Joseph DeCristofaro was just 17 when he enlisted in the Navy, too young to join up without his parents’ permission but determined to do his part. “I had to get my folks to sign for me,” he said on Friday in his living room in East Hampton. “My father signed; my mother didn’t like it.”
It was 1943, and after training in Newport, R.I., he was made a gunner in the Armed Guard, a special branch of the Navy that protected the crew and cargo aboard merchant ships crossing the oceans. “We carried bombs, food, whatever, to the troops,” he explained.
It was a critical task to the war effort. “Upon the safe arrival of this cargo depended the future of every American and of the world,” according to “History of the Armed Guard Afloat, World War II,” put out by the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations in 1946.
Mr. DeCristofaro crossed the Atlantic twice on two different merchant ships, the first — the Knute Rockne — in 1943 carrying 10,000 tons of the bombs known as “blockbusters,” the second — the James Ives — in 1944 carrying 10,000 tons of food to Omaha Beach and the troops at Normandy in France.
When he got back to New York after that trip, he was sent to New Orleans, then to Norfolk, Va., and then on to Orange, Tex. “They took us out of the Armed Guard,” he said. “They had a new Navy ship that we were all going to take over.” He sailed aboard the U.S.S. Odum to the Pacific, where he stayed until the end of the war. “It was altogether different when we got into the regular Navy,” Mr. DeCristofaro said, reflecting on how, in the Armed Guard “we took care of our guns and our quarters,” but not the entire ship.
He would not return home until after he turned 21, sailing first into San Francisco and then through the Panama Canal and finally back to New York. After that it would be many decades before he again traveled overseas, joining a trip to Normandy organized by the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 2015. Even so many years after the end of the war in Europe, “The people there were so thankful,” Mr. De Cristofaro recalled.
Born in Bridgehampton, as a child he moved with his family to Westhampton Beach, where his father had a shoe repair business on Main Street. He was 13 when the devastating Hurricane of 1938 came through, leaving about three feet of water in his father’s shop, and he still remembers it well, he said.
By the time World War II was over, his parents had sold their house, so he found his way back to Bridgehampton, where he had aunts and uncles and a grandfather. He met his future wife, Lorraine Loris, at a carnival in Sag Harbor and they eventually settled in East Hampton, in a house he built and still lives in on Buell Lane Extension. He spent many years as a builder, but as time went on it got harder and harder to find helpers, he said. So when East Hampton Town offered him a position as a building inspector, he took it, and remained in the position for 20 years, much of that time as chief building inspector.
Service would continue to be a part of his life, in more ways than one. He was called back to duty during the Korean War and served on the U.S.S. Jarvis, and on the home front he became involved with the fire service.
In 2021, he marks 65 years with the East Hampton Fire Department, an impressive milestone recognized last month by the New York State Association of Fire Chiefs. “Your dedication to the East Hampton Fire Department is an example of what every department and the fire service as a whole should strive to achieve,” the association’s president, Robert R. Kloepfer Jr., wrote in a letter to Mr. DeCristofaro.
He was a captain on and off, but in his younger years when he thought he might like to be a chief, the department’s chiefs had to live inside the village boundaries, and he didn’t. At 96, he’s no longer responding to fires, of course, but he’s at all the meetings he can make it to.
Staying active is what keeps him ticking, said his daughter JoAnne Claflin. “He’s not one to sit around.” She and her sisters, Debbie Walter and Cyri DeCristofaro, live nearby. Their mother died in 2006.
He still mows his own lawn, Ms. Claflin said, and he’s still active in the East Hampton V.F.W. post.
“Joe has always been a loyal member of the V.F.W.,” said Brian Carabine, the post’s commander. “He comes to all the meetings we have.”
On Friday, he was one of many local veterans honored with patriotic songs and words of thanks at the John M. Marshall Elementary School, and this morning he was set to take part in the East Hampton Village Veterans Day Parade, organized by the V.F.W.
