NEW CASTLE —
Prior to World War II, Joseph Gabriel made the clay used to fashion fine dinnerware at the Shenango Pottery.
More than seven decades later, his grandson also created a bit of raw material that turned into something special.
Brian Vasconi, a sophomore at Hickory High School, handed in a report this spring on the 1939-45 global conflict in which his grandfather served. The assignment earned him more than just a good grade. It also wound up reconnecting Gabriel with his best buddy from the service, Albany, N.Y., resident Anthony Maffeo.
Gabriel and Maffeo had not heard from each other since their 4.2 inch mortar platoon came home from Okinawa 65 years ago.
“Anthony and I were best buddies all through the Army,” explained Gabriel, who lives with his wife, Veronica, of Clarence Avenue.
“I sort of got goose bumps,” Maffeo, 88, said of hearing his friend’s voice for the first time since the war’s end. “It was a surprise and quite nice to get to talk to him again.
“I have to say, though, that I didn’t know where to start or what to say.”
It all began with that report.
LIVING HISTORY
Vasconi was instructed to interview a World War II veteran as part of a paper he was doing for school. Fortunately, he had one right in the family.
And Joe Gabriel had no shortage of tales to tell.
He recalls how it took a month aboard a crammed ship to sail a circuitous route through the Pacific to get from Seattle to Okinawa.
“The waters were booby trapped,” he explained, “so we had to go all over. I don’t know how we made it over in that ship, with all the guys on it. I thought the boat was going to sink.”
He remembers having to flush Japanese soldiers from caves in which they were hiding on Okinawa.
“We’d use flamethrowers to burn them out, whatever we had to do,” he said. “Sherman said ‘War is hell,’ and it is. You do whatever you have to do, to do away with your enemy. It’s war. It’s real.”
And he recalls, prior to being sent overseas, working with poison gas at his military base in Alabama.
“We experimented with masks, in case the Germans or Japanese started using poison gas, so we’d know how to handle it,” Gabriel said. “They never used it, thank goodness. I don’t think there’s anything worse than poison gas.”
But most of all, he remembered Anthony Maffeo.
“When I was interviewing him, he kept bringing up one name, over and over: Anthony Maffeo,” Vasconi said. “He remembered that he lived in New York. I wondered if he could still be alive, so I got on the Internet and started to look for him.
“I found an Anthony Maffeo who was 88 and living in Albany, N.Y., and I got his phone number.”
Vasconi wondered what the chances were that this actually could be his grandfather’s friend, but he told his uncle — Gabriel’s son, Joe Gabriel Jr. — what he found and gave him the phone number.
MAKING THE CALL
Joe Jr. knew in his heart that Brian had struck pay dirt.
“I figured, ‘How many 88-year-old Anthony Maffeos from Albany, New York, could there be?’” he said. “So I picked up the phone. It was an unbelievable call.”
Maffeo’s wife answered the phone, and at first, Joe Jr. didn’t know how to begin. So he told the woman his name was Joe Gabriel and he was calling from New Castle, Pa.
That’s all the further he got.
“She said, ‘Stop! You were my husband’s best friend in Okinawa.’ I said, ‘No, ma’am, I’m his son.’ And she said, ‘We’ve been trying to reconnect with Joe for years, but we didn’t know where to start. We didn’t even know if he’d still be alive.’
“I said, ‘Very much so.’ “
Joe Jr. then spoke to Maffeo himself, and “it was almost like talking with my father — like they were the same guy. We had a wonderful conversation for a half hour or 45 minutes.”
Joe Jr. gave Maffeo his father’s number, then called his father to tell him that his long-lost best friend would be calling him in about 20 minutes.
“Dad said, ‘You’re kidding me,’” he recalled. “And then Tony called, and they finally reconnected after all those years. Later on, he even sent us some pictures of them during the war.”
While each veteran fondly recalls the time spent with the other, neither can pinpoint exactly what drew them together.
“I think we were sort of two of a kind,” Maffeo said from his home in Albany. “He was the quiet type. I was the quiet type — at least when I was young. Now you can’t stop me from talking.
“And I think we were the only two Northerners — possibly there was one other fellow — in a battalion of Southerners. I don’t know how we got stuck there, but we did. But they treated us nice. When you’re always with the same group of fellows, you become close to all of them.”
Maffeo related that he and his wife did make one post-war attempt to find Gabriel. Returning home from a cross-country car trip to California about 56 years ago, they stopped in New Castle to see if they could find him.
“We went to where we thought Joe worked, and nobody had ever heard of him,” Maffeo said. “So I thought we were in the wrong place, and we just went home.
“After that, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know where he is. I’ll wait. Maybe he’ll find me someday. And he sure did.”
HOME RUN
The two have yet to meet face to face. Gabriel broke his hip recently, and although he can get around with the help of a walker, he is unable to travel. His family is trying to arrange a visit from the Maffeos.
“My wife and I keep talking about it,” Maffeo said. “I drive, I still have my license, and I still don’t have to wear glasses driving.”
For Gabriel, a reunion likely would be one of the most thrilling events since he watched baseball legend Babe Ruth swat his final three home runs — including a never-before-accomplished shot over the roof of the right field stands — at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.
“He put on a show wherever he went,” Gabriel said. “He was a powerful guy.”
Perhaps the same could be said for his grandson. Who else could take a simple school assignment and turn it into a reunion that, for the longest time, seemed destined never to occur?
“I never thought it would go this far,” Vasconi conceded. “It was just something I had to do for school, and it ended up reconnecting these two.”
