowers such a considerable distance did not bother her at all, she said.
Over the intervening nine years, Argento, with DiPalma’s help, has built up the wreath-bearers, representing clubs, institutions such as Yale and others to 36. Still not that many young people are involved, and in her remarks Argento said, “Sign up young people to your membership.”
Even though Sunday’s parade in Hamden was projected to be the largest Columbus Day parade in New England, with 2,500 marchers, such that participation had to be capped, DiPalma said appearances can be deceiving.
“It’s the best and worst time to be Italian,” he said
“Everyone wants their cappuccino, but we’re moving away from our [deeper] traditions. You have Italian style and chic, but the loss is something deeper.”
Asked to elaborate, he looked around the sanctuary at St. Michael’s at the mainly grey, white-haired, and no-hair crowd, and said with a sigh almost palpable, “When we lose these older people …”
Yes, history books and cookbooks preserve the past. But “even though you have the cookbooks, it’s not the same as your grandma saying, You need a little of this, and a little of that.”
His getting jazzed on the Italian American experience sufficiently not only to make it his professional calling but also to become president of the Italian Youth Organization derived not from his parents but indeed from the older generation.
Specifically DiPalma’s 92-year-old grandfather.
“My grandfather was the influence. He exposed me to the culture, and it started early. I fell in love [first] with the music when he showed me his old Italian records.”
DiPalma said in particular he remembered hearing recordings of the Di Mara Sisters.
But there was little time for recollecting further recording artists of the 1950s.
After the service and the actual blessing of the wreaths by holy water and incense, two pipers from the New Haven Gaelic Highland Band playing “America the Beautiful” led the wreath-bearers under a beautiful son to the Columbus statue.
It was, Mayor John DeStefano had reminded the assembly, the very first statue of Columbus built in Connecticut, dating from 1892, when the great migration of southern Italians to New Haven was well under way.
Now the Italian consultate has been replaced by an Ecuadorian embassy, he said,
He praised immigration and the welcoming of the stranger as good for the country. “We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and on the values of this country,” he said, and tolerance is at the heart of that, he added.
Teaching that lesson, along with the Nina, Pinta, and the Santa Maria, which another speaker said most American kids can still identify, was also part of the challenge, the mayor suggested.
The combined towns’ parade will be in West Haven in 2011 and rotate back to New Haven in 2012.