Born in Manhattan on May 5, 1919, Louis Pagliaro was one of five children of Giovanni and Domenica Pagliaro, immigrants from Italy. His father was a baker.  Josephine Modica Pagliaro, his wife of 49 years, died in 1988. Besides his daughter Lois, he is survived by two other daughters, Paulette Russo and Janis Kay; a son, John; his sister, Josephine Carlisle; seven grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.  Table tennis was Pagliaro’s way of staying out of trouble on the rough streets of the Lower East Side. At 8, he walked into the Boys’ Club of New York on East 10th Street and picked up a paddle. Soon, he was beating the older kids who had taught him how to play the game. In 1933, he won the city’s Metro Junior Championship.  “It kept him off the street and away from the dead-end kids who ended up in jail,” his daughter Lois said.  Through the 1930s, Pagliaro worked his way up through the ranks of the nation’s table tennis players. During World War II, he toured with the U.S.O., exhibiting his skills to the troops. But there was no way to make a living at the sport. Until his retirement in 1984, Pagliaro worked at an ironworks factory in Brooklyn.  “I should have been a jockey,” he said in 1942, after winning his third title. “I got the coordination of a spider monkey.”  He also had remarkable agility. At one point during the 1941 championship match in which he defeated Edward Pinner, Pagliaro found himself backed up about 40 feet from the table.  “Playing on the defensive in this instance, having been caught off guard at the start of a fast serve of Pinner’s, Pagliaro kept retreating before Pinner’s overhand drives until he was prevented from going back any further,” The New Yorker said. “Then Pagliaro won the point by returning a ball that was only three inches from the floor when he hit it.  “The ball soared up among the arc lights and came down on top of the net, then dropped off on Pinner’s side of the table.”
At just over 5 feet tall but with nimble footwork and a rocketing forehand, Mr. Pagliaro won the national championship in 1940-42 and 1952.