When I was a child, Gloria, my mother, would sing to me and tell stories of my grandfather Jim Jordan, a pro boxer, and his six brothers. Born “Giordano” in the impoverished Mezzogiorno region of Italy, these were big, burly men, lumberjacks, (the reason why as a 6’ 1” and 190 lb. teenager, I towered over the Italian shrimps in my neighborhood).
The Giordanos had a rambunctious, expansive sense of themselves, long since diluted in me and my Americanized cousins. They’d arrived , flat-broke, in South Brooklyn on the Gowanus Canal at the turn of the century. Within 10 years, two had joined the NYPD and were Mayor Fioriello Laguardia’s personal bodyguards Two others strongmen and pro wrestlers who toured the ethnic enclaves of the East Coast and Midwest as the mad Russian and a bone-breaking Sicilian, a ruse that came to a bad end when from the mat, the “Russian” whispered to his brother in Sicilian, “Shithead, you’re hurting me!” Real Sicilians were in the front row.
My grandfather, insanely jealous, but otherwise righteous, is remembered for dangling a man over the rail of the Gowanus. The guy had dared tip his cap and say, “Buongiorno’ to my grandmother, Clementina.
When Gloria told me the 10-year-old me, her uncle Frank Jordan and the brothers organized their own annual, costumed Thanksgiving Parade and rode through the cobblestone streets of South Brooklyn—now overrun by an infestation of fedora-wearing hipster ass-wipes—on horseback, I balked. I admit I did.
All these years later, my cousin Lorraine (Giordano) Garrison comes up with a photo from the 1922 Brooklyn Standard newspaper. It’s all true and all these folks are long gone, their lives and stories unremarked, but sometimes when I return to Carroll Street and stare over the turgid, toxic green waters of the Gowanus, I remember a line from the odd lullaby my mother used to sing: “Give me some men who are stout-hearted men…” And I see my grandfather, bull-necked big-nosed, muscles rippling, holding a guy over the canal, I know exactly who that person would be.
The Seven Giordano Brothers:
