For many years, Anthony Rocco worked in the legal community, including as an assistant state’s attorney and assistant public defender in Cook County.
Rocco died in April at age 82. For most his professional career, he and his children lived in Oak Park.
Michael Rocco is Anthony Rocco’s only son, along with two daughters, Christine and Cathleen.
“My dad was not one necessarily to walk around with a smile on his face, but he always had an easy smile for anybody that he met,” Michael Rocco said.
“He loved to tell stories,” said Anthony Rocco’s sister, Marlene Carey.
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Marlene Carey is eight years younger than her brother. Carey said that Anthony Rocco helped a great deal with their mother as she declined. “Not many men would have helped the way that he did.”
“We were both brought up to care about other people,” she said.
Kane County Judge Joseph Grady said he first met Anthony Rocco in the early 1970s, when Grady was a police officer and Rocco was prosecuting for the Metropolitan Enforcement Group.
“He turned out to have an interesting background,” Grady said. “He knew the law.”
“He had a very high regard for law,” said Christine Rocco, the youngest of Anthony Rocco’s three children.
She said she recalled a case that involved a child who was starved and beaten. She said she told her father, “if you take that case, I’m not going to speak to you again.”
She said he explained to her that it doesn’t matter what the crime is, “the law is the law; everyone is entitled to a fair defense, and if they can’t pay for it, they come to the public defenders, and that’s what we do.”
“He had been on the prosecution side for so long prior to that. … I guess I was just kind of blown away that he would have compassion enough to say that to me.”
Michael Rocco recalled one time his father took him fishing off the coast of Florida.
“The two of us we were on a charter boat. As soon as we got out far enough where you couldn’t see land, he got horrendously sea sick,” Michael Rocco said.
He explained that his father wound up lying down inside the cabin of the boat, and every time Michael Rocco would catch a fish, he would exclaim, “Dad! Dad! Look at what I caught. … He would take a look at the fish, and then he’d promptly have to go throw up.”
Michael Rocco said his father would do his best to make it a fun outing.
“His heart was always in the right place, even if circumstances didn’t quite cooperate with him. And that is what I’ll miss the most,” he said. “That is something that I try to live myself: To try to do things with people and do things for people in the spirit of goodness and the spirit of giving and not in the spirit of what it will get for you in the end.”
Taryn Galbreath is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.