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In Their Day, It Was WWII, But War Is Still Hell

By STEVE OTTO

Published: Nov 11, 2007

It's Friday morning at the El Gallo de Oro in West Tampa. Louis Matassini begins every Friday here over coffee and Cuban toast with his old buddies who grew up in what was once called Roberts City on the west bank of the Hillsborough, north of what is now the University of Tampa.

"Then we go have lunch at another Spanish restaurant and have coffee somewhere else," he says. "My wife has me the other six days of the week; this is my time."

This Friday, Louis is early, sitting with his brother, Pat. The two are part of the Matassinis who have been around since their father opened the fish market back around 1905, when he would go down to the end of Franklin Street and sell baskets of fish from the boats that gathered there.

Both are in their mid-80s, and I asked them what it was like in those days leading up to World War II and a generation that would be changed forever.

Their generation was not unique. There are veterans and their families from up and down the turbulent 20th century and already from this still young one. For them, their lives also were forever affected by long stretches of families separated and the emotional as well as physical scars of time apart.

World Of The Vet

Most of us get on with our lives and those times are just memories. But how many veterans today are among the homeless loitering at the edges of our cities? How many suffer deep emotional wounds the rest of us don't understand or have families that struggle economically coping with what their veteran went through?

The Matassini brothers came from a strong family, although Louis had determined that when he got out of school he was not going into the fish business like Pat. When he graduated from Jefferson in 1942, he headed off to the University of Florida.

Their Uncle Nick was already in the war and soon Pat got his draft notice. He had started school at Hillsborough and moved to the new Jefferson and then graduated. He was already working when the war caught up with him.

"I thought I would go to Florida," Louis said, "but I was put in the Army reserves. It was in my second semester they called me up and I was off to training and pretty soon they shipped me to England, where Pat was already stationed."

Pat would stay in England for the duration of the war but picked up a Purple Heart when a buzz bomb exploded only yards away.

"I have to say the English were incredibly tough, especially the women who would go about their jobs and then at night take the children into the subways."

Louis headed off to France as a forward observer. Along the way he picked up a Silver Star when he volunteered to lay land lines in the open and under fire after the Germans destroyed the other lines.

Neither brother remembers where he was when they learned their Uncle Nick had been killed at the Battle of the Bulge.

'Enough Of The World'

"That was enough of the world for me," says Louis, who changed his mind and came home to Tampa and the fish business with his brother. "There is enough to see in this country."

As we sat there and drank coffee, a friend stopped by to say hello. He mentioned to the Matassinis that his son was back in Afghanistan for the second time. I wondered if sometime a few decades down the line that son would be sitting in some Tampa coffee shop talking about another war and another time on a Veterans Day weekend.

Steve Otto can be reached at sotto@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7809.