From USAToday.com
Wednesday is Veterans Day, when America remembers those who served in its armed forces.
Frank Caruso served in World War II. And this Veterans Day, just eight days shy of his 100th birthday, his memory still serves him remarkably well.
When asked for the secret to his longevity and happy life, he turns to Anna, his wife of 72 years.
“There she is,” he said. “There’s the secret.”
Then Caruso offers another suggestion.
“I have a longevity medicine,” he said. “One Absolut vodka martini a day, just one, with a drop of Vermouth and no fruit.”
Caruso’s stories fly with flecks of tantalizing detail, from the shadow of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius to “Mad Men”-era New York and beyond.
“I have to think, ‘What era did I do that in?’ because I sort of had separate different lives that I’ve lived through the years,” Caruso said. “You try to remember them in groups.”
99 years, 51 weeks
Each “group” is well-represented as Caruso speaks, inching his wheelchair forward, a storyteller eager to be closer to his audience at a New York retirement home.
There were the early years in Detroit, before his tailor-father Michele Caruso, a native of Abruzzo, Italy, moved the family to the Bronx in 1929. Then came the Depression and his war years in the Army — service that found him in Rome, shaking hands with Pope Pius XII.
After the war came his wife, Anna, and their two children.
Caruso spent years as a commercial artist on New York City’s Madison Avenue. From 1956 to 1987, he worked in commercial packaging for American Can Company, in Midtown Manhattan and, later, Greenwich, Connecticut.
That he has lived 99 years and 51 weeks – through war and, now pandemic – is remarkable. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that fewer than 325,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are still alive.
He wears a mask out of deference to the coronavirus pandemic – which has hit the elderly hardest, accounting for 171,814 deaths of those age 65 or older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Cold, heat, mud
When Caruso remembers his military service – as an artillery instrument operator, siting shells in Gen. Mark Clark’s Fifth Army in North Africa and the invasion of Italy – his memories are part battle objectives, part weather report.
“You listen to artillery shells all day long, back and forth,” he said. “The Germans shelling, the Americans shelling all day.”
Caruso moved onto Corsica and on to Salerno, as the Americans worked their way up Italy’s “boot.” There was time spent in Naples, where, at night, he could see flames rising from a simmering Mount Vesuvius.
There was, by Caruso’s account, all kinds of weather, conjuring images from Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose work regularly depicted soggy GIs in flooded foxholes.
Caruso’s basic training was on “bitter cold Cape Cod,” followed by a landing in North Africa, “where it was 120 degrees in the shade.”
Read the full story at USAToday.com
