Born in Shreveport to Sicilian immigrant parents, Angelo joined the Navy with five friends on August 9, 1942. His father signed enlistment papers for his underage son, although, as Angelo recalls, the elder Cascio didn't know what he was signing. When he entered the service Angelo was fifteen and weighed 125 pounds. The boy was assigned to the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier, and stayed aboard about eighteen months as the carrier transported aircraft between the West Coast and New Hebrides. He asked for a transfer and was assigned to a destroyer, the USS Dale (DD-353). Angelo worked as a deck hand and manned a five-inch gun. Aboard the Dale he helped shell Wake Island, escorted three LSTs with Marines in the invasions of Gilbert Islands and Makin Island, and saw action off Eniwetok and Kwajalein. Once, he recalls, Japanese soldiers fired on the destroyer with rifles as the ship edged through a narrow channel in the Marshall Islands. Angelo was aboard the Dale for eight months. Later, back in America, he worked aboard a PC-566 in Miami, a patrol craft for submarines used as a school ship. Next, he served as part of a forty-five man crew on the towing ship, ATA-190. When the war ended, Angelo went into Japan to clear minefields in Tokyo Bay. He was discharged in June of 1946, but two years later he returned to the Navy and trained reservists aboard an LST in Beaumont, Texas. This time, Angelo stayed in less than a year. Discharged again he worked for American Linen Service for thirty-seven years. He retired in 1986, but then was called back and worked four more years for the company.