Dear Editor:
I received the news from my sister a few weeks ago that our uncle, Nick Sevano from Beverly Hills, passed away approaching his 91st birthday, a product of Fourth and Madison Street. He was a graduate of Demarest High School, and a fairly decent basketball player even though he would tell you that Matt Finnerty Senior was one of the best. Nick was proud of being born in the Mile Square but a person named Frank who lived around the corner on Monroe, a little older, changed things!
From his late teens from Dorsey and Damone, with the chairman of the board in between, his rise from the third ward in Hoboken to Roxbury Drive, in the hills with Lucille Ball and Jimmy Stewart as his neighbor, our family get together with all the cousins were always filled with running narratives, anecdotes, many starched with facts with very little hyperboles.
Why was Mickey Rooney over our grandmother’s house for Italian food way back? Well, knowing my father’s brother was linked to Frank, I sort of understood at an early age, that he was not an ordinary uncle. From Sal Mineo, Tommy Dorsey, Johnny Ray and Al Martino, and there were so many others he agented and managed with bookings from Vegas, New York, London, Miami, Chicago and beyond. His biggest stars were Jack Jones, Glen Campbell, Charo and Lindsey Wagner. He was a close friend and advisor to Frank in the early years, as Nick always qualified as his friend inside and outside of show business with agreements and disagreements over many years.
I visited him a few times and actually met a young lady on the way to Vegas who later became my significant other. While sitting in Jack Benny’s house in the late 70’s, which he bought at the time, the motels and hotels of dates and cancellations early on, to the main room at the leading clubs and casinos had paid off. The chairman, Francis Albert, who Nick revered, opened a door while he broke down many others with his own talent and tenacity.
Yes, it all started on Madison Street, with too many stories to tell, and in his passing, chips away at a small town. As he softly disappears, my father, Uncle Jack and Aunt Mary would say, “You did good Nick.”
Dennis Sevano