When I described my grandparents’ garage-converted-house, where we lived for several months in 1948, I mentioned the “music room.” Such a designation may sound a bit strange. A music room and a collection of Caruso records were usually not found on the second floor of a masonry garage converted into a home. However, Uncle Joe, who really was in charge of the extended Camerino family, although his sister, Mary, might have disputed such a claim, was an avid opera buff. He enjoyed pointing out he had been blessed by living when both Enrico Caruso and Luciano Pavarotti were opera stars. Caruso died in 1921; Joe had been born in 1906, so the actual overlap lasted until he was fifteen.
Uncle Joe, himself, had sung opera in his younger years. It must have been during the middle of the “roaring twenties” that he performed with the Metropolitan Opera. Family legend was silent on any details, and I never inquired about his musical career. At one time, a photograph of Joe in operatic tights and blouse hung in the music room. How long he stayed in New York City and what occurred there remained a mystery. My guess was that the family called him back to Ohio to be part of the family business.
Once back home, my Uncle continued to listen to the great Caruso and owned a copy of every 78-rpm vinyl record Enrico made. Unfortunately, Joe began to go deaf at an early age. He made use of earphones, when they came along, to listen to his collection; but he died twenty years before technology allowed for the fidelity found today. When Uncle Joe died, my cousin Fremont, who was the executor of the estate, tried to donate the Caruso-Pavarotti collection to Youngstown University. However, the university was not interested and so all of those albums were tossed into the Niles city dump!
The music room, itself, was destroyed when the garage-house was torn down a few years ago. It had once been a place for opera and prayer. The room held a writer’s desk, many glass cabinents housing the record collection, and a couch for use while the records played on a very good Victrola. There was also a spinet piano. I don’t know who might have played it, although I did use it while we lived there. My short-time spent taking piano lessons did not have a large payoff.
As for the room’s use for prayer, this occurred, of course, during Caruso’s and Pavarotti’s performances, but also in another, typically Italian, way. The corner of the music room, where the doorways to all three of the adjoining bedrooms interconnected, was also the site for a built-in wall-niche accommodating all of the “house saints.”
Historically, Roman homes had a place for all of the Lares et Penates, the family gods and guardians. The true Italian home had a place for the statues and pictures of the saints special to the family. The music room niche housed ours, including a Christ figure inside a small lamp, the size of a lightbulb! Over the years, the lamp’s glass cover became blackened, as did the inside of many old bulbs, but it never, to my knowledge, burned out. I have no idea what became of it.
Our own bedroom in Houston now has a two-foot-high, glass case enclosing an Infant of Prague with a white-cloth gown and a red-cape sewed by Aunt Mary before I was born. Originally this statue was the focal point for the music room’s house-shrine. Later in life, I saw the original wax image in the Discalced Carmelite Church of Our Lady of Victory in Prague. The Christ-child, at that time, wore a blue cape rather than Aunt Mary’s red one. This bedroom relic, taken from its small shrine overlooking that old music room, has survived much better than the Caruso albums did.