‘Relax, tell a joke and enjoy the round’

Golf tournament carries on charitable tradition of its honoree

BRANFORD — Vincent Malerba could make a rock laugh, his friend Bill Connolly said. But it wasn’t the memory of his fabled joke-telling that had 235 people gathered at Grassy Hill Country Club in Orange on Sunday night.

“He’d see someone sitting on the street and it would be 20 degrees outside and they’d be shivering and he’d crack open his car window and hand them 10, 20 bucks,” said Branford’s Kathryn Malerba of her father Vin at the golf tournament held in his memory.

Malerba died at 68 in June 2020.

“When we were thinking about what to do in his honor, we thought of a golf tournament because that was his passion,” Kathryn said in her remarks in the banquet hall following the tournament, a “jovial crowd,” she said, “just

like he would have wanted it.”

Proceeds from the benefit will support a family that “needs a little help getting back on their feet,” Kathryn said, “and that’s because helping people was just as much his passion.”

To hear his cousin, Fran Erba, tell it, it wasn’t only strangers that were positively impacted by Malerba.

“Vin would always be late, we used to call it Malerba Time, but when he was there, he was very present in the moment and very focused on you,” he said, as Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” filtered through the brightly lit space. “He’d do that with everyone, which is why you see this place so packed. Everyone here was Vin’s friend.”

It’s also why, it seems, at his graveside service at the height of COVID in June 2020, upwards of 400 friends and relatives showed up at East Lawn Cemetery in East Haven to pay their respects, “with people stretching back as far as the eye could see,” as Erba put it.

Malerba grew up on Burke Street near lower Dixwell in Hamden, “the baby of the family and very spoiled,” his sister Theresa Pierce said. It was a multi-family home, Erba said, with his grandmother on the second floor, his uncle in the basement, and his family, including his parents Gregory and Catherine and his two older sisters on the main floor.

It was the “hub,” Erba recalled, where, at any given time, his mother would throw a meal together for the whole family, including Vin’s 11 cousins; where each Sunday, the boy cousins would troop in to have their hair cut by Vin’s father, a barber.

In the center of it all was his mother Catherine.

“It was an open door,” said Anthony Erba, a childhood friend who referred to himself as Vin’s “unofficial cousin.” “When you went in there, Aunt Kate would always be like ‘what can I get you?’ She welcomed all of us as if we were her kids.”

“Think of having 10 kids traipsing through your house with wet feet,” Fran Erba said. “Every Christmas Eve, besides her family, she opened up her house to everyone, that’s just the way she was.”

“Vin came from such a loving, giving environment, and I think that’s where all the charitable stuff came from,” he said.

That included gestures as quiet as a donation to someone in need or as “tremendous,” as Vin’s friend Bill Connolly put it, as the golf tournament he hosted each year at Tunxis Plantation in Farmington to benefit juvenile diabetes research.

“He raised tens of thousands of dollars year after year,” said Connolly, who met Vin through a softball league in North Haven all the way back in their late twenties before shifting to golf.

Vin was a salesman, and a good one, Connolly said, and much of that Connolly attributed to his congenial nature.

No surprise, he said, that a memorial plaque in bronze planned for the third hole on the Grassy Hills golf course will read “relax, tell a joke and enjoy the round.”

“Vin was just a lot of fun,” Connolly said. “And friendly. He could go into a group of 200 people and come out with 190 friends.”

“He grew up in this community and he never left and he was loved by everybody,” said his best friend Michael DiVietro.

Toward the end of the evening, Fran Erba sounded a similar refrain.

“For [his wife] Michele and Kathryn to tap into everything that made Vin who he was — golf, friends, family, generosity, and fun — it’s been just a beautiful thing,” he said.

Contributed photo