When young, Joseph Finelli had comparatively little formal schooling. In his na-tive Italy, he went through the early grades, then, after his family moved to New York City, he continued only through the first year of high school.
In high school “I had been told that I had talent,” he now recalls, from his current vantage point of age 85. Nonetheless, like so many others then, he had to drop out to support his family. A few years later he left work and joined the army for a four-and-a-half year stint in World War II.
After returning home, he began his first career, that of butcher. He worked at var-ious meat-cutting shops in the Bronx, learning the trade and becoming expert at it. The work was not without stress, however; he had his first heart attack in the late 1950s.
Eventually he left the butcher’s trade and, in his second career, ran a home-cleaning service in Manhattan for ten years. But he yearned for something more creative.
Finally, he wife said to him one day, “Now, it’s time to go back to study.” So, at age 58 he enrolled in the National Academy of Design and, he says, “The rest is history.”
That is where he learned to become a sculptor. This is the goal he set for himself, a purpose that fit nicely with his philosophy of life. He was conscious of himself as an immigrant and his aim, as he puts it, was “to excel in everything.” In becoming an artist, he wanted to give something back to the society that had received him and given him op-portunity.
“My life completely changed,” he told me, in a recent telephone interview. After completing his training, he began work and sculpted many works that he sold to churches, cemeteries, and other agencies. He enjoyed his work and felt at last creative in carving the pietas and other art that emerged from his studio. And he soon made enough money in his new role to support his wife and himself.
When I spoke with him, Joseph Finelli was feeling in high spirits and not without reason. He had just returned, with his son Anton and several other members of his ex-tended family, from Benevento, the provincial capital of Campania, near where he was born. The Museo del Sannio had bestowed on him the high honor of installing in its halls seventeen of his sculptures. Some were busts; most of them were full-life figures and nudes, he told me.
Asked how he felt about it, this late-blooming artist found it hard to express his pride and sense of fulfillment. That the place where he was born and raised recognized him in this way defied easy words. But clearly his was a “Nunc dimittis” experience, one that recalled Simeon, the eighty-year-old man in St. Luke’s Gospel who, at the moment of his fulfillment, exulted “Now, O Lord, you dismiss your servant in peace.”
The ties with his native land reached back more deeply than one might have thought. His son, Anton, recalls being told that his father, as a young boy, did some work with his uncles in the stone cutting business. How fortuitous that this childhood activity should blossom so many decades later!
I like to connect Joseph Finelli’s life story to the currently fashionable idea of “re-inventing oneself.” As more and more of us Americans retire early with the prospect of decades more of life still before us, we often feel the need and the desire to explore fur-ther our creative potential.
There will be much more time for this kind of experimentation than we ever thought possible. People in the huge baby boom generation, looking toward at least some increases in longevity, will have ample opportunity for further education and for trying new models of life style and professional activity. Some, of course, will need to work for financial as well as psychological reasons.
Joseph Finelli and other members of the older generation who have succeeded in changing course in middle or later life, are clear models of personal re-invention. They have listened to their inner voices spurring them on to excel in fields different from the ones in which they began adult life.
Looking toward the unfolding of this new century, the business/gerontology guru, Ken Dychtwald, writes in his new book Age Power: “In contrast to the 20th century, when most of the interesting innovations in human lifestages occurred with the youthful periods, the expanded middlescent life stage and the new years of vital maturity will pro-vide new opportunities for comebacks, late blooming, and second chances. In the 21st century, adulthood will explode with lifestyle experimentation and personal transformation.”
Allowing for the somewhat inflated language of an age booster, people now mid-dle-aged can perhaps find some inspiration in this vision of the future. I suspect, however, there is greater inspiration in the life of Joseph Finelli and others in the older generation like him who have already led the way.
Richard Griffin