Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 84

G-4 PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17. 1995 Essentially Pittsburgh In search of the soul of Perry Como I Michael Knapp a name that, spoken, sounds bigger than life? That it happens to a lot of people doesn't dull the fascination. I've driven past Canonsburg hundreds of times going up and down Interstate 79. It's all pretty much in view from the road. Those soldier-thin Western Pennsylvania houses painted wan colors, set into the hillside as democratically as rows of identical tombstones.

And each time, glancing left if I'm coming north, right if I'm heading south, I think, "This is Perry Como's hometown," the man whose Christmas specials sprinkled my youth like drop-in visits from a pal of my dad's. I stopped the other day at the Canonsburg Borough building, where Mayor Daniel A. Caruso showed me the "wall of fame" in his office. Photos of Perry Como Day in Canonsburg Aug. 24, 1977 when they renamed Third Street Perry Como Street; of Perry with Ike; Perry meeting the Queen Mum; Perry fishing in Hawaii.

Caruso gets calls "all the time" from people who want to see where Perry grew up. He takes the time. It's not really a burden. A small town that produces a celebrity can say, See, we aren't nobody. The same person you ve heard on the radio and seen on TV? Who sold more than 100 million records worldwide? Well, he scooted along these very sidewalks with us.

Como would wear a cardigan sweater and sit on a stool in his TV specials. His voice was as smooth and easy as a mature Italian wine. You didn't have to think about it to savor it. You didn't feel presumptuous sing- By Diana Nelson Jones Post-Gazette Start Writer CANONSBURG On the trail of Perry Como, I stop an old woman who is hobbling east along West Pike Street. It's a gray day, and she's hunched inside a cardigan, munching her gums.

She has walked her shoes shapeless. When I ask her where Perry Como used to live, she shoots me a sideways look that says, You're nuts: "Years ago, on Central. But he's moved." Perry Como, though he never lived on Central, left his hometown the year FDR was elected to his first term. He returned briefly when he was still building his singing career, but really, Canonsburg was as quickly in his past at age 20 as fame was in his future. Sixty-three years later, Como's life and career serve as symbols of now huge and yet confoundingly compact the American century has been.

He was born in the shadow of the Old World the first of Lucia and Pietro Como's 13 children to have been born outside Italy. He approaches the next millennium with a golf swing refined by leisure and a legacy of hits that began and ended the most dramatic 25-year span in American history: "Till the End of Time" lasted for 10 weeks at No. 1 in 1945 and "It's Impossible" made it into 1970's Top 10. How does one person make such a leap? How does a kid in a modest white frame house in a little town in a sooty region become an international singing star with Keep in Touch Over the Holidays ins with it, as you would have with Sinatra. He had his own variety hour, "The Perry Como Show," in the '50s.

He had Christmas shows, Thanksgiving shows, Easter shows, a Valentine special, special after special, right into the '80s. He's still visible: Public television is airing his 1993 Christmas special, filmed in Dublin, Ireland, this holiday season. And RCA released a three-disc boxed set, "Perry Como: Yesterday and Today A Celebration in Song, just last year. With Christmas nearing, Perry Como croons in my consciousness. I hear "Silver Bells" and "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays." His home now is Jupiter, where he will spend his holidays.

But no matter how old you get or how far you've moved, your hometown is the floorboard of your soul, Though it has changed greatly since 1932 for one, its population fell from 14,000 to its current 9,200 Canonsburg has something that's the same as it was then. I can't know that, but I feel it. Something about the air, like the odors in a house, and how stuff from way back remains settled in the mortar of brick buildings. And the way people walk down the street. People still stop and talk on the corner, women with scarves around their heads and coats made of vinyl, hefty people wrapped tight like the immigrants their parents might have been, and if they don speak another language, they appear to.

It's all still there, even though the high school Perry Como attended is gone, replaced by a newer building, and the Third Street barber shop where he apprenticed as a boy a two-story frame that was later covered in brick siding was razed sometime after 1970. What happened to Perry Como is like a fairy tale, like the Hollywood mogul plucking the beauty from the stool at the soda parlor: He was in his shop, clipping his neighbors' hair, singing as he clipped, and someone who knew someone heard Turn and passed the word along. And one day, a phone call. At 2 1, with a pencil-thin mustache and liquid, matinee-idol eyes, Perry is pictured in the July 19, 1934 edition of the Canonsburg Daily Notes. Mayor Caruso said it was probably the first article about the native son: "A young Canonsburg boy threatens to snatch the crown from Bing Crosby's head," the article begins.

"Perry Como, 21 year old son of Mr. and Mrs. Pietro Como of 530 Franklin street is said to have one of the grandest baritone voices in the country." The ties to Franklin Street are slim now. Two of Como's brothers live in Pennsylvania, but his sister, Ven-zie Jakubetz, remains in Canonsburg. She remembers her famous brother as a mischievous kid.

Really? "Oh yeah," she says, as though it were well known, then adds, "He was good-natured." Did people know him as a kid who sang around town? "Yes, he sang for weddings and he played guitar, you know." Any of his boyhood chums still around? "No dear, they have all passed away." He's doing well, though, right? "Oh yes, he's doing very well. He has a lot of grandchildren: I think the last one was the llth or 12th." Mayor Caruso and I drove along Franklin the other day. "Pull over there," he said, motioning. I rolled my window down and he leaned toward it, calling out to a woman on the sidewalk that we were looking for the house Perry Como grew up in. "That house, my she said, pointing behind her at a frame house with yellow siding.

She introduced herself as Barbara Steiner. "It didn't look like this be- T4 fore. We put on new siding and a new porch." But it's the same house. When the front door opens, it leaves the same space through which passed the boy who would be someone someday. My mind had begun mythmaiting.

I decided I had to talk to Perry. His sister gave me his manager's number 1 in New York City, who told me, "Gee, I don't know. I can't promise anything." An hour later, the phone rings, I pick it up and intro- duce myself. There's a pause, then a voice, frailer than I was expecting: "It's Como." I ask him to remember as much as he can about 1 Canonsburg, and at the mention of his hometown, he laughs so fondly, I think he's going to go into a fit of i nostalgia. But he says, "It's been so long ago.

"Once in a while, I hear someone has passed away. Guys I used to run around with, cut their hair. It dis- tresses me." He recalls running his own shop as a teen-ager. "I ran a two-chair barber shop in a building with a Greek 4 coffee house. On Blaine I think.

I had my own business at 15 or 16, had someone working for me. It was a good -life. "I was there 'til I was 21 or 22, then I started to sing I a little bit. "When I was in Pittsburgh for a show, the old welcome mat was out, they'd bring in some Italian wine very nice memories. "I'd go back home to Canonsburg occasionally.

"I would walk down the street and think, 'People haven't changed at Well, we all got older. But the facial expressions, it's all still there. I'd walk up to someone, say You wanna and they'd say, 'Oh my God Perry, how are Then we'd go through a little cryingjag, me with 'em." A It's simple. With Wireless Services Messaging Division you can keep in touch over the holidays with all your family and friends no matter where you ard no matter what you're doing. And now; for a limited time, receive Four Free Passes to ZooLights at the Pittsburgh Zoo when you lease or purchase an Wireless Services pager.

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