Another Local Veteran Hits 100

Parge Sgro has served country and community

Lifelong Cold Spring resident Parge Sgro celebrated his 100th birthday on Aug. 18. What does the latest local centenarian like to do with his time?

“To tell you the truth, I enjoy doing nothing!” he said. 

Sgro’s first name is Placito, “but my mom called me ‘Pargy,’ which people turned into ‘Parge,’ ” he said.

Asked if it seems possible to have lived 100 years, Sgro replied, “It’s a fact. There’s not many left in my generation; I left a lot of them behind.” 

He said he never smoked and only had the occasional beer. “I wasn’t a drinker.”

By reaching the century mark, Sgro joins a select group of local World War II veterans, including Joe Etta of Cold Spring, who died in 2020 at age 102, and Carmine “Toot” Giordano of Beacon, who died in December at age 102.

One of five children, Sgro grew up in an apartment on Main Street across from Dalzell’s newsstand and dry goods store. As a kid, he’d talk to his best friend, Angelo Percacciolo, through the thin wall that separated their adjoining homes.

In winter, a horse-drawn plow was used to clear snow from streets and sidewalks. For recreation, he and his friends played “tackle” on the lawn of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. “It was like football; we’d have two teams,” he said. “We had a lot of fun.” 

Sgro admits he did not make the honor roll in high school, but adds, “I got through.” His favorite subject? “I liked playing basketball for the Haldane team,” he said. “I loved basketball. I wasn’t one of those rough guys made for football.”

“When I was a kid, they used to give out free Yankees tickets, but you had to buy milk, I think it was,” to get them.

He recalled seeing Joe DiMaggio play the one time he visited Yankee Stadium. “There was another player who more or less matched DiMaggio as far as his qualifications,” he said, trying to remember the other player’s name. “Mantle!” he said, after a moment. “Son of a gun — it was Mickey Mantle!”

DiMaggio and Mantle played together for just one season: 1951. 

Sgro was an electrician for most of his working life, a trade he learned while serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II. “I like to tell everybody I enlisted,” he said. “In a way, I did, because in those days, the armed forces were slim, so they gave you a choice” of services.

Because he always liked the water, he selected the Navy and was sent on a 16-week training program to learn the electrical trade. He served in the Pacific on the destroyer escort USS Flaherty and for 30 months on the USS Barnett, a luxury liner that was converted to serve as an attack transport. 

“It was a little different on board ships in wartime,” Sgro recalled. “You had to watch the generators, make the electricity, put it on the switchboard, then switch the electricity to various parts of the ship.”

When ships were in battle, “you had to know how to knock off the electrical systems in parts of the ship that got damaged,” Sgro said. “You had to isolate those damages so that the ship can still stay afloat and still do its job.”

Sgro, who was also called to serve in the Korean War, said he rarely thinks about either conflict. “You try not to think of those parts of your life,” he said.

He has been an active member of the Cold Spring community throughout his life. In 2013, when he stepped down from the Planning Board after serving for 39 years, then-Chair Joe Barbaro wrote The Current with a letter of appreciation.  

“Parge brought a workingman’s common sense to the Planning Board, along with a feistiness that made you think he was really a 20-something,” he wrote. “Planning Board members absorbed every morsel of Parge’s wisdom.”

He married his wife, Luchrezia (“Lu”), in 1954 and they raised five children: Mary Lou, Barbara, Michael, Stephen and Peter. Lu died in March at age 95 and Pete died in 2016 at age 56. “I miss them both terribly,” he said.

Asked if he has any regrets about his life so far, Parge said: “No, I don’t think so.”