My brother Michael would have been 75 years old this week, and he has been on my mind a lot lately.

Somehow, I think my 6-year old granddaughter must have known that. At dinner on the night before my brother’s birthday, I was telling a make-believe story about “Peter, Peter Pasta Eater,” and another boy. My granddaughters, ages 6 & 4 love hearing my made-on-the spot stories the way my brother’s oldest daughter and son did, when they were the same ages. And, I love telling them, vamping along the way, watching their eyes grow as big as pizza pies, suspense building.

I was searching for the name of the other boy in the story, when my granddaughter asked me for it, and “Michael” was the first name that popped into my mind, and came from my mouth.

“Wait,” my oldest granddaughter said, stopping the story cold. “Is this real or is it a make-believe story?”

“It’s a make-believe story,” I said, surprised by her question. “Why do you ask?”

“Well,” she said, looking at me with her saucer-sized eyes, “isn’t Michael one of your brothers’ names?

I was stunned. Was she reading my mind? My face? Were my emotions that evident to this sweet, sensitive child?

“Why, yes—yes it is,” I said. And, before I could correct myself and say, “yes, it was,” the story moved on, and my granddaughters wanted to know how it ended. On the eve of what would have been my brother’s 75^th birthday, his name found it’s way into a story I was creating for the two human beings who are everything to me.

It got me thinking of how my brother would have smiled warmly, quietly at my granddaughters, the way he glowed softly as I watched him observe each one of his four children when they were babies, and the world was still fresh and innocent.

My brother Michael was my first hero, a calm gentle presence in my chaotic early life, the opposite of my father whose temper could explode as quickly as the steam boilers he worked on all his life.   Gifted with patience, my brother would assemble all of my toys that my father had no patience for putting together.

My first real visual memory of my brother was through the split front seat of a 1958 Ford Fairlane, when I was 10 or 11 years old. He had taken me to a drive-in movie one night, along with his girl friend, who later became his wife.   They sat in the back seat; I sat in the front.   I was curious about what my brother was doing back there. But, fatigue conquered my curiosity, and I fell asleep while I tried to sneak a peak of a show that I was convinced was more fascinating than the movie on the big screen in front of me. My brother, nine-years older than I, carried me back into my parents house and up to my bedroom that night, and, for years, laughed gently at my invasion of his privacy.

I always saw my brother through my mother’s eyes, and that view was rose-colored, gentle and perfect, even when my brother’s life took on a far different, more tumultuous tone in later years.

To my mother, to me, my brother was always there, ready to help, to calm the waters. He could build anything—a four-poster bed, a bicycle, a house. I once watched him cook a meal from scratch for two dozen people, each ingredient carefully chosen, each choice delicately considered, each course, better than the one before. I was mesmerized by his short, stubby fingers and how much they looked like our mother’s.

My brother’s life and mine, diverged sharply over the years, and my idolization of him turned into sadness, anger, sorrow and then, in the end, love again. Whatever he did, and he did plenty, he was always my mother’s son, and early in his life, the very model of how I believed a man, and father, should behave.

To my granddaughter, who never met him, Michael was my brother. He was real, not make believe.

This week marked the 45^th anniversary of the Kent State killings, when four college students were gunned down for protesting the War in Vietnam.

A photo, forever burned into memory, electrified the nation. A distraught young woman, her mouth open in a silent scream of terror, knelt over the dead body of a college student from Long Island, 20-year old Jeffrey Miller who was shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen. It could have been me.

My mother, a diminutive, chunky Italian women became radicalized by the killings of “ those kids” at Kent State, as she called them.   I was one year older than Jeffrey Miller, and in my junior year of college at a State University in upstate New York.   I was active in local anti-war rallies, demonstrations and marches on Washington. My mother looked at the photos of Jeffrey Miller on TV and in the newspapers, and all she saw was me.

She knew I stood face to face with a National Guardsman’s bayonet during one of those “Moratorium” marches. She knew I was tear-gassed. Each time I embarked upon a new crusade, my mother warned me to “be careful”, gnawing what was left of her finger-nails.

My mother was no stranger to hardship and struggle. Born during the polio epidemic of 1915, she was paralyzed on one side of her body. She was carted off to a “Crippled Children’s Home,” (the actual name of the place), where, as a young child, she saw children her own age living in an iron-lung, fighting for each breath. She considered herself fortunate that only her right arm was paralyzed.

Kept out of public swimming pools in NYC and summer camps in the Catskills because she was a “Polio Kid,” my mother developed a determination to overcome all odds, and a natural empathy with outsiders. She found her public champion and life-long hero in fellow-polio battler Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, as Mario Cuomo eloquently said, “lifted himself out of his wheelchair while lifting a nation from its knees.”

Kent State radicalized her, despite the growing conservatism of most suburban Italians, and the Catholic Church’s unconscionable support for the war. Every college student, demonstrating against the war, was her child. Every act of protest, was an act of courage. She saw herself defying the odds; she saw her son defying a war which she did not want to see him fight.

Each Christmastime at our modest split-level suburban home on Noble Street in North Babylon, New York, it was my job to put up the Christmas lights. I enjoyed the task because I enjoyed the season. But that year, Christmas 1970, as the war in Vietnam raged on, I decided to use our lights to make a political statement in our conservative, working-class neighborhood.

I shaped the Christmas lights into a huge Peace Sign, taking up the entire height and width of the big Bow Window at the front of our house. My father, more politically conservative than my mother and a WWII Veteran, was not comfortable with my Holiday handiwork, but my Mother, with visions of Kent State still dancing in her head, defended it proudly as a symbol of peace, during a season of peace.

A few nights before Christmas, my mother’s brother Angelo “Eddie” Desimone, a big bruiser of a man with the largest hands I had ever seen, came for a visit. As soon as he pulled up in front of our house, he spotted “Stephen’s Peace Sign.” He entered the house and before saying hello to my mother, demanded to know why she allowed such a “Communist” sign to deface our house. Uncle Eddie towered over my mother. When he was younger he had knocked out half the patrons of a bar in a brawl. He was menacing. He was ranting about “communists” like me, bringing America down.

My mother was wearing a housedress and a flour-covered apron with her paralyzed right arm hanging limply by her side.  She was at least a full-foot shorter than her brother.   She raised her voice to match my uncle’s, and told him that it was a “peace” sign. Without yielding an inch, she argued that her youngest son was no communist but a lover of peace, and that if he didn’t like it, he could leave. My uncle left.

Uncle Eddie had committed the original sin with my mother: he attacked the character of her son. He knew Margaret Julia Villano would not back down. Yet, what he could never understand, was how much Kent State had radicalized my mother, and how she now considered all students protesting the war to be her children.

During his 1986 Gubernatorial re-election campaign, I was prepared to take a bullet for Mario Cuomo.

I was working in Cuomo’s NYC Press Office at Two World Trade Center for less than a year, when WNBC’s dean of political reporters Gabe Pressman phoned late one afternoon to tell me that NBC news received a death threat against the Governor and Coretta Scott King.   Both were scheduled to speak at Town Hall, in Manhattan, before a gathering of Local 1199, a union being torn apart by internal strife. Understandably, Mrs. King cancelled. Cuomo, ignoring advice from staff and State Police, went ahead.

A few minutes before we arrived at the West 43^rd Street building, Cuomo, seated in the front passenger seat of the unmarked State Police car, turned to me in the back.

“Steve,” he asked, “Do you believe in heaven and hell?”

I panicked.  Good god, he was genuinely worried about the death threat if he was thinking of an after-life, I thought.  I was silent for a moment.  I had less than 60 seconds to answer Mario Cuomo, who thought deeply about such matters.

“Well, Governor,” I said, buying a few more seconds to think, “I’m not sure I’m smart enough to know whether heaven and hell exist.” I paused. “But, I believe in acting as if they do.”  As we pulled up in front of Town Hall, Cuomo turned to face me, and smiled.

“That’s a very good answer, Steve; a very good answer,” he said.  The student had pleased the mentor.  I was gratified by his praise, and terrified at the same time.

We got out of the car and were surrounded by a phalanx of undercover NYC cops who escorted us in through Town Hall’s small kitchen.  My mind instantly replayed the scene of Robert F. Kennedy, life bleeding out of him, on the kitchen floor of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel.  Cuomo greeted all of the kitchen workers and my eyes darted around the pots and pans, anticipating a pistol pointed our way.  I was ready to throw my body in the way of an assassin’s bullet, determined not to have another RFK blown away.

New York Times reporter Jeffrey Schmaltz, then Albany Bureau Chief  who was covering Cuomo that night, noticed the ashen color of my face.

“Was there a death threat against the Governor’s life tonight, Steve,?” Schmaltz asked me.  I looked straight at him.  I couldn’t bullshit Jeff Schmaltz.  I respected him too much as a journalist, and liked him too much as a person.  It was hard for me to hide what my face revealed.

I nodded my head, “yes.”  The Governor and his entourage of police, staff and reporters, including myself and Schmaltz, moved backstage , barely out of sight behind the curtains.   We could hear shouts and catcalls coming from the balcony.  Union leaders were having trouble keeping the crowd under control.  Then, Mario Cuomo was announced as the next speaker.

The crowd broke into sustained applause, upstairs and down, cheering Cuomo just for showing up, knowing that Martin Luther King’s widow had cancelled. Mario Cuomo, instead of ignoring the division among the union members, seized on it, delivering a passionate appeal for 1199 members and all of organized labor to come together and “fight our common enemies of inequality, poverty and the need for more jobs, more education, and more access to health care.”  The Governor’s words brought the crowd to its feet and brought the union’s warring factions together, fleetingly, on a night when everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, like a black and white newsreel, frozen in time.

Jeff Schmaltz gave me a wink, acknowledging Cuomo’s accomplishment, and later showed me the obituary he had drafted in case the threat on The Governor’s life materialized.  I sucked in my breath, stunned.

“It comes with the territory, “ Jeff said.  “All of us who cover public figures carry these around.  We just have to fill in the blanks, if it comes to that.”

Cuomo got back in the unmarked State Police car waiting for him out in front of Town Hall on West 43^th Street, and phoned his long-time secretary, Mary Tragale, who, earlier, urged him not to challenge the threat on his life.

“Well, they missed,” he joked.

PBS’ brilliant series on “The Italian-Americans” features, among others, the contributions of New York’s Governor Mario M. Cuomo struggling mightily to elevate an ethnically-biased public’s perception of the intelligence and integrity of Italian Americans.  It also underscored why Bill Clinton’s crude attempt to stigmatize Cuomo, and all of us, still  sticks in my throat.

Clinton’s comments to his mistress Jennifer Flowers, on tape, that Mario Cuomo “acts like a Mafioso,” have always infuriated me.   The PBS series, depicting bigots murdering Italian immigrants because we looked different, ripped the scab off that wound once again.  To many of us, “Mafioso” is a code-word for “thug.”

For me, the monstrous slander was magnified because I knew how untrue it was, since I grew up with members of both the Gambino and the Genovese Crime families.   The word among the Mob guys, including my oldest brother who “ran” with John Gotti, was that Cuomo was “pure as snow” and could “never be reached.” What made Clinton’s crime for spreading his slime especially evil,  was that Mario Cuomo represented a civilization of achievement, and his presence in public life gave us hope for our future.  He was the anti-“Wise Guy”; the anti-thug.

After the Clinton/Flowers transcripts revealed raw prejudice against Italians by a Democratic Presidential candidate, I angrily exhaled an Op-Ed piece, to be submitted to the New York Times, under my own name.  The piece said, in part:

            “Foremost among the reasons I came to work for Mario Cuomo, is my deep conviction that Governor Cuomo is to Italian Americans what Martin Luther King, Jr. was to African-Americans, and what John F. Kennedy was to Irish-Americans and Catholics.  He represents the best of us—an articulate, intelligent, compassionate, Italian-American of great personal integrity who shatters the negative stereotype of Italians with which newspapers, television, books and movies are in love.”

“Young Italian kids in Bensonhurst, Ozone Park and Canarsie dress up like John Gotti, their hero.  They walk like him and talk like him and quit school like Gotti did, recording the third-highest drop-out rate in New York City, right behind Hispanics and African–Americans.  Some of us, led by the examples of Mario Cuomo, Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti, and  Professor Guido Calabresi of Yale Law School, have tried to show our children that there is another way, a better way—a good, honest life of service and learning and concern for the community.”

I lived what I was writing about, having grown up with that terrible conflict in my own family. This was not rhetoric; it was far too real.

            “Bill Clinton’s flippant comparison of Mario Cuomo to a “Mafioso” demonstrates that he neither understands what the most prominent Italian-American politician in the nation’s history means to us, nor how his acceptance of the word “Mafioso” in connection with Cuomo’s name is like a dagger thrust into our chest.”

“Mario Cuomo’s importance to Italian-Americans—which transcends politics—is that he acts exactly unlike a “Mafioso”; that his whole existence has been a living statement against organized crime; that he shows all Italian kids that there is another way to behave, another kind of life they can achieve, because he did.”

For Italian-Americans, the damage wrought by words that scar so deeply is not in our minds, but in the streets of our communities, at our dinner tables, and on the faces of our sons and daughters.”

Clinton’s tossing of the term “Mafioso” at Cuomo was a cultural insult that resonated through our generations—not unlike the use of the racist term “thug” lobbed loosely at Black men today.

I was writing what I knew and felt, and was prepared to put myself out front to protect my hero.   Cuomo was moved by my words, but also cautious.  He weighed the ramifications of one of his personal staff publishing such a powerful piece.  In bold, black script he wrote across the top of my Op-Ed Draft:  “Steve:  I’m concerned people will think this is something I influenced because of our relationship.  What do you think?  M—“

The “hot-headed Italian” being stereotyped by the media because of his human reaction to Clinton’s slur, had, in fact, calmed me down.  Intuitively, Cuomo understood the larger picture, and what was at stake for his State and the country if, either through surrogates or on his own, we continued to slug it out with Clinton over his coarse, anti-Italian sentiment.

PBS’ “The Italian-Americans” shows how stigma can damage the spirit, and cost lives.    Neither Cuomo, nor the Italian Poet/Labor Leader Arturo Giovannitti would have any of it.  To them, speaking some 80 years apart, all that really mattered was  “ a sincere heart, a search for truth,” and “doing battle against wrong.”