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chapter 1 Allegheny River Launch B orn in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924 as Enrico Nicola Mancini, the young Henry would grow up just over the Pennsylvania border in the steel town of West Aliquippa, where two great rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela , come together to become the Ohio River, not far from Pittsburgh. Mancini’s father, Quinto, worked for a while at the Jones and Laughlin Steel mills there and was known in the local community as something of a loner. To Henry he was always something of a mystery. Quinto was a laborer all his life, yet he voted with management for Republican candidates; as a teenaged immigrant from the mountainous Abruzzi region near Rome, he had identified with the Italian enclave in West Aliquippa, yet, unlike those who kept close ties with their relatives in the old country or brought them over to the new world as soon as enough money had been saved, he never spoke of his family. According to Henry, Quinto had been the fifth child of his parents and was quickly farmed out to the care of an uncle. Then, while still a young teen, he made what Henry called “the maverick decision” to take off for America. In Boston by 1910 or so, Quinto moved to Cleveland, where he would meet the five-foot-tall Anna Pece, whose family had come to Ohio from the Italian province of Campobasso when she was an infant. Her English was finer than Quinto’s, and her familiarity with the Italian American communities in the Northeast was always handier than his. She appreciated his ambition and sense of silent, sometimes brusque, authority—and, of course, his total independence. Along with that mystery about Quinto’s past, Anna i-xii_1-286_Caps.indd 5 2/10/12 2:46 PM 6 chapter 1 (known everywhere as Annie) found intriguing the fact that this privately opinionated laborer had taught himself, also without comment or clue, to play that most gentle and whimsical of instruments, the flute. Mancini described his parents’ marriage as based on Annie’s admiration and affection for Quinto but always returning to the foundation of her strength. She was the homemaker; he the breadwinner. With equal parts of puzzlement and pouting, Mancini later admitted in his autobiography, “I never saw my father display a trace of affection for her or for me either, for that matter . . . or give her a gift, not even at Christmas or her birthday.”1 Journalist Gene Lees, who worked with Mancini in writing that life story, talked to family cousin Helen Musengo, whom Mancini always thought of as a sister, and reported her opinion that Quinto was actually a very sentimental man, proud to the point of bragging that his son had been able to escape the steel mills of Pittsburgh and become a famed musician. But he would only do his bragging away from the family. At home you did not verbalize praise or passion. Stoicism was strength. It is tempting, then, to trace Mancini’s later reserved sense of yearning in his most personal music to that estrangement from his father, just as one can hear his mother’s reassurances and good humor in his warm ballads and witty jazz-pop. Yet it is also clear that father and son were never completely alienated. It is to Quinto, after all, that Henry owed his first lessons on piano and soon the flute. And when there seemed to be some talent there, it was Quinto who sought out someone all the way in Pittsburgh to coach his son. The maverick ambition of the father obviously passed strength and confidence to the son, if Mancini’s forthright, clearheaded, masculine early scoring style is any indication. But young Henry was developing a musical hunger of his own, too, and seems to have been encouraged by his father—or at least not discouraged—to follow it. He may have wished for a more demonstrative father, but his whole career demonstrates an essential integrity in the household where he grew. Ninety percent of West Aliquippa in the late 1920s and early 1930s were Italian immigrants with a few Slavs and a handful of Jewish families. To the wider world, though, the Italians were still a minority and, as steel laborers, considered to be from the other side of the tracks. The backward coal-mining towns of West Virginia were not far in miles or style from the life of West Aliquippa. Whether Quinto felt...

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