They will find it hard to replace Alfredo Cipolato, who helped found the club 63 years ago and sang with them for 61. His funeral service began with the melody of “O Solo Mio,” a song Cipolato would sing whenever he felt joyful or had an audience, two circumstances that usually coincided.
“What a swath he cut through 95 years of life,” the Rev. Rich Perry told more than 200 assembled mourners. “Missoula will never be the same again. Did you ever see that man without a twinkle in his eye?”
Cipolato was a grocer for most of his time in Missoula. He introduced legions of the city's residents to fresh-grated parmigiano cheese and a worthy Barolo wine in the days when Monterey jack and domestic burgundy ruled the grocery stores.
The outbreak of World War II sent Cipolato to Missoula as an interned Italian citizen. His imprisonment at Fort Missoula provided his introduction to Ann D'Orazi, who he met while singing in the St. Francis choir. They married in 1943. The couple worked in her father's grocery store on Woody Street before opening their own shop on the corner of Broadway and Madison Street in 1957.
“We would always go down to the Woody Street store on Friday afternoons,” retired University of Montana professor Meyer Chessin recalled of his faculty friends. “He was a bit of the Old World. He'd have the good Italian bread and draft beer and Genoa salami. We'd try to speak a little Romanian together. And he'd always remind me he grew up with Jewish boys.”
Perry added that Cipolato sang in the Holy Spirit Episcopal Church as well as at St. Francis.
“I bet he took communion in both places, too,” Perry said. “His spirituality was broad and inclusive.”
Sentinel High School band director Gary Gillett was one of Cipolato's pallbearers. He remembered how singing with Alfredo was sometimes a challenge, because you could never be certain if he was going to interrupt a song with a story, or a story with a song.
“But he always wanted everyone to sing along,” Gillett said. “The last time he sang ‘O Solo Mio,' on the Bonner Park bandstand, he kept saying, ‘This isn't a solo - it isn't about me.' He kept holding the microphone out saying, ‘This is for everyone.' ”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.
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