DYKER HEIGHTS—When I see Dr. Anthony Fauci on the TV screen explaining expertly everything we need to know about the coronavirus pandemic, I find myself thinking back to his father, Stephen Fauci, whose drugstore our family relied on back in the 1950s. Steve Fauci was the neighborhood pharmacist.
The Fauci Pharmacy stood on the southwest corner of 13th Ave. and 83rd St., in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn, diagonally across from the Shrine Church of St. Bernadette. We lived two blocks away on 85th.
Long ago parishioners like me remember what the store looked like, the soda fountain that ran along the right wall, the telephone booths at the left close to the entrance and the counter straight ahead down the center.
Whenever my mother sent me there, Mr. Fauci would be behind the counter, but it was a family enterprise. They lived in an apartment above the store, and if the patriarch wasn’t serving you, his wife, Eugenia, or daughter, Denise, was there. Young Anthony, I’ve since learned, pitched in too, his father sending him out on his bike to deliver items to customers.
I’ve never met the man who has become the most important medical voice in the country. Nor have former parishioners that I’ve spoken to about him in recent days, like boyhood pals Anthony LoFrisco, from 80th St., now in Connecticut, and Bob Orlando, who lived on 84th, now a New Jersey resident, as well as Bishop Gerald Barbarito of the Palm Beach Diocese., from 11th Ave. But each remembers the pharmacy as a Dyker Heights institution.
While we don’t know him personally, in a sense he’s become everyone’s friend. With his steady television presence, he’s imparted his vast knowledge and straightforward advice in a trademark, sometimes gravelly or raspy, Brooklyn accent that has endeared him to people far and wide. You can’t be anything but proud of someone of his prominence who came from the parish.
Anthony became known as Tony, as he tells it, when Father Flanagan, principal of Regis High School, decided to call him that on his first day as a freshman. The name stuck.
Tony took buses and trains to the Jesuit school in Manhattan, including the old Sea Beach Express. He traveled 70 minutes each way, did three hours of homework, captained the basketball team and excelled in the class room.
I remember hearing that when Tony was a high schooler, he had a part-time job working in St. Bernadette’s rectory, answering the phone and doing whatever else parishioners wanted him to do to put them in touch with one of the parish priests. In those days, the rectory had a priestly bonanza. There were four of them.
Because St. Bernadette’s School had not yet been established, Tony went to Our Lady of Guadalupe School, where he was taught by Dominican Sisters. It was, and is, St. Bernadette’s neighboring parish.
Like most kids, he loved sports. He played CYO baseball and basketball. At Dyker Park on 86th St., he and his friends developed skills in imitation of their heroes. A Yankee follower living in the midst of Brooklyn Dodgers fans who adored The Boys of Summer, he’s said his favorite players were Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle.
Tony’s father and mother married at 18, after they graduated from New Utrecht High School. Steve went on to Columbia to study pharmacy.
Sometime after he opened his pharmacy, he became friends with Father Al Varriale, one of St. Bernadette’s beloved parish priests. At one point, Steve, as a parent, and the priest known as Father V, who directed the parish’s robust CYO sports program for youths, shared a concern. It was the easy availability of indecent and immoral publications that they knew was a threat to the moral development of young people.
So, with the approval and support of the Diocese of Brooklyn, together they formed a diocesan commission against pornography. Both men are now long gone, and so is the commission, but it was a good idea, though it did not survive them.
Remarkably, just a few houses up the block from where Steve established his pharmacy, lived the Pellegrinos, another family of St. Bernadette’s parishioners that produced a renowned medical professional.
The eldest son, Edmund, became a bioethicist, a “preeminent” one, as one newspaper described him after he died. But he was more. He helped develop medical programs at Kentucky, Stony Brook and Tennessee Universities. Later, he took on the presidency of The Catholic University of America. Then, after completing his tenure there, he became, as physician and philosopher, the director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.
Though years apart in age, both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Pellegrino became Hippocratic stars, nurtured on the same block. Only in Brooklyn, I say, not without bias.
Steve Fauci was known by members of his extended family and friends for his personality, kindness, sense of humor and wit, and for telling good stories. So they said in comments after he died in 2008.
Tony appears to have inherited Steve’s gene for lightheartedness. His daughter once told the Washington Post that her dad could be a “goofball. . .he works hard and does his thing, but he comes home and he’s singing opera in the kitchen and dancing around.”
That kind of calm can help a man maintain his balance as he deals with the pressure of talking to millions of people every day about the complexity of a global pandemic. As one newsman said, “When Fauci appears on the screen, you turn up the volume.”
He once said the Jesuits at Regis and Holy Cross College taught him the importance of “precision of thought and economy of expression.” That’s what he delivers every day: accurate information given concisely.
That’s Tony Fauci, now a national treasure. And to think, he came from the neighborhood.
By Frank DeRosa
(DeRosa retired as Associate Publisher of The Tablet and director of the Diocesan Public Information Office in 2008)
