June 9th, 2025
Prelude
This is a speech 16 years in the making. A priest, a man like other men, prone to sins of pride and ignorance, must have been running late for his golf game, so he chose to skip my father’s eulogy when he said Saul M. Weiss’s funeral mass in April of 2009. Nonetheless, Rita V. Weiss, my mother, who passed just this last month, adored this priest, even after he moved on to another parish and distanced himself from her. Her way was in the way of old-school Italians who have at least one priest in their lives as a personal friend and spiritual advisor. The connection was clearly one way only. To the best of my knowledge, he only visited her once, if that, in her nursing home, though in my mother’s dementia, he was “a regular visitor.”
My whole family knew how arrogant this man of God was, but I was the one who wrote to him out of grief and anger to express the emotional toll of his oversight. This was a bone of contention between me and one or two of my family members and I suspect still is. To the devout, priests are not subject to the criticisms of the faithful, which I don’t count myself as. However my father remained uneulogized until May 15, when I stood in the same church, at a funeral mass conducted by a far more empathetic priest and eulogized both my parents at the head of Mom’s funeral mass.
I’m sharing this double eulogy, today, June 9th, on the anniversary of Saul and Rita’s 69th wedding anniversary. After my father’s funeral mass, I felt crushed, heavy and haunted by my father. After my mother’s funeral mass, I felt somehow lighter, embracing, however tentatively, a sense of closure 16 years in the making.
In everlasting love, Rita and Saul Weiss 5/16/2025
As a writer of stories, speeches and scripts, I have had the solemn honor to eulogize my grandmother Irene, my Uncle George, my cousin Greg and two friends. 16 years ago, my father passed on Good Friday just 82 years young. Vicki and I spent the previous night at his bedside while I wrote a eulogy for him that I never got to deliver. Call it a clerical oversight, but Saul who loved words dearly and inspired in me my own love of words, never got his last words, words that he richly deserved. This oversight has haunted me all these years and I made a silent vow to Saul to make things right by him in the appropriate time and appropriate place.
To accomplish this, we’re going to take a little journey together.
Submitted for your approval, a bright Sunday morning in bustling households like ours, maybe even like yours. Mass starts in just shy of an hour. Our beloved Rita—she’s is in the car already. Church is only 15 minutes away but God as her witness, Rita WILL NOT EVER BE LATE.
Sully!
Saul is still in the house puttering around. He found his Marine Corps League ballcap. He has his best jumpsuit and string tie on, but he is distracted. Maybe his mind is on his own parents, Schmul and Esther, who escaped the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Kiev and Omsk at the beginning of the last century to settle on the 3200 block of Ward Street in the bustling immigrant-filled Oakland neighborhood that Saul proudly called a little United Nations. The immigrants that this country used to welcome to our doorstep. Somewhere along the line, we’ve forgotten that this country is great because immigrants are the backbone of our nation.
But I digress, the church clock is ticking, and Saul is still MIA.
Sully, what’s keeping you?
He is missing his own brothers Bill and Bert who went on to their rewards before him. Bill and Bert were 10 and 14 years older than him and perhaps it’s that age difference that led Saul to bond with kids his own age, young Irish, German Catholic lads and perhaps it’s through these friendships that Saul became steeped in Catholicism and began the extraordinary conversion journey.
It to took me time to fully appreciate why his family’s minds were so totally blown by this news. Remember, it’s the mid-50’s, not even a full decade since the wholesale slaughter of 6 million European Jews. For a Jewish man to end the successive line of Judaism in his family would have been a hard, hard thing to get your head around.
Sully!
I’m sorry Rita, we’ll try to hurry him along.
So according to family legend, Saul is already living the secret life of a convert. One day he stops the cute, I mean drop dead gorgeous 23 year old Italian-American hottie next door and he asks her where she’s going all dolled up.
I’m going to take my driver’s test she says with a little attitude and he laughs, eyes twinkling, with that smug football captain charm that made all the bobby-soxers in Schenley High School swoon. Women drivers, he snorts. You’ll never pass.
You have a lot of nerve Saul Weiss, says she. Not only will I pass. But I’ll pass today. The first time. What do you have to say to that?
If you do, says he, I’ll take you out on a date. Challenge accepted. Let history reflect that she aced that test and was always a better driver than him. I don’t know where they went on their first date. Last time I drove her through Oakland, Rita suggested that It was probably some soda shop on Forbes Ave.
Rita has the motor running now. The car isn’t the only one fuming. Let’s get a move on Sully!
He’s now reflecting on the bright Saturday morning, staggering into the house on 4149 Branding, red-eyed and tearful after spending the night at his father’s deathbed. I’ll never forget his hug, his wet tears and grizzled sandpaper cheek against mine, and him giving me the first of many lessons in how to be a man.
A man, he said, is not ashamed to cry over the loss of those he loves.
50’s guys, stern. John Wayne stoic. Didn’t tolerate emotional displays, particularly from boys. But Saul, I suspect like Samuel before him, was cut from a softer, gentler bolt of cloth.
The wisest lesson Saul ever taught me came from his own blended faith family experience. In early summer of 1980, at Rita’s request, I began the dispensation process that allows Catholics who aren’t married by a priest the opportunity to have our marriage recognized by the Church. Apparently there a two forms of dispensation. A-the easy one and B-the much longer, more intrusive one. The priest, another of my mother’s friends, chose B and alas, we couldn’t complete the process in time. As our wedding date approached, I knew Rita was upset and I went to Saul and asked him what he thought I should do. Again, with our family history, it was so important that there’d be no impediment to my mother getting along with my wife and her family.
Saul says to me, stop worrying. Know this. Your mother loves her God, but she loves you kids more. So live your lives. Be happy. For 45 years my wife and mother have always maintained the same rock solid love bond I’ve had with my in-laws, Virginia and Wayne. I think also to Rita’s credit, she took a page from her own in-laws. Whatever Esther and Sam felt about their convert son, they embraced his growing family. We have so many home movies with the two of them at home, enjoying our mother’s table.
My father was a principled, deeply compassionate man. His greatest source of pride outside of his family was helping to serve our nation’s veterans. I bristle when I hear uninformed people disparage the VA. VA people are the finest, most dedicated people I’ve ever known. And true to form, after Saul retired, he continued his service to veterans with the Marine Corps League, from chaperoning boat rides to scheduling honor guard funerals.
So many other tales to tell. But the church clock is tick tick, ticking. So let’s get Saul in the car and after enduring a withering look from Rita, they’re off. Let’s switch gears and acquaint you with Rita’s stories.
She was born on March 11, 1931 to Irene and Greg Mazza. My grandfather doted on his beautiful daughter. He loved showing her off to his friends and really loved that she had such a talented singing voice. Sing us an Ave Maria, cara mia. Then tragedy struck. Rita’s papa, the apple of her eye, was taken from her at age 17. Rita, George and Irene were two women and a young man, alone in the world. Irene had offers of remarriage, but she said look I’ve already had the love of my life and there was no replacing him. And that’s that. Mummum worked a factory job in an era when few women worked outside the home. Rita finished school at St. Paul’s Cathedral and went on to study music at Duquesne with private lessons that they struggled to afford.
This is the 16 year old girl who, with her lifelong best friend Delores in tow, would crash funerals and grieve with mourners of deceased complete strangers.
It would take another 5 years for handsome head Saul to work up the courage to date her. During which time she worked a stint at the Pittsburgh Opera Company, sewing costumes and singing in the chorus. Women of her generation routinely gave up their careers when they married, but I prefer to think of hers as a lateral move, rather than an outright abandonment.
My mother was the center of our extended family universe. Carloads of uncles, aunts, and cousins would roll up, unload and eat my mother’s famous meatballs, shells, braciole, eggplant pickled or parm, and the cookies. No church or school gathering was complete without a tray of Rita Weiss goodies. Oh those cookies. Butterballs, pecan sandies, pizzelles, and the glorious braided Italian jobs. I literally stole a million of those cookies.
Richard Martin, GET OUT of the freezer.
Mom was most famous for her cakes. For my eighth birthday, she made a green fish that was so beautiful that I cried at the prospect of cutting it. I was an emotional child but not always a tactful one.
One day I asked her why we always had to have plain old homemade spaghetti when other kids got the new Chef Boyardee canned spaghetti-Os with little meatball pellets. Those who know how epic my mother’s meatballs were will understand the depths of my shame. We Weiss kids try pointlessly to duplicate those meatballs, but we will never taste their like again.
Rita had her own secret bank account funded by cakes. Save something every week, she insisted, her face as stern as a stone bust of Augustus Caesar. Even if it’s just 5 dollars a week, put it away and forget about it. Your father could never save anything.
Geeze Mom, with 8 mouths to feed, I wonder why. But the lesson stuck for all of us children.
Rita continued her musical career, lending her beautiful mezzo soprano voice to the adult choir first at St. Ursula’s and every parish she attended. Mom fed her passion for music at other choirs, also by volunteering at Fox Chapel with Mr. Cannon and singing at nursing homes with the Tuesday Musical Club. I recently learned from my sisters that there is a choral honors award at Fox Chapel that bears her name to this day.
I have lived in every house Rita has lived in. You young ones probably can’t conceive of houses as low tech as ours was. Phones tethered to walls. They didn’t text or take pictures. They only rang a couple times a day if that. We were too poor to afford a new television until I was 12. To keep us from murdering each other, Rita bundled the four boys and baby Vicki up and we spent days at the North Park Pool or even better, the local library. My brothers and I competed to see who could check out the tallest stacks of books. The radio was our source of media entertainment. Rita sang along to the crooners. There are love songs from the 40’s and 50’s burrowed deeper in my head than an RFK brainworm.
Our summers were filled with picnics, fireworks, crewcuts on the porch, evening drives with the old wagon rocking and swaying through the back roads of suburban Pittsburgh, the perfume of ripening corn and sun-warmed seed grass blowing through the open windows. Crickets sang. Fireflies danced. Sights and sounds. Smells and tastes. Such powerful memories.
In New Orleans, we lived in a neighborhood New Orleanians call Elysian Fields, but to Rita it was the fifth circle of hell on earth. Mom came to New Orleans with baby Jena in her belly and other than the joy of giving birth to her second daughter, she hated everything about New Orleans. But being a good company wife, she endured it. When the opportunity came to move back here, Paul Newman, Saul’s boss, called Rita and essentially offered the transfer to her first. Such a class move on his part that I’ll never forget.
A random recollection of my parents. Saul teasing Rita about her love of Luciano Pavarotti. Unable to endure his taunts a second longer, she whipped around and fixed him with a baleful stare “I would leave you in a second to be his chambermaid.” Poor deflated Saul never insulted Pavarotti again.
Thirty six years ago, Kara and I were undergoing fertility treatments and they weren’t working. People understandably focus on the emotional impact on women, but my mother called me one Friday night and could immediately hear the suffering in my voice. She reached out through that phone line and gave me the courage to be strong for my wife. She and Mummum both offered me the same encouragement. In God’s time they both said. And in God’s time her prediction come true. How did she know?
Because you all know, my mother is a baby whisperer. While Saul was always very sweet with the little ones, put a baby in Rita Weiss’s arms and it’s like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Vicki told me that right after she delivered Julia, she told Mom, my heart is so full. I don’t know if I can love any more than I do right now. Rita turned to the new mother and said, “Wait until you become a grandmother.” When Kara got sick after Bennett was born Rita moved right in with us and wrapped her second grandchild in her special brand of baby love. She saved us. And she did the same for most of her other 13 grandbabies.
Grandmothers are all soft and cuddly, but they can be tougher than iron too. Senior grandson Steven reminded me of an incident shortly before Rita gave up her license. She’d parked her 3 row Ford Windstar grandma mobile at church but alas, she forgot to put it in park. As soon as she got out, the van started moving and she got caught under the wheel. The damned thing rolled right over her. Was she injured? No. Not really, just a bit bruised, shaken up and mad as a hornet that the paramedics “ruined” her snow white church outfit. A white church outfit, mind you, that now had a black tire track running the length of it.
You may have noticed that I’ve used my parents’ given names liberally along this little road trip. As the now senior member of the Mazza-Weiss clan, I claim that right, but is it really disrespectful? Rita thought so and once asked me why I do it. He’s your father. You should call him Dad.
This was my answer. Mom. I love my father’s name. Saul. It’s not a name you hear very often. But it’s a beautiful name that I love hearing and love saying. So every chance I get, I put it out into the world.
I never heard another complaint from her. I love my mother’s name too. Rita is not a name you hear very often. I love hearing it and I especially love saying it. So whenever I get a chance, I plan to put it out in the world.
So the grandma van is pulling in with plenty of time to spare. You see Rita, there was always plenty of time. Just make sure you put it in park. In the car sit two post-war, post-depression kids, who transcended the differences in their backgrounds, to create a beautiful, blended family.
I rejoice, with you that Rita and Saul Weiss are with Irene and Greg, with Carmella, Felix, Sam and Esther. And especially Delores and Pete. It saddens me that Rita and Saul will never get to see any of their great grandchildren, so I’m particularly addressing you grandkids here. Carry them in your hearts. Speak their names down the line to the next generation. Let their names be forever written in and spoken of in the annals of love.
The church bells are ringing, Please Saul, don’t fall asleep and snore through the sermon. On behalf of my family, I embrace you all with love, in the spirit of the love that brought you here today to honor the lives of Rita and Saul Weiss. Let their memories forever be a blessing.
