Though they were altar boys in their Italian-American Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1950s, Vincent Manago and his friends often acted like little devils.
There was the time the now-Manhasset resident and his buddies got their hands on a set of keys that opened every door to the former Church of St. Lucy, and the time they used those keys to find the church’s “third attic,” a secret room that had been the stuff of childhood legends.
“We were convinced we were going to find it. We heard all these stories about the relics of St. Rita that were there,” he said. “The priests didn’t like it one bit.”
To Manago, St. Lucy’s was special. Brooklyn was special. His altar boy buddies and family history were special.
So he racked his brain and collected his stories and set out to write that history, self-publishing his memoir, “The Third Attic and Other Brooklyn Stories” in April 2014 through Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace.
“I wrote the book because I had a story to tell,” he told a meeting of the Long Island Antiquarian Book Dealers and Long Island Book Collectors at the Manhasset Public Library Thursday.
“I know everybody has a story they think is worth telling,” he said, “but I wanted my story to be told for my children and my family.”
Thematically, he said the stories are linked by its subjects’ search for something, either for material items, stronger relationships or for a purpose in life.
In the book, Manago tells the story of how his grandfather helped build St. Lucy’s in the 1910s, and writes of the church’s demise in the mid 1970s, around the time the Brooklyn naval yard closed and, he said, “the rest of the neighborhood went with it.”
There are stories about Manago’s father’s childhood illness, the saga of Father Caruana, and the day the Western Union boy arrived on their doorstep with news his uncle Anthony had been killed while fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.
“My grandmother mourned every day for the rest her life,” he said. “She died at 66, so young.”
Now in his early 70s, Manago was tasked with developing his computer skills to type his stories and sell the book on Amazon and through social media.
He said his son helped set up a Facebook page for the book, and enjoys reading the reviews readers leave online.
“This story is a beautiful story and i didn’t want it to fade away with history,” he said.
