Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi once said, “If we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
My dad, Andrew “Andy” Monteleone, whose favorite sport was America’s pastime, baseball, echoed Coach Lombardi’s words when he would say: “No one bats a thousand, but never stop trying.” My dad lived those words. And he inspired me—and many others—to do the same.
My dad’s life is very much a story of how a parentless boy, inculcated at an early age with a hardscrabble work ethic, raised a family in the pastoral village of Hopewell, New Jersey, started and operated a retail gasoline business, helped found the local Little League Baseball program, and organized and coached a local town baseball team. In fact, Andy was considered by many to be the Branch Rickey (the sports executive who helped sign Jackie Robinson into Major League Baseball) of neighboring Hunterdon County, having introduced the first black players to league play in the 1950s with his Hopewell town team. In World War II, he joined the U.S. Navy, leaving a wife and two children behind, and served in the Pacific Theater aboard a PT-Boat that sunk two Japanese destroyers during battles in the waters of New Guinea and the Philippines.   …