Before there was a governor Mario Cuomo, who died Thursday, and before there was his son, Governor Andrew Cuomo, who delivered his second inaugural address only hours before his father expired New Year's Day, there were Andrea and Immaculata Cuomo.
Immigrants from Italy's Provincia di Salerno and cuttings from the American scrapbook, Andrea and Immaculata Cuomo are the key to understanding Mario Cuomo, who served three terms as governor of New York, transfixed the Democratic National Convention with his 1984 jeremiad against Ronald Reagan, was a consensus front-runner for the White House before turning away from a presidential campaign, was offered a Supreme Court appointment but turned it down, and reared a governor in his own household.
For it was impossible to talk with Mr. Cuomo, one of the dominating figures of American politics at the end of the 20th century, without hearing about his father, "powerful but prideful," in his son's words, cleaning sewers and being animated by what Mario Cuomo called "that ultimate humility that gives up nearly everything to the next generation." For perhaps more than the Kennedys of Massachusetts, and more than the Bushes of Connecticut and Texas, the Cuomos of New York are the quintessential American family, a combination of striving and stunning success, and yet uneasiness about their place in America.
Andrea Cuomo, with calluses on both hands, eventually opened a 24-hour Italian grocery smack in the middle of the Germans, Irish, Poles, blacks and Jews of South Jamacia, N.Y. The family made sandwiches for the construction day crews and midnight snacks for the night crews, and even as a three-term governor the son's memories were full of the proscuitto that hung in the store, the smell of fresh bread, the Italian prunes and the recollection of 6 a.m. Mass at St. Monica's.
"God," Mr. Cuomo wrote in the introduction of published excerpts of his diary, "had created the world as a kind of hard passage to eternity," and Mr. Cuomo was not one to shy away from the hard passages, either in his lesson books or in the streets.
He thrived from a decade of Vincentian training and thrived, too, from sports. Joe Austin, who coached him in basketball and baseball, remembered him as "a good hustler," and the fabled St. John's basketball coach Lou Carneseca, who helped coach the college basketball team that Mr. Cuomo played on, remembered him as "smart and competitive." Smart, competitive – and dutiful. The kids who swept in to pick him up for baseball often had to wait while he took the bottom leaves off the lettuce in the back room of the store. Then they'd blow out the door, sometimes getting a can of paint to draw bases in the streets or cutting a broom handle for stickball. Or they'd fish a small rubber ball out of the sewers with a bent clothes hanger. Or they'd play basketball at St. Monica's, taking their shots around the eaves and hiding when Father Ernie, Father Gardner or Father Kriss came looking for altar boys.
This was the world that created Mario Cuomo, a long-ago, forgotten world that also created a long-ago, forgotten America.
Though Mr. Cuomo was known as governor for a confrontational style, he won his first broad attention in conciliation.
He mediated a signature confrontation in Forest Hills, after New York tried to move scores of poor families into an all-white community. Suddenly a star was born. Before long Mr. Cuomo, regarded as "the ethnic who was sensitive to the liberal concerns," was wooed by opportunistic Democrats who hoped to use him for political cover.
That led to his selection as secretary of state and as lieutenant governor – and finally to a gubernatorial campaign itself. Once elected to New York's highest office, he was preachy but unpredictable. Like Nelson Rockefeller, he kept a lot of the details to himself, and like another onetime governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he was drawn to harnessing the power of the state for liberal ends.
"I love this job," Mr. Cuomo once told me as we were flying between Albany and Rochester in the state's Grumman Gulfstream. "There is so much opportunity to do good. The best thing you can do in life is to help someone. Every day in this job you have an infinite opportunity to be worthwhile. Some days you don't avail yourself of that opportunity. But the next day you can."
David Shribman