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When James Gandolfini was eleven years old, in 1972, Paramount released The Godfather, and the gap between the rich and the poor in America was the smallest it has ever been in its history.
The Godfather was the capstone for a long series of hit gangster movies, beginning with Edward G. Robinson’s Little Caesar in 1931 and continuing, at regular intervals, through The Sopranos. For a long period The Godfather was the highest grossing film of all time. In a barbershop-mirror way, the world of The Godfather has replaced the reality of organized crime for many fans, and real gangsters now model themselves on its characters—on The Sopranos, we overhear thugs in tracksuits discussing the film’s finer points as if they were Roger Ebert.
Director Francis Ford Coppola hit upon the idea of turning the gangster into an analogue of the American capitalist, forced to adapt to survive, constantly changing with the times and the culture, and thereby slowly “losing the family.” It was a love letter to the stubborn ethnic cultures of the Northeast, which were being worn away by suburban mobility, rock ’n’ roll, and the general prosperity of the 1970s.
Of course, the Corleones were a New York crime family, and their idea of the suburbs, at least in Coppola’s imagination, was a fieldstone estate in Lake Tahoe. As the series progressed we got to see them not only kill their fellow Italian-American competitors but threaten movie producers and United States senators, successfully suborn the grand jury process and defy Congress. They were captains of industry, building the new world, convening corporate board meetings (only, instead of energy or railroads, they oversaw illegal booze, gambling, prostitution, and the labor rackets).
It was a little over the top.
The reality for Italian-Americans was less operatic than that. When Italians began immigrating to the United States in large numbers (between 1880 and 1920 some four million Italians recorded entry to the United States, more than any other ethnic group over a period lasting almost half a century), many of them settled in cheap housing in port cities. Factory work, dock labor, and construction jobs were mainstays.
Today, Little Italy in Manhattan is a tourist-trap vestige, a few blocks under constant threat of being swallowed by a burgeoning Chinatown. But back then the tenements were crowded with recent immigrants. They helped found similar concentrations in cities all around the region. Many of the new arrivals were uneducated peasants from the south of Italy, traditionally the poorest section of the boot, and they dreamed of moving out of the cities.
“The majority of Italians came after Garibaldi united Italy, and one of the outcomes of unification was compulsory education,” says Maria Laurino, who published a book in 2000, Were You Always an Italian?, about the woes of New Jersey Italian-American assimilation. David Chase read Laurino’s book, blurbed the paperback, and then distributed it among The Sopranos’ scriptwriters. Laurino was raised in the upscale suburb of Short Hills, New Jersey, but her father came from neighboring Millburn, which had a large concentration of southern Italians. Laurino, whose brother Robert is now an Essex County prosecutor, is descended from emigrants from Basilicata and Avellino; David Chase’s mother’s people come from Avellino, too.
“Most of them had been peasants for many, many generations,” Laurino says, “people who worked the soil. The dream was a little land in the country. But the idea of a son who’d be better educated than his father, who would not respect his father because he knew more—that was anathema to them. So that was one of the reasons why they moved to the United States in huge numbers. Compulsory education had been in place for years [in the United States], but they were already here when they found out.”
Many of these immigrants complained of American prejudice, of being asked to repeat themselves because of their accent or being followed around in department stores. More than one Italian-American has told me something like, “My grandfather never thought he was white.”
In New Jersey, the earliest concentrations of Italians were in Newark, first in the city near the factories and warehouses, and then in Vailsburg, on the city’s western border, and in mill towns like Paterson. In The Sopranos, Tony’s mother and father are buried in a graveyard in Vailsburg. The inner-belt suburbs offered factory work and tedious finishing jobs that could be done in the home (independent Italian garment workers, usually women, sewed “piecework”—“piece-a-work”—that paid per item of clothing completed long after the postwar boom began to fade).
New Jersey Italians began their long march toward that little piece of land in the countryside along Bloomfield Avenue, which runs roughly northwest out of the city toward the Caldwells (Tony Soprano’s McMansion was in North Caldwell). Bloomfield Avenue became known as “Guinea Gulch,” lined with Italian-American homes and businesses. Vesuvio, Artie Bucco’s restaurant in The Sopranos, was on Bloomfield Avenue—at least, until Tony had it firebombed so Uncle Junior couldn’t use it as a place to whack Little Pussy.
The Gulch forms the spine of the TV series, too. The famous opening credits sequence follows Tony in his SUV as he leaves the Lincoln Tunnel, passes through Newark (with its water towers painted like buckets), crosses the rusting steel truss bridges that embroider its edges, and then drives up Bloomfield Avenue to the Caldwells. Along the way we glimpse the shotgun step-back houses, sturdy bungalows, the Pizza Land shack, and finally the sweeping lawns of “the heights” (the hilly reaches of central Jersey) where the Soprano family manse sits on its cul-de-sac.
James Gandolfini’s parents came at the height of the prewar Italian wave, but moved in a different direction, almost straight north from Newark, at a right angle to the main postwar migration route.
James Joseph Gandolfini was born in Borgo Val di Taro in 1921, on a hillside a little more than a hundred miles outside of Milan, but he moved to the United States as a young man. The Gandolfinis still own land near Milan, a rocky plot the actor would later describe as “mostly covered with snakes.” During World War II, the older Gandolfini fought for the American army, winning a Purple Heart. He returned after the war to the area around Paterson and its suburb to the north, Paramus, where he worked as a bricklayer and cement mixer. He worked on the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson as a youngster, then worked construction in Jersey until he took the job as head custodian of the Paramus Catholic High School.
His wife, Santa, was born in New Jersey in 1924, but moved back to Naples as a child. She went back and forth her whole life. James and Santa had two daughters, Johanna (now Antonacci), who manages the Family Division of the Superior Court in Hackensack, and Leta Gandolfini, who would become the chief executive officer of a small dressmaking firm, Sunrise Brands. Johanna is thirteen years older and Leta is eleven years older than James John Gandolfini, the baby of the family. Jamie, as he was known until high school, was born even farther north, in Westwood, New Jersey, on September 18, 1961.
In a family that seemed full of women all old enough (well, to a toddler, anyway) to be his mother, Jamie was the center of everybody’s attention. And he learned early how to make all that attention worthwhile. Jamie’s cousin, Patricia Gandolfini, remembers one Sunday afternoon when her father, Aldo Gandolfini, had invited his brother James and his family over to Patricia’s house in Waldwick to play poker. “I had just gotten my license and wanted to drive everyone everywhere,” Patricia wrote in an e-mail exchange with the Bergen County Record. So she drove Jamie to the duck pond in Ridgewood, where they bought ice cream and walked around the water. “My mother says when I came home I said to her, ‘You know, Jamie was more entertaining than any of the guys I know.’ He was always fun, smart, always putting on a show.”
When Jamie was beginning grade school, the family decamped to Park Ridge, a suburb planted on the farthest northern border of the state, almost in New York. Park Ridge is only twenty miles from Times Square, but it can seem like it’s in a different country—a small, leafy community of around eight thousand, living mostly in Cape Cods, colonials, and ranch houses built in the sixties and seventies around a tiny nineteenth-century core. The downtown is festooned with gingerbread, and the meandering eighteenth- and nineteenth–century roads give it a bucolic charm very different from tract housing suburbs. In the 1970s, it was mostly a blue-collar town.
Don Ruschman, a former mayor of Park Ridge, first noticed Jamie Gandolfini sometime in the seventies, when he started crossing over into Ruschman’s backyard from his own in order to play with his daughter. The Gandolfini home on Park Avenue has been razed and replaced with a much larger house built in the past fifteen years or so, but there’s a small Cape Cod next door that neighbors remember as all but identical to Jim’s first house. The lot, with a big sweep of front yard, is on the town’s main street, just a couple of blocks from the town center and Park Ridge High.
“He was a tall, good-looking kid. My daughter knew him better than me, of course, but he was always respectful, kind of quiet,” Ruschman says. “I met him later, when he’d return for the local OctoberWoman Foundation for Breast Cancer Research fund-raiser in town every year. When The Sopranos was at its height, and people were crazy for it, he was still just a direct, down-to-earth person, totally indifferent to celebrity and all that. Even though he was the biggest draw at every dinner.
“I credit his parents with who he became,” Ruschman says. “They were hardworking people who raised their kids and that’s who they lived for.”
Most of the citizens of Park Ridge in the 1970s were Irish, German, or Italian, and many were Catholic. The town has its own power company and water company, and its own school district, too. High schools all around Park Ridge have graduating classes in the three- to four-hundred-person range, but Park Ridge High School graduates less than a third of those numbers. Thirty years ago the middle school was in the same building as the high school, so kids barely recognized their generational differences—everybody was similar, facing similar prospects, fellow students told me again and again. They were almost like one family.
“We didn’t have extremes of poverty or wealth,” Ruschman recalls. “Most people were working people, blue-collar people, in those days. Everybody got along. They still do. This sounds like boilerplate, but it’s just a great place to raise kids.”
Park Ridge is a town built by the American middle class during the era of its greatest security, based on well-paid union jobs and the great economic expansion of the postwar era. Homes sold for $15,000 to $35,000 back in the day; now, when people buy them, at an average price of around $435,000, they sometimes tear down the original and build a McMansion in its place. There’s even a new section of town, called the Bear’s Nest, with townhouses at $1 million to $1.3 million apiece.
But those are symptoms of a different, more unequal America—the Park Ridge James Gandolfini remembered all his life was a smaller town, almost a village.
“I think I feel a lot,” Gandolfini once said, trying to explain how his working-class hometown inflected his whole career. “I never wanted to do business or anything. People interest me, and the way things affect them. And I also have a big healthy affinity for the middle class and the blue collar, and I don’t like the way they’re treated, and I don’t like the way the government is treating them now. I have a good healthy dose of anger about all of that. And I think that if I kept it in, it wouldn’t have been very good. I would have been fired a lot. So I found this silly way of living that allows me to occasionally stand up for them a little bit. And mostly make some good money and act like a silly fool.”
James and Santa Gandolfini spoke Italian in the home to each other, but not to Jamie and his sisters. Jamie said he could always tell when “they were mad at me in Italian,” but even though he traveled back to Italy several times as he grew up, to meet family, he never picked up the language. Assimilation wasn’t a choice, it was simply part of growing up. His dad cutting the lawn with a push-mower to the sound of Italian singers on the stereo was about as far as his cultural memory went toward the immigrant experience.
“There were things I did that drove my father nuts, I know,” he told Stephen Whitty of The Star-Ledger in 2012. “Lying on the couch and then getting up, and thirty-five cents would have fallen out of my pocket and just be lying there on the cushions. Drove him crazy. He said it showed I had no respect for money. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I still don’t.”
Jamie’s father’s job at Paramus Catholic pulled long hours but was usually regular and predictable. He’d often have Jamie help out with painting jobs or other maintenance work at the school. Jamie’s mother worked as a high school lunch lady, first at the Immaculate Heart Academy in Washington Township, and then as cafeteria chief at the nearby Academy of the Holy Angels in Demarest, to make ends meet.
They were people who worked hard, who got up every day and did what had to be done. But in those days you could make a living that way. They bought a little two-family cottage in Lavallette, on the Jersey Shore, renting one side to friends or relatives every summer. After he was fourteen or so, Jamie had a boat at the Shore, a wooden boat with a motor, and he’d go fishing and crabbing along the coast. Sometimes with a friend, but often alone.
Jamie wasn’t entirely sure what he’d inherited from his mother. “I don’t know—introspective, depressed, a little judgmental, kind of smart about people,” he once said. But thinking about her made him take measure of just how assimilated he thought he really was. Asked, in the middle of The Sopranos, what was most Italian about him, Gandolfini said, “Loyalty to friends and family, I think. I guess you’d have to ask them. Stubbornness. I don’t know. I think I’m very Italian. I communicate a little bit through yelling. A lot of our family does that. I’ve been working on that.”
* * *
Park Ridge High is an imposing three-story brick pile with a six-columned Georgian portico, the flagship of a K through 12 school system that celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary in 2008. For years kids have gathered after school in a frame building right next door that was called Pop’s Sweet Shoppe—honestly—for decades (today it’s called Marc’s Pizzeria, but it’s still full of high school kids every afternoon). There’s an Astroturfed football field and handsome baseball diamonds just below the old mill race pond behind the fire department, and the whole town is scored by deep-sided creeks shadowed by oaks and maples and lined with cornflowers.
If growing up in Park Ridge in the 1970s sounds less like The Godfather: Part II than Happy Days, well, brace yourself. Jamie Gandolfini wasn’t the Fonz, either. He was more like Richie Cunningham, with a black helmet of hair everyone remembers as “David Cassidy perfect.”
“He was a tall, skinny but broad-shouldered guy, he joked around a lot with the girls, teasing them,” Julie Luce (née Francke) told me shortly after Gandolfini died. “He played football and basketball, and was well liked by everybody. He was just a fun, fun-loving guy.”
Julie had an off-and-on flirtation with Jamie, “like middle school love,” she said. “It started petering out in high school. He went off to college and I really didn’t see him again.” But she doesn’t remember him ever being serious about a girl. Girls maybe he was serious about, but not a girl. He never stuck with one girl through a whole year. Gandolfini would be voted “Best Looking” and “Biggest Flirt” in his senior year, and those jokey titles really seem to have been pretty well accepted, at least in retrospect. Whatever his appeal was to girls in those days, it was “nothing like the appeal he had on The Sopranos,” Luce says. “That was a role he was playing. It was completely out of character for the guy we knew in school.”
Jamie became “Jimmy” by his sophomore year, then “Jim,” but by senior year he was “Fini”—pronounced “Feeney,” as if he’d assimilated all the way to Irishness. There’s an unwritten rule about high school nicknames to the effect that the more generally they’re used, the more of a character that person is. By the end of senior year, almost everyone called him Fini.
The teachers who knew Gandolfini say he was never trouble in the classroom, never a discipline problem, but nevertheless a cutup with his tight group of friends. They were “their own best audience,” and competed all day long trying to make one another crack up, according to drama teacher Ann Comarato.
Donna Mancinelli was student director in the theater program at Park Ridge, and she decided, with Comarato, to cast Jim in his first speaking role, in Arsenic and Old Lace, his junior year. His audition seemed to come out of nowhere. “We were so surprised because he was, like, a jock,” Mancinelli recalls.
Somehow, no one knew he was already a triple threat, having participated in theatrical productions all through grade school. He played Dick Deadeye in a third-grade production of H.M.S. Pinafore. He was in the school marching band, sang in the choir, and he’d danced a small part in Can-Can the year before.
“He was a complete natural on stage right away,” Comarato says. “We thought, ‘Where have you been all this time?’”
Mostly, he was on the field—freshman year, Gandolfini played baseball, football, and basketball for Park Ridge, and ran some track and field. He could do all those things and, in his junior year, take a part in the seasonal school plays because Park Ridge was so small—a regional high school would have been both more competitive and more specializing. The 165 kids in Gandolfini’s class made up one of the largest in the school’s history, but it’s a lot smaller than those at the other high schools, both public and parochial, nearby in Bergen County. Park Ridge shrunk to as few as forty or so graduates a few years ago, before bouncing back to last year’s class of ninety.
Still, Gandolfini had a pretty demanding schedule. He dropped baseball first, after freshman year. Then football; basketball was Gandolfini’s best sport, anyway. “He was an all-round athlete, but not really a standout,” says Tom Bauer, who was assistant coach of the football team and taught Gandolfini Spanish (“a solid B student,” Bauer says). “But at Park Ridge he could play, and do well.”
The way theater worked was a drama in the fall and a musical in the spring. There’s a pretty little proscenium stage built into the corner of the school building, with a side door that opens a short hop from where Pop’s Sweet Shoppe used to be (the state just helped pay for a renovation that painted over the backstage cast graffiti from Fini’s years). Although there’s a petition going around Park Ridge to name a street after Gandolfini, former mayor Ruschman is trying to get them to name the high school theater for him instead.
In his senior year Fini tried out for the lead in Kiss Me, Kate, the Cole Porter hit about a company mounting a musical version of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The plot is a complicated confection of backstage romances, but the underlying themes of male vanity and violence winning female sympathy and support are roughly similar.
In Porter’s version the final eponymous song is almost a kinky demand to be abused, a “hurt me but don’t desert me” number that is meant to show both swagger and real vulnerability. Petruchio, the Shakespeare character, is decked out in a silly Renaissance outfit full of feathers and clashing stripes that’s deliberately comical, yet in that ridiculous getup he gives his most heartfelt and abject declaration of love—and wins the shrew.
Both Comarato and Mancinelli thought Gandolfini was perfect for the role. He shared it with another student, part of Park Ridge’s everybody-plays ethos, but Fini had the prestigious closing-night performance. Yet, to everyone’s dismay, he was having trouble with his first major memorization challenge. During rehearsals he’d shout “Fuck!” when he forgot a line or fumbled a cue, sometimes hitting himself in the head.
“I used to really get on him for that,” says Comarato. (Later, after The Sopranos became a hit and Gandolfini met Comarato at one of the OctoberWoman fund-raising dinners, he’d send her a note asking her to count how many times he said “fuck” on the air. “And they’re paying me for it!” he wrote.) “But it got so bad some of his friends in the play were worried he wouldn’t be able to perform.”
Sally Zelikovsky played Kate—she was Buttercup in that third-grade Pinafore—and she wrote about it on her blog. Zelikovsky lives in California now, where she writes a community blog and is involved with the Tea Party.
“Two weeks before opening night for Kate, Jimmy, yes, Emmy award–winning James Gandolfini, did not have his lines or songs memorized,” Zelikovsky wrote in a memorial to her classmate a week after his death. “We had been covering for him by ad-libbing cues in anticipation of his lines. With two weeks to go, the musical director threatened to call off the production.”
Gandolfini’s closest friends in the cast were furious with him. Zelikovsky remembered him responding to the pressure, coming into rehearsal the next day with all his lines memorized. And the performance went very well—just a hint of Fini’s future struggles with memorization. Still, nobody thought they had a great actor in their midst.
“Jimmy, surprisingly, pursued it as a career—surprisingly—because if you had taken a senior class survey of the ‘most likely to pursue a career in acting,’ I don’t think Jimmy would have won,” Zelikovsky remembered. There were other talents in Park Ridge who seemed much more likely to succeed in the theater, like Karen Duffy, who would achieve a certain fame as a VJ on MTV in the late 1980s (and just happened to move into the same building as Fini in the West Village). Whatever Jim had on stage, it didn’t seem theatrical so much as real. Some people remember Gandolfini’s star performance as more of a marker of how classless Park Ridge was than as an artist’s precocious juvenilia.
Park Ridge High was like any other school, filled with cliques and rivalries, but Zelikovsky thought of them as more “fluid” because it was a small institution. Students couldn’t mount a play if they didn’t get jocks or burn-outs to help. They couldn’t really field a sports team unless artsy students were given a shot.
Placing Gandolfini as a jock or a burn-out or any other binary opposition so popular in high school didn’t quite work because so many hats seemed to fit Fini. Had to fit, really.
* * *
Much later, after he’d moved to New York City and started taking acting classes, Jim Gandolfini came back to his parents’ house in Park Ridge to eat a home-cooked dinner and warn his family that he might be pretty good at this acting thing. If he succeeded as he hoped he would, the attention and publicity might get to be “a pain in the ass.” That’s when he was considering changing his name to “Jimmy Leather” to spare them the trouble.
At the time, his mom and dad and two sisters laughed at the very idea that Fini would have to change his name to save them from the press hordes that might one day come.
And yet, damn it, they did. Gandolfini said the way things turned out may have “humbled” his sisters a little bit, which was “a good thing.”
As Gandolfini’s fame grew, especially once The Sopranos became a runaway hit, and the reporters did start to come around, James and the family stayed mute. Gandolfini gave very few interviews to the press—you could count the longish ones on one hand—and he insisted on his family’s privacy. Friends were asked to avoid the press, too.
Even in 2001, when Donna Mancinelli first got him involved in the OctoberWoman Foundation annual dinners and Tony Soprano was almost as recognizable nationally as Colonel Sanders, he was still insisting on no press. The OctoberWoman Foundation became The Sopranos’ pet New Jersey charity until the banking crash in 2008 forced the foundation to scale back its fund-raising. Some years, much of the regular cast, from Edie Falco and Michael Imperioli to Tony Sirico and Lorraine Bracco, would appear. The $1,000-a-plate dinners drew as many as a thousand people at their height, and Gandolfini would stand for hours signing autographs and thanking donors. But only HBO cameramen were ever allowed in. TV crews from as far away as Australia were turned down.
Most of the people who knew Gandolfini say he and his sisters are just “very private.” Both Leta Gandolfini and Johanna Antonacci declined to be interviewed about their brother; some of his friends also declined, saying Jim had insisted on “almost an omerta” when he was alive. And it’s true, whenever he could, Gandolfini dodged personal questions.
The people at HBO who worked in publicity for The Sopranos or helped manage Gandolfini’s career say a celebrity press that often distorts reality out of aimless sensationalism would make anyone reticent. The family has denied the New York Post’s account of his last meal, for instance, saying the long list of alcoholic drinks is wrong—the two piña coladas he ordered were actually nonalcoholic drinks for his thirteen-year-old son, and nobody would assign everything on a family bill to one person, anyway. The twenty-four-hour media cycle creates an endless series of factual mistakes and false spins.
The fact that Gandolfini went through a painful divorce right in the middle of The Sopranos hoopla in 2002 no doubt encouraged him to batten down the hatches even more. Widely broadcast rumors of drug abuse and wild parties on the set were set off by the presettlement legal jousting, which in turn fed a popular perception that actors are the characters they play, especially when they play gangsters.
Some of his Italian-American friends shrug and say Gandolfini was so Italian that reticence with strangers is part of the culture. A man is expected to cut a bella figura, dress nicely, show manners in public (“Don’t shame the family!”), but draw the drapes at home.
There’s that Jersey Jinx to think about, too. The litany of friends and professional colleagues who say James Gandolfini was “a regular Jersey guy” is deafening, so much so that you wonder if he didn’t subscribe to some version of that “Nobody from Jersey ever gets credit for nothin’” syndrome. Stick your head up and they’ll chop it off. Safer to say you’re just like everybody else.
Others say it’s more a function of when he achieved success. Coming late to movies, when he was thirty-two, and landing his first lead role, as Tony Soprano, when he was nearing forty, meant that the vast majority of Gandolfini’s life was spent outside of the media maelstrom. Young actors often develop a backstory for their offstage persona to help drive interest in their movies, usually one that underlines their stage presence. Jim never had to; by the same token, when he achieved fame, there was no embarrassing “Jimmy Leather” persona to live down, either. You can ask John “Cougar” Mellencamp about what that’s like.
“I got successful at a late age, so I’m under no delusions about what all this is about,” Gandolfini himself said. “Well, I’m sure I have some delusions. But you know, basically, it’s a job. You work hard, and you get tired a little bit, but that’s all it is.” Being a famous actor was a little like being Geppetto. You work at it and work at it, and one day people may think you’ve made a real boy. Nothing to fuss over, really.
And there was such a thing as being a good son, too. Nobody fussed over his father’s labor or his mother’s; whatever Jamie did was all due to them. Success he wanted, of course, most people do, but this sort of monster success, where everyone knows your name and thinks they know you—that was embarrassing.
Some of those who knew him the longest say he was always just as shy as he was outgoing, if that makes any sense at all. As a kid, Gandolfini struck some of his friends as particularly gentle and paradoxically solitary. “In sixth grade, when I first met him, what he wanted to be when he grew up was a forest ranger, which seems so kind of low-key and kind of almost quiet and alone,” classmate Julie Luce told the Bergen County Record. “And I think a little part of that was sort of with him always. He was somebody who did not like the attention. It’s, like, contradictory because everyone in the entire planet knew who he was, or most of them did, but he was really very private.…
“He was like a really regular person. He tried to live a regular life and I don’t know how he did that, but he was able to a little bit, in between the craziness of being a celebrity.”
It did seem odd that an actor who was so convincing in the most intimate of performances would just stiff-arm almost all requests for interviews. And it made it very easy for his fans to simply assume he was Tony Soprano. People who didn’t know him before he got famous slipped and called him “Tony” all the time. After all, he was Italian-American, from Jersey, and he tawked like the Tone. Who else could he be?
And, whatever his reasons were, putting Park Ridge under a kind of media bell jar helped preserve a certain civic pride in appearances. Like a lot of Bergen County, Park Ridge projects an air of being left out of the modern issues roiling America. There are few class conflicts, few ethnic frictions, in Park Ridge. There are also very few African-Americans (one exception was a Park Ridge High School music director, the one who demanded Fini learn his lines or he’d cancel the play). Diversity largely amounts to people with Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish backgrounds. “But we don’t think of ourselves that way,” Dolly Lewis, a former teacher at Park Ridge High, told me by the town pool one day. “We just think of ourselves as Americans.” It’s really just a nice place, with strong civic values.
Though, as former mayor Don Ruschman likes to point out, there was that guy who lived in the Gandolfinis’ neighborhood, whom everybody knew was a lieutenant in the mob. Not that anybody made a big deal about it. As Ruschman says, chuckling, “He kept his lawn beautifully.”