Forum photos by Patricia Adams
Still kissing after all these years…
by Patricia Adams
It was not love at first sight.
In fact, the first time Jennie Veacchiano saw the young, strapping man she said, “I didn’t pay him any mind. He was already going with someone else.”
It was 1940 and 19-year-old Butch Puccio, newly discharged from the Civilian Conservation Corps, had been invited to join a close buddy at his fiancée’s 18th birthday party. The birthday girl just happened to be Jennie’s sister.
“I danced the whole night with one girl, but I was going around with another,” Butch admitted. While his arm was around his dancing partner, Butch’s eyes were on Jennie.
Not long after that he started visiting Jennie’s Jamaica house on a regular basis.
“We weren’t really dating. He was freeloading for my mother’s cooking,” Jennie quipped. After a bit, they started going out in the afternoons. “My mother was very strict. He would bring me home, eat and then go roller-skating. I stayed home.”
But the visits got more frequent and the free meals took a backseat to his beautiful new girlfriend. The courtship had become official.
It was just about a year later, on a Sunday afternoon in December, the 7th to be exact, that Butch and Jennie were seated around the radio in her family’s home, listening to a broadcast with her mother and father, when the program was interrupted with the news that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.
Butch had been passed over in the draft once before, for medical reasons, but in September of 1942, eight months after President Roosevelt proclaimed that day of infamy, Butch was drafted into the U.S. Army and slated to report on Jan. 6, 1943.
He embarked on a journey from South Queens to the South, to North Carolina, leaving behind the girl who hadn’t noticed him at first, the one he could never forget.
Butch and Jennie would marry the first chance he had to come back home. When news came that he would be getting a three-day pass, the wedding was scheduled. But the plans got fouled up when one of his Army buddies, who was holding a pass for the following week, needed to go home to see his gravely ill mother. Butch offered to switch passes with him because they were not allowed to be away at the same time. They cleared it with their supervisors and everything was set.
However, when the friend returned to the base and Butch was getting ready to take off for the wedding, he was told he couldn’t go.
“My captain didn’t like people from New York, and he didn’t like people of Italian extraction. I had two strikes against me,” Butch explained. But he persisted and finally got one of the officers to authorize a trip off the base to have his uniform pressed.
“I left the base—but I didn’t go to the cleaners,” he said. “I went home to marry my girl.”
At home, Jennie had saved up enough money from her job at a jewelry store to buy her wedding gown from Buckner’s for $65. But on her $35 per week salary, there wasn’t enough money for a veil, so she borrowed one from a cousin who had just gotten hitched. The couple tied the knot on Aug. 28, 1943, at St. Monica’s Church in Jamaica and spent the rest of the week together. It was the last time Butch and Jennie would see each other for three years.
Having been given permission to leave the base just to get his uniform pressed, Butch took an unauthorized 10-day furlough. When he got back he knew he would face the consequences.
“The same captain who didn’t like me before I left, liked me even less when I got back,” he said smiling. “I got my rank busted down from corporal to private.”
Newly married and completely out of the favor of his direct superior, Butch headed off to combat on Oct. 2, 1943. He served as a machine gunner with the Army’s Artillery Division in the Fiji Islands and the Philippines.
Out on a mission with two helpers responsible for setting up the massive gunnery, the men lost their grip on the platform and the machine gun came down on Butch’s back. He was taken to the hospital where he recovered from a crushing injury.
The rest of his time in the service is commemorated on a wall full of medals and a host of diseases, including malaria, dengue fever and jungle rot. Through it all, Jennie was at home. Waiting. She would cherish the only means of communicating with her husband: letters, often missing huge blocks of text that had been cut out by Army censors. “It was hard,” she said. “But it was all we had.”
On Feb. 2, 1946, Butch came home. Their life together was finally about to begin. Jennie had saved some of her salary and banked all of Butch’s Army pay—$50 a month—and bought the house they would live in for the next 50 years.
“I loved that house,” she said, referring to their Ozone Park residence on 105th Street, which had set them back a whopping $6,300.
They desperately wanted to start a family, but doctors told them it would not happen. As a result of
Butch’s injuries and all the illness, they said he would be unable to father children. But miraculously, on April 12, 1949, their son Dominic came along.
“We wanted more,” Jennie said, “but we wound up with the best son anyone could ever hope for.”
Jennie was a homemaker and worked part-time through the years, finally retiring from Japan Airlines in 1982. Butch was supposed to resume his pre-war job in a candle factory upon his return from the war, but they had replaced him, so he went to school to be a butcher and later started the family business, Puccio and Son Contracting, which he operated with Dominic for 30 years.
Life was good. Life was happy. They worked hard, raised Dominic and traveled extensively throughout Europe, Mexico, and the United States. Butch took his passion for antiques and cars to an enterprising level, landing movie roles with his beloved autos in several films, including “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “The Valachi Papers” and “The Great Gatsby.”
After suffering for decades with the damage to his back, he finally had neuromodulation surgery at
St. ude’s Hospital nearly 15 years ago, which still keeps him pain free through a battery-charged disc implanted at the base of his spine.
In the late ’90s, Butch and Jennie sold their house in Ozone Park and relocated to Howard Beach.
These days they go on outings every week to their son’s house and out to meals with friends and family. Butch can be seen regularly seated underneath the American flag outside their home, waving at passersby along Shore Parkway, always wearing his Army cap. The couple are standard fixtures at the Memorial Day parade in Howard Beach, where he was honored as the Grand Marshal several years ago.
On Sunday, they were joined by friends and family, including eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren (with another on the way), at Bruno Ristorante on Cross Bay Boulevard, one of their favorite restaurants (Butch insisted we mention that!), to celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary.
They were married when Butch was 22 and Jennie was 19. Now 97 and 94, the love story continues.
When Butch was asked about the secret to their long, wonderful life together, his reply was instantaneous.
“Take a look at this face: who could live without it?”
In the seconds it took for his big smile to fade, it was time for a serious answer.
“I learned a long time ago, if I fight with her, she stops cooking.”
Publisher’s Note: I would like to thank the Puccios for inviting The Forum to cover this story and for welcoming me into their home. After decades of covering this community, this was undoubtedly one of the most joyous and remarkable stories I have ever had the chance to tell.
