By Rocco M. Pugliese

The Town Plot neighborhood in Waterbury, from which I come, was overwhelmingly Italian-American and Catholic during the my childhood in the 1940s and '50s. To serve canned spaghetti was to invite derision; other ethnicities were aberrations, and a Protestant an oddity. The one Jew in the neighborhood was the best tipper on my paper route whose generosity inoculated me against anti-Semitism.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, the pride of the neighborhood's Italian-American Catholics, was the focal point of our religious life. The church's formidable presence on Highland Avenue exuded the certainties and authority of Roman Catholicism.

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