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Who expects a canvas sack sent from the other side of your lifetime to arrive in the mail?
About six months ago, Felix Cocco got a phone call from a stranger in Indiana.
Mr. Cocco, a widower who turned 84 this past Christmas, still lives in Bloomfield, the neighborhood in which he grew up. This guy from Indiana had done an Internet search and he wanted to know if he was talking to the Felix Cocco who boxed for 404th Training Group at the Army Air Forces Training Center in Miami Beach, Fla.
Sure, that was him.
As a teenager, he'd enlisted in the Army after graduating from Schenley High in 1943. In the early months of 1944, he decided he'd do some boxing. At the time, he considered himself more of a dancer than a boxer; the only real fight he'd had was over a girl at a Sharpsburg dance. But he figured boxing would keep him out of KP.
So, yeah, he'd boxed something close to a dozen matches in the Army.
Well, this Indianan named Lewis Fraser told him, he had found a letter to "Private Felix A. Cocco" in the back of an old canvas satchel he'd bought in a military surplus store.
Did Mr. Cocco want it?
Mr. Cocco didn't know if he was being scammed, but who wouldn't be curious? He gave the man his address.
Soon enough, Mr. Cocco was looking at stitched canvas he hadn't seen in more than 65 years. He knew it was his because his serial number was stamped all over it. Included in the package was a letter from Maj. Frank A. Drome, dated March 15, 1944 -- 66 years ago Monday -- thanking Mr. Cocco for furnishing "a good clean type of diversion for the men in their off hours." There was also congratulations for winning a Golden Glove trophy. Mr. Fraser had framed the letter for Mr. Cocco.
PG STORE
As he shared that laudatory note with me in a kitchen cluttered with other memorabilia, he said, "I didn't know I was doing that good."
That humble bag hanging over a kitchen chair got his mind drifting toward moments he hadn't considered in years.
"I enlisted at 17. They put me in the reserves till I was 18. I went on Jan. 16, 1944."
He took his physical at Fort Meade, Md., and then got on a train headed south. When he later arrived by truck in Miami Beach, the oceanside seemed like a movie set. But the new soldiers were quarantined in a hotel for seven days, and that drove these teenaged boys crazy.
"Some of the guys were bugging out. I had to take letters from my girlfriend to read it to them and quiet them down."
He did his basic training. He'd later get into the good graces of his master sergeant by teaching the man to jitterbug. After his training as a radar mechanic in Florida, the Army shipped Pvt. Cocco to California. He spent the final year of the war teaching radar operators in P-61s how to find enemy aircraft in the dark.
"Luckily, I went to radio school," Mr. Cocco said. "That's why I'm still here."
He returned to Bloomfield and learned roofing, siding, remodeling and plastering from his uncles, and ultimately got into home contracting. He married Rosemarie Trunick, the younger sister of a classmate at Schenley High, in 1949. They bought a rowhouse in 1950, where he still lives. They raised four children, Jannet, Gary, Andrew and Lori. They often worked as a family, and Mr. Cocco, his sons and younger daughter could entirely remodel a kitchen in three days.
Mrs. Cocco died seven years ago. These days, he stays active golfing and bowling, and the last time he kept his bowling average it was 186. There's a plaque in his kitchen from a 298 game he rolled in 2001, missing a perfect game on his last ball.
He remembers that Golden Glove contest, and the four matches he won, but had no memory of that letter from Maj. Drome.
I couldn't track down Mr. Fraser in Indiana on Monday. But the old private says he mailed Mr. Fraser $20 to cover his costs. It cost more to mail the satchel to Pittsburgh ($10.35) than it did to buy it in Indiana ($7).
The satchel isn't carrying anything but memories now. But like they say in those credit-card commercials, the chance it provided to relive bits of his youth: priceless.
