Mike Napolitano was the “dude.” He grew up playing on the streets of the Bronx in New York during the Great Depression. At that time a world away from the serenity of Muskoka. Napolitano was a first-generation American with Italian parents. His life navigates like a novel with stories of hunger, deprivation, and unemployment during his childhood in the 1930s, to fighting the Germans in 1945 during the Second World War. 

Mike’s son Raymond Napolitano describes his father’s childhood in nostalgic stories from his boyhood in the Big Apple. “There were the typical city boy hijinks like riding on the back of cars (picture the 1930s autos) bumpers, called "skeetching" where inevitably the driver would spot him along with his brother and speed up until they were forced to bail out, risking all types of injury.