Charlie Paparella Attends a Family Reunion
CRISFIELD, Md. – In this week’s edition of Back on the Road with Charlie Paparella, brought to you by Furniture & More Gone Coastal, Charlie reconnects with his family at a reunion in Crisfield.
Charlie says it’s not often his family is able to get together, as they are scattered across different parts of the country. But during a reunion last week, Charlie says even his late father was able to attend by means of preserved documents — thanks to his dear sister, Cathy.
“He arrived tucked safely inside a three-ring binder along with the only remains of a ‘web-log’, as they were known at the time, called The Shore Journal,” Charlie recounts. “While I was delighted to see articles concerning housing legislation and a changing internet there was, for us, something clearly more valuable: writings on a variety of topics written by our father.”
Charlie says his father’s first and longest contribution was titled, “A Few Choice Words”, and was a discussion on the origins of interesting words, such as groggy.
“[Groggy] comes from the grogram cloak and the British admiral who wore one,” Charlie explains. “When he ordered the daily ration of rum be watered, the sailors named the admiral ‘Grog’. The word later applied to all liquor and to the word ‘groggy’.”
Charlie’s father also wrote about alternative food sources, inspired by his deployment to the South Pacific in World War II. During that time, soldiers and sailors were more likely to get sidelined by food-borne illness than enemy fire. Food science ultimately became a post-war career for the senior Paparella, leading him and his family to travel the county. Charlie was ultimately born in Michigan, while his siblings were born in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Arkansas. However, their traveling lifestyle came to a halt after Charlie’s father took a job with the Marine Products Laboratory in Crisfield, where Charlie says he was loved and respected by everyone, especially watermen and seafood processors.
Charlie leaves us with this quote by his dad from “A Few Choice Words”:
“Egregious” originally meant that someone was distinguished. It changed to mean someone was outrageously bad. I wonder how that happened.
If you have a story idea that you’d like to see Charlie tackle, email them to papa@wmdt.com.
