I lived in the same neighborhood too but did not know Costello or his parents. Lou supported the Paterson YMCA where I learned to swim and I saw him there.
Kids never care who their friends are, until the adults say: Don't play with them, they are not the same with us. *Mind boggling*
Well Lon, I daresay you are considerable younger than either my father or Costello were. We are talking about the early 1900s here. They were also boy scouts together. Needless to say that as they grew into their teenage years, each pursued different paths in life and hardly remained friends beyond boyhood. No big deal.
And I am talking about the early 40's when Lou Costello & Bud Abbott were making movies and had apopular radio program.
One of our High School friends was a Jewish guy named Harvey. His family owned Levy's bakery with the best breads you would ever want to eat. Harvey was wannabee gentile. We would get together at his house to play penny ante poker forming a group of 3 Poles and a Jew. He had to leave a private school because of performance, I think only so he could attend public school with his buddies where he was an A student. We all spent a lot of time in his garage trying convert his yellow Dodge convertible with a slush box into a stick. We ended up cutting a big hole in the floor in the attempted transmission change, so when we gave up because we didn't know what we were doing, we drove around with a hole in the floor with which to watch the pavement under the car whiz by. Poor Harvey died by choking on pizza while still in High School. We all liked him.
I never knew the difference or even thought about it. Still not curious. Many Eastern Europeans settled in our area. Many kids had complicated last names, but they didn't seem unusual at the time. Didn't even think about that, until I happened to look at our class yearbook not long ago and noticed the names. There was a Russian Orthodox cemetery in our neighborhood, but it belonged to a church downtown, or so I was told.
Most of my boarding schoolmates were Anglo Saxon tho I do recall the odd Asian and those bearing European surnames. @Lon Tanner. You are most probably aware that Costello is not an Italian name even tho it certainly sounds like one. Fooled me until I read its derivations are Irish.
Ditto. But we did have Cajun neighbors from Louisiana who referred to themselves as "coonass". They were also Catholic... gasp.
My neighborhood was about 70% Jewish. Most Catholics went to the Catholic school, and we never mixed, for the most part. My classmates were about the same mix as my neighborhood. Then came White Flight! My neighborhood went from 100% white to 87% black in under four year's time. I adjusted, I got along. I'm a better person for that experience in my teen years, no doubt.
That I did not know Lois. He looked very swarthy Italian. Wonder why he changed it. Lived in a large Irish American neiborhood perhaps. Did you bring Bess Barber and Micki Pembroke back with you @Beth Gallagher
Many people in show business changed their names to something that was either anglo/saxon or Irish sounding. Seemed as though it was more acceptable to the public at large.