(This story was originally written and recorded for Retrocast #32, released on March 12, 2025.)
Nicola Scotti was like so many other American immigrants. He was born in Italy on September 27, 1894. He sailed from Naples at the age of eighteen, arriving in New York aboard the SS Prinzezz Irene on May 16, 1913.
Nick settled in San Pedro, California, where he would spend the bulk of his adulthood working as a fisherman, longshoreman, and restaurant cook. Along the way, he married Esterina Celetti and the couple adopted a daughter named Nancy. (An explanation of her adoption is explained on Find-A-Grave.)
Hard work, a good family, and a nice retirement. Not exactly the kind of thing that gets one into the news.
Shortly after his wife Ester passed away in 1976, Nick began planning a trip back to the land of his birth. Now in his early 80s, he felt this may be the last time that he would be healthy enough to visit his sister, nieces, and nephews in Italy.
But things didn’t go as planned. When his plane landed on Monday, August 8, 1977, he tripped as he stepped off of the airplane. In doing so, he reinjured a knee that had been bothering him since he had surgery on it many years prior, following an accident while working as a longshoreman.
Nick expected to be met at the airport by his nephews, but they were nowhere to be found. So, staff at the airline, Trans World Airlines (TWA) decided it was best to have doctors look at his injured knee. They arranged for an ambulance and he was taken to a nearby hospital.
TWA then notified his daughter back in San Pedro and she frantically tried calling the hospital. She said, “I put in 12 calls to the hospital trying to find out what was happening.”
“I was put off time and time again. Nobody seemed to know what was going on and they kept asking me to call back.
“My Dad is fine in his own surroundings, He cooks and works around the house. But he gets confused in a strange place and I didn’t want him to get lost.
“I finally contacted a social worker at the hospital and was told to call back and his release would be arranged.
“When I did call back, I was told he had already been released and put on a bus to the airport.”
And that’s where things went haywire.
While he didn’t know his nephews’ address, he figured that this was his native homeland and we would be able to track them down fairly quickly. He left the airport and began to wander the city looking for them.
But as Nick roamed the streets, he was unable to locate any of the Roman landmarks that he remembered from his youth. The Roman ruins were gone! Yet, other things were unchanged. For example, he noticed that residents grew zucchini and tomatoes in their backyards, just as he remembered from when he was a kid.
For most of Monday and nearly all day Tuesday, he searched in vain. He traveled endlessly on the buses but had no luck.
Eventually, a bus driver noticed that Nick had been riding the bus for hours and sought the help of police officer Gerald DiAngelo. The problem was that DiAngelo, while of Italian heritage, didn’t speak a word of Italian. And Nick, since he was in unfamiliar surroundings, was having a tough time speaking in English.
Whoa!
Hold up…
What gives? Something is a bit off here. Why would a policeman in Italy not speak Italian, and why would Nick need to speak in English while in Italy? Even the bus driver or any passenger on the bus should have been able to talk to him.
The problem was that Nick was not in Italy. When his TWA plane landed at New York’s Kennedy Airport for a one-hour layover, Nick thought he was in Italy and got off. The hospital that he had been taken to wasn’t in Rome. Instead, he was at Jamaica Hospital in Queens. When they released him, he began wandering the streets of Queens, buying food at pizzerias and wondering why the Italians had ripped down all of those Roman ruins.
It wouldn’t be until 5:45 the following evening that Nancy would get a call from New York City police detective John Hammond to let her know that her dad was alright.
She told reporters, “The police said he had traveler’s checks and plenty of money but that his leg was hurting. They offered to put him back on a plane to Rome, but I said no, they’d better send him home until his leg was better.
“Detective Hammond, his partner George Baker, and officer Gerald D’Angelo made all the arrangements, got him a plane ticket, arranged for a wheelchair, and put him on a plane for Los Angeles Wednesday morning and I picked him up at the airport.
“Thank God for those police officers. They are just terrific.”
Back home, Nick expressed his desire to get to Italy soon, but his daughter squashed that idea. “Not this year, but if the good Lord is willing, perhaps next.”
Did Nick Scotti ever get back to Italy? I don’t have an answer to that question. He passed away nearly four years later in San Pedro on May 2, 1981. He was 86 years old.
