Faith-filled husband turned tragedy into triumph

    As a clerk for the Kansas City Southern Railroad at Union Passenger Terminal, Sam Catalanotto had a heightened and precise sense of time, schedules and deadlines.
    Time is a funny thing. You think you have all the time in the world to be with your wife and three kids, until suddenly you wake up one day and your wife, an effervescent woman who as a teenager loved to dance, goes in for an operation to relieve chronic spinal pain and comes out of the hospital paralyzed from the chest down.
    That happened to Frances LaPorte Catalanotto in 1969.
    The following September – Sept. 8, 1970, to be exact – Catalanotto’s 5-year-old daughter Linda, who two years earlier had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, passed away. The angel of the family had been beset with untreatable headaches and was going blind.
    The loving husband and doting father – the veteran railroad man – took stock of his life but refused to rail at God.
    “I know where you’re going,” Catalanotto says, reflecting on his response to the personal suffering. “I accepted it in the sense that this is what life dealt. And we went with it and did the best we could with it.
    “Naturally, you always project these things into the future. Linda was going blind, and I was concerned, naturally, about how she was going to make it through life. As it turned out, God had a better plan, and she didn’t have to make it through life with me being concerned about who was going to take care of her.”
    For the next two decades, Catalanotto turned his attention to Frances. She still was independent enough to cook for the family from her wheelchair – Catalanotto cut the legs off the stove so that Frances could reach the burners. Women parishioners from St. Benilde Church in Metairie came in during the day as a lifeline, allowing Catalanotto to hold down his job.
    Nighttime was a different story. Because his wife couldn’t move, Catalanotto woke up every few hours to rotate her body and reduce the chance of her developing bedsores.
    “During the 20 years that she was a paraplegic, I don’t think we slept one full night,” Catalanotto said. “I guess it was like the equivalent of going a full year without sleep. I would get up at night and physically turn her and exercise her legs. I don’t want you to take that out of context. It really wasn’t that burdensome. The only thing is I would go home, take a bath, eat supper and then we’d get to sleep about 11 or 11:30. There was no big shake as far as being tired.”
    At lunchtime, Catalanotto would wolf down a quick sandwich in his car and then sleep for 25 minutes.
    All the while, the Catalanottos never missed Mass at St. Benilde. Once on a shopping expedition, Frances allowed herself a moment of self pity because she was the only person in Lakeside Shopping Center in a wheelchair.
    “I told her, ‘You can see all these people walking, but you don’t know what’s going on inside their bodies,’” Catalanotto said.
    Frances died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1989, and Catalanotto continued attending the charismatic prayer meetings to which he had been introduced a few years earlier. It was there that he met Jackie Castay, whose husband had died of cancer in 1981. Jackie’s friends kept urging her to call Catalanotto.
    Finally, she called and asked him if he wanted “tag along” with her to the French Quarter Festival. But she made sure to tell him, “This is not a date.”
    “He said, ‘That sounds pretty good,’” Jackie said. “And we went out that day and never wanted the day to end.”
    Seven months later – Nov. 3, 1990 – the man and woman who each had lost a spouse but found each other were married. Jackie is now 74 and Sam is 78, and they became the driving forces behind the Covington Food Bank, which provides boxes of nutritious food to 100 families a day. They retired as volunteers at the end of last year.
    Jackie, ever the extrovert, was the public speaker and promoter of the food bank, while Sam, the man Deacon Tom Caffery likes to call the silent “St. Joseph,” was always in the background, loading up the canned goods.
    “I guess we’re a confirmation that opposites attract,” Catalanotto says with a laugh. “A lot of people ask us how all of this developed at the food bank. We didn’t develop it. It was God. He took 12 fishermen, and they were kind of dumb, and he worked with them. Then he got a hold of Jackie and me – the dumbest of the dumb – and used us.
    “I don’t want anybody looking at us and thinking we’re saints. I would just like them to say that this is what God does if you just stand there and let him do it.”
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].