It was December 1947, just days before New Year’s Eve. Twenty-one-year-old Anthony “Tony” Gillistro had just come home from the Marine Corps and was paying his childhood friend William Manocchio a visit on Standish Street, their old neighborhood in Wethersfield, Conn.

“The guys were getting together for a New Year’s Eve party. We all just came home. That was, I think, ’47. And I didn’t have a date,” Gillistro said. “Billy said, ‘Why don’t you ask my sister?’ So, I asked Dottie, she asked her father and he put the sign of the cross.”