Al and Vita Lamperti: How her red hair, his failed chemistry class led to love

Al walked the same route to high school every day, yet had never before seen the beautiful girl with flame-red hair who was walking on the other side of the street. She wore the girls’ version of his Catholic school’s uniform, so that evening in 1964, he scoured his yearbook and found her face and part of her name: V. Coviello. Like him, she was a junior. In the Bronx phone book, he found a Coviello family living just half a mile away.

Al vowed to talk to Miss Coviello the next time he saw her. Boys and girls took separate classes, but he searched the crowds of students before and after school and scanned the groups of girls at every mixer dance, but graduated without seeing her again.

In his junior year at Manhattan College, biology major Al failed Professor Newman’s organic chemistry class, forcing him to take the class again the summer of 1968. Class was in the morning, and Al volunteered to spend his afternoons working as an orderly at Misericordia Hospital.

During introductions on his first day, Al immediately recognized the red hair tucked into one ER nurse’s cap. And he learned her first name: Vita.

“Did you go to Cardinal Spellman High School?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” said a surprised Vita.

“And you lived on East 233rd Street,” he said.

Vita took a hard look at him. “And how do you know all of this?” she asked, a bit annoyed.

“I used to walk to school, and I saw you walking to school, too,” he said.

She softened toward him then – Vita knew she stuck out in a crowd. Soon, she liked Al. “He was quiet, but he was funny, with a dry sense of humor,” she said. “He’d come out with something, and I’d be laughing.”

Al volunteered so much that the hospital hired him as an orderly. “We would have lunch together, and if we worked the 3 to 11, we would have dinner together,” Vita said. “He was very comfortable to be around, and very nice.” Years later, she learned Al had looked at her posted schedule and timed his meals with hers — something she finds both flattering and smart. “It was a natural way to get to know each other that did not make me self-conscious,” Vita said.

In high school, Vita, the youngest of three sisters, was not that comfortable around boys — one of the reasons she didn’t go to the boy-girl mixers.

Al — the youngest of three brothers — wasn’t always smooth, either. On their first date in May 1969, he took Vita to Manhattan College’s campus day. She had painstakingly put her naturally curly hair in rollers to create a popular style. When she asked Al how he liked it, he responded with simple candor: He liked it better more natural.

That tiny bit of awkwardness did not stop them from holding hands, and more dates followed. They soon met each other’s families, learning that her oldest sister knew his oldest brother, and that their mothers had met when their children were in grade school.

“There were no firecrackers. It was not love at first sight,” said Vita. “But it was like I had known him all my life.”

Three months after their first date, Al left New York to earn his Ph.D. in human anatomy at the University of Cincinnati. In September, he made what was then an expensive phone call to talk to her.

“He really likes you,” her mother said when they hung up. “He wouldn’t have gone through all that trouble to call you from Cincinnati if he didn’t care for you.”

Neither Al nor Vita can say exactly when they fell in love, but agree it happened through the $10-a-pop phone calls they took turns making and the many letters sent in between.

Vita kept Al up to date on the Bronx and the hospital.

Al told Vita about his classes. She laughed when he told her the extra credit question on his philosophy exam was simply: “Why?” and even harder when he said a classmate got high marks for answering “Why not?”

During his winter holiday break in 1970, they were alone in the hallway at her parents’ house when Al asked, “Vita, will you marry me?”

“Why not?” she replied.

On Memorial Day Weekend 1972, the couple married in a nuptial Mass at Vita’s church. A reception for 98 followed in Yonkers. Then the couple drove to Montreal, the Thousand Islands, Toronto, Niagara Falls, and finally on to Cincinnati, where Vita had already been hired in the pediatric ICU at Cincinnati General. Al taught at the University of Cincinnati from 1973 to 1980. Son Tom was born in 1974, son Alex, in 1977.

In 1980, the family moved to Greater Philadelphia, when Al took a job at Temple University, where he became a professor of anatomy and cell biology at what is now the Lewis Katz School of Medicine. Vita worked at Sacred Heart Hospital and Chestnut Hill Hospital before becoming a utilization review nurse, eventually for Independence Blue Cross.

The couple say laughing together has been strong cement for their marriage. Their humor tends toward the silly side.

“When our kids were young and Star Wars came out, Al took them to see the one with Jabba the Hutt, but he couldn’t remember his name and called him Tubba the Bubba. Any time he said that, we would just get hysterical,” Vita said.

Another summer was especially hard on the local groundhog population. “They were along the road dead, looking like footballs,” Vita said. “One time, when he was coming home from work, I laid on the kitchen floor with my feet and hands up in the air like a dead groundhog.” The telling of the tale still has them both laughing.

Their boys are both married, and the couple has five grandchildren. Vita retired in 2000 and Al, in 2009. They took a celebratory trip to Italy, the first of many trips they’ve enjoyed together.

They are not constantly at each other’s side, though, not even during the pandemic.

To say Al likes astronomy is an understatement; he stargazes so frequently that his telescope has been named The Other Woman. “Some of his astronomy friends’ wives go with them, but I do not feel compelled to do so. It’s just not my thing,” Vita said. But it was she who encouraged him to buy the big telescope.

Vita would much rather be making greeting cards, singing, or sewing.

“I’m proud of the things that she sews for herself, and I call her Hot Stuff when she tries them on,” Al said.

All in all, the pandemic has not been that bad for them. Astronomy takes place safely outdoors, and Vita used her extra time to finish a jacket she started 14 years ago. They walk a mile together every day that weather permits. They cleaned their closets and netted $100 in Facebook sales, which was donated to a Catholic fund drive.

They have missed their kids and grandkids, though. They have seen local son Alex and his family outdoors when it was warm enough to do so. Thanksgiving and Christmas happened over Zoom. But both have recently been vaccinated. They won’t be fully immune by Easter, but are hopeful for a Mother’s Day gathering. And a rescheduled trip to visit Tom in Seattle will happen ASAP.

Next month, the couple will celebrate their 49th wedding anniversary. Besides laughter, both credit respect and open communication — neither expects the other to be a mind reader.

Vita also notes that she and Al have both worked equally hard outside the home and within it. “Listen, you hear about other people and their husbands, but he will do the dishes, cook, clean, and I never have to ask — he just hops right in.”

And Al offers a special thanks to Professor Newman: “If he hadn’t failed me in organic chemistry, none of this would have happened.”