the family who seemed not to have experienced personal humiliations as a consequence of having the surname Bonanno. As a girl she had a somewhat sheltered existence, attending mass regularly with her mother and devoting herself as she got older to Catholic teachings of the most binding belief: she was decidedly pro-life. She and her husband, whom she met when she was twenty and was operating a day-care center in a town near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, had raised ten children together, and, at the age of forty-two, Felippa was expecting another child a month after the reunion. She told me the job she most enjoyed as a schoolgirl in San Jose was babysitting.
Never at odds with her faith, she attended mass and received communion every day, she said, adding that she and her husband prayed together with the children at home and as a family ventured out in the community to participate in charitable and humanitarian activities. Although she was no longer known as a Bonanno since taking her husband’s name in marriage, she had always been guided by her mother’s often repeated warning to her and to her three brothers when they were growing up in San Jose: “You are not ordinary children. You have to try twice as hard to be good. You have to be better than everybody else. The world won’t give you a second chance because of your name.”
Rosalie and Bill’s four children, with the exception of the bachelor Charles, not only had children of their own (seventeen in total at the time of my visit in May 2007) but a few grandchildren as well. And again, except for Charles, none of the Bonanno offspring had ever been, as their father often referred to it, “a guest of the government.”
At the conclusion of the family reunion, Rosalie and Bill escorted their children outside the house and onto a grassy field across the street to pose for the Newsweek photographer. They arranged themselves in the same order they had posed forty years before in a family snapshot that I had obtained in 1970 for use in Honor Thy Father. This old photo, together with the one taken at the reunion, illustrated my article that appeared in the June 25, 2007 issue of Newsweek.
I saw to it that copies of the recently posed photo were mailed to members of the Bonanno family, and in the months that followed I called Tucson on two or three occasions to chat with Bill Bonanno—the last time in late December to thank him for the Christmas card that he and Rosalie had sent, and also for his accompanying note in which he expressed satisfaction in our having known one another for more than forty years. He said that he and Rosalie were planning to be in New York sometime after the holidays—he would let me know when—but first they would be driving up to northern California to spend time with their daughter and her husband, adding that the couple’s hillside home fortunately was large enough to accommodate their ten resident children and had private quarters for the children’s grandparents.
Late in the afternoon of January 2, 2008, I received a call in New York from Dr. Joseph Bonanno’s wife, Kathleen, in Phoenix. She said that Bill Bonanno had died suddenly of a heart attack in the early morning of New Year’s Day. As I listened in stunned silence and sadness she explained that he had felt well enough on New Year’s Eve to dine with Rosalie and a few friends in Tucson, then he had gone to bed and did not wake up. He was seventy-five. Kathleen said that the funeral mass would be held on January 7 at the Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Tucson.
I flew to Tucson a day early in order to attend the evening viewing, and, on the following morning, I joined hundreds of mourners in pews crowded with people from Arizona as well as New York, California, other parts of the country, and also Canada. Those in attendance belonging to the Bonannos’ immediate and extended family amounted to nearly one hundred people. Some of the grandchildren and the cousins served as gift bearers and pallbearers. Television cameras were posted outside the church, and extra police were added to oversee the arrival of lines of limousines at the curb and the steady stream of cars pulling into the church’s parking lot.
Lengthy obituaries and articles about the funeral appeared in national newspapers and weekly magazines. The New