I was born Rocco Vanasco, January 5, 1926, in Fort Green, Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, at my grandfather's house, at 178 Clermont Ave. My brother Jack, who's here with me, was born on March 5, 1928, he's two years younger. We were five brothers and grew up there with my mother and father, my grandfather, my grandmother at that house. It was a quiet neighborhood.
I attended the local Precinct Community Council's Police Athletic League, and I learned a lot about boxing, it was an enjoyable time. I graduated from the John Jay High School. But before that, I was a member of the New York National Guard, 27th Division, with my brother Jack, my brother Joe, and about a dozen friends of ours. When the war broke out in December 1941, we all joined the Home Guard, which later became the National Guard. But we weren't old enough; we lied about our age when we joined. They wanted to ship us out to Hawaii with the Home Guard, and all the parents on the block and in the neighborhood, whose children lied about their age, all stormed in to see the general, and the general reprimanded the mothers: "You never should've signed the papers to enlist your sons in the Home Guard." But he gave us all honorable discharges, one is up on the wall there, and my brother Jack has his.
I graduated from high school in January 1943, and enlisted in the Navy. As I joined the Navy, I left home, and I headed up to upstate New York where we trained. I have to say, being trained with the Home Guard gave me a huge advantage and once my superiors found out about that, they made me a supervisor on the floor that we were on. And it was a little easier on me, I didn't have to wash the toilets and do all that, because I was busy helping the newcomers like myself, still suffering from leaving Brooklyn with getting accustomed to the new settings. As for the most of us - it was the first time we ever left Brooklyn. Maybe we went to New York to see our uncles or something, or on vacation some place up in the Catskills, other than that, none of us really got out.
Some of them were pretty downhearted, someone cried. I was good. I comforted a lot of guys. We had all kinds of nationalities: black, white, Hispanic - all coming from Brooklyn. And we enjoyed the two-months training. It made a man out of you right away. I mean, you weren't mamma's little boy anymore! You did your own washing, you took care of yourself, you protected yourself. And my brother Joe who was Master Sargent in the Home Guard with us, he always said: "You always gotta fight for yourself, and never take any bullshit from anybody, no matter how big or small they are - you gotta fight." I was a boxer in the PAL, and I learned how to fight from my brother Joe who was in the Golden Gloves. There were a couple of guys who were rough, and I wouldn't take anything. I always remembered: "Fight back, fight back. Don't sit back and take any bull crap from anybody, no matter who they are. But you gotta be right. You gotta be right." I always thought about what my brother Joe told me and always fought back.
After we trained upstate, I got on the train and went to California, where I waited to be shipped out to Hawaii. At San Diego I was put on the first carrier, which was a baby carrier. I had my seabag and all my stuff. There were no bunks at that time so we had to use our hammocks. After being out in the Pacific for some time doing routines I got transferred to another ship, the aircraft carrier 70 Fanshaw Bay. There I caught pneumonia and ended up in Balboa Park hospital. I stayed there for some time and was cured. People in California were real nice to me. They invited me and other sailors to visit, because their houses were empty, all their kids were away, except the girls, their daughters. And that was great for a sailor, you know.
When I got over pneumonia, I ended up going back to San Diego and getting on the DE-164 Osterhaus. It was a destroyer escort. We were at the Admiral Halsey's fleet most of the time, protecting battleships, aircraft carriers. It was our duty and our main purpose was to protect the fleet. It was our job to weave in and out from the outside in case the Japanese let go of any torpedoes. That was the job of destroyers and destroyer escorts. We always traveled in groups of six destroyers. We were a team.
So, when we left San Diego, we went out on a shakedown cruise, and everything was good, we came right back, and then about a week later, we finally left. We went underneath the bridge in San Francisco, and we headed for Hawaii. And that same night I was sea-sick. I was sea-sick for five days. And the guys who were good seamen, helped me with crackers and things like that, but I had to carry a bucket so if I had to, you know, relieve myself, it was in the bucket, not on the deck that I had to clean. In five days I was cured, I was a real seaman, I was a real sailor now. We had our tour of Hawaii and all that, we were there a couple of weeks. We had to load up the ship with food, and that was another job of somebody new who got on the ship. We would find any food that we could load up on the ship to go out for months. And that was the job of young, 18-year-olds. The older guys, the 25-years-old - they were old. Thirty years old - oh god, they were old men. We were 18 years old, so we had plenty of energy.
And from Hawaii we just went from one island to another. We had a lot of encounters with the Japanese, but no hits. There were plenty of kamikaze planes. When we were in a convoy, they hit ships: aircraft carriers, the Hornet, the Essex... They were looking for big ships, the big carriers, but they hit destroyers too. And once they did hit a destroyer in our convoy, and almost 250 kids got killed right away. Our own ship was never hit.
One time we were in a convoy with USS Franklin, that's an aircraft carrier. And it was hit. They said it was going to capsize and sink, but it didn't. So, as a convoy, we took it - in case the Japanese would try to sink it - we took it to another island where they were going to repair it. And it got there safely. We were like the Coast Guard, you know.
I liked being on a small destroyer, rather than the aircraft carrier, because you only had 250 guys there. On the aircraft carrier, that baby aircraft carrier, you had 2,500. And I didn't like the fact that on the aircraft carrier you had to wear dress blues at dinner. On the destroyer, all you had to do was wear clean clothes.
My own job was below the deck, on the bottom of the ship, which was technically speaking a diesel electric destroyer. I had to take orders from the captain; he would send the signal down to where I was, in the engine room, on the electric board, with meters and all that. And I would repeat the numbers that were sent down to me on my board. This would rev up the diesel engine, just like in happens in a car. These were Rolls Royce engines, and they were 20 feet, 30 feet long. That noise! 24 hours a day! They were run by diesel, but the electric was on the board, that's how it ran.
I was below deck and didn't know what was happening up there. I mean we had our headphones on, so the captain could inform us, but other than that we could only guess. So when the Japanese would attack we had no idea what was happening. We had to take orders and there wasn't much time to think about anything else. You were frightened when you first heard the whistles and all that. But I got used to it.
Towards the end of the war the kamikaze planes became very dangerous. When we saw what they did to some of the aircraft carriers, and some of the other transport ships that they sunk... And there were submarines everywhere too! We were lucky not to get hit.
About ten islands we hit, before we went to the island where the war ended. My last island was Miriam Island. And that's where the B-29 took off. The one that broke the war - the Enola Gay. And we were protecting that island when it happened. They took off at night, very early morning. We heard them, but we didn't see them. We didn't know that the planes are gonna drop the A-bomb. You know, as sailors, you didn't know anything. Scuttlebutt, it was called. Everything was always scuttlebutt. We were going to Japan, we knew that. But we never did end up going. In a few days we heard our captain on the loudspeaker, and told us what happened. He said: " The war is over". Everybody was dancing, yelling, screaming, crying... The war was over. It was a great day. The war was over, we were going home. We were gonna go home. The war was over. Most of us cried. Patted each other, hugged one another. And I still cry, as I remember that day.
When I got home, well... When you come home after the war, you gotta cry. You're home, you're alive. My older brother was alive, my other brother was alive. We were four brothers in World War II, and we all came home! Jack just got in towards the end of it, he was drafted in 1945 and was in the tank corps. He ended up in Japan working for General McArthur's headquarters. My brother Terry went through the war, Joey went, I went, Jack went, we all went. Tommy didn't go because of his ear perforations.
When I got back we docked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, two blocks away from our home. It was unbelievable, I just walked couple blocks and there I was at my house - my mother was happy, my father was happy. And I started a new life. It wasn't easy, because you could be home, in your house, and you could be happy that you were alive. That you lived, that you survived the experiences you had with the Japanese Navy, Japanese kamikaze planes... But thousands of kids got killed. We lost about 15-18 of our friends. We lost a lot of our friends that we grew up with. I had a close friend of mine who went on an island and got killed right away. He was in the Marines. His name was Ernie Marino. I played second base, he played third base, we grew up together. He died getting on the island. He didn't even have a chance. He was my next door neighbor, we played softball together...
My brother Joe was the one who got discharged because he hurt his back in the Army. He passed away due to a health problem he had, but essentially he died from penicillin. We lost Terry some years ago, and we also lost Tommy. So it's only Jack and I who are left.
After the war, I got a job, training for Genuine Refrigerator Company at 203 Atlantic Ave, where my brother Tommy was already working as a refrigerator mechanic, and I learned the trade and became Tom's assistant. I stayed there for a while, I learned every trade, and then I went to work for General Electric as an outside repairman on Northern Boulevard, and my father brought up the idea that I should open a business. So I looked around on Myrtle Avenue, and I found a place at 595 Myrtle Ave, and I opened up a business. This was a tuxedo store, the man passed away, his wife wanted to sell it, and I bought it for, you wouldn't believe it, $5,000. Which is now worth millions of dollars, after I bought the property next door from the city of New York. And this is where I am, and I'm proud to say, people have heard that we're leaving, and they come into my store, and they say: "Roy, you took care of my mother, my grandfather, they always talked about you, we used you..." - it made Jack and I really feel proud. That people came into the store, and they come here, one by one, they're hearing that we are selling and there's not going to be a store around where they can get stove parts, refrigerator parts, to fix their own appliances. There are no other stores in downtown Brooklyn or anywhere else! And all this that you see, all these photographs, all the years going back fifty years!
I became the 57th district leader. I opened up a Republican club, and I ran for the assembly, I ran for Congress, I ran for state senator as a Republican. When I was chairman of the community board, I was one of the first people to ask to remove the Brooklyn elevated train that used to run right above our store. I made the train come down and made the neighborhood change the way you see it today. And as chairman of the community board and the one who began the Myrtle Avenue Merchants Association, whatever you see on Myrtle Avenue today, it's the result of the Association's work, and I was its chairman for over forty years.
Another thing is that Jack and I have given our life to Brooklyn War Memorial. This is something very important to us. The Brooklyn War Memorial is a building that was built over 25-30 years ago, and hardly ever used. There are names of 2,500 soldiers inside this building, which is never used... So Jack and I took it upon ourselves to try to reopen the Brooklyn War Memorial on Fulton Street. The NYC Parks Department was trying to do some work there, and they didn't have any money to do it, so it started to deteriorate. But now we are finally going to get the money, and it's going to cost us $5 million to fix it. We've been pinpointed by the Parks Department to get this place open, Jack and I. That's what occupies my mind and time these days.
