Echoes from the past: Early history recounted by Dad's best friend

My dad once worked 49 days in a row with no days off, sometimes even pulling double shifts. I only learned this in 2005—long after Dad had passed away in 1984 at the age of 70.

Marvin Natucci, the pilot

Like many of us, I waited too long to interview my parents about their lives growing up. My mother also died suddenly and far too young, at just 58. During those years, I had been totally engrossed in my own job and raising a family. By 2005, life had slowed down; I had taken an easier job, and all four of our children had moved out. But by then, all six of Dad’s siblings had passed away too.

I wondered: How could I find out more about what his life had been like growing up in the Shore Acres neighborhood of Gig Harbor?

I had one final chance. Dad’s best friend from high school onward, Marvin Natucci, was still alive at age 90, living with one of my cousins. I interviewed Marvin in March of 2005. He passed away just two months later.

A summer that changed everything

Marvin at age 18

Technically, Marvin was not related to me. But given that three different members of the Natucci family had married into our Spadoni-Seghieri family, we all considered anyone named Natucci to be a cousin. Marvin kindly sat down with me to explain how he and my dad, Julius Daniel Spadoni, became best friends as teenagers.

“My uncle Remigio Natucci operated a small general store in Shore Acres,” Marvin told me. Remigio—who also went by Ray, Bigio, and Remy at different times—was married to Rosina Seghieri, the younger sister of my grandmother Anita Seghieri.

Rosina had immigrated from Montecarlo, Italy, to Gig Harbor in August of 1919, the last of the four children of Torello Seghieri and Ines Capocchi to arrive. She married Remigio in May of 1920, and they opened the store shortly after. Sadly, on April 29, 1931, Remigio died. Marvin said he had cancer.

At the time, Marvin was 16 and living with his family in Tacoma, where he wasn't particularly happy. Neither was Rosina, alone in Shore Acres.

“Rosina was terribly shook up,” Marvin explained. “It was just difficult for her to live here, trying to take care of herself. Emotionally, she was disturbed very easily. On June 15, my relatives talked me into coming out and living with her for the summer. And it was a good thing I did.”

It turned out to be a saving grace for both of them. Marvin was quickly welcomed into the extended Spadoni and Seghieri families, becoming fast friends with my dad and his brother, Roy. Rosina recovered her good humor, and Marvin decided to stay through the fall to attend Union High School.

“I wasn’t doing very well in Tacoma schools,” Marvin admitted. “I probably would have dropped out of school if I hadn’t come over here. I just felt more at home here.”

Dances, rodeos and locked doors

The Spadoni boys a few years before Marvin
came to live in Shore Acres. Julius, Roy,
Claude and Rudy.

“Julius, Roy and the sisters would go up with me to Hood Canal together to swim and play tennis,” Marvin reminisced. “We went to the rodeo in Ellensburg. We would often go to a dance at Horseshoe Lake on Friday, camp out that night, and then go on to Hood Canal for another dance Saturday night.

“Julius and Roy asked me to go every place with them. The girls taught me to dance. In the wintertime, almost every weekend there’d be a dance at Horseshoe Lake. It cost 50 cents to get in. I could scrape up that much money a couple, three times a month.”

When funds were tight, they made their own entertainment. "My cousin Alma [Seghieri] played the piano and violin,” he said. “There were a couple of fellows out at Cromwell who also played musical instruments. I played the guitar, and so we had a little orchestra. We didn’t charge anything. Everybody could enjoy a little free music.”

The social life of the neighborhood truly centered around the Spadoni home after Marvin helped the family build a concrete tennis court. “They had two gas-powered cement mixers to do the work,” Marvin said. “Lots of people pitched in to help. And when it was finished, Julius and Sig Uddenberg became the best two tennis players in town.”

Marvin and Clara Spadoni in Shore Acres

Naturally, a handsome young man spending so much time with the family led to a few dates with the Spadoni sisters. Marvin smiled as he recalled one evening: “I remember once going out with Clara while she was working in Tacoma and living at the YWCA. When we came back, it was late and the doors were locked. We had to throw rocks at the windows to get one of the other girls to come down and let Clara in.”

Marvin’s presence also worked wonders for grieving Rosina. Every evening of that first summer, Marvin and Rosina would walk about a half-mile down to the Spadoni house to socialize.

“It was uphill going back,” Marvin noted. “Rosina would stop to rest on the way. By the end of the summer, she could go all the way without stopping.”

Learning a trade on the brink of war

After high school, Marvin took a job at a lumber company in Tacoma. Using discarded lumber from the mill, he built his own house just below Rosina’s in 1938, inheriting an old wood stove from her house to heat it.

By June of 1939, the shadow of war was looming over Europe, creating a massive demand for defense labor. Marvin and my dad, then 24 and 25, drove to the Navy shipyard in Bremerton to apply for work. Both were called back that very same day to work as helpers in the sheet metal shop.

“I think they paid us about six bucks a day, which was pretty good pay, because we were coming out of the Great Depression and we didn’t have anything,” Marvin said.

Alongside their grueling shifts, they attended welding school for half a day, five days a week. They also attended “layout school” two nights a week for three years. As Marvin explained, it “taught us to read and draw diagrams, as well as to fabricate and repair machinery.”

They made a perfect team, cementing a lifelong professional respect. “Julius was really good at creating diagrams,” Marvin said. “I would follow his plans and cut out the pieces, so we worked well together.”

Hearing Marvin describe this perfectly answered a childhood marvel for me. It explained exactly how my dad was able to custom-build an “Iron Mike” pitching machine for me when I was in high school. During my freshman year, Dad and I had built a batting cage on our Rosedale property. We borrowed a pitching machine from Peninsula High School for the summer, and Dad quietly studied its mechanics. Using those layout skills from his shipyard days, he built an almost identical machine from scratch for me. I went from batting below .200 my freshman year to leading the team in hitting by my junior year—and I can assure you it wasn’t because of natural talent. It was a credit to Dad’s ingenuity.

The wartime hustle and peacetime success

When the United States officially entered the war in December of 1941, Marvin and Julius commuted to the yard together in Marvin’s 1937 Chevrolet. Because their shipyard roles were deemed critical to the naval base, both were exempted from military duty.

The workload was staggering. “We once worked seven days a week for seven straight weeks,” Marvin recalled. “And sometimes, we’d finish a shift in Bremerton and drive straight to Tacoma to do another shift there.”

Despite the relentless pace, they carved out room for their private lives. Marvin married Marie Brown in 1943, and Julius married my mother, Margaret Wagoner, in 1944.

When the war finally ended, both men channeled their wartime mechanics into the local economy. Marvin founded Natucci Heating & Supply, which became a successful, decades-long staple of Gig Harbor. He also worked on fishing vessels and earned his private pilot’s license, fondly crediting his cousin, Roland Spadoni, with teaching him and Marie how to keep the business books.

My dad did some logging before partnering with his brothers to start a long-lived business of their own—supplying coal and heating oil, clearing land, and building roads. Dad used the money he saved from his shipyard days to buy trucks and heavy equipment, much of it military surplus no longer needed for the war effort.

A thinker and a doer

During the interview, I had hoped to draw out sweeping, colorful stories about my dad’s personality, but Marvin was a man of his generation—uncluttered by excessive words.

“Julius was a serious person, a fairly quiet man,” Marvin said simply. “He was a thinker, but he was a doer, too. He was a great mechanic and a pretty darn good businessman, too.”

In all my years growing up and into adulthood, I had never once seen my father lose his temper. Curious, I asked Marvin, “Did you ever see my dad get angry?”

“I have seen him get angry, but he never expressed it very much,” Marvin replied. And with that, the line of inquiry closed.

I have no doubt that Marvin held countless more memories of the days he shared with Dad. But to him, those moments were just routine life—the quiet, ordinary rhythm of two friends growing up in a different era.

Marvin and Julius stand with Alma
(Seghieri) Blackwood and Rosina.
I'm not sure if I've correctly ID'd
Alma. Maybe someone in the
family can help me out.

As I look back on that afternoon in 2005, I close my thoughts with a familiar blend of thankfulness and regret. I am profoundly grateful that I finally took action and interviewed Marvin before his passing just two months later. Yet, I am left with the quiet disappointment that I didn’t make a greater effort to spend more time with him—and a deeper regret that I never conducted a similar interview with my own dad when I had the chance.

Our parents’ stories are fragile, existing only as long as the people who remember them. I’m just glad I caught this piece of my dad’s history before it slipped away.