R.I.P. Carl T. Severini 1932-2023

Carl outside home in Youngwood with his sister
Flora (my mother) and his mother Gioconda

 Carl Thomas Severini was my mother’s younger brother. He was born in 1932, one of the worst years of the Great Depression.  Nevertheless he grew to be about a foot taller than either of his parents and either of his sisters.  He played pickup football with neighborhood friends in the very small western Pennsylvania town of Youngwood, even when nobody could afford an actual football.  They used an old evaporated milk can, sealed at both ends. 

 He remembered flooded railroad tracks before New Deal era flood control projects cut down on their frequency, and he remembered watching people stream past his house on Depot St. with food baskets, on their way to catch the special train to Idlewild Park for Youngwood’s community picnic. His family soon joined them.

 During World War II, Carl participated in scrap drives, collecting cans, old nails and other discarded metal in his wagon, which he took to Holy Cross school, so it would eventually be loaded into box cars at the Youngwood depot and sent off to be re-purposed for the war effort. He remembered hearing the news of President Roosevelt’s death on the radio.

 The Severini home in Youngwood had a player piano—not uncommon in those days—and Carl began taking piano lessons when he was about 10.  By the time he started college he performed in a series of local dance bands.  

He was such an excellent student that he completed two grades in one year, and finished 10^th grade with honors at the age of 14.  Perhaps influenced by his Tom Swift novels and other futuristic fiction, he was interested in science. By the time he was a senior at Youngwood High, he told the school yearbook that his ambition was to become a chemical engineer.  He also expressed preferences for Cary Grant, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, relaxing at the Rexall Drug soda fountain and playing basketball. He and his neighborhood friends had chipped in and bought a hoop that they mounted on a pole on First Street.

 He graduated from nearby St. Vincent College in 1952, and in 1954 he married Rose Morozowich, my beloved Aunt Rose.  They eventually would raise three daughters and two sons in a marriage that lasted for 67 years, ended only by Rose’s death.  

One of Carl’s first jobs was at Callery Chemical in Evans City, PA.  As the newest employee, Carl was often left to mind the store when everyone else went to lunch. That’s how he met Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was overseeing the construction of the first nuclear powered submarine.  He was touring facilities that might contribute to the Nautilus, and arrived at lunchtime, so it was up to Carl to show him around.

  Callery soon decided it could use an employee with a law degree to handle its patents, and offered to pay (or perhaps help pay) for law school. After someone else turned it down, Carl jumped at the offer.  He graduated from the law school of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1960.  Patent law would become his career.

 He soon became a patent attorney at PPG—then still known as Pittsburgh Plate Glass-- and remained there for 32 years.  He became PPG’s Chief Patent Counsel, and served as president of both the Association of Corporate Patent Counsels and the Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association.  His work involved extensive travel around the United States as well as Europe and Asia. Sometimes he would drop into antiquarian bookstores to find first editions of the Tom Swift series he’d read as a boy.  He eventually collected the entire series.  

My Uncle Carl was a major figure in my young life.  He was just 14 when I was born. To get a little perspective on that, my mother—his oldest sister—was 12 years older than him.  While I never thought of him as an older brother, his youth and the things he did—playing basketball, playing piano, going to college—were more interesting and exciting.  He was also fun.

 At some point in my first few years he worked in the summer at a drug store in downtown Greensburg, and would walk down to College Avenue to our apartment, where my mother would make him lunch. But my first memories of him are situated at my grandparents home in Youngwood, where he lived in high school and college. I recall watching him play piano, his left hand flying back and forth on the base notes while his right hand did something completely different.  Sometimes I would crawl under the keyboard and listen from there, watching his feet work the golden pedals.  If he wasn’t at home when we visited I would ask where he was.  At least once I found him playing basketball on First Street.

 We moved into our house on what was then called Lincoln Avenue Extension just outside Greensburg when I was four or so. Probably when Carl was at St. Vincent College he would suddenly show up in his car.  Though he spent most of the time with my mother, his visits were special events for me.  Once before I started school I was out in the yard writing numbers and letters on a blackboard.  He approved, but noticed that I was making the 4s wrong.  I didn’t make that mistake again.  His visits were impromptu, or a least I usually didn’t know he was coming.  Once it occurred to me that when he wasn’t there, he was doing other things that I didn’t know about.  At first I could almost understand how he had a life away from me—or that in general things could happen without me being there, then I couldn’t, and then I could again, and forever.  These are some of my earliest memories, and there aren't many more.  My Uncle Carl was part of them.

 When I was nearly 8, his wedding reception at the Roof Garden of the Penn Albert Hotel was a major event—perhaps the first time I’d heard a live band.  This was when wedding bands played Italian tunes as well as Big Band numbers from the 1940s.

  When I was old enough, Carl’s visits to our house included playing catch with baseball or football.  I threw my first forward pass to him, leading him and hitting him in stride on my first try, earning his praise.  A big moment.

 Now I notice that in the photos I have of the two of us from my childhood, we are always in physical contact.  Twice I’m perched on his shoulders, and there’s a group photo taken in the early years of his marriage.  We are all visiting his other sister, my aunt Toni, in Federalsburg, Maryland.  We’re sitting on the stoop of her house at 305 Morris Avenue (an address I remember because it was one of the first I learned—my cousin Dick was probably my first correspondent.) There’s Carl and his wife Rose, my sister Kathy and cousin Dick.  I’m sitting on a step between Carl’s legs, with his arms draped down over my shoulders.  I remember the warmth and comfort of that contact.

 Even when he and Rose moved away—to Butler, to Evans City—we would have family visits, and of course the big family meals in Youngwood, especially on Christmas and Easter.  When his first two daughters (Susan and Shirley) were little girls, and I had two younger sisters (Kathy and Debbie), our families took a vacation trip together, through New York state to Niagara Falls.  Then when I was in high school, Carl discussed colleges with me.  He was the only person I could talk to in person who’d even been to college.  He told me what only a graduate knows: that the people you go to college with will remain in your life to some degree thereafter.

 Carl and Rose’s first son Tom was born in 1959, then their third daughter Nancy ( I remember carrying her as an infant to the front door of another relative’s house.)  Steven was born when I was away, but I saw more of him when I had moved back.  Our dinners at Carl and Rose’s home in Murrysville, and later at their vacation farm, would typically involve Carl leading some athletic activity outside afterwards with all the kids, usually involving a football. I noticed that at that point we did a lot more running around that he did.

 Once when he was in Boston in the 1970s and I was an editor at the Boston Phoenix, we had dinner together atop the new Prudential Building. Over the years, Carl was present at important family moments, from weddings to funerals. He spent time with my father in the months after my mother died. When his father died he watched over his mother for decades, and oversaw her care in her last years.

 After I moved to California I made it a point to see him on my infrequent visits to family in Pennsylvania. I had lunch with him on one such visit and told him what he had meant to me as a child.

 When he was in his late 80s, Carl and I began corresponding by email regarding his early memories.  He remembered the names of grade school teachers, his first music teacher, and the bands he’d played in. He especially remembered my mother, and her kindnesses to him as a child. 

 The last time I saw Carl and Rose was a little earlier, in the fall of 2019.  My sisters and I visited them at their home in Murrysville.  We marveled how little it had changed.  The piano that had been a fixture of my grandparents’ house was still in their living room.  They looked and seemed the same, even as they told us about the many cruises they had taken after Carl retired.  Carl still had his lively sense of humor, perhaps even more so.

   We had some wine and cheese—Carl pointed out that the wine was a Montepulciano Abruzzi, made in the region when the Severini family came from and where Carl had visited several times, maintaining ties with the Old World family (though they were actually descendants of my grandmother.) Then we went to dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant.

 It was a still point in a turning world.  For as unchanged as they seemed, both Carl and Rose had experienced serious health problems by then.  In the next several years, they sold their house and moved closer to their last child who still lived in Pennsylvania. Their daughter Nancy and her husband John took care of them from then on.

 Carl had a series of heart problems and was near death more than once.  But it was Rose who passed away first last year.  Carl moved to a skilled nursing residence nearby. He celebrated his 91^st birthday in January. As this June was coming to a close he had a particularly alert week, visiting with daughter Nancy on Sunday the 25^th.  He had a good morning on Monday, and then suddenly slipped away. 

 May he rest in peace.  His legacy lives on.