Remembering my old Scoutmaster

Mr. Palazzo (center) at a cabin in which we camped at Camp Bullowa, at which it snowed. Best campout ever.

NOTE: I do not know when this originally ran, and I don't know if this is the way it appeared in print, exactly.

My old digital archives are so out of date I can't open a clean version of my old work.

From the file creation date info, it might have been around July of 2003 when I wrote this. The time fits, because I was in the waning days of my time at The People-Sentinel.

I saw a post from the daughter of my old Scoutmaster today on Facebook. So I thought I would dig this up.

(I thought I had all my latter work saved as a pdf, but nope.)

Anyway, on to Mr. Palazzo.

Originally published in The People-Sentinel around July 31, 2003.)

I don't know why, but I thought the unhappiest thing a wedding invitation might garner was a "Sorry, I am unable to attend" check.

I didn't expect him to come, but I sent the invitation on anyway, just in case. If he couldn't, it would let him know that after so many years, I still remembered him. But the answer for Nick Palazzo came instead in a letter to my father.

I shouldn't call him by his first name. He was my Scoutmaster when I was growing up. I always called him Mr. Palazzo. It's an Italian name, and only one person, a priest at St. Helen's parish in New York, pronounced it correctly when we were growing up – Pah-lots-so.

He was the Scoutmaster of Troop 56, St. Raymond's. He's the guy who watched us. He didn't try to teach us "leadership" like they do in some troops these days. He saw who the natural leaders were and he tried to develop them.

He worked in the city planning office of New York City.

When the terrorists attacks happened on Sept. 11, I thought of Mr. Palazzo, because he had given us, when we moved to South Carolina, something to remember New York City with. They were five books, the city planning documents for all five boroughs of New York. They were so big, square pages bigger than a phonograph record. I mostly looked back on those pages to the book on the Bronx, about Parkchester, where I grew up. But the Manhattan section had a detail plan for something called the World Trade Center, which wasn't complete.

It weighed about 20 pounds, at least.

It was a great gift to give someone leaving the greatest city in the world, in my case under protest. It kept us connected.

He was an usher at the church. He was a father.

When I signed up, even though the Scouts met in the basement of St. Raymond's Elementary School, I never knew how heavily tied into religion the Scouts were. But as a Cub Scout, he got us to get our religious medal, the Parvuli Dei. And he was my instructor when I went through the Boy Scout-level Catholic Scout award – the Ad Altare Dei.

That's Latin, and it means Approaching the altar of God.

It was a big deal, and I still have the cross badge and red white blue and yellow ribbon that I earned by listening, in part, to what Mr. Palazzo taught us.

I must have been 12 when I went for it, and I am 37 now. A quarter of a century has passed, yet I can still remember one night, walking home from an Ad Altare Dei class, at which Mr. Palazzo tried to teach us about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which we Catholics call the Beatitudes. It was an odd situation for me, that class. Mr. Palazzo was a "civilian" yet he was teaching us religion. He wasn't a priest or a nun or a school teacher.

But he made the most salient point I've ever been taught.

"Blessed are those who show mercy, for mercy shall be theirs," Jesus said. What did that mean, Mr. Palazzo asked. I was a kid, and of course I didn't know. I thought maybe it meant there was a scorecard up in heaven, and you got points later on, in the afterlife. He knew it wasn't so silly.

So he taught me.

"When you do something for someone else, don't you feel good inside?" he asked. I thought I did.

"Isn't that a mercy?" he asked. Indeed it is. I can hear his voice, I can see him standing next to me, me on the other side of my father and my brother as we walked home.

He was just a good man, a man who told me that sometimes my ability to make people laugh was also a mercy for those people, a mercy that should return to me.

I am on the verge of tears as I write this.

I just wanted the invitation to perhaps thank him for always teaching me, and he never saw it.

He was a large man, though. Late in life, he developed diabetes. He got a sore on his foot that wouldn't heal. He was put in the hospital, and some toes were amputated, then his leg, at the knee. The second amputation caused a blood clot.

On Thursday, I found out all that. His wife Phyllis wrote a letter to my father because she had gotten the wedding invitation.

I found out Thursday Nick Palazzo died. He died back in January, and I just found out Thursday.

I need some mercy, Lord; mercy for Mr. Palazzo, a good, good man who I never thanked.

It doesn't have to come back to me, but right now, I could use some myself.

Edit to add: I think an online obituary I found is his. Lists "Nicholas A Palazzo was born on February 20, 1926. He died on January 24, 2003 at age 76." 

Dad (center) and Mr. Palazzo (right) at the cabin we camped in at Camp Bullowa where it snowed, we had an epic snowball fight and we went out after Bigfoot at night.