May 10, 2024 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Lee Habeeb opens up about his mother's life and legacy in the patch of earth in Northern New Jersey she cared for, and influenced with her love, grace, and class.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories and our special
celebration of Mother's Day. 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.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
We lost someone who lived for us, someone who.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Loved us, someone who would have done anything for us,
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,
(00:52):
the stories of her childhood were mostly fond one. She
grew up in West New York, New Jersey, a densely
populated town three miles from downtown New York City. Like
the neighboring cities of Hoboken, Union City and Jersey City,
West New York was packed with immigrant families from all
over Europe. First generation Poles, Jews, Irish, and German families
(01:14):
all had distinct cultures, food, and languages. Her parents were
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.
(01:35):
America changed them and the lives of their family. Her
parents wanted their children to assimilate into the fabric of
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
(01:56):
adapt to the kids. The kids adapted to the school system.
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.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Never really remembered many really hard times.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I didn't know we didn't have much because no one
else I knew had much. She would always tell us
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
(02:40):
and just what had happened to the American family, And
she knew it wasn't just lack of money that could
explain it, given the times she'd.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Grown up in. To have a family intact and have
families around you that.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Are intact, and churches around you, and she was surrounded
by Catholic and Protestant churches everywhere.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It's harder to imagine the kind of.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Poverty that we now know because there were kids who
were loved by families. My mom met 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
(03:25):
a stutterer and was shy about it, and ultimately it
could have easily after some very good sporting years, ended up,
as he put it, in the penal system 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
(03:45):
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, there were
always kids. By the time they were thirty, they had
four of us to take care of.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Were they ready for it all?
Speaker 1 (04:06):
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. I remember as a
kid looking at pictures of Mom and Dad before they.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Became the adults they became.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
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
mom and did his sacrifice irritated them.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
They were doing what they were supposed to do.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
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 and groom grinning as they cut
their wedding cake, celebrating on a rooftop in a neighboring building.
(05:07):
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, was watching a marriage grow. In the
early days, my dad had a temper. It actually scared
(05:28):
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 would just call it quits, But always, always,
the next day came and there they were. As time passed,
(05:50):
Dad's temper fated. As Dad's temper fated and he got
more comfortable, the marriage settled.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
My mom had learned a lot.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Picked less fights and just with her patience, let him
grow up. As 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.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
The coffee they.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Had every morning, the daily run to the supermarket, the
evening coffee out by the pool, listening to war on
the transistor radio, the early dinners at a local bar
for pizza and mussels 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
(06:44):
eye witness didn't look like anything I saw in movies.
It looked like something so much better, 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 Bonnaffer who said this in a letter to
(07:08):
his niece before her wedding quote, it's 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,
(07:29):
there are too many to count. But 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.
(07:50):
But in the end, as we grew up and left home,
a little part of my mom well just died because
in the end what gave her the greatest satisfaction was motherhood.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
It just did not work.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
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 couldn't afford it. The negotiation was
always I really can't afford that Chris, and Chris would say, well.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Just pay me what you can.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
I also remember my mom as a warrior.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
An African American couple moved into town with a beautiful family,
and there were some.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Efforts to resist this, and it's called blockbusting.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
That was the discrimination pattern of the North the South
that their's the North had, Well, we had our own too.
And I'm broadcasting from Oxford, Mississippi, and speaking about segregation
in New Jersey.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
But it happened, and my mom fought that.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
It was rough go and.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
My mom also always stood up for the young Jewish
kids in the neighborhood, so discrimination was something she just
did well.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
She didn't stomach well.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
The other big 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.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
She lost her brother in World War Two.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
He was a paratrooper and was killed in France not
long after D Day, and I was honored with that presentation.
My 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
(09:57):
in cigarettes for her more menthols, and I would sneak
in a really.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Good meal there.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
She said, the stuff here is rubbish, you can't eat it,
and so I would 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.
(10:25):
And those are the fondest memories I have of my mom.
Those are just some 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.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Here on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories and our special
celebration of Mother's Day. 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.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
We lost someone who lived for us, someone who.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Loved us, someone who would have done anything for us,
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,
(00:52):
the stories of her childhood were mostly fond one. She
grew up in West New York, New Jersey, a densely
populated town three miles from downtown New York City. Like
the neighboring cities of Hoboken, Union City and Jersey City,
West New York was packed with immigrant families from all
over Europe. First generation Poles, Jews, Irish, and German families
(01:14):
all had distinct cultures, food, and languages. Her parents were
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.
(01:35):
America changed them and the lives of their family. Her
parents wanted their children to assimilate into the fabric of
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
(01:56):
adapt to the kids. The kids adapted to the school system.
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.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Never really remembered many really hard times.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I didn't know we didn't have much because no one
else I knew had much. She would always tell us
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
(02:40):
and just what had happened to the American family, And
she knew it wasn't just lack of money that could
explain it, given the times she'd.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Grown up in. To have a family intact and have
families around you that.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Are intact, and churches around you, and she was surrounded
by Catholic and Protestant churches everywhere.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
It's harder to imagine the kind of.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Poverty that we now know because there were kids who
were loved by families. My mom met 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
(03:25):
a stutterer and was shy about it, and ultimately it
could have easily after some very good sporting years, ended up,
as he put it, in the penal system 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
(03:45):
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, there were
always kids. By the time they were thirty, they had
four of us to take care of.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Were they ready for it all?
Speaker 1 (04:06):
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. I remember as a
kid looking at pictures of Mom and Dad before they.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Became the adults they became.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
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
mom and did his sacrifice irritated them.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
They were doing what they were supposed to do.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
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 and groom grinning as they cut
their wedding cake, celebrating on a rooftop in a neighboring building.
(05:07):
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, was watching a marriage grow. In the
early days, my dad had a temper. It actually scared
(05:28):
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 would just call it quits, But always, always,
the next day came and there they were. As time passed,
(05:50):
Dad's temper fated. As Dad's temper fated and he got
more comfortable, the marriage settled.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
My mom had learned a lot.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Picked less fights and just with her patience, let him
grow up. As 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.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
The coffee they.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Had every morning, the daily run to the supermarket, the
evening coffee out by the pool, listening to war on
the transistor radio, the early dinners at a local bar
for pizza and mussels 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
(06:44):
eye witness didn't look like anything I saw in movies.
It looked like something so much better, 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 Bonnaffer who said this in a letter to
(07:08):
his niece before her wedding quote, it's 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,
(07:29):
there are too many to count. But 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.
(07:50):
But in the end, as we grew up and left home,
a little part of my mom well just died because
in the end what gave her the greatest satisfaction was motherhood.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
It just did not work.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
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 couldn't afford it. The negotiation was
always I really can't afford that Chris, and Chris would say, well.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Just pay me what you can.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
I also remember my mom as a warrior.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
An African American couple moved into town with a beautiful family,
and there were some.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Efforts to resist this, and it's called blockbusting.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
That was the discrimination pattern of the North the South
that their's the North had, Well, we had our own too.
And I'm broadcasting from Oxford, Mississippi, and speaking about segregation
in New Jersey.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
But it happened, and my mom fought that.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
It was rough go and.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
My mom also always stood up for the young Jewish
kids in the neighborhood, so discrimination was something she just
did well.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
She didn't stomach well.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
The other big 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.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
She lost her brother in World War Two.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
He was a paratrooper and was killed in France not
long after D Day, and I was honored with that presentation.
My 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
(09:57):
in cigarettes for her more menthols, and I would sneak
in a really.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Good meal there.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
She said, the stuff here is rubbish, you can't eat it,
and so I would 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.
(10:25):
And those are the fondest memories I have of my mom.
Those are just some 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.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.