Sixth in a series. 

Re: “Cassese: How to Succeed by Really Trying”

In a memorable scene from John Cassese’s video biography that he hopes grows into a commercial film, this youngest of five sons is 12 years old and innocently toiling at an ironing board.

Suddenly, his angry, drinking father, who never needed provocation, winds up and fires an ashtray fast pitch.

It whizzed past young John’s face.

John would have been startled – had he had time to react.

Sure the Italian Catholic Cassese family went to church three times a week, Sundays, Tuesdays and Saturdays.

After church, however, the much abused John and his four big brothers had to go home. There they would face their father’s inevitable and piercing wrath.

It was during those years that the man who has been known for decades in Santa Monica and across the Westside as the Dance Doctor chose his career.

Not accidentally, the tone he selected was exactly the opposite of his childhood household.

In the next scene from John Cassese: American Story, he emerges for the first time as a performer.

“Singing and dancing was an escape from the horrors of home,” he says while watching the video in his longtime seaside home in Pacific Palisades.

“I really loved it. When I saw that girls liked it, too, that sealed the deal.”

The path, however, was not smooth.

When little John was 2 years old, his successful businessman father thought about leaving the whirl of New York City. He bought a summer home for the family by Lake Mahopac.

When John was 10, the Casseses moved there fulltime.

“When I was 14, I asked my father to teach me how to drive,” he says.
“He handed me a set of keys to his car. I would take the car and drive around the lake every day, even when I skipped school.

“One day my friend Eddie said ‘Let me drive.’ I said ‘Okay. But don’t peel around this corner.’ He peeled around the corner.

“We hit this big rock wall and ended up on the other side of the street, in a swamp.

“When my father came home from work (his construction company) in the truck with my brothers, he asked, ‘Where’s the Lincoln?’

“When I told him, he beat the hell out of me.”

(To be continued)