QL part 1

		Wow (70 KB)			My Place (100 KB)			Ace (118 KB)			Free (235 KB)
		The 60s (152 KB)			Care (231 KB)			War (376 KB)			Wall (432 KB)

Rear Admiral Albert Calavicci

Albert Calavicci was born June 15, 1934. His father was an immigrant from the Abruzzi section of Italy; his mother's side of the family was of Russian descent. His only sibling was a younger sister named Trudy who had Down Syndrome. The Calavicci family life was an unstable one at best . Al's father was often off in search of work, and went even as far as the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to try and procure employment. It was during one of these times that Al's mother left the family, causing the youngsters to be separated; Al was placed in an orphanage, and Trudy was sent to an institution.

Their father returned to America and bought the family a little house to live together in; but sadly soon after they moved in he developed cancer and died. The children were once more separated, and Al couldn't even take comfort in his religion, since he lost his faith in God over his father's death. (He periodically mentioned family members such as uncles Jack and Stawpah (sp) so it is known that he had family other than his parents and sister. It can only be speculated as to why they never stepped forward to take in the children when they were left on their own.)

Al ran away at least twice from the orphanage, the first attempt landing him in the company of a kindly professional pool player, the second time he joined up with a circus. When he was old enough, he went to retrieve his sister from the institution, only to find that she had died of pneumonia at age 16. Around this time Al went to college, first at MIT and later at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he excelled in the sport of baseball, both as a pitcher and a hitter. It is unclear as to whether he attended college for a total of 3, 4 or 6 years. His uniform is decorated with ribbons showing that he was in Korea during the war, though he never mentions having served there. Unless the timeline has been altered so that the Korean conflict occurred at a different time than we now recognize it as having taken place, Al would have had to have graduated from college by no later than the spring of 1954. Perhaps he managed to begin his college education prior to the age of 18, so that he graduated in time to be sent to Korea as a pilot. Or, though less likely, he went to Korea as an enlisted man and later returned home to complete his education.

By the time we meet him in 1999, Al is a highly decorated naval officer as denoted by the ribbons on his uniform. But long before he became the director of Project Quantum Leap, he was a naval aviator whose tremendous love of flying and the Navy kept returning him to the cockpit despite harrowing encounters in the air. By the mid-1950's he was stationed at NAS Pensacola, where he reportedly earned the nickname of "Bingo Bango Bongo" thanks to an emergency landing and a set of unnamed triplets.


			Bingo (699 KB)			Lisa (59 KB)

This nickname was later shortened to "Bingo" and used as Al's flight call sign. During his time in Florida he was involved with one married woman, navy nurse Lisa Sherman, and accused of killing another, the wife of a superior officer (thanks to Sam's intervention he was acquitted.) Originally, his relationship with Lisa ended when she was killed in a tragic automobile accident. We do not know why the relationship ended after Sam righted the wrongs in that timeline and Lisa no longer lost her life. (Perhaps she divorced her philandering husband and by some quirk of fate ended up marrying Dirk Simon, a man who in one timeline was married to Al's first and most loved wife? Who is to say it couldn't happen? In Quantum Leaping, anything can happen.)

At one time Al was stationed in Japan, though he never specified as to exactly when he was there. By 1961 he was married to the love of his life (127 KB), Beth, another Navy nurse, who worked in the burn ward at the Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego while he was overseas. Whether he was also stationed in California when he wasn't on sea duty was never mentioned, but the Calaviccis did have a house (music, 1 MB) in the San Diego area. Beth said that in eight years of marriage they had spent less than two of them together due to time at sea and TDY assignments. Frustrated with her nearly nonexistent marriage she was prepared to divorce him (263 KB), but changed her mind as she felt she couldn't do such a thing to a man going off to war.

Ever the courageous pilot, Al flew an F-4 Phantom over Cuba during the missile crisis, and later in 1967 while on his second tour of Viet Nam, he was shot down in an A-4 Intruder. He spent the next six years (479 KB) as a POW somewhere outside of Cham Hoi. He was repatriated in the mid-1970's and returned to an empty home (385 KB); his wife, having declared him dead 4 years earlier, had remarried and moved away. Beth and Al had no children resulting from their marriage; he felt the military lifestyle of constantly relocating would be unfair to them.

Al flew more than just airplanes; he orbited the moon ten times as an astronaut on an Apollo mission for NASA. (This is another instance in which there are liberties taken with the timeline. To have orbited the moon Al would have to have been on a mission several years earlier than implied, as there was no mission of this sort being done at the time he was at NASA. Or to have flown in space when he said he had, he would have participated in the Apollo-Soyuz mission rather than a moon orbit.) Sometime after his experiences at NASA, Al went on to work on several government projects, including the mysteriously named "Star Bright" Project where he met his brother-in-spirit Dr. Sam Beckett. When that project closed down, they decided to continue working together on a new one, "Quantum Leap."

Al is a very sensitive man who cares greatly for people, especially those in need or who are discriminated against. He feels strongly about protecting the environment and animals as well. He is a very sensual man, taking great pleasure in cooking and eating a variety of ethnic foods, listening to a tremendous range of musical genres, and wearing clothes of very distinctive styles, colors and patterns. He loves anything fast: motorcycles, cars, airplanes, and of course . . . women. He claims to have had many women in his life, and that he loved every one of them for at least as long as he slept with them. He was married five times, his wives being Beth, an unnamed woman of Hungarian heritage, Ruthie, Sharon, and Maxine. He had numerous other relationships aside from these marriages, and numberless encounters that never even qualified as relationships. He makes the most of his status as a hologram, leering after women during every leap Sam makes, with the exception of one leap in particular; Al never takes notice of a single female when Sam arrives in San Diego right at the time when Beth loses all hope and is about to declare him dead.

It is presumed that his "love 'em and leave 'em" attitude began with his abandonment by his mother as a child, and that coming home from the war to find his wife had given up on him only compounded the problem. He couldn't bear the pain of another woman leaving him, so he left them first. It is quite possible that many of the women in his life were drawn to him because of this attitude; they may have fallen victim to the classic supposition that they could 'fix' him. They would be the one woman who could love him enough to heal him, to make him want to stay. Sadly, this never seemed to work. His relationship with his coworker Tina from the Quantum Leap Project, though fraught with difficulties and infidelities, showed signs of becoming a stable union with Al eventually confessing (69 KB) that he loved her. In the end, however, it mattered not as Sam changed history and reunited Al with his lost love Beth. In the later post -"Mirror"-Leap timeline, Al and Beth remained married and would have four daughters after he returned from Viet Nam. Some might say that it was poetic justice, giving a womanizer such as Al so many girls to keep away from men like himself.