Facing his last chapter, Ted Pellegatta is still living large

One day he feels fine . . . next comes a diagnosis of cancer, five kinds 

“I’m a very blessed man. My whole life, I’ve had everything I wanted or needed,” said Ted Pellegatta, looking back on 84 years from the vantage of his recliner in the tiny cottage next door to the big green barn on Sperryville’s Mount Vernon Farm.

His signature license plate proclaims RICH MAN, and that’s how he sees himself. “I’m okay, and I’m going to die happy,” he promised, the words reinforced by his ever-present smile and the characteristic “I’ve-got-a-secret” twinkle in his eyes. 

In a Pellegatta pilgrimage, friends and admirers have been rolling down the riverside road for the past three weeks to share time with Rappahannock’s favorite raconteur, defacto poet laureate, late-in-life performer and originator of the “Rehabbahannock” T-shirt as word spread that the sand in his hour glass was running out. 

One night in late March, Pellegatta went to bed feeling fine — a little creaky, an arthritic ache here and there, but healthy, or so he thought. When he woke the next morning, he couldn’t walk. 

Four days of scans, MRIs, blood work and other tests pinpointed the cause: cancer in his brain, stomach, liver, kidneys and adrenal gland. Staggering news that would devastate most people, but it didn’t knock him down or leave him deflated. “Reality de jour,” he dubbed it, grinning.

He said “no” to chemotherapy and radiation — it would buy him only a few months at best — and “yes” to home, hospice and palliative care for pain control.

“I’m comfortable now, nothing hurts. I know the pain is coming for sure, but that’s why they have drugs!” he joked, adding that he expects to “go out as high in death as I ever was in life.”

He’s the decision-maker, and as always, Pellegatta is fully in the moment, as he waits for the last great adventure. Meanwhile, he’s busy continuing his most recent creative turn, adding melody to his poetry. “I’m going to make music in the time I have left, so stay tuned, folks!”

And while he’s engaged in the “now” of his final days, he spends hours with the memories of what came before – a life well lived but completely and absolutely unplanned. “Serendipitous” is the word he returns to again and again to describe the strokes of luck that set him first on one path, and then another and another and another, and finally to Rappahannock County.

Childhood in a family restaurant

Pellegatta was just five when he started scrubbing clams and picking crabmeat as the littlest gofer in the family restaurant founded by his grandfather in 1894 in Bethlehem, Pa. What he learned there became his safety net for the next 80 years. “When I needed a job, I could always cook or wait tables or wash dishes. Growing up in the hotel and restaurant business, it didn’t get any better. I never wanted for anything, and I was working and learning with family.”

He stayed with the family business until 1956 when he joined the United States Marine Corps for eight years, with the highlight being a London post at security headquarters for the Mediterranean, where he says he was one of just 40 Marines chosen from the ranks of 175,000 for the assignment. Next came a stint as a crane operator in the rolling mills of Bethlehem Steel, producing structural steel for bridges and skyscrapers.

By 1966, Pellegatta was in New York City, a bartender on the Upper East Side. It was a heady time. The sexual revolution was in full swing, and he bore a remarkable resemblance to the movie star and heartthrob Al Pacino.

“Very lovely ladies were drawn to me. I never understood it, never questioned it, I just went with it,” he said.

Working in St. Croix

One evening in the autumn of 1968, when a builder from St. Croix took a seat at the bar for a third night, Pellegatta asked him offhandedly, “Got any jobs?” 

A week later, he was in the Virgin Islands, the quartermaster for a labor force of over 200, making sure the foremen had the construction materials they needed for the day’s projects. He did that for two years, then convinced a retired underwater demolition diver with a boat to turn the craft into a six-passenger charter, with Pellegatta as snorkeling master and chef. 

“I was having the time of my life!” he remembered. 

Serendipity. The good times got even better when he locked eyes with a TWA stewardess who was vacationing in the Caribbean. 

“It was love at first sight, and we were married by the harbormaster,” he said.

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The bride returned to Los Angeles, Pellegatta stayed in St. Croix and they met at one place or the other or somewhere in between every couple of weeks. Peripatetic married life in fancy hotels was glamorous and fun, but not sustainable.

The couple settled in D.C., and “after five months, we looked at each other and agreed, this ain’t working.” They divorced, and Pellegatta began a 15-year-stint as a bartender and waiter at The Exchange, a favorite restaurant with lobbyists, just a block from the White House.

Always on the lookout for opportunity, he began a side business after he figured he could beat the big produce suppliers’ prices by 15% with vegetables and fruits from Jessup, Md. He began with The Exchange, added more restaurants, outgrew his van and hired a helper, making the little produce company his full-time job for five years.

The day he shut down that business, Pellegatta was carrying on the internal conversation that had become a familiar feature of his unplanned life: “NOW, what are we going to do next for money?”

Serendipity. That very day, he reconnected with an old friend who had won the wine contract for the Morocco Pavilion at Florida’s EPCOT Center on the heels of moving to France, and offered Pellegatta the job of organizing and managing the transport and warehousing of the wine.

Coming to Rappahannock

By then, Pellegatta had discovered Rappahannock as he tagged along on weekend outings with a buddy who had a girlfriend in the county. “I found home,” he said.

The city boy who didn’t ride horses was soon riding to the hounds and, on occasion, hanging out with hunt country stars like Virginia Sen. John Warner and Elizabeth Taylor. “I was privileged to know the privileged,” Pellegatta added.

He didn’t want to leave. And he realized he didn’t have to. The coordinator of the wine flow from New England to D.C. to EPCOT could work from the Blue Ridge foothills as easily as from the canyons between Rosslyn’s skyscrapers. He moved to Little Washington, and seven months later, his buddy lost the contract, and there was no wine flow to manage.

“I knew if I worked in a restaurant, I could eat. And I knew I could find a restaurant job.” His first was dishwashing for $5 an hour at Four & Twenty Blackbirds in Flint Hill. After his last day ended, he stopped in at the Blue Rock restaurant to see an old friend, “and I had a new job, at double the salary, before I got home.”

Becoming a photographer

Then followed a decade of restaurant work and odd jobs. The dramatic course change came after a visit to his past haunts in Baltimore in 1983.

The old horsehair brush factory where workers wore black leather bow ties, the decaying row houses with their textures of peeling paint and crumbling brick, the abandoned monoliths of the Bethlehem Steel plant – Pellegatta wanted to photograph it all in black-and-white.

He didn’t have a camera or any experience beyond a point-and-shoot, but that didn’t stop him. He borrowed a Nikon from the mortgage banker and would-be photographer who was his girlfriend at the time and returned for a week to capture those haunting images. “When the feelings I had came across on film, I knew I could do this,” he recalled.

For the next three decades, he was Rappahannock’s paparazzi, following gravel roads here and there, watching for the perfect light on the fields and mountains, the perfect framing for picturesque farmhouses and barns, the perfect moment for wildlife and rural life.

Somewhere along the way, after a quarter century as a hard and sometimes out-of-control drinker, two DWIs, a suspended license and three years of riding a 10-speed bike, Pellegatta beat alcoholism. He now celebrates 46 years of sobriety.

His photos were framed in shows and galleries and showcased on calendars. They decorated trivets and T-shirts. He published his coffee table collection, “Virginia’s Blue Ridge: A Pictorial Journey,” in 2011.

“Then, in a single moment, I lost all interest in photography,” Pellegatta remembered. “The lure, the passion, the desire – it all stopped.”

New direction: Writing 

But serendipity intervened again, with a push from his muse in a new direction. “Instead of using images in photographs for my messages, I had to write to create,” Pellegatta continued. “How did that happen?” he wondered. “It confounds me still today.”

He published “LYRIC Words on a Page” in 2019 and “LYRIC Words on a Page II” in 2021. Pellegatta’s poetry is free verse that streams vivid images in rapid fire bursts to evoke times and places, or swings to a ballad cadence for stories from the human experience.

He did poetry readings in Rappahannock and neighboring counties, and in 2016, backed by Forrest Marquisee on pedal steel guitar and Jesse Rogers on bass, with vocal accompaniment from Linda Orfila, he set poems to music.

“Never is a Good Time for a Broken Heart” is now on Spotify, iTunes and YouTube, and he’s working on more, trying tunes for poems already penned and reaching for inspiration for new lyrics.

“Now, I’ve decided I’m a musician,” Pellegatta continued. “I took a different approach to figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. I found out where I didn’t fit in. That’s a quicker route. I’m a man who went for it with everything, and I have no regrets. I’m not an organized religion man but I got faith. It’s simple – I got it through living.

“The whole journey, the people you meet along the way, it’s all about learning. You learn from everyone you meet. You learn human nature.”

Dishwasher, cook, crane operator, photographer, poet, lyricist, bartender, produce salesman, T-shirt designer, snorkeling master, Marine, construction quartermaster — Pellegatta doesn’t have a favorite. “I haven’t taken my favorite photo yet, and I still have to write my favorite poem. I loved it all. I wouldn’t have been there if I didn’t!

“Life is a short ride, no matter what,” he concluded. “So my advice is to live like today is your last. As for me, I’m gonna live it up until I die.”