January 13, 2026 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Lee Habeeb, host of Our American Stories, reflects on his mother’s life and the quiet legacy she left behind. Set in the patch of Northern New Jersey she cared for and shaped, this is a deeply personal meditation on love, grace, character, and the influence a parent carries long after they are gone. It’s the eulogy he never gave, and the story he chose to share.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
And we continue with our American stories. And now it's
time for my own celebration of my own mother and
her life. The world didn't notice when she died in
December of twenty twelve at the age of eighty, but
those of us who knew her and loved her, we
all noticed. We lost someone who lived for us, someone
who loved us, someone who would have done anything for us,
(00:35):
and her friends, even strangers. Christina LaPadula, my mom came
into the world in December of nineteen thirty two, a
pretty tough time to be born, you'd think. Though she
grew up through the Great Depression and World War II,
the stories of her childhood were mostly fond one. She
(00:55):
grew up in West New York, New Jersey, a densely
populated town are miles from downtown New York City. Like
the neighboring cities of Hoboken, Union City and Jersey City,
Western New York was packed with immigrant families from all
over Europe. First generation Poles, Jews, Irish, and German families
all had distinct cultures, food, and languages. Her parents were
(01:21):
both from Italy and came to this country with no
money and no education. Neither could speak English like all
of the immigrants in their neighborhood. Her parents didn't come
to America to change the country. They came to have
America changed them and the lives of their family. Her
parents wanted their children to assimilate into the fabric of
(01:42):
their adopted homeland, and to do it fast. That meant
no speaking Italian in the house. Luckily for her, the
English as a second language movement in education had not
yet been born. The school systems of the day didn't
adapt to the kids. The kids adapted to the school system.
(02:04):
My mom lived in a small, five story walk up
apartment with her sister Marie and her brother John. The
streets bustled with NonStop action and drama, and though times
were tough, my mom never really remembered many really hard times.
I didn't know we didn't have much because no one
else I knew had much. She would always tell us
(02:24):
we were never poor. She would always add, we didn't
have money, but we were never poor. I remember my
mom seeing some of the tough neighborhoods in the sixties
and the seventies, and mothers pushing baby carriages and graffiti,
and just what had happened to the American family, and
she knew it wasn't just lack of money that could
(02:46):
explain it, given the times she'd grown up in to
have a family intact and have families around you that
are intact and churches around you, and she was surrounded
by Catholic and Protestant churches where it's harder to imagine
the kind of poverty that we now know, because there
were kids who were loved by families. My mom met
(03:13):
her husband to be in high school. She was the
captain of the cheerleading team. He was the captain of
the basketball team. And yes, these things happen in life.
My dad was a stutterer and was shy about it
and ultimately could have easily after some very good sporting years,
ended up, as he put it, in the penal system
(03:35):
because he had a temper and he was angry at
the world for this affliction of stuttering. And my mom
knew it and ultimately worked with him, loved on him,
and got him through college and he became an educator.
My parents got married right after dad graduated from college,
but they never took time to be a married couple.
(03:57):
There were always kids. By the time they were thirty,
they had four of us to take care of. Were
they ready for it all? Well, Mom didn't ask that
kind of question, nor did Dad or any of them
back in the nineteen fifties. They were probably better off.
No matter how long we delay such things, we're never ready.
(04:18):
I remember as a kid looking at pictures of Mom
and Dad before they became the adults they became. They
looked like grown ups even in their high school yearbooks,
as did most of their peers. Why did they sacrifice
so much? We asked that a lot of both of them.
I learned as I got older that calling what my
(04:39):
mom and did his sacrifice irritated them. They were doing
what they were supposed to do. No one back then
thought postponing adolescents into their thirties was an option. They
started things, They started lives, They started families and careers.
One picture from their wedding is my favorite. Young bride
(05:00):
and groom grinning as they cut their wedding cake, celebrating
on a rooftop in a neighboring building. No wedding planners, folks,
no exotic honeymoons. It was a drive up and down
in Niagara Falls and back to life. One of the
great gifts my mom gave me. Along with my dad,
(05:23):
was watching a marriage grow. In the early days, my
dad had a temper It actually scared all of us.
He never hit anybody, but just the power of his voice, well,
it almost made all of us cry. None of us
understood what the fights were about. What kid does? They
probably didn't know either. Sometimes I thought one of them
(05:43):
would just call it quits. But always, always, the next
day came and there they were. As time passed, Dad's
temper fated. As Dad's temper fated and he got more comfortable,
the marriage settled. My mom had learned a lot less fights,
and just with her patience, let him grow up. As
(06:06):
I got older, I came to appreciate the small things,
the daily habits and rituals that my dad and mom shared.
Those rituals and rhythms of life gave me a great
sense of stability, a great sense that relationships can last,
that love can last. The coffee they had every morning,
the daily run to the supermarket, the evening coffee out
(06:27):
by the pool, listening to War on the transistor radio.
The early dinners at a local bar for pizza and muscles, marinera,
the card games Mom always won them. The habits of
love were there for me to observe and later in life,
to imitate. The love eye witness didn't look like anything
I saw in movies. It looked like something so much better,
(06:50):
something within reach. The constancy, the consistency, the mutual understanding.
None of it was terribly exciting, but it was good
for me. It was good for my parents too. There's
a line of theologian Dietrich Bonneffer, who said this in
a letter to his niece before her wedding quote, it's
(07:10):
not your love that sustains your marriage, but from now on,
the marriage that sustains your love. That lesson may be
the greatest lesson. My mom and my dad taught me
marriage sustains love. The number of things my mom did
for us, well, there are too many to count. But
(07:32):
the thing we all most appreciated was her taking a
job as a secretary at a local college, fairly Dickinson University,
so all four of us could go through college for free.
And by the way, there were two years where all
four of us were in college at the same time.
By the way, my mom loved doing it, loved the work.
But in the end, as we grew up and left home.
(07:53):
A little part of my mom well just died because
in the end, what gave her the greatest satisfaction was motherhood.
It just did not work. She had a thrift shop
called Anything Goes in our little town, and we're not
sure whether it ever made money. Dad never came clean.
He never told us the truth about that. But I
always watched my mom give stuff away to people who
(08:15):
couldn't afford it. The negotiation was always I really can't
afford that Chris, and Chris would say, well, just pay
me what you can. Not exactly the way forward for
a great business enterprise, but I think my mom ran
that business just to just keep her maternal instincts going
and just continue to help and serve folks. I also
remember my mom as a warrior. An African American couple
(08:38):
moved into town with a beautiful family, and there were
some efforts to resist this, and it's called blockbusting. That
was the discrimination pattern of the North. The South had theirs,
the North had well, we had our own too. And
I'm broadcasting from Oxford, Mississippi and speaking about segregation in
New Jersey. But it happened, and my mom fought that
(08:58):
she remembered as a young Italian girl being called wap
and daego, and Italians did not get perfect treatment from
their white European brothers and sisters. It was rough go
and my mom also always stood up for the young
Jewish kids in the neighborhood, so discrimination was something she
just didn't well, She didn't stomach well. The other big
(09:21):
memory I have is of my mom sharing with me
one day as she gave to me the purple heart
and the picture of her brother's tombstone in Sant Lauran, France.
She lost her brother in World War Two. He was
a paratrooper and was killed in France not long after
D Day, and I was honored with that presentation. My
(09:44):
mom gave it to me and it hangs in my
office still. My last memory of my mom is at
the nursing home. I remember those last days. I would
always take the late shift and I would sneak in
cigarettes for her more menthols, and I would sneak in
a really good meal there. She said, the stuff here
is rubbish, you can't eat it, and so I would
(10:06):
bring in all the food she wasn't allowed to eat
and we'd go outside in the dark and in the
cold at midnight, I'd turn on that transistor radio and
put on her favorite station, try and catch some Sinatra oldies,
and she would puff away and then slice up a
good steak with some of the great macaroni and cheese
at the diner next door. And those are the fondest
memories I have of my mom. Those are just some
(10:29):
of the stories I remember so many more. I don't
have the time to tell the life of Christina LaPadula,
Christina Habib, my mom. Here on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. And now it's
time for my own celebration of my own mother and
her life. The world didn't notice when she died in
December of twenty twelve at the age of eighty, but
those of us who knew her and loved her, we
all noticed. We lost someone who lived for us, someone
who loved us, someone who would have done anything for us,
(00:35):
and her friends, even strangers. Christina LaPadula, my mom came
into the world in December of nineteen thirty two, a
pretty tough time to be born, you'd think. Though she
grew up through the Great Depression and World War II,
the stories of her childhood were mostly fond one. She
(00:55):
grew up in West New York, New Jersey, a densely
populated town are miles from downtown New York City. Like
the neighboring cities of Hoboken, Union City and Jersey City,
Western New York was packed with immigrant families from all
over Europe. First generation Poles, Jews, Irish, and German families
all had distinct cultures, food, and languages. Her parents were
(01:21):
both from Italy and came to this country with no
money and no education. Neither could speak English like all
of the immigrants in their neighborhood. Her parents didn't come
to America to change the country. They came to have
America changed them and the lives of their family. Her
parents wanted their children to assimilate into the fabric of
(01:42):
their adopted homeland, and to do it fast. That meant
no speaking Italian in the house. Luckily for her, the
English as a second language movement in education had not
yet been born. The school systems of the day didn't
adapt to the kids. The kids adapted to the school system.
(02:04):
My mom lived in a small, five story walk up
apartment with her sister Marie and her brother John. The
streets bustled with NonStop action and drama, and though times
were tough, my mom never really remembered many really hard times.
I didn't know we didn't have much because no one
else I knew had much. She would always tell us
(02:24):
we were never poor. She would always add, we didn't
have money, but we were never poor. I remember my
mom seeing some of the tough neighborhoods in the sixties
and the seventies, and mothers pushing baby carriages and graffiti,
and just what had happened to the American family, and
she knew it wasn't just lack of money that could
(02:46):
explain it, given the times she'd grown up in to
have a family intact and have families around you that
are intact and churches around you, and she was surrounded
by Catholic and Protestant churches where it's harder to imagine
the kind of poverty that we now know, because there
were kids who were loved by families. My mom met
(03:13):
her husband to be in high school. She was the
captain of the cheerleading team. He was the captain of
the basketball team. And yes, these things happen in life.
My dad was a stutterer and was shy about it
and ultimately could have easily after some very good sporting years,
ended up, as he put it, in the penal system
(03:35):
because he had a temper and he was angry at
the world for this affliction of stuttering. And my mom
knew it and ultimately worked with him, loved on him,
and got him through college and he became an educator.
My parents got married right after dad graduated from college,
but they never took time to be a married couple.
(03:57):
There were always kids. By the time they were thirty,
they had four of us to take care of. Were
they ready for it all? Well, Mom didn't ask that
kind of question, nor did Dad or any of them
back in the nineteen fifties. They were probably better off.
No matter how long we delay such things, we're never ready.
(04:18):
I remember as a kid looking at pictures of Mom
and Dad before they became the adults they became. They
looked like grown ups even in their high school yearbooks,
as did most of their peers. Why did they sacrifice
so much? We asked that a lot of both of them.
I learned as I got older that calling what my
(04:39):
mom and did his sacrifice irritated them. They were doing
what they were supposed to do. No one back then
thought postponing adolescents into their thirties was an option. They
started things, They started lives, They started families and careers.
One picture from their wedding is my favorite. Young bride
(05:00):
and groom grinning as they cut their wedding cake, celebrating
on a rooftop in a neighboring building. No wedding planners, folks,
no exotic honeymoons. It was a drive up and down
in Niagara Falls and back to life. One of the
great gifts my mom gave me. Along with my dad,
(05:23):
was watching a marriage grow. In the early days, my
dad had a temper It actually scared all of us.
He never hit anybody, but just the power of his voice, well,
it almost made all of us cry. None of us
understood what the fights were about. What kid does? They
probably didn't know either. Sometimes I thought one of them
(05:43):
would just call it quits. But always, always, the next
day came and there they were. As time passed, Dad's
temper fated. As Dad's temper fated and he got more comfortable,
the marriage settled. My mom had learned a lot less fights,
and just with her patience, let him grow up. As
(06:06):
I got older, I came to appreciate the small things,
the daily habits and rituals that my dad and mom shared.
Those rituals and rhythms of life gave me a great
sense of stability, a great sense that relationships can last,
that love can last. The coffee they had every morning,
the daily run to the supermarket, the evening coffee out
(06:27):
by the pool, listening to War on the transistor radio.
The early dinners at a local bar for pizza and muscles, marinera,
the card games Mom always won them. The habits of
love were there for me to observe and later in life,
to imitate. The love eye witness didn't look like anything
I saw in movies. It looked like something so much better,
(06:50):
something within reach. The constancy, the consistency, the mutual understanding.
None of it was terribly exciting, but it was good
for me. It was good for my parents too. There's
a line of theologian Dietrich Bonneffer, who said this in
a letter to his niece before her wedding quote, it's
(07:10):
not your love that sustains your marriage, but from now on,
the marriage that sustains your love. That lesson may be
the greatest lesson. My mom and my dad taught me
marriage sustains love. The number of things my mom did
for us, well, there are too many to count. But
(07:32):
the thing we all most appreciated was her taking a
job as a secretary at a local college, fairly Dickinson University,
so all four of us could go through college for free.
And by the way, there were two years where all
four of us were in college at the same time.
By the way, my mom loved doing it, loved the work.
But in the end, as we grew up and left home.
(07:53):
A little part of my mom well just died because
in the end, what gave her the greatest satisfaction was motherhood.
It just did not work. She had a thrift shop
called Anything Goes in our little town, and we're not
sure whether it ever made money. Dad never came clean.
He never told us the truth about that. But I
always watched my mom give stuff away to people who
(08:15):
couldn't afford it. The negotiation was always I really can't
afford that Chris, and Chris would say, well, just pay
me what you can. Not exactly the way forward for
a great business enterprise, but I think my mom ran
that business just to just keep her maternal instincts going
and just continue to help and serve folks. I also
remember my mom as a warrior. An African American couple
(08:38):
moved into town with a beautiful family, and there were
some efforts to resist this, and it's called blockbusting. That
was the discrimination pattern of the North. The South had theirs,
the North had well, we had our own too. And
I'm broadcasting from Oxford, Mississippi and speaking about segregation in
New Jersey. But it happened, and my mom fought that
(08:58):
she remembered as a young Italian girl being called wap
and daego, and Italians did not get perfect treatment from
their white European brothers and sisters. It was rough go
and my mom also always stood up for the young
Jewish kids in the neighborhood, so discrimination was something she
just didn't well, She didn't stomach well. The other big
(09:21):
memory I have is of my mom sharing with me
one day as she gave to me the purple heart
and the picture of her brother's tombstone in Sant Lauran, France.
She lost her brother in World War Two. He was
a paratrooper and was killed in France not long after
D Day, and I was honored with that presentation. My
(09:44):
mom gave it to me and it hangs in my
office still. My last memory of my mom is at
the nursing home. I remember those last days. I would
always take the late shift and I would sneak in
cigarettes for her more menthols, and I would sneak in
a really good meal there. She said, the stuff here
is rubbish, you can't eat it, and so I would
(10:06):
bring in all the food she wasn't allowed to eat
and we'd go outside in the dark and in the
cold at midnight, I'd turn on that transistor radio and
put on her favorite station, try and catch some Sinatra oldies,
and she would puff away and then slice up a
good steak with some of the great macaroni and cheese
at the diner next door. And those are the fondest
memories I have of my mom. Those are just some
(10:29):
of the stories I remember so many more. I don't
have the time to tell the life of Christina LaPadula,
Christina Habib, my mom. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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