A torrential raconteur, Aldo Mancusi traces what he calls his magnificent obsession to his father, Everisto, who in 1920 emigrated from Campania, Italy, to this, New York's most populous borough, while still in his teens.

"He had about 70 Caruso records that he would crank up when I was 4, 3, 2, 1," Aldo said one recent morning. As curator and founder of the shrine grandiloquently styled the Enrico Caruso Museum of America, he was about to turn back the clock, flourishing a shellac disc dating to November 1902, the year the peerless Neapolitan tenor began recording.

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Source: http://online.wsj.com