Word: cocozza
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Dates: during 1951-1951
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Dead-End Kid. The gift from God came into the world Jan. 31, 1921. Mario (real name: Alfredo Arnold Cocozza) was born and grew up in South Philadelphia. As part of the self-made Lanza legend, he sometimes likes to shock friends or interviewers by painting a lurid picture of his old neighborhood as a hotbed of crime, where stray gangster bullets might have nipped his career at any moment. Outraged by some of the tall tales, South Philadelphians once hurled stones and tomatoes at Lanza's grandfather's home, and made a public ceremony of smashing...
Actually, young Cocozza lived in a fairly pleasant working-class neighborhood, where his parents, Antonio and Maria Cocozza, had a six-room house and brought up their only child with pampering indulgence. The elder Cocozza, a decorated World War I combat veteran on a total disability pension, is a semi-invalid; his wife worked as a seamstress in the Army quartermaster depot. Freddy, as everyone called their son, was a spoiled, reckless kid: one of his teachers still remembers him with a shudder as "one of the biggest bums that ever came into the public-school system...
...feel that Caruso is doing well to get his name in the title. Meanwhile, so far as the new crop of U.S. bobby-soxers is concerned, Frank Sinatra might as well be a contemporary of Hans Sachs (1494-1576). All in all, Philadelphia-born Mario (real name: Alfred Arnold Cocozza) is just about the hottest singer to hit the sound tracks in a decade...