Ventnor hero's home burns down, prompting call for fundraising ...

VENTNOR — John Gigliotti was an instant hero around his part of Ventnor Heights last summer after he ran into the house up the block in his bare feet and used an extinguisher to put out a fire that was spreading around the first floor. Firefighters thanked him publicly, some friends gave him a new nickname — Hotfoot — and it didn’t matter to him that he’d never met the new family in the neighborhood whose house he saved.

But when the 19-year-old Gigliotti’s own home caught fire in the middle of the night — and in the middle of that nasty northeaster that hit here in mid-November — John Gigliotti was out of town. There were no neighborhood heroes around to help, and the fire department had to fight through 3-plus feet of floodwater just to get down the street of the family’s bay-block house.

Now Gigliotti and the new neighbor he helped, Victor Maene, have gotten to be friends, and Maene is throwing a fundraising party next week at Maynard’s Cafe in Margate for this Ventnor neighborhood hero and his family. But that generous gesture has more than gratitude behind it.

Because it turns out that the Oxford Avenue home where John Gigliotti grew up, and that he shares with his mother, Barbara, was so damaged in the fire, it apparently needs to be knocked down and rebuilt.

“There’s structural damage to the foundation,” John Gigliotti said Wednesday at the AAAA Bike Shop in Ventnor, where he is a mechanic. “The floor joists went bad and the foundation has cracks from the flooding.”

But their insurance is balking at paying for an entire rebuilding project, he added. Still, when Maene came to the family to suggest that he hold a fundraiser for them, his mother “was fully against it at first,” John Gigliotti said, because she didn’t want to have to ask anyone for help. But when the new neighbor kept after them, Barbara Gigliotti finally agreed, her son said.

Maene’s own house is “all better” after the August fire there, he said, and for that, he thanks “my new best friend,” John Gigliotti.

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Life and Fate, Radio 4, DailyJimmy Young at 90, Radio 2, Tuesday

24.09.11

To my shame, I'd never heard of Vasily Grossman until a couple of weeks ago.

I certainly have now. The dramatisation of his epic novel Life and Fate – the 20th century's War and Peace, by all accounts – must have broken all-comers' records for the most heavily publicised radio programme in history. If you watch television at all, the faux-Soviet animated trailer will have bored its way into your brain much like that brilliantined tenor on those terrible car insurance ads.

The good news is that you can believe the hype – and you can understand why the former Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer said he wasn't going to leave the job until he'd got the project under way. "It contains no lies or slanders, only pain, love and truth," says the narrator Nadya, daughter of the hero, and so far that seems like a pretty good summing-up.

Splashed across the week's schedules, filling all the main drama slots, it has that big-number feeling the BBC is so good at establishing. Kenneth Branagh is the hero, the brilliant Jewish physicist Viktor, and he's backed up by, among others, David Tennant, Greta Scacchi and Dame Harriet Walter (and a particular big-up for Ralph Ineson, Finchie from The Office, whose rich Yorkshire burr graces the role of a suspected informer).

Source: The Independent

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