People You Should Know

Young Italian boys would come to the U.S. air base where George Defenbaugh was stationed near Cerignola, Italy, in World War II, and offer to watch the airmen’s tents while they were on missions, in exchange for tips.
Defenbaugh became well acquainted with one boy, Umberto Albanese.
Twelve years younger than Defenbaugh, Albanese’ father had been killed while serving with Mussolini.
 After school, the boy’s mother would give him a paper sack full of fresh fruit or tomatoes. He would ride his bike out to the base and trade them for cigarettes, chocolate bars, etc.
“He’d take them back to Cerignola and give them to his mother who would then sell them for what she could get and that was the way they lived day after day while the war was going on,” Defenbaugh said.
Years later, on a trip to Italy, Defenbaugh asked a travel agent to find them a bilingual driver with a chauffeur’s license who could drive them to his old base in Cerignola.
The commercial driver not only drove them just where they wanted to go, but reunited them with Umberto Albanese who by then was a professor of law and government, an author and lecturer on Italian television.
After the war, another bomb group Albanese had known as a boy, set up a scholarship fund for him to administer to Italian youth. He was doing that, too.
“We had dinner at his house and the next day, on a plane coming home, we sat next to a journalist who saw Albanese’s name on a card,” Dorothy Defenbaugh said.
“He’s famous,” the journalist informed them.
 “When we met him, he hugged me and said, ‘I just love Americans!’ It gave you such a good feeling,” she said.
Since then, Albanese and his family have visited the Defenbaughs several times here, and in Houston.