Grateful American Read online

  Yet my life’s work has turned into so much more than what I’ve done on the stage and screen. Over the years I’ve grown in my relationships with our troops, veterans, and first responders. I’ve been blessed to visit our service men and -women in the distant and often dangerous places where they live and work. I’ve traveled to visit our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world, and have performed with my band—the Lieutenant Dan Band—in Kuwait, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan, Okinawa, Korea, Singapore, Diego Garcia, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Puerto Rico, Alaska, and all around the United States in an effort to help boost the morale of our troops and military families.

  I’ve seen firsthand our service members’ extraordinary skill and dedication, and my life’s mission and passion today are to shine a light on those who serve and defend, the true heroes who go into harm’s way, volunteering to lay down their lives so we can have the freedom to make something real and good of our own lives.

  I’m still an actor—absolutely. But I realize I’ve become more than an actor. While this is not a term I use myself, I have heard people say I’ve become “today’s Bob Hope”—t he legendary Hollywood entertainer who began doing USO shows in 1941 and continued supporting and encouraging troops for the next fifty years. Bob Hope became the figurehead of tribute from an entire grateful nation. Other people—entertainers, reporters, citizens, and even the troops themselves—have compared me to him, I suppose because we both share an ongoing and long-term commitment to supporting and entertaining our defenders at home and abroad. But I never set my sights on “becoming” anyone, or trying to fill Bob Hope’s shoes. He set the bar very high in his fifty years of entertaining and supporting our troops. I’ve simply tried to take action whenever and wherever I can, because I care about the men and women who are serving our country and want to do my bit to back them up.

  For this work I’ve been privileged—astonishingly—to be named an honorary chief petty officer by the United States Navy. The Marine Corps has pinned me as an honorary marine. The New York City Fire Department named me an honorary battalion chief. The Association of the US Army presented me with the George Catlett Marshall Medal, awarded for “selfless service to the United States.” I’ve received the Sylvanus Thayer Award at West Point, given to a civilian “whose character, service, and achievements reflect the ideals prized by the US Military Academy.” And in November 2008 I received a call from the White House, inviting me to come to a ceremony to receive the Presidential Citizens Medal, the second-highest civilian honor awarded to citizens for “exemplary deeds performed in service of the nation.”

  The flow of praise feels exactly backward to me. As I travel to bases and military hospitals, it’s humbling to see our servicemen and -women grow excited when I show up to shake their hands. I’m the one who’s honored to meet them, to thank them, and I’m touched that they would want to turn their thanks back toward me. I’ve learned the reason they’re excited to meet me or shake my hand is not just because I’m visiting or performing with my band, but mainly because wherever I go I carry a message of a nation’s gratitude. I’m letting them know that the country they love hasn’t forgotten about them.

  The experiences of war leave an indelible impact on our servicemen and -women. As our veterans return to civilian life, the physical, emotional, and psychological challenges they face are often difficult. I’ve come to realize that one of our greatest shared responsibilities as American citizens is to support and honor the heroes who defend our nation. We are all beneficiaries of the freedom and security they fight to protect.

  In 2011, I established the Gary Sinise Foundation to formally continue the service work I’d begun years earlier. Today, my foundation has become a rallying point for people everywhere who want to serve, support, and honor our troops, veterans, and first responders. Thousands of individuals and dozens of great companies and organizations have come together to help us. One of my foundation’s main initiatives is to build smart homes for severely wounded veterans. We provide these houses and the land they’re built on at no cost to the vets, completely mortgage free. Each house is individually designed and equipped with anything each severely wounded vet needs to make life more manageable. Adaptive smart technology, ADA-accessible restrooms, sometimes, if necessary, wheelchair ramps or elevators, whatever can help to restore functionality and independence to the veteran and his or her family. And the foundation does other things to help too.

  The Lt. Dan Band is an important program of the foundation. We perform at bases in the United States and all over the world to support and encourage our troops. We’ve played hundreds of shows over the years. I don’t make any money from these concerts or from my participation in any of the foundation’s activities. And at my age, I certainly don’t need to be out on the road performing cover tunes over and over again. But I believe I’ve been given a mission—a mission of service. What I love about playing music and doing live concerts is that they do some good: they bring a little joy, boost spirits, raise funds, and give me a platform to help spread a message of support and appreciation as I speak directly to the men and women who, past and present, serve our country. Seeing the smiles on the faces of the troops and their families is all I need to keep going.

  There’s a message I want to deliver in this book: I love my country, and I’m grateful to be an American. I know where my freedom comes from, and I do not take for granted the sacrifices of those who provide it. Because of that, I want to do all I can to ensure America’s defenders and their families are never forgotten.

  I want this book to help spread a spirit of joy, tribute, action, and ultimately gratefulness. In the pages to come, you’ll read how a wild kid from the suburbs of Chicago stumbled into theater, how he eventually developed from an actor into an advocate, and why his passionate commitment to support our nation’s defenders continually manifests into action.

  As I’ve looked back on this life’s journey and seen anew how my story unfolded over the years, what I’ve seen has surprised even me. There have been any number of ups and downs in my life, and there was a time when I wasn’t concerned about too much more than my own career. But slowly things changed. It’s my hope that as I share these stories from my life, you will be entertained and maybe even inspired too—empowered to overcome obstacles, embrace gratitude, and engage in service above self.

  So let’s go. First up: the vineyards of Ripacandida, a trip through Ellis Island, and a man who would have three wives.

  Wait a minute.

  What did he say?

  CHAPTER 1

  Yearning to Breathe Free

  Let me take you back to old Italy, to the little village of Ripacandida in the province of Potenza. I want to look at how certain decisions, moments, and events in the past can shape and mold the present—and even the future—in uncanny ways.

  While I’ve yet to travel there myself, I’m told that in Ripacandida you can see lush valleys and large cliffs, bright sunlight on the whitewashed houses. You smell fresh-baked bread and catch in the air the fruity tang of grapes. In the late 1880s, my great-grandfather Vito Sinisi (spelled with an i at the end) lived in Ripacandida with his family. My last name was pronounced Sin-NEEZ-zay. Say it out loud like a good Italian would.

  The land was beautiful, the people vibrant and industrious, yet times were tough for Vito in the old country. So he traveled to Brazil and settled there for a while to try and make a buck working in the coffee fields. He then headed back to Italy, and when he was twenty-three, on January 22, 1887, he married a sixteen-year-old from the village named Anna Maria Fusco. They were happy, but times were still tough. He needed a land of opportunity. He needed a land that welcomed the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. Four years and two children later, in 1891, Vito and his young family came to America. They sailed past Lady Liberty, headed through Ellis Island, and when the American clerk who stamped forms saw the last name, he mispronounced it, saying it softer, like a whispe
r—Sineece. Rhymes with niece. Vito figured that’s how good Americans say his last name, and Vito wanted to be a good American, so the i was changed to an e, and ever after the Sinise family has said its last name the way that nameless clerk did.

  Vito and his family wound up on the south side of Chicago, where he was soon able to buy a little house with a bakery and store out front. He created his own job, running his little grocery store and baking Italian bread twice a day. He sold his bread for ten cents a loaf as fast as he could bake it. Vito had nine children—the first two born in Ripacandida, and seven born in America. My great-grandmother Anna passed away in 1918, and after a period of mourning, Vito met and married Adiela Labriola, who had immigrated to Chicago from Italy in 1910. Adiela went by the more American name of Ethel. Sadly, a little over eighteen months after their marriage, she also died, so Vito returned to Italy in hopes of finding a new wife, this time meeting Maria Lucia Giambersio. They married in Ripacandida on December 30, 1920, and returned to America. Neither Adiela nor Maria Lucia had any other children with Vito. In later years, Vito worked in Rock Island, Illinois, as a crossing watchman, the person who flags automobile traffic when trains run through crossings, then for the city of Blue Island on a horse-drawn garbage wagon before he retired in 1940. He died in 1946, old and full of years in this new country, his family welcomed by the mighty woman with a torch.

  My grandfather Donato Louis Sinise was called Daniel by everyone. He was one of Vito’s kids born in Chicago. Grandpa Dan arrived in 1900 and quickly grew into a hardworking kid who sold newspapers and peddled bread. He left home at fifteen to work in a glass factory. In 1917, Grandpa Dan joined the US Army to fight in World War I, and at eighteen found himself on the front lines in France in the Battle of the Argonne Forest. This huge, bloody battle saw some 26,277 American troops killed, more Americans than were killed in the entire Revolutionary War (25,324), or about six times the number of American troops killed on D-Day (4,414 killed on June 6, 1944).

  After the war, Grandpa spoke little about his battle experiences except to tell one story. He served for a time as an ambulance driver, shuttling wounded from the front lines to the hospitals. You’d think that would be a safer job in a war, but the enemy targeted the big red crosses on the ambulances while Grandpa drove in convoy, and the shells began to whistle in. Kaboom! The ambulance in front of Grandpa blew up. More shells whistled in. Kaboom! The ambulance behind Grandpa blew up. More shells whistled in. Grandpa braced for the inevitable. But somehow—miraculously—Grandpa Dan’s ambulance wasn’t touched.

  In 1920, during a second epidemic of flu at US Army Facility Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois, a young registered nurse named Vesta Lambertson worked at night in the pneumonia ward. Grandpa Dan became night supervisor and met her. Bells went off and they married three months later on April 23, 1920. Whenever Grandpa told this story, he said jokingly, “It was either marry me or else,” but he never explained what the “or else” meant. It cost two bucks to get married. He remembered that. A buck fifty for the license and fifty cents to the judge.

  In August 1920, Grandpa Dan became a switchman on the Indiana Harbor Belt railway line and a year later was promoted to conductor. He was a hardworking heartland railroad man until he retired, when he gave me, his firstborn grandchild, his pocket watch. On the back he had engraved a simple inscription: “To Gary from Grandpa, June 1969.” I treasure that watch to this day.

  By the time I knew my grandparents, everybody called Vesta “Grandma Betty.” Grandpa Dan and Grandma Betty had three children: my uncles Jack and Jerry, and my dad, Robert. During World War II, Uncle Jack flew thirty missions as a navigator on a B-17 bomber over Europe, while Uncle Jerry, at just eighteen years old, served on a US Navy ship—a landing ship tank (USS LST-811)—in the Pacific, arriving just after the battle for Okinawa ended in mid-June 1945. After Imperial Japan surrendered, Uncle Jerry traveled to the Palau Islands to pick up Okinawan families to return them to their homes. Mostly women and children, they’d been used by the Japanese as slave labor. He fed Hershey bars to the kids and on the ship bought them everything he could think of. The children sang for him in return, and years later he still said they were the most beautiful voices he’d ever heard. He spent that summer and fall traveling between the islands of Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Guam, Saipan, Leyte, and Tinian, and took part as a member of the occupation force of mainland Japan.

  Uncle Jerry was remarkable. He signed up for the military right after high school graduation in 1944 but was told he was 4F because his ears were badly scarred from the scarlet fever and chicken pox he had simultaneously as a child. But Uncle Jerry convinced the recruiters he was fit for service. When he reached boot camp in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, doctors examined him once again and told him to get back on the train and go home. Uncle Jerry refused. He insisted on doing his duty. They let him stay. After the war, he would be discharged in June 1946, only to be drafted back into the navy again during the Korean War. In January of 1951, he began serving aboard the USS McCoy Reynolds until being discharged on February 14, 1952.

  By the time I was old enough to understand and appreciate what my grandfather and Uncle Jerry had experienced during their war years, their service was long behind them. They also never spoke much about their military days. I did talk to my uncle Jack about his service during WWII before his passing in 2014, but this only came after I was an adult. I regret that I was never able to ask my uncle Jerry and my grandfather more about their service days before they passed away.

  Dad was still a young teenager when World War II ended. After he graduated from high school, he tried college for about three months before deciding it wasn’t for him. He joined the navy and in 1951 went through boot camp at Naval Station Great Lakes near North Chicago. He then trained at Naval Air Station Jacksonville in Florida where they asked him if he wanted to go on a ship or if he’d like to take pictures for the navy. Dad chose the camera, so he was sent to Pensacola for more training, and then to Naval Support Facility Anacostia near Washington, DC, during the Korean War. Dad’s job was to develop the film and photographs that came back in cans from the war zone. The film and photos were sent to all the high-ranking generals at the Pentagon for analysis, so Dad had top-secret clearance. This was where he learned the film business.

  Dad had met Mom back at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School in Blue Island, Illinois. Mom’s name was Mylles Alsip. Her parents had come up with the name Mylles when they combined her mother’s name, Mildred, with her father’s name, Leslie, throwing out the i and spelling it with an artsy y instead. We never knew much about my grandpa Les’s side of the family, as he and my grandmother divorced when I was young, and we didn’t see him much after that. I do know he didn’t serve in the military because of medical reasons, but his father, Walter Alsip, served in WWI, as did my grandmother’s father, Elmer Percival Blomberg.

  After Mom and Dad tied the knot, I was conceived on the naval base Anacostia. A few months before I was born, Mom, pregnant with me, went home to stay with her mother and father on the south side of Chicago because she didn’t want to give birth on base. I was born at Saint Francis Hospital in Blue Island on March 17, 1955, eight days before my dad was honorably discharged from the navy. Does that mean I’m a navy brat? Well, just barely, I guess. Mom and Dad soon moved into a rental on the south side and eventually had two more kids. Three years after me came my sister, Lori Allyn, and a year later came my brother, Craig Randall. We called him Randy growing up, though today he goes by Craig.

  Having served his four years in the military, Dad wanted to do something different, so right after I was born he went into the film business. Filmmaking was then a burgeoning industry in Chicago, with an entrepreneurial and forward-thinking workforce. The great Bob Newhart started in Chicago. So did Bill Friedkin, who won an Oscar for directing The French Connection. And today, the Chicago International Film Festival is the longest-running international film festival in North America.

  Dad worked for other pe
ople as a film editor before launching his own company, Cam-Edit, when he was about thirty years old. He was the first person in Chicago to have his own editing business, and years later he was inducted into the Chicago Editors Hall of Fame. But in those early days, he edited documentaries, commercials, and industrial films—whatever came to him—and found himself immersed in the real-time Mad Men culture of the era: the 1960s, hard-driving, wisecracking, three-martini lunch crowd. Dad left home at seven most mornings and returned late, sometimes at midnight. And he worked many weekends. I knew Dad loved me, but in my growing-up years he simply was not around much.

  My mom’s sister, Aunt Nori, married Bill Smith, an army guy. Bill was stationed in Japan, and when I was about five years old, Bill brought back a little army uniform for me to wear. My eyes widened when I saw it, and I put it on immediately. I loved it. I wore that uniform as much as Mom allowed. To the store. To kindergarten. On Halloween. I even slept in it. Whenever, wherever—I wore that army uniform.

  When I was just a little kid, I visited Dad in his office where he cut films on the old Moviola editing machines. Dad was working on the World War II documentary series Victory at Sea for NBC, and had also been hired by a director named Herschell Gordon Lewis, who shot very low-budget horror films, “splatter films” my dad called them. I couldn’t read yet, so Dad told me the titles: Color Me Blood Red, Two Thousand Maniacs!, Blood Feast. Dad showed me a clip of a Lewis movie where a monster came out of a swamp and chased two hunters down the road, and he later pointed out his name on some movie posters. Dad told me once that the film was so low budget they would just run down to the local meat market for some cheap special effects to use for the blood and guts. So I imagined a director yelling at the people around him, ordering them what to do: “We need some more gory stuff—go down to the store and get some hamburger and lots of ketchup! Get tons of ketchup! This movie is called Blood Feast for cripes’ sake.” I looked on as Dad ran the inky film through a machine about the size of a breadbox and pressed a button, and I watched the film on the machine’s little screen. He would stop the film often, tamp down on either side of the film, cut it with a blade, and put a piece of tape over it.