text: According to an account in Ms. Magazine in 1984, he had switched to baseball after the injury and coming out of high school was offered a spot in the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system. He attended Iona College from 1951 to 1955 and graduated with a degree in business administration.
  Marriage and family
  Zaccaro and Ferraro met in 1954, when she was a sophomore at Marymount Manhattan College. They became engaged in August 1959, and married on July 16, 1960.
  They raised three children, Donna (born 1962), John Jr. (born 1964), and Laura (born 1966).
  Real estate career
  Origins through early 1980s
  Zaccaro started working as a salesman for his father, Phillip J. Zaccaro, who established P. Zaccaro Co., Inc. in 1917. As an agent for the City of New York, the firm managed properties which were condemned by the City, upon which Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, and Knickerbocker Village had been built in the 1930s and 1940s. John Zaccaro began as licensed real estate broker in 1951 and became a member of the Real Estate Board of New York in 1955.
  In the late 1970s, Zaccaro was appointed a member of the New York City Housing Council.
  By 1984, Zaccaro's company owned or managed over 20 residential and commercial properties in Manhattan. According to a New York Times article, Zaccaro's buildings had accumulated over 100 mostly minor code violations, but some serious, with tenants complaining of poor conditions in some of the apartments.
  Attention during spouse's political campaigns