On May 9, 2015, Alan Walowitz’s poem “The Story of the Milkman” was featured in our ME, AS A CHILD Series. The poem — written specifically for our series — tells the story of Nicholas Lucivero, the Walowitz family’s milkman in Queens, New York, who was killed when his truck was hit by a train on January 31, 1957. Alan’s poem sparked an incredible series of events that culminated in an article in the New York Times (April 16, 2017). Read this awe-inspiring story below.
Ode to a Milkman, Killed 60 Years Ago, Soothes His Family
CAPTION: Alan Walowitz, 68, holding “Exactly Like Love,” a book of his poems. It includes “The Story of the Milkman,” which was inspired by Nicholas Lucivero’s death 60 years ago. (Credit: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)
As a sensitive, sheltered third grader growing up in Cambria Heights, Queens, Alan Walowitz first encountered the concept of death in 1957 when his milkman was killed while making overnight deliveries.
The accident’s outsize impact haunted Mr. Walowitz for 60 years and finally burst out of him in verse, in an ode he wrote called “The Story of the Milkman,” which begins:
When I was a kid our milkman was killed
right before dawn at a railroad crossing
one low whistle away from where we lived.
“The story stuck with me — I was a pretty sensitive kid, and I found it kind of haunting,” recalled Mr. Walowitz, now a 68-year-old retired teacher who lives just over the Queens border in Great Neck, N.Y. “It was the first time I was even tangentially reached by death.”
The poem was published on a poetry website along with a mention of the real-life back story, and caught the attention of Anthony Maraglino, 40, a finance director from New Rochelle, N.Y., who, despite having little interest in poems, was riveted by this one.
The milkman was his grandfather.
“It just blew me away that 60 years later my grandfather pops up in this man’s head for no reason,” said Mr. Maraglino, whose mother, Dorothea, was 4 when her father died on the milk truck. The grandson encountered the poem while searching online for information about his grandfather, and he immediately contacted Mr. Walowitz to hear his memories of the man he never met.
Mr. Walowitz had to explain that he really did not know the milkman well, if at all. That he had become more of a mythical figure, an unusual childhood obsession to an impressionable boy of 8 whose mother, Mr. Walowitz said, informed him one day that their milkman had died “in this awful way.”
CAPTION: Nicholas Lucivero, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, was killed in 1957 when a train hit his milk truck in Queens. The story became a childhood obsession for Mr. Walowitz. (Credit: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)
Mr. Walowitz recalled how he had devoured newspaper accounts that described the milkman as Nicholas Lucivero, 30, who left behind a pregnant wife, Theresa, and their daughters, Christine, 6, and Dorothea, 4.
The young Alan Walowitz was both horrified and oddly excited to read about a man who, at least in a boy’s imagination, had died while rushing cold bottles of milk to the metal box on his family’s porch. The milkman was a World War II veteran, just like Mr. Walowitz’s father.
His poem decades later would recount how he raced on his bike to the crash location, gripped by the death of “a man we’d actually met,” Mr. Walowitz said, and whose photo in the paper he would memorize “like a list of spelling words.”
Back then, the episode added to the churning mix of fear, excitement and wonder that helped inspire the boy to become a poet.
For the milkman’s family, the death was not some childhood rite of passage “one low whistle away,” but rather a direct blow that ripped a hole that never fully healed, said Mr. Maraglino, whose grandfather’s memory is revered in the family.
Mr. Lucivero’s son, born a few months after the accident, was named Nicholas, the first of several members of the family — Nicks and Nicoles — now named after him.
CAPTION: Anthony Maraglino came across Mr. Walowitz’s poem online while researching Mr. Lucivero, his grandfather. “It just blew me away that 60 years later my grandfather pops up in this man’s head for no reason,” Mr. Maraglino said. (Credit: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)
Mr. Maraglino passed the poem around the family, and Mr. Walowitz sent an autographed book of his poems, titled “Exactly Like Love,” that includes “The Story of the Milkman.” It sparked a long overdue, painful discussion about the death and the void it left.
Mr. Maraglino’s father, John, was so inspired by the poem that he wrote one of his own. Titled “A Forgotten Hero,” it’s about a milkman who, as the poem reads, was “an unspoken hero never given his due,” and whose story was “never revealed, kept secretive so all involved given time, their wounds could be healed.”
Anthony Maraglino said the poem by Mr. Walowitz had “opened up a whole Pandora’s box” about his grandfather. “I was blown away because I would never have thought anyone would ever know, much less write about him, 60 years later,” he said.
“I work as a director of finance, so writing and poetry are not my thing,” Mr. Maraglino added, “but it was a fire that ignited me to start researching more about my grandfather.”
A history buff, Mr. Maraglino began piecing together his grandfather’s life and military service, which included landing on Normandy Beach in June 1944, fighting valiantly in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army and earning a Bronze Star for heroism in the Battle of the Bulge.
Then he died delivering milk in a bedroom community in Queens because a sleepy gatekeeper at the Baisley Boulevard crossing failed to put down the gates. A 1:51 a.m. train out of Penn Station carrying eight passengers bore down on the crossing, demolishing the milk truck and killing Mr. Lucivero and his teenage employee.
CAPTION: Mr. Maraglino holding a photo of his mother, Dorothea, right, with her father, Mr. Lucivero, and sister, Christine. (Credit: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)
“It boggles my mind how someone can live through one of the worst battles in one of the worst wars and come home and then die this way,” Mr. Maraglino said.
The milkman’s youngest brother, Phil Lucivero, 84, said this very aspect — “that he went through hell in the war, and to think he died on his milk route” — only added to the senselessness of Mr. Lucivero’s death.
He described his brother as an athletic and charismatic prince of the family. He was a football and gymnastics standout for Jersey City High School and after the war married a woman from Brooklyn, moved to East New York in Brooklyn and bought a milk delivery business.
Mr. Lucivero’s parents were Italian immigrants, and both died from heart failure within two months of their son’s death, Phil Lucivero said.
His death so shocked the family that no arrangement was made for a military burial. He was buried in St. John Cemetery in Middle Village because it was convenient for visits from his widow, who never remarried. Ms. Lucivero rarely spoke to the children of their deceased father, and died in 1993.
As for Mr. Walowitz, to this day he drives inordinately slow at railroad crossings and still thinks of his fallen milkman, whose death oddly enriched another’s life by helping inspire a penchant for poetry.
It is a passion that Mr. Walowitz can now indulge in his retirement, after packing it away for decades to support his family as a teacher.
“Marketing poetry is on the same level of delivering milk,” he said. “It’s hard to sell.”
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