The Smithtown exhibit honors the determination of the early San Remo resident and Holocaust survivor

Thomas Gugliotta’s eyes lit up one morning as he remembered the reason his father, Biase, traveled 6 miles from San Remo, a small hamlet in Kings Park, to pay taxes at the Smithtown Town Hall.

“Back then he was a laborer, working as a bricklayer, and money was tight,” Gugliotta said before an exhibit at City Hall that featured a photo of his late father and the tax bills he had paid decades earlier. “He couldn’t afford a car. He had children to feed. Walking was part of the sacrifice he made to give us a better life.”

The tax records of Biase Gugliotta, who experienced a harrowing beginning in a Nazi labor camp in Mecklenburg, Germany, are part of a new exhibit near the tax administrator’s office.

City officials hope the exhibit will remind residents of the great “American Dream” that laid the foundation for Smithtown’s suburban development in the 1950s and 1960s. Smithtown Superintendent Ed Wehrheim said he expects the exhibit will not only honor Gugliotta’s story but also touch the town’s residents.

Wehrheim called the new exhibit “an inspiration to our community about the power of perseverance in the pursuit of the American dream.”

Early days of San Remo

Thomas Gugliotta, who lives in the San Remo house where he grew up, told Doreen Perrino, executive director of the city’s senior center, his father’s story. Gugliotta said he plans to donate the documents to the city.

“Things are lost when you die, and they may not mean the same to someone else,” Gugliotta said. “And I thought to myself, ‘How many tax records from 1956 are intact and in such good condition?’ So I knew it was special.”

Wehrheim said Gugliotta’s story is emblematic of the early days of San Remo, when the hamlet was largely a settlement of bungalows. The tax records donated to Gugliotta by his father ranged from 1956 to 1964. A yellow-framed paper bill from December 1958 showed fees totaling $86.05. A well-preserved paper note from 1963-64 – white with black typewriter font and red letters – is also framed.

Gugliotta was liberated when US troops liberated the camp in 1945. Gugliotta and his family immigrated to the United States in 1956, eventually arriving in the San Remo neighborhood of Smithtown. Gugliotta worked as a bricklayer and bricklayer. He became a U.S. citizen in 1969 and was hired as an administrator at Kings Park High School in 1971, where he worked for 15 years until retiring in 1986, his son said.

“Back then, only people like Thomas’ father, immigrants and working-class people came here,” Wehrheim said.

In the 1950s, advertisements for San Remo appeared in local Italian-language newspapers, making the community a magnet for Italian-American immigrants, said Richard Smith, the town historian and mayor of Nissequogue Village.

“It was really marketed to Italian Americans in the city and in Brooklyn so they could get out and enjoy life in the country,” Smith said. “But after the end of World War II, more and more people started moving out, winterizing these summer homes and living there year-round.”

“What a hassle it is.”

Biase Gugliotta, who served with the Italian Allies during World War II, almost never made it to the United States, his son said. German troops captured Biase in 1943 and forced him to work in a Nazi camp in Mecklenburg, said Thomas Gugliotta.

While Biase was in captivity, he and other prisoners were fed food left over from Nazi military officers’ meals, his son said. Biase Gugliotta told Thomas about a near brush with death, the son recalled. One morning, when one of his roommates was sick with the flu and couldn’t get out of bed to work, a Nazi officer fatally shot the man in the head in front of Biase, Thomas said. Moments later, Biase stared down the barrel of the same rifle.

“One thing he always told us kids was, ‘You don’t know what trouble is.’ He raised us to appreciate what we were like in America and how lucky we were to be here,” recalls Thomas Gugliotta.

Gugliotta was born in 1922 in Calvera, a small mountain village in the province of Potenza, Italy. He worked as a farmer and met his future wife, Philomena Buglione, while growing up there.

Biase Gugliotta died in 2006 at the age of 84; Philomena Gugliotta died in 1985 at the age of 63.

Gugliotta hopes his father’s story helps people deal with adversity.

“I hope it serves as an inspiration to people and a testament to his will, that he was willing to walk to pay his taxes,” Gugliotta said. “I want his story to be told for generations to come, long after I’m gone and can no longer tell it.”