All About Food:

Tom De Paolo is the author of four cookbooks, all written after his 75th birthday. That’s because he didn’t learn to cook until he was 78. We interviewed him at his beachfront home on a lovely cove in South Laguna where he has lived for 30 years.

Gracious and charming, he seems surprisingly youthful for his 81 years.

He regaled us with stories of his large Italian family in Roseland, N.J. As a small boy visiting his grandmother, he remembers there was always a house full of people. It was quite common to have at least 15 at every meal. His grandmother did nothing but cook. After breakfast she went shopping for lunch, and after lunch she shopped for dinner. Everything had to be fresh.

He attributes his love of wine to the tiny thimbleful he was given as a child, so he could participate in the toast that began every meal. Of course, at the time, he really didn’t like it. Then, as he grew older he realized that his grandfather’s homemade wine was “really rather dreadful.”

Wine-making, however, did become a family business. Uncle John owned a vineyard in Napa. During prohibition, he sold “sacramental wine” out of the vineyard’s 12-car garage to the church but also by the case to anyone else who was in the know. Tom eventually inherited that winery but sold it awhile ago.

He grew up in Hollywood. His colorful, “crazy Italian” father was a famous racecar driver who won the Indy 500 in 1925. His mother, with a very different temperament, taught ceramics at USC. He ended up with a career in marketing at J. Walter Thompson and later with the Disneyland Resort, where he worked until he retired.

For Tom De Paolo, retirement and then the death of his wife, three years later, made for a difficult time but it also created new opportunities and tapped into resources he never thought he possessed.

When Tom retired, his very savvy wife realized that golf alone would not be enough to keep her husband busy, so she suggested he take up painting. He had never picked up a brush in his life but she had noticed he doodled all the time when he was talking on the phone or watching TV and she thought the drawings were quite good.

Several lessons later, he was hooked.