So, what did you do last week when the WVU Mountaineers weren’t playing a football game?
If you’re Tony Caridi, the sportscaster who calls the action for radio, you did the usual.
You know: Hanging out in your kitchen baking bread with Tony Bennett and Charles Barkley, like that.
No big deal, actually.
It was the team’s bye week, a mid-season break between Oklahoma and Baylor, and Caridi was all carpe diem on this particularly mellow Friday.
Normally, he’d be strapped in an airplane seat, if it was an away game week.
Or ensconced in his home office, during his legendary, pre-game preparation if the contest was at Milan Puskar Stadium.
Spends a lot of time in that office, he does.
But that’s not his favorite room in the cheery, airy house in the hills above Morgantown where he and Joan raised their three boys.
Nope, the kitchen is the culinary-Caridi version of the man cave.
And Bennett (the legendary Italian crooner), and Barkley (the legendary NBA character), really were there on this day, technically.
The crooner came by way of his Greatest Hits that Caridi streamed over his phone.
The other Tony made the love songs ache, while swinging the up-tempo, sophisticated blues that made you want to usher your best girl to the dance floor.
Mr. Barkley, meanwhile, jumped and waggled his behind.
The NBA namesake is a spirited Wheaten terrier — and a goofy, family pet who isn’t shy about saying hello (or informing you when he really, really needs to go outside to answer the call of Nature).
Charles Barkley kept putting his nose to the air on this particular Friday.
The transporting aroma of that artisan bread curlicueing from the oven was why.
It made itself part of the molecules in the kitchen.
If you listened, too, you may have caught something else,
riding in on one of the lower frequencies.
Guiseppe takes a bride
You may have heard Guiseppe Caridi telling his youngest boy in that Italian accent of his that he had to get the dough just right — because this is what we do for our customers.
That was back home in Lockport, N.Y., a working-class town of 20,000 or so souls about 30 minutes north of Buffalo along the Erie Canal.
The locks of the canal gave Lockport its name, in fact.
It didn’t take long for the elder Caridi to unlock his heart to Mary D’Agostino, a local girl (the daughter of Italian immigrants, in fact), he met during his first trip to the U.S. when he was
32 years old.
Guiseppe didn’t know one word of English then.
He learned.
The once-and-future Lockport patriarch grew up in Gallico Marina, a coastal town in Italy’s Calabria region, near the toe of the Boot.
His family owned and operated a citrus processing business that had an international clientele, and Guiseppe had come here on a business trip.
The more serious business of love made him stay.
In 1958, after he and Mary were wed, Guiseppe decreed he would stay in his wife’s homeland and go into business. Anything with food and produce.
The couple founded Joe’s Locust Market, which worked for 52 years out of a frame house on 295 Locust St., in Lockport.
By then, Guiseppe, as said, was getting a good grasp of English. He Americanized his name to “Joe” and became a U.S. citizen.
He and Mary had three kids. Tony, the once-and-future WVU broadcaster, was born in 1962.
The Caridi kids all came up working in Joe’s Locust Market, where they learned the grocery business, in English and Italian, from their dad.
To this day, Tony Caridi is fluent in his father’s dialect, even if his cousins in Calabria still laugh when he goes there for visits.
“There are times when I might say something a little wrong or use an outdated reference, since I’m really speaking my father’s Italian,” he said.
“They get a kick out of me, but I can understand what they’re saying, and they can understand what I’m saying, so we’re good.”
‘Let’s go,
we got an order’
Customer service ruled at 295 Locust St.
Guiseppe and Mary were known for their banter with the regulars — Mr. Caridi, especially.
And the trademark pizzas and subs that came out of the kitchen made the place a landmark.
To watch Tony Caridi in his own kitchen is to know he grew up in the kitchen of Joe’s Locust Market.
He works fast, with no timeouts or plays under review. He was conditioned to it.
“Oh, yeah, my dad would be right there, behind me, saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, we got an order.’ The customer was everything.”
Food remains a big part of everything for the Caridi family. Tony has a nephew who is a chef in New York City.
Sports was everything for the third Caridi, meanwhile.
Tony, who grew to 6-foot-4, was by his admission,
“a nominal athlete” in
high school.
He was drawn more to the commentators and announcers who painted word-pictures from the field of play.
It was seven weeks after his graduation from journalism school at Syracuse University when he had
an interview at WAJR, in Morgantown.
That was in August 1984. Hoppy Kerchival hired him.
He made his way to the Mountaineers’ announcing booth and made a lot of friends along the way, also.
Our daily bread
Two of them, Dr. Gary Marano and Dan Oliver, the Morgantown radiologist and Morgantown attorney, respectively, got him into the artisan bread-baking business over the summer.
Which was why he was in the kitchen during his weekend off last Friday.
“Try it with the olive oil,” he said, to a visitor after the loaf emerged.
Two years ago, on
Feb. 7, 2017, Mary Caridi died in Lockport.
Prudden & Kandt Funeral Home did the arrangements and the Mass was held at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, both close by to Joe’s Locust Market.
Just six weeks later, on March 21 of that year, Guiseppe “Joe” Caridi joined his wife, with visitation at Prudden & Kandt and Mass at St. John’s.
In Morgantown, Tony Caridi still misses his parents — but he celebrates them every day, he said.
That’s for the lessons they regularly served, just like those pizzas and subs on Locust Street.
“You work hard,” their son said.
“You make friends and you bake bread. And you have fun.”
Charles Barkley was watching the whole time, and the pup’s blink looked like a wink.
“Huh, Chuck?”
