Welcome to a memoir about my father Louis Scotellaro. The following text is a WIP (work in progress) in honor of our recently transcended father, Louis/’Poppy‘ as he was affectionately known as.
I will be adding more biographical history of my father and my grandfather Anthony’s life every so often. The full memoir will be printed and offered on my AMAZON BOOKS platform where all my fictional works are displayed. This piece, however, is not for public readership and though to list the title on Amazon a price must be assigned, the intention is to make the story available for family only. Who else would be interested? All copies for family members will be given a FREE copy as I will purchase author copies from my KDP bookshelf. Enjoy!
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The first two things I remember as a child were rage and the deep need to write stories. I’ll say that upfront and begin this tribute to my father Louis who you will come to know if you wish to. Or, p’raps not. Whatever you may think of this telling please know it is not a whiny escapade to cancel the past, glaze over truth or convince myself that if things were different my life would have turned out better. Scribing of one’s Past must be, if I may say, a ‘polite excavation’ of the truth, yes? I own every decision I ever made, good and bad. I don’t blame my folks for anything – the psych industry makes fortunes convincing people the answer to their ills is always and forever, parental. Maybe for some. What my parents gave me, my father especially, was inspiration. No emotional diaper here I expect you to change or for me to clean as a confessional scribbler, for confession is a strange thing, ey. It’s all in the ears of the listener. And my truest confession right now is that my connection with my beloved father was from the start, about writing fiction. We all can fool ourselves into believing imagination over facts, truths for crystalline lies – and worst of all, mistranslations and misinterpretations of memory, be them convenient or uncomfortable.
So, let us begin. First, my own quote on this freak show of life: ‘I only compete with myself – everyone else is just practice.’
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The first question any decent scribbler must ask before shipping out to sea (as I use the metaphor often and have written many maritime novels and stories about the sea) is, is it worth the time and danger to go to ‘the sail.’ And, who will ever read the work when it’s done? The answer to both is simple: Yes, always. And, who gives a good goddamn. WRITE your wares boy, I say! Take to the seas and seek mother fate like Conrad and Melville. That’s all a writer does – boards a vessel into the unknown with the hope of one day returning home to inhale the safety of familial winds.
A writer carves for himself only not some mysterious audience who he believes will bow down to him for writing the tale for them alone. Authors, like readers and any public favor, come n’ go, always have and will. Fickle hominids, we are, ey! But a Timeless writer, the type I strove to become over decades, that desperate scag behind the typer, he’s what I was after. Therein lies the rub – unknown. Oblivion. Ignored. Danger. Many men find literary or pulp triumph enjoyed by millions. While so many more lay like ruined carpet are left in a basement with mice n’ mold. So be it – such is the great risk to take to the sea with a high manner of skill and confidence to make a foreign shore. Or, sink ‘round the Horn thinking, ‘I alone can fill in the blanks for someone in order to change their perception of the world.’
I ALONE, shall straddle the yardarms during the hoisting of the flaps and endure the squalls to come.
Luckily for me, my father Louis gave me works written by men and women who did just that – the great Ones who changed the world nobody speaks of anymore – Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neil, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Anais Nin, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson, Cicero, Plutarch, Guy D’Maupassant, Charles Bukowski and on and on n’ on…you have your own list. Or maybe you don’t.
I would never have been led to read the works of those epic writers if not for my father’s urging when I was a boy to hold their books and dive deep into imaginary outer and inner worlds. All of my fiction writing since the age of 7 or 8, since exploring my bedroom back in the days living in the New Jersey house at 660 Ridgewood Road in Washington Township, is because of my father Louis Ralph ‘Scotty’ Scotellaro. I grew up in a scrap of a town where the cauca-zoid suburbanites dwelled in rotting 1970s Colonials and the classic ranch design of houses; or the more contemporary style house some folks bought to suggest they had more income and were a tad hipper than their neighbors. Fact was, WE, the Scott’s were the hippest and most progressive, and more hippy-esque than the other ignorant and culturally insensitive residents in the Township at the time. That said (and our house/home was far more architecturally designed than our neighbors) I’ve no choice but to start this work in my childhood bedroom.
After much thought over years about whether to actually write of my past in real time about actual events (reluctantly agreeing to do so) I finally acquiesced to the urge after our beloved father Louis passed and transcended in the Fall of 2025 in Vermont. So be it – I write and mourn him daily. Here’s the first big TRUTH to admit: I am nothing without the presence of our beloved Patriarch for HE created in me all safety, protection, and gave me solace in the family house on Bausch Lane Hill for 26 years before his death.
If I had known that opening a closet one day would alter my imaginative and emotional life from that day forward, I don’t believe I would have been so curious about what lay hidden in the musty shadows.
My disclaimer is this, reader – I never became a great writer/author like my mentors and heroes of literature. I failed on that path. Though I had the hungry sharpened teeth to rip into all of my strange tales, fact is no agent or publisher stepped up to SELL me as an author of merit. But I tried, indeed I did do that. All that I really am, however, in truth is a decent storyteller or ‘scribbler’ as I say. That’s it. The many works listed on Amazon Books under my pseudonym S.W. Laro are ALL dedicated to my parents Louis and Brenda (‘Popi & Patches’ as I call them) because they alone were and still are my Muse. But Louis especially became my Guide/Tutor and the only HERO I ever adored. Lou was my lighthouse or as one of my childhood friends said after he died, “Lou was a ray of light to me.” To you, dad, is this memoir of sorts dedicated for loving a compromised child and man during his tumultuous life of regret and disappointment. All that shall remain of my creative soul are the fictions – that’s it. For that alone I am grateful I lived long enough to write myself out and be the family narrator in many ways of a life YOU created for your family as I never made one of my own.
(Stay tuned…)
The LINK below is to the ‘award-winning’ Indy film I wrote and directed and starred in opposite my father Louis. ‘OSCAR PHITKIN’ (A Vendor’s Tale) won Best New Feature in 1996 at the New York International Film/Video Festival.
For this post (for November 2, 2025) I will deviate from the above text of the WIP about my father’s life and dedicate a section solely on Rod Serling, the creator of THE TWILIGHT ZONE series and NIGHT GALLERY and writer of the classics such as, ‘Requiem of a Heavyweight’ and ‘Patterns’ written for stage and 1950’s television) and the screenplay adaptation of the immortal, PLANET OF THE APES movie One, not the sequels. NOTE: for the record, my discussing all things Serling and the ‘Zone’ t.v. show that ran from 1959-1962/’64, is in honor of Serling himself as the trend setter in early television that he truly was, as well as and most vital, my father’s life as a self-made ad executive for his own medical device marketing agency, LSA, Inc. (1968-2000).
From the earliest memories I have as a boy growing up in Washington Township, N.J. in the swamps of Bergan County in that scrap of 1970s suburbia, I never forgot being introduced to Mr. Serling and the show he created, ‘The Twilight Zone.’ To you, reader of this blog, you would know I’ve already written in other posts about my father’s influence over me regarding his own attempts to sculp fiction and how ‘The Zone’ as a creative incubator, helped shape my dad’s inner quest to be seen n’ heard years before he went into his own business. Once entrenched in the age of 1970s advertising Louis never looked back at those hard times when he submitted teleplays to The Twilight Zone’ and being rejected for two of his compelling stories, namely THE STRANGE FATE OF OSCAR PHITKIN and THE JAIME STORY. My father submitted stories before I was born (on December 22, 1963) which was also during those days of his young marriage when he covered the walls at the Township house with the many rejection letters he got from t.v. shows, as we as from marketing ad agencies in the Tri-State Region.
I remember the upstairs office across the hall from my parent’s bedroom where Louis had pasted those rejections to the wall as a macabre wallpaper.
THE HELL'S KITCHEN WRITER 