"Yank My Doodle, It's a Dandy"

Vic Peruzzi, 1934-2025

My father-in-law and I at my high school graduation in 1988, years before we had any idea he’d become my father-in-law

I’m ignoring the news again this week. I know the world is falling apart, but fear not — it’ll still be falling apart when we get back to it. Instead, I feel compelled to close a loop. Last week, I told you that my father-in-law, Vic Peruzzi, was entering hospice. And the family was gathered ‘round at his house, doing the tearful Old Yeller scene. Except nobody was taking Poppy out behind the barn to put him out of his misery, much to his probable chagrin. We just had to watch him struggle to breathe, as he speechlessly clasped our hands, until God pulled him over to whatever lies beyond this earthly veil.

At the end of last week’s piece, I ran Lyle Lovett’s “Family Reserve” as the bonus track. A song about how Lovett’s cherished relatives keep dropping off the team roster. The song opens with this:

When I saw the ambulance screaming down Main Street
I didn’t give it a thought
But it was my Uncle Eugene
He died on October
The second, nineteen eighty-one

I coincidentally published this piece on October the second. And not five hours later, Vic passed. I’ve listened to that tune countless times since its release in 1992. But I’d never keyed in on the date before, and will never hear the song quite the same way again.

The man, the myth: Vic Peruzzi

When my wife’s family started divvying up funeral tasks, they knew better than to ask me to prepare Vic’s eulogy for the service, since I’m one of those who’d rather jump out of a plane without a parachute than engage in acts of public speaking. I’m not the least bit shy in everyday life, mind you. But formal addresses make my throat close up, and the only way I can get through it is with a half-a-bottle of Maker’s and a fistful of beta blockers. Nobody wants to take that risk. So they wisely put me on written-obituary duty, instead. Here’s what I came up with for his official notice-of-death:

Victor Mario Peruzzi came into this world on December 5, 1934. He left it on October 2, 2025, some 90 years later. A good, long run. Yet still not nearly long enough for those who were fortunate enough to have him grace their lives. Vic was a devoted husband, often stipulating to his comely daughters that their mom was still the hottest woman on God’s green earth. He was a loving father, grandfather, and great grandfather. To many who knew him (not just his family), he was the axis upon which their world turned, with his generosity, earthy decency, and perpetual good humor. Whether he was laughing with you or at you — he had a unique talent for doing both simultaneously — he always threw his arm around everyone, and brought them in on the joke. Vic was a life force, and everyone in his orbit knew it.

Born in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, to Italian immigrants Oliva and Joseph Peruzzi, Vic only spoke Italian until he attended school. He retained patchy Italian all his life, particularly the swear words, while perfecting his English — his active and curious mind forever needing the stimulation of crossword puzzles, which he always completed on Sunday mornings when he should’ve been in church. (Vic loved God, but he and God had an understanding that Vic wouldn’t be getting overly religious about it.)

He became the first and only member of his immediate family to graduate college — from the University of Pittsburgh with a civil engineering degree. A degree he financed by hook or crook. When shy of tuition to complete his last semester, he went walking through farm fields to contemplate his predicament, found an abandoned tractor complete with brass fittings, and took a sledge hammer to it, knocking down his tuition piece by piece, selling the scrap metal.

In the early 1960s, Vic moved to Washington D.C. to take a job at the United States Patent Office. (While becoming a semi-professional volleyball player for fun in his spare time.) He always had his head in his own inventions, from aluminum siding lifts to the Record-Go-Round. He worked there for seven years, until he became a co-founder of the business, Victor Stanley, with his partner, Stan Skalka, manufacturing everything from park benches to wooden trash can receptacles — still seen to this day at a park or boardwalk near you. He then left Victor Stanley, and in 1971, started his own home-building business with his brother, Dean (whom he called his “right arm” — Dean was a mechanical genius who could fix anything, while Vic had the vision to acquire property and see all the business angles, though he himself enjoyed digging holes and doing physical labor right up until his retirement.) Vic built his own house in Dunkirk, Maryland, in which he raised three children. The very house where he left this earthly plane, in the same pool room where he gleefully used to smoke his son-in-laws in nine-ball matches. He took his last breath surrounded by his family, doubtless feeling the love. Because not a single one of them could revere a family patriarch any more than they already did.

No matter how many years I’ve been putting words on paper for a living, and no matter how many people I’ve eulogized along the way, I always find it difficult to distill a man’s life down to a few paragraphs, which seems grossly reductive. Especially when they are forces of nature, whom I personally knew and loved. Vic, qualifying on all counts. Which is why this six-second video captures him better than my arrangement of nouns and verbs ever could.

I’ve kept that clip on my desktop for years, not just for the automatic laughter it provokes, but because it was a reminder of how vital and vibrant Vic used to be before time started having its way with him. Taken about a decade ago, it contains everything I treasure: it was shot in my wife’s family’s backyard around the Fourth of July, the place where I keep my kayaks to escape from life, on the creek where Vic cleared the land, and built a pier with his own hands five decades ago. Vic is holding a sparkler, singing “I’m A Yankee Doodle Dandy” while doing a marching-in-place dance, subbing in his own lyrics: “Yank my doodle, it’s a dandy!” And that cackle you hear in the background is my wife’s unrestrained laughter — the sweetest music I know. A sound I’d hear often when her father was in our presence, as even when she was a too-cool teenager, she found her dad to be one of the funniest people in the world. A judgment with which I concurred, even when I was a teenager.

Even in his winding-down years, Vic would constantly be on his flip phone. When my wife would take him for his serial doctors’ appointments in his last years, he’d whip it out as a prop. While everyone else would be reading their smartphones in the waiting room, he’d make sure he caught his daughter’s eye, then would flip his phone open, which of course had no internet service. He’d then start mock-scrolling like the other kids, nodding his head in exaggerated fashion as though he were taking in all sorts of valuable information.

Mostly, though, he would keep it on his person to do battle with telemarketers, who would call him all hours of the day and night, since he must have been mistakenly put on someone’s gullible-seniors list. Vic saw it as something of a civic duty to keep them on the phone as long as possible, since the longer they talked to him, the less time they had to fleece actual gullible seniors. Then, after 20 minutes or so of deliberately slow-walking, he’d start subtly and not-so-subtly trolling them. When they’d ask for his name to start an order, he’d spell it out slowly: “J-o-e-F-a-n-c-u-l-o.” (“Fuck yourself” in Italian.) Or he’d yell at them, leveling phony accusations like someone in the throes of dementia: “I know you’ve been to my house. Stay away from my wife!” His telemarketing persecutors would end up laughing as often as they hung up in alarm.

Vic didn’t love to maliciously fight, but he did love to spar. I’ve known Vic since I was a high school punk (see cover photo above), and when I was still a Limbaugh-quoting conservative in Before Times back in the early ‘90s — Vic was a classical liberal in the best old-school sense of the word — we’d often knock heads for sport, even while staying pals. As I became more disillusioned with Republicans for the last two decades, ultimately punching out entirely during the Trump era, I could almost feel the air being let out of Vic’s tires. He’d gained a kindred spirit, but had lost a sparring partner since we now agreed on almost everything.

Still, he delighted in showing me the new Trump-related artworks in his study. One was a framed photo of Mussolini, with a caption he hand-wrote underneath it, saying “Make Italy Great Again.” The other was a photo of Richard Nixon, also containing Vic’s handwritten caption: “I used to be the worst president ever.”

To those he knew and loved — sometimes just after knowing them, before he even started loving them — he was not afraid to display his huge heart. He lent people money, then forgave their unpaid debts, as if it had never happened. He treated high-and-low society the same. Some of his best friends in the early eighties were two roughneck laborers named Peewee and Pappy. (Vic would often walk around the house, bellowing a song of his own creation, the title of which was “Peewee, Pappy, and Me.”) When he met Christopher Hitchens at my book party in 2010, he couldn’t wait to tell Hitch what Vic’s grandson (my son, Luke) had said after asking whether Hitchens, the world’s most famous atheist, believed in Heaven and Hell. When told he didn’t, a nine-year-old Luke replied, “Well, he’ll believe in Hell when he gets there.”

“Little bastard,” Hitchens told my father-in-law with a smirk, respecting my son’s inappropriate cheek, and Vic’s cheek for telling him, which is what Hitchens made a living doing himself.

In the 1960s, Vic met a young eight-year-old black kid, named Steve Ayres, who appeared at his Victor Stanley factory door – Steve’s father having been recently murdered. Steve showed up with his friend, their ankles dressed in heavy fire hydrant metal rings and chains they found in a scrapyard, pretending they had just escaped from jail. Vic took him in and put him to work, paying him to sweep their floors, while becoming something of an unofficial father figure/counselor to him. As Vic lay in his deathbed at home, unable to communicate, Steve – now in his seventies — showed up in a suit to honor Vic (who never wore suits), sitting with him for a farewell afternoon in silent communion. Steve is slated to be my fellow pallbearer, as Vic would’ve wanted it.

Those are a few snapshots of what we’ve lost. And here are a few more. If you are a longtime reader, you’ll recall that Vic has appeared in my pieces plenty of times over the years as a consistent member of my life-theater company.

Here he is in a chapter I wrote for the 2015 book, The Christmas Virtues, titled “Home for the Holidays.” :

There’s my father-in-law, Vic. He’s eighty going on fifteen and his favorite Christmas hobby is protesting Christmas. When he buys presents - if he buys presents – he tends to throw them under the tree in an unadorned paper bag. But he does care enough to grade us on our gifts to him. Once we gave him a hundred-dollar gift card to Ruth’s Chris Steak House. His response? “Great! This’ll buy me a salad and a half an appetizer.” Years ago, we went to an ornate local lights display, requiring us to spend half an hour idling in our car in a line of onlookers. When Vic didn’t feel like waiting, he commanded us – from the backseat – to get out of the line and head home. We refused, the Christmas spirit having seized us. He said, “Okay, have it your way. You were warned.” He then lifted his loafer’ed barges over the front seat, made a clicking sound like a gun turret, and let loose a terrible ripper, fumigating the whole car like a flatulent Orkin man. We returned home with the windows down, lights unseen, everybody coughing.

And here Vic is in a piece I wrote about our trip to the Amalfi Coast for our niece’s wedding two years ago, when Vic was already suffering from the interstitial lung disease that would help do him in:

Now, Vic could barely get to breakfast without an oxygen tank, even if he still maintained the same fighting spirit. Our spirits, if they’re any good at all, are always the last to know we’ve aged. When I asked him how he was doing – in the physical heat, and in the heat of the schedule we were adhering to, in this gorgeous country with beauty residing in every direction, a country that he has loved all his life, his people hailing from Tuscany and Trentino, where he still has plenty of relatives - he would shoot me a thumbs-up, saying, “I’m okay, buddy.” When I first met Vic, I was in high school. He was roughly the age I am now. And now, he’s the age he is. An age neither of us ever counted on accounting for. Me looking down on his still-full head of hair, now white, as I push the wheelchair he occasionally needs when long distances are required. (Otherwise, he still walks on his own steam, though sometimes with a cane.)

He has always been a smartass with a straight-razor wit. Charmingly so. Not aggressive in any off-putting way. He is willing to laugh at you if he thinks you’re wrong. But he’d prefer to laugh with you. Except when my politics began turning, around the time of the Iraq War, when I started getting more disillusioned with the side I had always chosen, and which only went downhill from there: Donald Rumsfeld, Sarah Palin,The Tea Party, Donald effing Trump……The last time Vic and I were in Italy together, in his family’s hometown of Cortona – an Etruscan architectural marvel in the middle of Tuscany – the news broke that Trump had just ridden the golden escalator, declaring his candidacy. “Don’t worry,” I told Vic. “This won’t go anywhere.” There are a lot of things in life, besides aging, that we can’t account for. Perhaps some inevitabilities, we’re better off denying as long as we can.

He laughed then. And we haven’t stopped laughing since. Even if I suspect Vic’s disappointed that I now more often than not agree with him. He is a once old-school liberal who is now a fierce independent. When I started finding agreement with him many years ago, he didn’t gain an ideological soulmate. He lost a sparring partner, which is important to him. He relishes argument, as a good, clean fight gets our blood up, always reminding us we’re still alive.

Vic was and is the kind of guy who enjoys upsetting things. Which is why, in his younger days, he physically and spiritually reminded me of Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H. One of my all-time favorite characters. In fact, when I think of Vic, I often think of the “We Want Something Else” scene, when Hawkeye has had it up to his gills with the same old military gruel served in the mess tent, and leads a revolt. Angrily, defiantly, musically, hilariously. If you want to know my father-in-law, this is him in a nut:

And so when he suffers, I kind of do, too. I don’t mean to suggest Vic’s a fragile person. He’s not, even deep into his fourth quarter. That’s the stock he comes from. His pop, Giuseppe, nicknamed “Joe,” came to America in his twenties from the Old Country, all by himself, with no family or friends. He worked coal camps in northwestern Pennsylvania. He blacksmithed and made wine and bread and even at the ripe old age of seventysomething, lied to foundry bosses, where they were casting metal for Sherman tanks during WWII, telling them he was ten years younger. Just so he could work his ass off and provide for his family. He only balked when his bosses nearly punished him by penalizing the many drunks on his shift, telling them they could no longer drink at lunch. Joe brought a thermos full of watered-down red wine every day (you can’t take the Italian out of the boy) - and when the new rule came down, he threatened to quit. But Joe was such a hard worker, they made an exception for him.

In his last years (he died in his sleep at 101), he lived with Vic and his family (including my then-elementary-aged future wife), becoming a figure of comic sport. They would pick up a pizza at the mall, and tell Joe to sit by it, as they went shopping. Instead, Joe would sit on it, soiling his pants, and ruining the pizza. At parties, Joe (whose wife that was twenty years his junior died long before he did), would try out pick-up lines on unsuspecting younger octogenarian women, saying things like, “So missus, how was your Christmas?” (Even though it was presently July.) He hated to be left alone for any reason. And when the family left him at home during one excursion or another, upon their return, he would inflict guilt-inducing tall tales on them, claiming in his pig-English, “The chief’a’police came by while you were away. He asked, ‘Joe, why they leave’a’old man alone?”

And here Vic is in a piece I wrote about the sacredness of trees, part of which was set in the creek-side space on his property, the very spit of land where his daughter and I were married.

But the hardest tree I’ve had to say goodbye to — which has also been the longest goodbye — is to the weeping willow on my in-laws’ land. It has a lot of memories for me. It was the tree that overlooks the clearing next to a creek where we got married. It’s the tree where I used to tie up the late Levi, who was too rambunctious to sit in a kayak with us when we made our way out to the river. We had to leave him behind after first trying to exhaust him by making him swim for fetching sticks before we departed. No matter. We could hear his barks of displeasure all the way down the creek.

It’s a tree that holds even more memories for my in-laws, because it is the tree they planted after their daughter, my wife’s little sister, died in a car accident. She was hit while riding her bike not a mile away from home, two weeks shy of turning ten-years-old. It happened years before I came on the scene. But I’m told that my father-in-law, Vic, a man not given to overt displays of emotion, didn’t cry. He merely spent hours walking in silence in the woods behind his house, his hands in his pockets. Waiting for…….I don’t know what. I’ve never managed to ask him. But I’m guessing he was waiting for his world to come back together, after it had been blown to pieces.

By tree standards, weeping willows don’t last long. They grow fast, but die young. The average lifespan is about 30-50 years, give or take. I thought this one would likely last much longer, since it took root right along a creek, enjoying an endless supply of the water of life. Which turns out, might’ve been the water of death. An arborist told me since the creek water there is slightly brackish, the tree might’ve been drinking slow poison, taking salt into its system.

We noticed the willow started falling apart. At first gradually, then swiftly. Initially, its bark began flaking off. Then you could walk up to it, and literally grab a hunk of wood out of its trunk, like you were tearing off the edge of a sponge. Vic used to run his own construction company, and still had a few big machines at his disposal. One day, without telling anyone he was going to do so — perhaps no longer willing to watch the tree’s accelerating death — he took his front-end loader to it, knocked it down, and pushed it off into the marsh.

It seemed an abrupt move, but maybe a necessary one. We thought that was the end of the tree. And then a strange thing happened. And has kept happening since. Its top, poking out over the marsh, is still sprouting. Every spring, its leaves come back, and it blooms more brilliantly than before. I don’t know how or why. The undergrowth it sits in is so thick, I can’t make out if it’s still rooted, or what’s going on. I suppose with enough determined shoveling, and marsh-plant clearing, I could figure it out. And yet, I don’t want to. The way you’re never quite sure about looking behind the curtain whenever a minor miracle decides to present itself. I don’t want the magician to show me his trick. I just want to believe in magic.

The last words I spoke to Vic were telling him that he would soon see his sister Annie, and his right-arm/brother Dean, and his daughter, Rosanne, who died long before she should have. Vic crossed to the other side about 30 seconds later. Here, I choose to believe in magic, still. Sorry, unbelievers — you know I love you, and can often relate to you in my moments of doubt, of which there are plenty to choose from — but I fully believe I will see Vic on the other side of this mess. And we will have a good laugh about it all, as we always did on this side of things.

Farewell for now, Vic. But see you later, old pal.

Bonus Tracks: As we sat around Vic’s hospice bed near the end, we played a lot of his favorite tunes — he loved music. And he really loved Kris Kristofferson, as do I. Kristofferson himself having just died a year ago, at the age of 88. So we played many of Kristofferson’s standards, like “Me and Bobby McGee.” Which my wife, when she was a little kid, used to think was about her. Her name is Alana, but she couldn’t say it correctly when she was four, so she called herself “Hana.” And so, my father-in-law used to bellow out, at the top of his lungs in the same voice he did in that Yankee Doodle video above, “Me and Hana McGee.” But here’s another much lesser-known Kristofferson song which we’re hoping the funeral singer can pull off at his homegoing: “Thank You For A Life,” which is precisely how we feel about Vic:

And here’s a gorgeous song by Warren Zevon, covered by Jackson Browne. You can skip ahead to the one-minute mark to hear the tune, but the pre-song patter is pretty good, too. It’s called, “Don’t Let Us Get Sick”: