Joseph Vitucci
March 12, 1944 - September 27, 2025
Editor's Note: I have this rule against using the real names of people I know in the world, and I generally avoid posting pictures that aren't mine. I'm breaking both those guidelines today. This picture -- probably taken by Robin's mother -- shows Robin's father, a man named Joe Vitucci. That last name isn't pronounced the way you might think. Joe's father (Robin's grandfather) immigrated from Italy to Cincinnati in 1921, but he wound up living on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River and decided to Kentuckify the pronunciation of his name for reasons that aren't clear. The arrangement of letters that might translate to a "ch" back in Italy make an "s" sound in Cincinnati's Northern Kentucky suburbs. The name is a close rhyme to "watusi."
The picture was taken 21 years and ten days ago during a 2004 trip Joe and Carol (Robin's mother) took to Montana to visit Carol's brother and his wife. I think this shows Joe on a boat tour on one of the reservoirs on the Missouri River near Helena, but they roamed all over the place on that trip, so it might have been down in Yellowstone or up in Glacier. Robin's mother will tell me. Joe looks like a cool dude here in his do-it-yourself sunglasses and his turtleneck shirt and his free cap from work and his understated Joe Vitucci smile.
I'm not going to write out the story of Joe's life, because I wasn't there for most of it, and it's not my story to tell. Robin can talk about the family history. I just know some basic facts. He served in Vietnam but lucked into a non-combat "Radar O'Reilly" job because he could type. (That's what he always called it, a "Radar O'Reilly" job.) He came home and married Carol and spent decades doing some sort of desk job for a box company 60-someodd miles from where he lived, and he had a deep respect for a particular brand of folding box because of it. (We still have some of those things lying around.) He built or mostly-built two houses with Carol, learning tradesman skills as he went, and he turned into an excellent handyman. He liked driving but was a horrible passenger, thanks to a wreck he'd had when he was young and riding with a women who crashed a Volkswagen. He always rode in the back seat when he wasn't driving, and he always told the story of that wreck to explain why. He was a finicky eater and was very particular about his machines -- he never missed an oil change for his cars and had a three-page checklist for starting up his giant RV -- but was otherwise very easygoing, and he was one of the least judgmental people I've ever known. He was always nice to me. I always felt like he liked me. He'd laugh at my jokes.
He loved his wife, who was the core of his world, and whenever he left the house -- whether it was a five-hour jaunt around the Ohio Valley or a five-minute hop to the store -- he always took a moment to kiss her on the way out.
For a longest time, I'd have complicated and (sometimes) contentious talks about the state of the world with Robin's mom, but Joe always kept his opinions about all that stuff to himself. He talked to me about guy things, like what was going on at work or school or with the kids, or what little I knew about sports teams, or how our car was running. The first thing he'd say to me whenever I'd walk in the door was, "How was traffic?" He'd follow that up with, "What's gas running up there?" And then he'd talk a little about what was going on down on the river, or maybe he'd mention something he'd heard on the Chicago news he picked up from his AM car radio on the way to work. And then maybe we'd go outside and walk around the river house and talk about cutting the grass, or we'd plan some excursion out into the countryside.
That's the way I most connected with Joe. He liked to roam around and poke his nose into places, and a lot of weekends he'd take me and Robin or, later, just me on long drives around Northern Kentucky or Ohio or Indiana. Early on, he took me to my first-ever Major League Baseball game with outrageously expensive home plate tickets he'd gotten for free from the guys at work. Later, we started just wandering. We went to Clifty Falls State Park a couple of times. We drove down to Lexington once and walked around the nature preserve at Ravens Run. We drove the road on either side of the river more times than I can count. We explored a state park where Daniel Boone had fought a Revolutionary War battle. We crossed the Ohio River on a ferry boat and walked through museums and parks and a frickin' castle in Cincinnati. If he couldn't think of a specific place to go, he'd just drive around, thinking maybe I'd see things to photograph, and a bunch of pictures on this page come from those drives. He liked looking at this Flickr page and was always curious about how I came up with all this stuff to write. Sometimes he took his own camera along and shot some pictures of his own, and I kind of wish now I'd thought to set him up with his own Flickr page in about 2015.
He was fascinated with the logistics of big machines and liked to watch things running so he could figure out how they worked. He lived near an Ohio River dam, and he liked going down to watch the boats pass through the locks. One time, we were in the middle of a dinner with the extended family on Robin's grandparents' back porch, which faced the river, and he saw a big paddlewheel boat round the bend upstream. He dropped his hamburger (plain, no cheese) and asked if I wanted to go watch the boat lock through, so we abandoned the rest of the family and drove fast down to the dam, and I took this picture.
I think it was those weekend drives that finally clued us in on what was going on with his mind. Robin and I went with him on a random drive to Rooster Run sometime around 2018, and a car at a stoplight backed up right into him for no reason at all. Joe had done absolutely nothing to make that happen -- the moron in the car ahead of us had decided he was in the wrong lane and forgot mirrors existed -- but the excitement of the moment froze Joe in a way he wouldn't have frozen before. Something about this tripped a wire in Carol, and that night she asked me if I'd seen anything odd about his behavior on our drives. I said that he got turned around easily, but I pointed out that I'd never seen anyone named Vitucci who knew where they were, and that I figured getting turned around was just part of his nature. But the more I thought about it, the more evidence I saw buried in the moments. It turned out that Carol was right to worry, and the diagnosis came not too long afterward.
But that's just how the story ends, and as Robin said a few days ago, you can't measure the quality of a life by how it ends.
Joe Vitucci lived 81 years, and 75 of those years were everything any of us would hope for in a life. You never know what goes on in a person's head, but I think he was a happy man. He was satisfied, and by any measure I think he would have valued, he was successful. He spent more than half a century married to a woman he deeply loved, and at the very end when he'd lost everything else, that love was the anchor that showed he was still Joe Vitucci. Even to the very last moment, he worried about Carol getting home safely. He was an excellent father, and his love for his daughter shaped a wonderful woman who has become my entire world. He was a nice guy, a good man, a brilliant husband and father and father-in-law, and I will miss him deeply.
Joseph Vitucci
March 12, 1944 - September 27, 2025
Editor's Note: I have this rule against using the real names of people I know in the world, and I generally avoid posting pictures that aren't mine. I'm breaking both those guidelines today. This picture -- probably taken by Robin's mother -- shows Robin's father, a man named Joe Vitucci. That last name isn't pronounced the way you might think. Joe's father (Robin's grandfather) immigrated from Italy to Cincinnati in 1921, but he wound up living on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River and decided to Kentuckify the pronunciation of his name for reasons that aren't clear. The arrangement of letters that might translate to a "ch" back in Italy make an "s" sound in Cincinnati's Northern Kentucky suburbs. The name is a close rhyme to "watusi."
The picture was taken 21 years and ten days ago during a 2004 trip Joe and Carol (Robin's mother) took to Montana to visit Carol's brother and his wife. I think this shows Joe on a boat tour on one of the reservoirs on the Missouri River near Helena, but they roamed all over the place on that trip, so it might have been down in Yellowstone or up in Glacier. Robin's mother will tell me. Joe looks like a cool dude here in his do-it-yourself sunglasses and his turtleneck shirt and his free cap from work and his understated Joe Vitucci smile.
I'm not going to write out the story of Joe's life, because I wasn't there for most of it, and it's not my story to tell. Robin can talk about the family history. I just know some basic facts. He served in Vietnam but lucked into a non-combat "Radar O'Reilly" job because he could type. (That's what he always called it, a "Radar O'Reilly" job.) He came home and married Carol and spent decades doing some sort of desk job for a box company 60-someodd miles from where he lived, and he had a deep respect for a particular brand of folding box because of it. (We still have some of those things lying around.) He built or mostly-built two houses with Carol, learning tradesman skills as he went, and he turned into an excellent handyman. He liked driving but was a horrible passenger, thanks to a wreck he'd had when he was young and riding with a women who crashed a Volkswagen. He always rode in the back seat when he wasn't driving, and he always told the story of that wreck to explain why. He was a finicky eater and was very particular about his machines -- he never missed an oil change for his cars and had a three-page checklist for starting up his giant RV -- but was otherwise very easygoing, and he was one of the least judgmental people I've ever known. He was always nice to me. I always felt like he liked me. He'd laugh at my jokes.
He loved his wife, who was the core of his world, and whenever he left the house -- whether it was a five-hour jaunt around the Ohio Valley or a five-minute hop to the store -- he always took a moment to kiss her on the way out.
For a longest time, I'd have complicated and (sometimes) contentious talks about the state of the world with Robin's mom, but Joe always kept his opinions about all that stuff to himself. He talked to me about guy things, like what was going on at work or school or with the kids, or what little I knew about sports teams, or how our car was running. The first thing he'd say to me whenever I'd walk in the door was, "How was traffic?" He'd follow that up with, "What's gas running up there?" And then he'd talk a little about what was going on down on the river, or maybe he'd mention something he'd heard on the Chicago news he picked up from his AM car radio on the way to work. And then maybe we'd go outside and walk around the river house and talk about cutting the grass, or we'd plan some excursion out into the countryside.
That's the way I most connected with Joe. He liked to roam around and poke his nose into places, and a lot of weekends he'd take me and Robin or, later, just me on long drives around Northern Kentucky or Ohio or Indiana. Early on, he took me to my first-ever Major League Baseball game with outrageously expensive home plate tickets he'd gotten for free from the guys at work. Later, we started just wandering. We went to Clifty Falls State Park a couple of times. We drove down to Lexington once and walked around the nature preserve at Ravens Run. We drove the road on either side of the river more times than I can count. We explored a state park where Daniel Boone had fought a Revolutionary War battle. We crossed the Ohio River on a ferry boat and walked through museums and parks and a frickin' castle in Cincinnati. If he couldn't think of a specific place to go, he'd just drive around, thinking maybe I'd see things to photograph, and a bunch of pictures on this page come from those drives. He liked looking at this Flickr page and was always curious about how I came up with all this stuff to write. Sometimes he took his own camera along and shot some pictures of his own, and I kind of wish now I'd thought to set him up with his own Flickr page in about 2015.
He was fascinated with the logistics of big machines and liked to watch things running so he could figure out how they worked. He lived near an Ohio River dam, and he liked going down to watch the boats pass through the locks. One time, we were in the middle of a dinner with the extended family on Robin's grandparents' back porch, which faced the river, and he saw a big paddlewheel boat round the bend upstream. He dropped his hamburger (plain, no cheese) and asked if I wanted to go watch the boat lock through, so we abandoned the rest of the family and drove fast down to the dam, and I took this picture.
I think it was those weekend drives that finally clued us in on what was going on with his mind. Robin and I went with him on a random drive to Rooster Run sometime around 2018, and a car at a stoplight backed up right into him for no reason at all. Joe had done absolutely nothing to make that happen -- the moron in the car ahead of us had decided he was in the wrong lane and forgot mirrors existed -- but the excitement of the moment froze Joe in a way he wouldn't have frozen before. Something about this tripped a wire in Carol, and that night she asked me if I'd seen anything odd about his behavior on our drives. I said that he got turned around easily, but I pointed out that I'd never seen anyone named Vitucci who knew where they were, and that I figured getting turned around was just part of his nature. But the more I thought about it, the more evidence I saw buried in the moments. It turned out that Carol was right to worry, and the diagnosis came not too long afterward.
But that's just how the story ends, and as Robin said a few days ago, you can't measure the quality of a life by how it ends.
Joe Vitucci lived 81 years, and 75 of those years were everything any of us would hope for in a life. You never know what goes on in a person's head, but I think he was a happy man. He was satisfied, and by any measure I think he would have valued, he was successful. He spent more than half a century married to a woman he deeply loved, and at the very end when he'd lost everything else, that love was the anchor that showed he was still Joe Vitucci. Even to the very last moment, he worried about Carol getting home safely. He was an excellent father, and his love for his daughter shaped a wonderful woman who has become my entire world. He was a nice guy, a good man, a brilliant husband and father and father-in-law, and I will miss him deeply.