Mag Blog Radio Expressions Volume 1 Issue 3 | Page 4

Featured Guest - Jon D’Amore

Another day in the Life
by Jon D’Amore
A lot of people ask me how I wound up in Los Angeles and working in the entertainment business. That’s a question that’s both
simple and difficult for me to answer.
It started when I was barely 2 years old and my parents brought me to L.A. to vacation at the homes of my dad’s cousins
Francesco and Pasquale D’Amore (brothers better known to the world as Franklin and Patsy) who moved there in the 1930s when the
San Fernando Valley was mostly walnut and orange groves. The brothers opened the very first Italian restaurant in L.A., which also
happened to be the first pizzeria in all of California. Their restaurants, The Casa D’Amore and The Villa Capri, became two of Hollywood’
s most famous Italian eateries. These were the places where James Dean ate his last meal, Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack (years before
they’d be known as that) would dine practically nightly, Jackie Gleason and countless others would hold court in the red leather booths
with tables covered in red & white checkered tablecloths.
When we returned to our northern New Jersey apartment and my dad had the 8mm films developed…I was hooked as I watched
the images flicker onto the screen in our living room. Of course, those images didn’t really connect with me until a few years later when I
was able to understand what I was looking at. But that was it. Los Angeles was where I wanted to live. I knew it from the time I was 4 or 5
years old. It was a very lofty goal for someone so young…but I was determined.

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