Comments:
The little shy Italian guy we sometimes called Meatball or Meat would become as adventurous and innovative as his father. Ed’s father Michael, an immigrant at 13 from Italy found his niche in working with metal—first silver, then his own radiator business and scrap salvage. He once bought for $100 the 240 foot shell of Submarine 51 that sank in LI Sound off Block Island in 1925. He intended to put it on display but safety concerns stymied that plan and he cut it up by Hempstead Harbor and sold it for scrap. Ed’s sister Gail says, “He wasn’t afraid to try anything.”
In high school Ed hung out at Freddie’s Service Station and liked to contemplate the uses and value of the wrecked cars in junk yards. When Ed left high school and went to working for one of the zanier and more daring local experts—Don Deeks the “tree man.” While doing tree work Ed earned himself a place in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not when he cut down a large old elm and found growing inside of it, an 18 inch sapling.
Ed’s experience in scrap metals and mechanics led him into the scrap metal business. His expertise in the uses, values and markets for scrap took him into places and projects few people think much about, but which are vital to the way the world works and which require both a practical mind and a good imagination. We tend to think of progress as building and assembling. A great deal of such progress cannot begin until someone does the un-building and hauling away of the old. Call it un-building because wrecking doesn’t begin to describe the kinds of skills and knowledge that led Ed to become an expert on disassembling a whole power plant on Gardiner’s Island and employing helicopters to lift outmoded air-conditioning units off of high rise buildings in Manhattan.
Ed has lived his entire life on Long Island.
