Vincent John Carano

Vincent John Carano, 83, of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, former longtime resident of West Orange, NJ and husband of Gladys Margaret Carano entered into eternal rest Wednesday, April 7, 2021. His graveside service with military honors will be held in Mount Pleasant Memorial Gardens, 1308 Mathis Ferry Road on Saturday, April 10, 2021 at 3:00 pm. Arrangements by J. Henry Stuhr, Inc. Mount Pleasant Chapel.

Vincent was born September 11, 1937 in Newark, New Jersey, son of the late Vincent Edward Carano and the late Margaret Senerchia Carano. He served in the Army National Guard and earned his bachelor's degree from Bloomfield College. Vincent was in the real estate business for 64 years and owned and operated Carano Realtors for 50 years, often working 6 and 7 days a week. As a talented musician he was the Principal Bass player in the top professional orchestras of both New York and New Jersey, often having four rehearsals in a day while simultaneously running his busy real estate office. With his love of music and strong work ethic, he grew into his third business of contracting musicians to perform in the top professional orchestras of New York and New Jersey, and became the top orchestral musical contractor in the New York Metropolitan Area. He was a long time resident of Northern New Jersey before relocating to Mt. Pleasant to be near family in September 2020.

He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Gladys M. Carano of Mt. Pleasant; son, Vincent E. Carano II (Barbara) of Mt. Pleasant; daughter, Michelle Carano (Rick Kreshtool) of Manhattan, NY; grandchildren, Emily and Katherine Carano; brother, Fred Carano (Marji) and their children, Molly and Sara of Leland, NC; and cousin, Hugo Carano (Susan) and their children, Kristin and Stephen of Ocean Ridge, NC.

Vincent John Carano is remembered for his love and tireless support of family, his great, joyful, witty, and sometimes wry sense of humor, and his inextinguishable positivity and yearning for the future despite unrelenting burdens and obstacles. He never gave up, he never shyed away, and he ultimately never failed. Vincent John Carano believed in greatness that had the Hand of God on it, and he achieved it.

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Please take a few moments to read the Eulogy for Vincent John Carano delivered by his Son, Vincent Edward Carano II

I'd like to start with an impression of my Father that my Brother-in-Law David wrote to me yesterday. David wrote, "Your Dad is for me such a gentle, kind soul. Every time in his presence I felt a calmness come over me. He is in the best sense a man of the 19th Century, pre industrial technology, a chamber recital where the instruments are all acoustic." Definitely the most beautiful and accurate expression of my father that I've ever heard. And I took note of the word "gentle", because in texts this week my father's friend and collaborator in the music business, Barry Centanni, who is here today, said at one point "God rest his gentle soul." The word struck me, because being raised by my father I always saw him as active, ethical, honest, kind, funny, good-hearted, always willing to help, hard-working, and family-focused, even if the family at the moment was a philharmonic orchestra. I guess since he was such a potent life force I never picked up on the word "gentle", and I found that very intriguing. It's a word I hadn't explored when thinking of him, but other people had always known him that way. My friend since Junior High, Gary Schreiber, said "You're Dad had such a great sense of humor", which now occurs to me may have escaped those who only dealt with him in regards to serious business matters. Those people would have described his ethics, knowledge, and honesty. It's just interesting how you really need to hear the heartfelt impressions from different people in order to reveal a whole person.

I spoke with my father's lifetime friend from college, Charlie Garafano, Uncle Charlie, this week and it brought back all of those tableside discussions when I was a kid and good friends got their families together and just spent the afternoon eating, and talking, and telling stories, and now that I think about it really revealing their whole persons and personalities to each other, completely unguarded. And I realized by sitting and listening to their stories and their wisdom just actually the reason why I came to form the deep friendships that I have
myself. Once you have that experience it's your background and your soul connects with other people who have had that experience, and so it's no surprise of the close friendship that I developed with the Sobol Brothers, Greg, Paul, and Rob, who similarly sat around the table with their father David and their many colorful uncles, and had breathed into their souls the wisdom, humor, and wit of the ages, and I am so grateful to have been exposed to that experience, and it all started because of the friendships that my father had formed before I was alive. We've all spent a year where we've been separated, and the information that has come to our isolated selves over that time did not come from around tabletops but rather through little electronic boxes where instructions masked as facts had been packaged, and managed, and controlled, and decided, and permitted, and "corrected", but in the end not really wisdom at all, and certainly no replacement for the conversations of multiple generations that start with the coming together of friends, uniting their families together, and in an unguarded way speaking and talking and being together for the sheer joy of it. Only in these crucibles does real wisdom get to breathe living air. And it turns out, thinking about those unguarded tableside times, that when we have the right to assemble freely, all good comes out of it, and we really don't need the instructions from the little boxes after all. All we need all along is the multigenerational communion of family and friends. I'm so thankful that my Father gave me this gift, and as I said it was all set up for me before I was even born.

I can't mention Uncle Charlie without conveying to you a story he told me. It's just one of those scenarios that good friends laugh about for life, and one of the few times when my Father was perhaps a bit naughty. At their local college, Bloomfield College of Bloomfield, New Jersey, Uncle Charlie was running for Class President, which he ultimately won. My Father was his campaign manager. Such a moment

in time would not be foreign to the movies of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, or the Marx Brothers. When the final votes were counted, Uncle Charlie had more votes than there were students in his class. The Administrator wanted to know how this had happened, and my Father said, "Well, it wasn't easy."

Many of you know that my Father was a tireless worker, and had 3 careers going at the same time: his real estate business, his performances as Principal Bass in several top orchestras in the New York Metropolitan Area, and his contracting business where he hired the musicians for those orchestras. To observers who knew about all 3 it seemed an exhausting schedule, and my Father certainly got tired and at the end of the day needed to collapse in front of the TV and watch Johnny Carson until the wee hours just to unwind. And I can thank him for that experience because by sneaking in to watch when I should have been sleeping he exposed me to the likes of Don Rickles and Frank Sinatra and all the rest of the great characters. The next day my Father would get up and do it all over again, but it was never a grind to him. Exhaustion, yes, but never a grind. He loved it. He told us numerous times that he was never more happy than when he had all 3 businesses going at full speed. He referred to it as his golf game.

I was talking to my High School friend Kenny Baris this week, who comes from a distinguished real estate family that my Father was close with, and who now runs his own very active and successful real estate business. My Father moved the remnants of his real estate business to Kenny's office before he moved down here, and true to form insisted on numerous luncheons with Kenny at Libretti's in order to "discuss the deal." Well Kenny is a real guy and had been exposed to those same multigenerational tableside conversations growing up, and so despite his busy schedule always gave my Father the consideration of his time,

and enjoyed it too. The impression that Kenny conveyed to me this week was how my Father always treated other Realtors as colleagues rather than competitors. Kenny's family were the same way in their business dealings, and Kenny saw in my Father a rare compatriot in the way real estate business leaders interact with each other. In a business that can be cutthroat, seeing colleagues instead of competitors is a great blessing and a life lesson for us all. It's like what my friend Larry Slefko, who owns a car lot, says. When he's at the wholesalers, seeing other guys there that he's known for years buying cars, everybody is observing every deal that goes by. Larry deals fairly with people; he's not looking to make one great steal and then run away. Many times one of the other guys would say, "Hey, you could've gotten that car for less", and Larry would respond, "Can't the other guy win once in a while?" Letting the other guy win once in a while is the kind of wisdom that my Father lived by. And so getting back to my Father's exhausting business schedule, it wasn't just that it was his golf game and that he loved the activity, it was that he was able to do it freely with a clear conscience. If you do things intentionally wrong anyone in the world can own you. But if you do things right and in good conscience, you are free. And so even though to the outside world it may have looked like my Father was burdened by hours upon hours of work, not only did he do it joyfully because he loved it, but he did it unfettered because his ethics made him a free man.

My Father experienced life, and religion, and philosophy, and social interactions through business. He was a business man not in the sense of occupation, but in the sense of what foundationally defined him as a person and how he looked at the world, and that was the reason he incorporated gentleness, and kindness, and goodness, and philosophy, and wisdom into his business interactions; he put his humanity into the curriculum vitae of his business life. It was who he was, and that's why it was so difficult to get him to move down here, because he was not only afraid of losing the activity, but he was afraid of losing who he was. When my parents finally made the move in September, he loved it from the first week, and he wanted it to go on for years and years. He was the opposite of bored and depressed in retirement. We had a great six months. We all needed it. It completed the circle of when I was a kid and with my parents on a daily basis, and that was a great gift. My Mother is now here and living up the street from me, and her Daughter-in-Law Barbara, and her grandchildren, Emily and Katherine, and she's living in the home that she shared with my Father in the area that she has been actively exploring with my Father for the past six months. We all wanted much more time, my Father most of all, but we definitely completed the essentials of the circle. And now my Father will rest here with us eternally, in the area where most of our extended family now live. And as such, this week we had to plan not only funeral arrangements, but also establish a family plot for our new homeland. My Father had prepared me for both jobs, because he had me sit in with him on the funeral arrangements in the past for my grandparents, and now I know why. And he had told me about the family plot that our Dr. Uncle Fred had purchased for the family in New Jersey, so I understood the concept of all that. We purchased 10 plots here, of which my Father will have the honor of being the founding member for our family's new future. My wife seemed surprised by the number, but I explained the importance of having a certain number together by way of a joke: imagine a few years from now if you didn't buy a group of plots together, and someone comes up to you and says, "So this is your family plot?", and you have to say, "Well, Granddaddy is here, but Uncle Jimmy is over there, and Aunt Mildred is over there, and… Cousin Bobby is under the fig tree." You gotta plan ahead.

And speaking of planning ahead I'll close with the memory of my Father that for some reason was the only one that caused me to sob uncontrollably. I'm going to try to put the memory visually out of my mind while I convey it to you so that I'll be able to get through this. When I came out of college and got my first real job at the General Cable fiberoptics company, my Father took me to Brooks Brothers in the Livingston Mall and bought me 5 quality, fitted suits, complete with ties and business shirts. These suits cost over $400 each and it was quite an expenditure along with all the other expenses my father was dealing with at the time. I understand the significance of the sacrifice and also the feeling of wanting me to have quality things now that I have my own children and now that I am in that scenario. But I didn't understand the significance of it at the time, and so I was surprised at first when it was that memory that caused me to cry uncontrollably this week. But I soon realized it was the tender act of kindness mixed with sacrifice that got me. The thing is that my Father wanted me to have quality items for my new adult business life, and he was willing to sacrifice for it. It wasn't the first time my Father had put me first… but it was the first time that I knew he had put me first, and that's why it's the one moment that got me this week. Once again, he had let the other guy win. Dad, thank you for everything you've done for me. I really, really appreciate it.