Joe Napolitano, an Italian entrepreneur who was born on a freighter off Gibraltar in 1899 and lived an active, colorful life until his final weeks, died peacefully on July 4 at his home in Pacific Palisades. He was 105, and the town’s oldest known resident. “I’m now feeling fine,” Napolitano wrote in a letter to the Palisadian-Post in April, as he recovered from cancer surgery. “I can still pass the DMV tests for driving. No glasses needed.” Indeed, he delivered the letter in person, driving to our office from Iliff (he had a restricted driver’s license) and parking just down the street. He even renewed his subscription for another two years. After his third wife, Reva, died in 1996, Joe lived independently at home, cooking his meals, keeping the place tidy, cultivating his numerous backyard fruit trees and tending to his stock market investments'”not for the money,” said his niece, Tonia, “but as something that was challenging for his mind.” Last August 19, when photographer Rich Schmitt and I visited Joe on his 105th birthday, he was still mentally sharp, with eyes so good he could read his birthday cards without glasses. Face beaming, he welcomed us into his modest home and led us to the kitchen, where he was cooking a large pan of homemade applesauce, made from the gala apples he had picked from his own tree. “I freeze it and then I have frozen applesauce every night for dinner,” Joe said. “It tastes wonderful’just like apple ice cream.” He spooned out a bowl for me to sample and said, “With my compliments!” I told him, quite honestly, that it was indeed delicious. When we sat down to visit, I asked Joe how he felt. “I feel good today,” he said, lighting up his beloved pipe. “I don’t take any pills or medicine and I don’t have any aches or pains’just old-age wear. I want to die like my grandfather back in Italy. He was 97 and he smoked a pipe up until a week before he died. He wasn’t sick or anything; he just didn’t want to live anymore.” In the mid-1890s, before Joe Napolitano was born, his parents, Carlo and Antonia, accepted a free boat trip from Italy to Brazil in hopes of becoming rich by working on the coffee plantations. Instead, after three years, they realized they had become indentured slaves to the plantation owner, and when Antonia became pregnant with Joe (after already giving birth to a daughter in Brazil), she told her husband, “If I have to have another child in this country, I’m going to kill myself.” And Carlo told her, “If I don’t get you out of this country before the child comes, you can kill me.” Fortunately, the Napolitanos were able to board a French freighter bound for Italy, just ahead of their self-imposed deadline. Joe was born at sea, “two days before I reached earth,” he liked to say. After a few years, Carlo Napolitano followed his four sisters to America, where he worked his way across the country as a railroad surveyor. When he saw Los Angeles, he remarked: “This is so much like Naples, this is where I will bring my family.” About 1911, Joe and three of his brothers came to America, penniless and not knowing a word of English. In fact, their luggage had been stolen at the docks in Genoa and all they owned were literally the clothes on their backs. “We arrived on a large ship and when they put down the gangplank [at Ellis Island], everybody crowded into that giant hall,” Joe recalled in a 1999 interview, his brown eyes glistening. “Everybody found their way until not a soul was left, just us four brothers. There had been a mix-up outside, but nobody told us what to do or where to go. So we just stood against the wall because we were scared that somebody would come up behind us. We were there all day, without any food, and I remember thinking, ‘We’re in America’but where is it?’ “Finally, my mother arrived with one of our uncles and when she saw us, she started crying and shouting to the guards in Italian, “Those are my sons! Those are my sons!” and we were brought together. A great moment. I wish I could draw the picture.” After a boat ride to Manhattan, a long ride on the ‘I’ to the Bronx, and another lengthy ride by street car, the boys reached their aunt’s apartment. “She set the biggest table and served the best Italian meal you could imagine,” Joe recalled. “I’ll tell you’the joy of that first meal in America!” Several months later, Joe and his siblings and their mother rode the train out to Los Angeles to join Carlo, and within two years, with all the kids working at odd jobs, the Napolitanos had scraped together enough money to buy a little brick house with dirt floors next to Chavez Ravine. Although Joe left school after the ninth grade, he had tall, dark and handsome features that might have yielded a Hollywood career. When he began taking drama classes (with the likes of Ramon Navarro) in his early 20s as a way to sharpen his English-speaking skills, the teacher was impressed. “She said, ‘You should go into acting. You have a personality, you have a voice,'” Joe recalled. “And other people said, ‘You can run rings around Valentino.’ The guy was short and had a squeaky voice. But I didn’t like the acting life that I heard about’the wild parties, the drinking, taking dope, and having to sign slave contracts. I’m glad I didn’t go into that whole mess.” Instead, Joe capitalized on his sharp mind for business and a work ethic built upon wise advice from his father: “A bull has his horns, a man has his word.” In 1924, he started his own olive oil business, buying a press in Redlands that he moved onto a lot in East L.A. and building a two-story plant with his brother, Nick, where they processed olives from all over California. Napolitano Olive Products lasted until 1950, when Joe realized he couldn’t survive against larger, well-heeled rivals, plus the fact that farmers were selling their olive trees to make way for housing developments. Over the years, Joe earned his real estate license and an insurance broker’s license, worked for an Italian newspaper printed in English, and even ran for L.A. City Council (13th District) in 1931. He lost that race, despite the fervent support of one newspaper editor who wrote on the eve of the election: “Joe Napolitano is NOT A DYED IN THE WORLD POLITICIAN, neither is he past the age of discrimination to the best needs of the district; he is youthful, energetic and with an ideal in mind….A new broom sweeps clean, and a strong character does a good job. Go to the polls and ELECT JOSEPH NAPOLITANO, you worthwhile people of the THIRTEENTH!” In 1951, Joe and his beloved second wife, Lila, bought the 17th Street Nursery on Wilshire in Santa Monica, moving into a little house on the property. He operated the business until 1961, when the owner sold the land to an insurance company. By that time, Lila had fallen ill with cancer. “I spent three years taking care of my wife,” Joe said. “She was the sweetest thing in the world but she suffered from so many things. When she died [in 1994], I sold our house on Chautauqua and moved in with my sister for six months. They gave me everything free but I decided I had to do something different. So I came back to the Palisades and bought my house on Iliff.” Soon he met Reva Aronson Grant at a Democratic Club meeting and they got married when Joe was 81. “She was the baby in her family, so she never learned to cook, never learned to sew, not a damn thing,” he said affectionately. “But we had so much fun together, traveling to places like Mexico and Canada.” As I left Joe’s home after a visit in 1999, he pointed out his latest pride, a scrawny little apple tree that he had recently planted in the front yard (since there was no more room for fruit trees in the back yard). “It’s just a sapling right now,” he admitted, “but I’ve got it going pretty well, so I have to live long enough to enjoy it, maybe two or three years from now. When you have a reason to live, something to look forward to, it helps. Always look for the next day.” Joe Napolitano was predeceased by the two children from his second marriage, Joe Jr., who was a fireman and arson investigator, and daughter Nita. Survivors include eight grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and 21 nieces and nephews. His Funeral Mass will be celebrated at Corpus Christi Church in the Palisades this Saturday, July 16, at 10 a.m. Interment will follow at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, and a reception will be held at his home in the afternoon.
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