A Tribute for Joe Carota,



Oct. 30, 2010

For Alice and me Joe was a dear friend. He had a big heart, enjoyed laughter and loved people, especially his daughters Julie and Anne and his grandchildren, and he dedicated his best energies to helping others in need. So when Liz called to tell us of his death and the few details of his last week of life, we felt a deep sadness: a dear friend who loved family and friends and built or remodeled homes for hundreds of people died far away from those closest to him, alone and homeless. The tragic dimension of life leaves us with a sense of loss that some of the issues Joe struggled with remained, it seems, unresolved. Yet we remember Joe with deep affection for the kind, good, generous person he was.

I first met Joe when my uncle took me to meet the Carota's at their apple farm in Aptos nearly 50 years ago. Fr. Joe liked and respected Mario for his social activism. For him the Carota's embodied the social gospel. We arrived for lunch. The whole tribe of clamoring children sat opposite one another at the longest dining table I'd ever seen, Estelle at one end, Mario at the other. It felt like utter pandemonium. Only during Grace was there any quiet. Estelle tried to moderate the family's exuberance, while Mario went up and down the table laughing with the children and making sure they all shared the food fairly and got enough to eat. This was Joe's initial education in caring, as he observed the example of his parents. It shaped the Joe we all know who spent much of his life helping others.

His parents' example perhaps influenced Joe even more when they packed their whole family into an old school bus in 1961 to spend a summer with a group of students from Yale in Actipan in Mexico City building a chapel. Joe saw first hand not only the poverty of the neighborhood but more importantly his parents' respect and appreciation for the Mexican people and his parents' intent on helping instill in the Yale students a generosity toward others that would inspire the rest of their lives. But it wasn't all work. By nature warm and hospitable and irrepressibly fun-loving, Mario organized a party each week for all involved in the project, Mexicans and North Americans, and like his father Joe fully enjoyed the fiestas and the opportunities they opened up to get to know people better.

With all this background and experience, it's not surprising that Joe became one of the most appreciated leaders in Amigos Anonymous, and that among Amigos he made some of his closest friends. When Julie was born, Joe and Liz asked Jack and Donna Walton to be her godparents, and when Anne came, they honored Alice and me to be Anne's. Joe liked to reminisce and his stories were often of funny incidents in Amigos. Joe laughed heartily when recalling the dramas surrounding the ramshackle latrine some of the girls used in Tarimoro that the household pigs had open access to.

When I got my teaching job at Modesto Junior College in 1969, Liz was the person who found me the apartment I lived in for three years, and Joe and Liz had me over to dinner often. They helped make me feel at home in Modesto. They had moved there because Joe was hired to work for Self-Help Enterprises, an early version of Habitat for Humanity, that built homes with and for low-income people. Joe had learned his carpentry skills from his father, but he honed them under the tutelage of Modesto's legendary Master Carpenter, Virgil Simmons. After Self-Help Joe spent most of the rest of his professional life working for a few building companies in Modesto and as a free lance carpenter in Modesto and the Santa Cruz area.

For many years in Modesto Joe was an active member and leader of the Modesto JayCees, a fraternal organization that helps our local community. One of their main activities was to help organize the (then) well known Modesto Relays, in which athletes like Carl Lewis competed. For Joe, who loved sports, this annual event was a highlight. He helped officiate and he met some of the best track and field stars in the country. But he was most proud of his work helping the JayCees install a new state-of-the-art rubberized surface track at Modesto Junior College where the relays were held. That was over 20 years ago and the track is still in good shape.

In sports I knew Joe was a scrapper because we'd played basketball a few times. But when I invited him to join a weekly MJC faculty-student touch football game, I discovered "scrapper" was a euphemism. When Joe blocked or ran into a runner's defender to try to tag the runner, he didn't just "touch." The encounter was a collision, a flying full body block or lunge, usually leaving his opponent wincing in pain. Joe became known as "Carota the Crusher." I made sure Joe was on my side. An image stays with me. Scat-back Alice had just gained 20 yards on an end run with Joe having eliminated several opponents before she was finally tagged. One of them was limping, gripping his side, cussing. In the huddle, Joe was beaming, as though saying, mission accomplished. Next!

Alice and I and our children feel thankful Joe spent a lot of time with us over the years. I hired him to work with me on house expansion projects four times, and he stayed with us often during those projects. A lot of our house we owe to Joe. He loved a tasty steak, a cold beer, and a lively conversation. Our children liked talking with Joe about whatever they were involved in--baseball, tennis, gymnastics, school, or whatever--and Joe enjoyed listening to them. When they mentioned some accomplishment, he would say enthusiastically, his hands palm up in a typical Sicilian gesture, "This is Good! This is Good!" (his voice rising on the word "Good." When Alice called Kriya to let him know of Joe's death, Kriya's response was immediate, "That's so sad. He was such a nice, jovial person who loved life and people."

For Alice and me and our three children, Joe was a kind, caring, and tender person. He loved his children and granchildren and always spoke proudly of Julie and Anne, whom he still called his "babies" even when they became adults. We never heard Joe speak harshly or meanly about anyone. Though he and Liz had ended their marriage, Joe always spke with deep respect and appreciation for Liz and the way she raised Julie and Anne. Joe was happy the last time I talked with him on the phone, a couple of months ago. He spoke with pride of his work with some Santa Cruz churches to build homes for poor people in Mexico, and of his volunteering here at the St. Francis Catholic Soup Kitchen. Whatever difficulties Joe had, we believe he tried his best to live as St. Francis taught: "Divine Master, may I seek not so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."

Julie and Anne, Sydney and Nathan, Liz, Mario and Estelle, and Joe's brothers and sisters, we hold you in our hearts with love and affection,

Dan and Alice Onorato