It might have been the rare illness that wiped out part of his childhood, put him through surgery after surgery and years in bed and left him with a bad limp that continued into adulthood.
Or maybe it was his big, loving Italian family, their farm life, his tree-climbing dog Rex and adoring parents and siblings.
Most likely it was all that and a wonderful wife, two adopted kids and devoted relatives and friends who got retired realtor William “Bill” Filice to his 100th birthday party on Feb. 1. It even got him looking forward to a few more birthdays, even though within a few weeks he was so close to death that a Roman Catholic priest was summoned to administer last rites.
A week later, Bill Filice talked about the episode, his second brush with death in recent years.
“I am prepared, I am ready for it,” he said, semi-reclining in an easy chair in the den of the Gilroy house he has called home for 53 years.
“I knew [growing old] was going to be hard, but I am the type of person who doesn’t go down easily; if I had been that way I’d have been dead a long time ago,” he said.
As for the prospect of reuniting in death with his parents and beloved wife, Ellen, Filice said, “I am a strong Catholic [and] I am looking forward to it very much, you bet I am.”
His reaching 100 might have surprised one of his best friends as much as anyone.
About five years ago, according to Filice, he convinced his dear friend Don Christopher, perhaps the city’s best known businessman and philanthropist, to host a 100th birthday party.
“The odds are pretty good that nobody’s going to make it to 100, so I said sure, Bill, no problem,” Christopher recalled recently, adding, “After that he reminded me every year. Well, he made it.”
The two have been friends for more than 40 years, cementing a close personal and business relationship in Gilroy Rotary. Christopher and Filice’s nephew, Tim Filice, hosted the party at the Gilroy Elks Club, where Filice has been a member for 75 years.
The son of Italian immigrants has been in the Gilroy Chamber of Commerce for 76 years, more than any living member, and in the Gilroy Rotary for 56 years. That’s 207 years, and counting, in the city’s service and business organizations where he earned the respect, admiration and love of his fellows.
A big baseball fan whose shooting skills as a kid turned him into a hunter who would travel winters with friends to Colorado, Wyoming and Montana for deer, the short-statured Filice became something of a giant of empathy and caring in his community.
Son Patrick, 56 and daughter Kathleen, 58, said their father was always there for others. Whether it be someone’s personal or business needs, he was the first to show up and help, they said.
They agreed he would have made a very good priest or therapist.
“He is a model citizen,” said investment advisor Ron Pray, a friend since 1974 who was asked to emcee the party and said it was an “honor” to do so.
“You try to make yourself more like him; he never complained and never whined. He has a positive attitude and just did what he had to do,” Pray said, referring in part to Filice’s devastating medical problems as a child.
“He became ill over something that today would be nothing, a cat scratch, many surgeries, bed-ridden for year and only an eighth-grade education.”
It was a cat scratch that became infected long before penicillin and led to blood poisoning and osteomyelitis, a rare and sometimes crippling bone disease that kept him from most activities that typically are part of a young boy’s life, such as sports.
“I couldn’t go to school and spent most of the time in bed.” Filice recalled. “I finished seventh and eighth grades at home, that was the extent of my education. But I graduated cum laude from the eighth grade.
“And I never worried about it, I wanted to give courage to my father and mother that I would be all right, to console them. I was so ill, my father died young worrying over me, he worried and worked, we worked so hard.”
His early years were spent in a farming life, what Pray called “idyllic” in so many ways.
Filice’s parents, Ralph and Rafaella, and extended family had come from Italy. He was born in Paradise Valley in Morgan Hill. When it came time for him to attend school, he spoke no English.
Uncles started Morgan Hill’s first cannery—later to become Gilroy’s Filice and Perrelli Canning Company—and a winery that went out of business when Prohibition became law.
His parents moved to Gilroy in 1919 and built a house that still stands just south of the entrance to Gilroy Sports Park. They had 170 acres of French prunes and a dehydrator that operated 24 hours a day during the harvest season, according to Kathleen Filice.
“Dad’s family was pretty self-sufficient,” she said. “We dehydrated our own fruit, put it in big sacks and shipped them out to food buyers and brokers; they went overseas in World War II, there was a huge demand, that is when my grandparents started to be pretty comfortable and got out of debt completely,” she said.
Filice recalled life before that with a combination of fondness and fear, the latter from the family’s finances.
“It was the depression, I was just 16 years old but we had to sacrifice to live, we were so close to being in the streets, it wasn’t funny. We were on the brink of losing everything.”
After the war, times were good. Filice recalled the harvest and holiday parties that brought together the whole family for the slaughter of the pigs and sausage-making, the big pork meatballs, fried pig skins and soups of cabbage and onions. He learned to play the concertina and entertained.
In the ’40s Filice decided to get out in the world a bit more, so he left the farm and went to work as a petroleum distributor to homes and farms from a tank operation that still runs off Monterey Road north of Luchessa Avenue.
One day in 1948, his life changed forever when a journalist for the Gilroy Dispatch asked if she could write about him for her monthly column that featured a merchant.
“I was amazed,” Filice recalled, “Here was this beautiful lady with a big smile and beautiful blue eyes. She asked me, ‘Are you married, a nice young Italian man like you?’ I just said, ‘How about you’; she said no.”
A week later he took her to dinner in Palo Alto. She was from an Irish family back east and her name was Ellen Sullivan. And as quickly as she had appeared she was gone—home for nearly a year to care for her ailing mother.
When she returned, they began dating again and in 1954 they married and drove off to Mexico in a big Oldsmobile for their honeymoon. He was 38 and she was 39.
When after two years there were no children, they adopted two privately, waiting six months anxiously with one of the newborns until the child’s birth mother consented officially to the adoption.
Kathleen was joined by a brother, Patrick—raised with love by adoring parents, as Filice had been.
His love of his family was extended to his community, his children said, and it was noticed.
Patricia Golden, a retired surety expert, met Filice in 1990 when she joined Rotary. She was invited to his 100th birthday party at the Elks Club on Hecker Pass Highway.
“I was very impressed with his genteel behavior, the Italian gentleman. Uncle Bill always had a smile on his face, he was a happy person.”
When later she was fighting cancer and not mentioning it to anyone, he impressed her again when he asked discreetly if the radiation was going well.
“He was always very sensitive,” Golden said.
Filice friend Rich MacKie called him “a straight shooter,” who pushed on in life no matter what. “Ever since I’ve known him he’s walked with a limp but it never held him back.”
Nor did it crimp his sense of humor, according to Don Christopher.
“He is a real kick, he likes to have fun. In Rotary they would fine him two dollars and he would say it used to be a quarter so that is what he would pay.”
He said, “He really cares about everybody but he’s not going to give you cash; just tell him I said that, he’ll laugh” Christopher said jokingly about Filice’s legendary ability to, as MacKie said, “stretch a penny.”
Filice even was in on the very beginnings of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, now in its 38th year, when he and Christopher and others discussed over the new ideal at a dinner for the guys.
“Nobody believed it was going to work and when it did we all felt like jackasses,” Filice laughed.
So how does a prune grower turned real estate agent who battled illness as a kid, was raised in a loving family and worked till the age of 90, get to be 100, surrounded by folks who would like nothing more than a few more good years with their dear friend, uncle and father?
His daughter put it this way: “I think the biggest thing dad leaned from the closeness in his family is that your town is really your family also; so, he just loved Gilroy. Human contact is very important for dad and I think he looked at the town as his extended family.”
