[Editor’s Note: Last in a series about how personalities in the community observe Christmas present and those in the past.]
Today is the big day – not tomorrow — for the Frank Campagna family to mark the year’s happiest holiday.
“Because of the distributed family, all with sub-families, we celebrate on Christmas Eve,” he said.
“We get everybody together on Christmas Eve so they can be at their own homes individually with the kids,”
Mostly, said the community activist whose mobile home was in the City Hall spotlight six years ago, the Campagna clan is based in Orange County – except for a branch in Simi.
He wanted to be clear. “This is direct family,” he said.
“Thanksgiving is at one particular house. Christmas Eve is at another particular house.”
The Campagnas don’t reunions to holidays. “Other festivities go on during the year,” he said.
Now it was time to tote up the totals.
“I have got six kids, 11 grandkids and eight great-grandkids,” said the peppery grandfather of many.
With a familiar smile, “this is our routine,” he said. “Well-orchestrated, and it works out fine.”
Mr. Campagna is a Pennsylvanian by birth, starting in Scranton, after which he matriculated at Lehigh. After a turn at Martin Aircraft in the Baltimore area, he went into the Army, and came to the West Coast in 1957.
As a boy, was Christmas a banner day for Mr. Campagna, the baby in a family of four children?
“Absolutely,” he says.
Births of the Campagnas a couple generations ago was so strategically arranged, he recalled that “in high school, one of us was there 12 years in a row.
With apparently mixed feelings, he remembered his first English teacher, Mrs. Wolongowitz. “When she saw my name, she said I should take a seat by the door.
“I asked why. She said if I was like the rest of the family, I wouldn’t be there very long.”
