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Pfc. Lawrence DeVico

Lawrence DeVico was born in 1923 to a family of Italian immigrants who settled just north of the big city, in Harrison New York. The youngest of eight, his father passed away from appendicitis right after he was born. His mother, the quintessential Italian woman, always adorned in an all-black dress and was primarily found in the kitchen or the backyard garden, then struggled on to raise the poor family by herself.

Times were tough, and the family had to scrape by with what they had, to include having to eat dog meat on occasion to fill the children’s empty stomachs. How exactly this was sourced was never quite discussed.

As a result, the young Lawrence grew up tough: a no-nonsense individual that quickly developed skills in maintaining and repairing everything he had, because replacing it was simply out of the question. This mindset was to last him his entire life, but little did he know how much he was going to need that fortitude in the more immediate years ahead.