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12/14/2016 07:30 AMMany wives of recent retirees find themselves desperate to get their suddenly idle husbands out of the house. As the old joke goes, “I married him for better or for worse, but not for lunch.”
After Michael Piccione retired, his wife, Connie, instead of encouraging him to take up golf, talked him into volunteering.
“Connie kind of lit a fire under me,” says Mike, sitting next to his wife on a couch in their home, an 1880 Victorian in the Neck Road area.
Since 2010, working with the Madison branch of the Knights of Columbus and other groups, Mike has dedicated himself to improving the lives of veterans and active-duty military personnel.
He does that two ways: Besides collecting goods and funds, Mike has turned what was a side career—singing and playing keyboards—into a source of charitable donations.
Connie preceded Mike into volunteering. Mike says that when she retired in 2007 from her job as a teacher at Island Avenue Elementary School, she told him, “I’m not staying home. I’m going to hit the road.”
She volunteers for groups including the Madison Historical Society, Madison Community Services, and the Friends of the Library.
When Mike joined the Knights, he became the head of the chapter’s Patriotic Committee. “It was clear that we could be doing more for the veterans,” he says. “We embarked on two programs.”
The first, Operation American Soldier, is an organization that in fact supports active-duty military personnel who are overseas, sending what the group calls “cheerboxes.” “We do collections of kind of taste-of-home items,” says Mike, “snacks, cookies, things that the military would not necessarily supply.”
The Knights enlisted the aid of St. Margaret’s Church, where the group meets and where Mike and Connie are parishioners. “Then we also decided that, gee, this would be a great thing for the other Madison organizations,” says Mike, “like the Lions and the Exchange Club and the Rotary and even the American Legion, so we started pursuing them for support, and they were very generous with their donations.”
After Connie leans over and murmurs something to him, Mike adds, “I wanted to say that part of this program was to appeal to the schools, in Madison and also in Guilford and Clinton, where the kids would just write letters of thanks and appreciation for the service to our servicemen, and we put those all in the cartons that we shipped.
“They were beautifully written,” he says. “I mean it’s incredible what these little kids would write.”
Mike’s second major project with the Knights is timed to coincide each year with Veterans Day. “One of our members, Bob Barrett, was a Marine captain in Desert Storm in Iraq,” he says. “He had an associate up in Bethel who ran an operation called Save a Suit. It’s an organization that collects dress attire for returning vets who can’t afford dress attire to go for job interviews. It’s grown to a point where they ship nationally, to any veteran who needs support in that regard.”
Mike gives credit to The Source’s Zoe Roos for an article that she wrote about the Save a Suit drive. “We were getting calls, not only from the Madison community and all the usual organizations that we go to,” he says, “but there were so many generous people calling up. In 2015 and 2016, we literally filled a 20-foot-plus U-Haul truck with clothes.”
Mike constantly underscores that he doesn’t want to hog the spotlight, praising the generosity and hard work of his fellow Knights, their wives, and other charitable organizations. His musical fund-raising, however, is literally a solo act.
Although he played in bands in high school and college, he says, “once you get married, you might as well throw music out the window. It just doesn’t work.”
Mike got the idea of performing solo after seeing a bar singer who had a keyboard with programmable rhythm tracks. “I found one in 2008,” he says, “and being as low-tech as I am with those things, it took me six months to figure it out. And then I got a repertoire of songs, and I just decided to try to see if it could work in a restaurant and wine bars, and it did.
“I always had a soft spot in my heart for the vets,” he adds, “so even then, when I was playing restaurants and wine bars and stuff like that, I would always contribute a small portion of whatever I was earning in that direction.”
Mike’s repertoire ranges from Sinatra to James Taylor and Billy Joel. “Basically ‘40s through ‘80s,” he says. “No rap.”
By 2013, Mike says, “I was kind of getting tired of doing that kind of music work, but I still wanted to play music to a degree.” He started performing free of charge at the various charitable fairs held on the Madison Green, as well as at Beachcombers Night, held downtown.
“I put my little donation bucket out there,” he says. “and just get some donations for the vets. I can get my music fix, so to speak, and pursue something that’s near and dear to my heart.”
In the current holiday season, Mike is busy playing private parties, mostly those held by nonprofits. He either donates his fee to veterans’ causes or asks his clients to write a check directly.
Mike, who was born in 1943, grew up in the Bronx, New York, attending Catholic schools. “There was Franciscans, Dominican priests, Marist brothers,” he says. “We were beat up by all of them.”
He met Connie, who also grew up in the Bronx, on a double date with a friend of his, but they didn’t see each other again until two years later, at a college dance. He attended Manhattan College; she attended Hunter, which was nearby.
Mike and Connie still seem to disagree about whether one of them played it a little too cool at first. But that changed after Mike graduated, with a degree in electrical engineering, and got a sales job with General Electric.
Early on, he was sent on a one-year assignment to Indiana. “That’s when we started writing all the time,” says Connie. “Really, it helped having him move away.”
“Absence made the heart grow very fond,” says Mike.
Asked if she still has Mike’s letters from back then, Connie says, “Oh, God, yeah.”
Next September will mark the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary. They have two daughters, Joanna and Christa, each of whom lives in the area, works as a teacher, and has a son and a daughter.
The family was relocated several times by GE until Mike was posted to the company’s office in Meriden, in 1975. They’ve lived in Madison ever since.
After retiring from the company that acquired his GE division, Mike worked briefly as an executive recruiter in Madison, then started a small carpentry business. “That was the best job I ever had,” he says, “because I was my own boss, and there was nobody else to complain to.”
After Connie retired, she enlisted Mike to help with her charity work. “I always called myself Connie’s mule,” Mike says. “I used to wake up in the morning and try to look like the wallpaper so she couldn’t find me.”
So maybe volunteering on his own looked pretty good. Besides, it seems that golf was never really an option.
“I had to play a lot of golf in my corporate days,” Mike says “and I’m not a good golfer.” He says he was so bad that going out on the course would undermine rather than strengthen his relationships with clients.
“Even when I pick up a golf stick now,” he says, “and it’s maybe once or twice a summer, I’m like ‘Why am I doing this? This is punishment.’”