An Old Radioman  Tuned to the Past

 

  Fourth year medical student Chris Foresto ushered the elderly man into an examination room in the doctor's office in Buffalo. The file showed that the man had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for some time. A graduate of Chaminade High School in Mineola and of Boston College, Foresto, 26, was finishing his last rotation of medical school at SUNY Buffalo. He was to have returned home to Muttontown on Friday and now must wait until March 21 to learn where he will spend the next stage of his education, as an intern in radiology. It was my last week, he said by telephone. I'm finishing in an office in family medicine. As I walked in to see the patient, my preceptor- the doctor, tells me the guys Alzheimer's is more or less advanced and that it's probably going to be very difficult for me to talk to him. I'd never seen the patient before and I wanted to get an idea of how advanced the disease was.I asked him a few simple questions. I gave him a series of three numbers and told him I was going to ask him to repeat them to me.

    Well, he didn't remember how he had gotten to the doctor's office and he couldn't give me back the three numbers I had just given him. So knowing that Alzheimer's disease destroys the short term memory and not necessaryily the deep past memory, I asked him what kind of things he had done during his life. He said he worked in electronics his whole life. He said he was a radio operator in the Navy and an Amateur radio enthusiast.

    Foresto hesitated for a minute. In general, he believes it is not appropriate for him to engage a patient in a discussion of his personal life, regardless of what  he might think he has in common with the patient, just as he believes it would be inappropriate for him to further identify this patient to me (and he did not).

    However, Foresto shared an interest in radio with his patient  gleaned from the first 10 years of his life when he had the privilege and honor of being tutored by his Grandfather Paul Panzeca.

    Foresto was 10 when his Grandfather died, on Jan. 20 1986. 0ld enough to have been indelibly influenced by the 61 year old man's passion for Amateur radio.

    Panzeca was born in Brooklyn, in 1925. His own Grandparents lived with him and they spoke only Italian so Panzeca spoke only Italian until he was 7 years old. One of his daughters, Maria DeBonis, of Carle Place, recently recalled the stories she had heard about her father from older family members.

    My grandmother would tell us how she would send my father to bed and then find him    underneath it, where he had stashed all these cigar boxes filled with wires and coils and tubes. DeBonis said. He was always fascinated by electronics, and more so, eventually, by radio.

    At the age of 15 or 16, to make extra money while he was still going to school, he would go into he local repair shop and fix radios for them. He even learned how to fix televisions, and they were new then. When he was 17, though, he asked his parents for permission to join the Navy. It was 1942, and at his age, you needed permission. He  knew Morse code, so the Navy assigned him to radio control rooms. He served in the Pacific. When the war ended, and he came out of the Navy, he married my mother, Rose Panzeca. Her name was Petito. She lived across the street  from my father.

    My father worked for an electrical company for  seven or eight years and went to school at Polytechnical Institute. He got his degree in Electrical Engineering in 1951.They stayed in Brooklyn until 1952 or '53 and then moved out to Valley Stream, where my father opened his own  business, P.J. Panzeca Inc. It started in Elmont but pretty soon there were warehouses all over the Island.It just got bigger and bigger, until it was a major electrical construction company. We moved into a big house my father built in Old Westbury. There were four kids: my sister, Carmel Silk, who now lives with my mother in Westbury; Paula Foresto, of Muttontown, Chris' mother; my brother, Joseph, who lives in Huntington, and me, Maria.

     'My father was only 61 when he passed,' DeBonis said. 'But he was a dynamo. He taught us all Morse code when we were kids. He taught Chris Morse code, too. In the examination room two weeks ago in the Buffalo doctors office, Foresto decided to reveal to the Alzheimer's patient that he too, was a radio enthusiast, and that he learned it from his grandfather, and that his grandfather had been a radio operator in the Navy, too.

    'What was your grandfather's name?' asked the patient. Foresto answered. 'Paulie Panzeca!" the patient said. 'I remember Paul Panzeca. He was exactly my age. I knew Paul well!" The patient went on to tell Foresto that he was 76 years old and had spent his entire life in Buffalo, save for the time he spent in the Navy. He boasted that he could still "copy" 40 words a minute in code. He said in his free time, all his life, would listen to the radio and copy what he heard into code. 'Only military guys can copy that fast," he told Foresto. This man couldn't remember what day it was," Foresto said, or what month or year it was, or what he'd had for breakfast. But memories 60 years old came pouring out of him. He remembered  details about my grandfather and how fast he could  key code. Everybody in the office  was blown away, the doctor I was working with and the nurses in the office, and the man's wife. The patient was laughing and crying at the same time. He said I'd made his day. I'd made his week. He showed emotion you'd never know he was capable of any more. It was incredible. When I walked out of there, I was weak.

    At the game time, Foresto said, it was sad. This disease is so debilitating. He and his wife are thanking me, and I don't know how long he is going to remember that we had this conversation, or that he'd had this experience.