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partner named Bill Garber, who happened to have been a pretty good ballplayer and was a close friend of Lasorda. Tommy had reluctantly retired as a minor leaguer in 1960 and was scouting for the Dodgers, which left him plentyof time to hang out at Garber-Piazza Auto Sales. After my dad bought out Garber a couple of years later and moved across the street under the name of Gateway Motors, Tommy kept coming around when he could—by then, he had been named a manager in the Dodgers’ minor-league system—for lunch and laughs.
    Tommy was not, however, the most important person in my father’s social life. Not after Dad went to a mixer and met Veronica (Roni) Horenci, a pretty young nurse and former high school prom queen who thought he was dapper, danced well, and looked like Tony Curtis. She might also have been impressed that he drove big, fancy cars, and she may or may not have known that they were actually inventory on consignment. Dad liked her well enough that, to spend an evening with her, he was willing to subject himself to ethnic slurs and physical challenges—which he welcomed, of course—at the Slovak Club, where her father bartended and her mother waited tables. Roni intended to become a stewardess, like several of her friends, but my dad, who was a little older, objected, at which point she said something like, “Well, then we should think about getting married.” That was 1966, when, around Phoenixville and Norristown, it was still pretty scandalous for a Slovak to marry an Italian. No matter.
    They were eager to start a family—Vince and I were born over the next two years—and to get ready for it, my father put everything he had into the business, including, now and then, the rent money. My mom would call him, all upset, to tell him that a sheriff’s-sale sign had been posted on their apartment door. You weren’t allowed to take it down. The deal was, if you didn’t pay the rent, they’d carry away your furniture. Dad would end up borrowing from a friend to cover it, then pay him back the next time he sold a car. He also maintained a line of credit at the bank. The first time he failed to make a payment, a bank official told him they were going to take possession of his inventory.
    With my dad sitting across the desk, the banker called a dealer in Coatesville to see if he’d put in an offer. The dealer, Jim Nelms, knew my dad and asked to talk to him, then told the bank official not to touch the cars because he’d take care of it. So my father and Nelms became partners. About a year and a half later, Dad bought out Nelms and applied for a new Datsun franchise, which was going cheap in those days, before Datsun became Nissan. Business picked up when Datsun came out with the 240Z. Then he bought a Honda dealership, which a lot of people thought was a screwy idea. It didn’t seem so screwy when the energy crisis hit in the mid-seventies.
    Before long he had thirty dealerships around Philadelphia. A lot of thedomestics were forced to close because of the gas prices, and Dad bought up their properties. The dealership holdings led him into the real estate business, and then into dealerships in other states. He expanded into Acura—specializing mostly in the high-end line—and Acura and Honda have been his mainstays ever since. He also did well as an investor in the computer repair business. Under Piazza Management, meanwhile, he bought or built who knows how many commercial properties, including the Westover Country Club in Jeffersonville, the Bellewood Golf Club in Pottstown, and an entire historic mining town called St. Peter’s Village.
    All that success put my father in better cars (a Ferrari and a Lincoln Mark VI), better clothes (white shoes and leisure suits, although not the crazy guy-from-WKRP kind), and better seats for Phillies games, which he could now attend without hitchhiking to the ballpark and sneaking in (which he did as a kid, when the Phillies played at Connie Mack Stadium). As it