Swiping through black and white photos on her iPad, local television producer and writer Joan Tortorici Ruppert stops at a picture of a shirtless young man reclining on grass. “This one is my dad too. Who took it, I have no idea,” she said. “But I know this is prewar because he didn’t have all the shrapnel scars on his belly he got during the war.” Ruppert barely had time to know her father, Joe Tortorici before his sudden death in 1963. He was 43 years old, and she was just eight.

“I remember that he was very tall and very broad, and I was little,” she recalls. “He went very gray early, and I remember hearing all the adults at the funeral whispering, you know, ‘he was so young.’ It never dawned on me as a little kid that he was so incredibly young when he died. He was so gray, I thought he was as old as Santa Claus.”