Harrison City centenarian to get covid vaccine when available

Joseph Cocco of Harrison City plans to get the coronavirus vaccine when it is his time.

While Westmoreland County is replete with senior citizens — the U.S. Census says 23% of the population is older than 65 — Cocco is among a select group. He will be 100 when he gets the shot that is expected to give him immunity against covid.

“I‘m planning to get the vaccine when it becomes available, if my doctor tells me” to get it, said Cocco, who has an apartment in the home he shares with his son, Nick.

Cocco turns 100 on Tuesday and expects to have a small party in his home.

“We might wait until later on for a celebration,” Nick Cocco said.

Cocco’s daughter, Carol Lauffer, who lives near Charlotte, said she and her husband, her children and grandchildren had planned to come to Harrison City for the celebration, “but it fell through.”

“We can’t come. It’s so highly contagious here. It (covid) is running rampant,” said Lauffer, of Harrisburg, N.C.

Her father, Lauffer said, “has been confined to his home pretty much since March.”

While taking measures to keep safe, Joe Cocco attributes his longevity to “always taking care of myself.”

Before the pandemic impacted what people did, his father was active, Nick Cocco said.

“He used to go shopping until the covid hit,” Nick Cocco said. Now, he is “real careful about where we go.”

Export roots

Cocco grew up in Export, the son of immigrant parents. His father, Nicholas, came to the United States from Italy’s Abruzzo region before World War I erupted in Europe in 1914. Italian was spoken in the house, and Cocco is fluent in the language, Lauffer said.

His father was a shoemaker by trade. He moved from Glassport to the village of White Valley in Murrysville. His father bought the shoe repair shop in Export from a friend — back when people had shoes repaired rather than buying a new pair when the soles wore out, Cocco recalled.

“I learned the trade from him,” Cocco said.

Cocco graduated from Franklin High School, predecessor to Franklin Regional, in what was then Franklin Township because Export High School did not have 11th or 12th grades, he said.

He graduated during the Great Depression, an economic collapse that had kept the nation struggling since 1929.

“It was pretty bad. If you had 50 cents, you were a wealthy person,” Cocco said.

Cocco said he got a job with Westinghouse Electric Corp.’s giant East Pittsburgh plant, where he was an apprentice machinist.

It was a skill that came in handy when he enlisted in the Navy in 1943. He recalled how a military recruiter in Greensburg told him his skills would be better suited for the Navy, so that’s what he did, becoming a motor machinist in the engine room of a mine sweeper.

He was part of the September 1943 invasion and subsequent liberation of the French island of Corsica, which was controlled by the Germans and Italians. The Germans had loaded ships full of explosives to deter the invasion of the Mediterranean Sea island between Italy and the French mainland. Cocco remembered U.S. battleships firing salvos over the minesweeper to blow up those ships.

His ship also participated in the Allied invasion of southern France in August 1944, which pushed German forces out.

“Dad is very proud of his military service,” Nick Cocco said.

He did not talk much about his military service, said Carol Lauffer.

After returning home in 1946, he went back to work at Westinghouse’s East Pittsburgh plant.

When his father died in 1959, Cocco kept the shoe repair shop until closing it years later and returning to the Westinghouse plant, Nick Cocco said.

Cocco met his wife, Josephine, at a dance in Jeannette. The couple married in December 1948. Josephine Cocco died in May 2011 at 88. The couple was married for 62 years.