Vincent Giuffre Sr.

Vincent Giuffre Sr., 1917-2005

Mary Lou Atkinson
Staff writer

Thanksgiving was Vincent Giuffre's favorite holiday, perhaps because it combined two very important things in his life: family and food.

He wasn't a big man, probably weighing no more than 140 pounds, said daughter-in-law Margaret Giuffre, wife of Gary, the youngest of three children born to Vincent and Geneva Giuffre. "He was a little Italian man, but he loved food. Every time he told a story, it always came back to food," whether it was the horse meat he once ate while serving in Europe in the Army or the time he and his father went to Jim's Fried Chicken and ate an entire chicken apiece.

"He loved to go to the casinos on the Gulf Coast," Margaret said of her 87-year-old father-in-law, "and when he'd say he didn't like that casino, he wasn't talking about the casino, he was talking about the buffet."

Perhaps his love of food stemmed from the time he spent at his family's Mid-City corner grocery store, where he was working -- after earning a Purple Heart in World War II -- in September 1948 when mutual friends introduced him to the student nurse at Charity Hospital who would become his wife. It was something of a whirlwind romance; Vincent and Geneva were married four months later.

Eventually, the family would include children Vincent Jr., Sandra and Gary, and later, nine grandchildren, to whom Vincent was "Tata."

Vincent typically worked at the grocery six days a week, 12 hours a day, until it closed in the 1960s. Then he went to work selling appliances for Berner's Heating and Air Conditioning.

"He was a man who worked very hard," said Gary Giuffre, the only surviving child. "But family was always first. No matter how well the store was doing or not doing, he always saw to our needs. He always impressed on us that your first obligation is to your family."

But his sense of obligation did not preclude a sense of fun. Even though he couldn't have been more than 5 years old at the time, Gary has fond and vivid memories of his father taking him and his brother to baseball games at the old Pelican Stadium.

In the late 1970s, the Giuffre family moved to eastern New Orleans, where neighbors knew Vincent as the friendly man who took such good care of his modest brick home, Margaret said. The members of St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church knew him as an usher at 7 a.m. Sunday Mass. And golfers at City Park knew him as one of their number.

Vincent and Geneva were together in their home when the post-Katrina floodwater started to rise. When it was waist-deep, and because they were afraid no one would find them in the attic, they tried to leave the house, but Vincent was too weak, slipping under and dying.

Geneva fought her way out and climbed a ladder to the gutter, to which she clung, with some support from a brick fence, for two days before attracting the attention of a neighbor and being taken by boat to the Interstate 10 Crowder Boulevard overpass. From there, she was evacuated to Houston and then to the Atlanta area, where she is now, with Gary and Margaret at their Lawrenceville home.

Seven weeks after the storm, Gary returned to the family home to try to salvage some mementos, only to find his father's body on the kitchen floor. After 45 days at the St. Gabriel morgue, Vincent Giuffre's remains were just released for burial. The family hopes to hold a service in Greenwood Cemetery in the next few weeks.

Published in The Times-Picayune