Editor’s Note: The following is the second in a series of oral histories supported by a grant from the Medford Arts Council.

It’s Wednesday morning. The year is 1950, the place is a three decker on 21 Mayberry Ave. in South Medford, the time is 4:00 a.m.. On the first floor Lucy DePasquale is making 24 cups of coffee in her two coffee pots on the stove. She pours them into an urn on the floor and starts on 24 more cups.  Neither of her two little girls are awake yet. Neither is her husband, Joseph.

On the second floor Uncle Peter and Grandma are still asleep but Aunt Celia is up making 24 cups of coffee in her two coffee pots.

On the third floor Aunt Mary is still asleep and so are her two young sons but Uncle Salvie is making 24 cups of coffee in his two coffee pots.

By 4:30 am Aunt Celia comes downstairs and pours her 24 cups of coffee in the urn on her sister, Lucy’s, kitchen floor. By 4:35 am, Uncle Salvie does the same.

By 5:00 am Lucy DePasquale is roasting two chickens in her oven on the first floor. Aunt Celia is putting a twenty pound roast beef in her oven on the second floor, and Uncle Salvy is baking a ham in his oven on the third floor.

By 6:00 am Lucy DePasquale’s sister Josie arrives. She has walked over from her apartment to help take care of Lucy’s little girls. By 6:00 am Uncle Peter is leaving for work and so is Aunt Mary.

By 6:00 am,  Joseph DePasquale,  Lucy DePasquale’s husband, known in the family at “JoJo”, has stacked all of his store- bought donuts on the shelves in the back of his custom made truck along with some Table Talk pies and Hostess Cakes.  He has filled his 100 cup thermos on the truck from the urn on the kitchen floor. He heads to Mystic Avenue to begin the day. His route includes gas stations, and businesses selling  and servicing motors and cranes. He toots his horn and the men come out to the truck. He opens up the back and his customers can choose from the shelves. A donut is 10 cents, a small coffee is 10 cents, and a large is 20 cents.  Sometimes JoJo runs a “special” – 10 cents for a donut AND a small coffee.

Meanwhile back on Mayberry Avenue, Lucy, Aunt Celia,  Uncle Salvy, and Aunt Josie are making the sandwiches while taking turns feeding and playing with the girls. Uncle Salvy’s sons are off to school.  By 11:00  JoJo will be back.   He will need to pick up the sandwiches.  The team of four at home are making chicken salad , roast beef , egg salad,  tuna salad, Italian cold cuts, and ham and cheese sandwiches.

By 10:00 am Lucy and Aunt Celia are making more coffee for JoJo’s lunch time customers.  At 10:40 the family members are wrapping  sandwiches in wax paper and rubber bands.

At 10:55 JoJo is back home, reporting that “almost everything went” this morning. He loads the sandwiches into the big wells he has filled with ice to keep them fresh and cool and he fills up the coffee urn. His wife hands him a special sandwich of meatballs with provolone and sauce. It’s not for sale - it’s for him.  In two years, he’ll add that sandwich, and a sausage, pepper and onion sub to his truck but right now Jojo isn’t sure Americans are looking for Italian specialites. He has no time to waste, so giving two quick kisses to his two little girls, he waves good bye, and is on his way back to the same route where the men are waiting to hear the toot of his horn for lunch. It is 11:10.

And that is how the business known as Medford Canteen, Inc.  was started in the house at 21 Mayberry Ave. that was purchased by Anna Di Gangi and her husband, (Lucy DePasquale’s mother and father), when they moved from the West End to Medford. Anna decided to keep the three-family after her husband died. “This way there will be a house for anybody in the family to come to if they need a place to stay for any reason.”  Grandma still  lives on the second floor with Aunt Celia and Uncle Peter and watches as the family works together in her son-in-law Joseph’s  industrial catering business.

But the business is growing and a year later JoJo moves it out of the house and into one small room in a building on Medford St. He also hires someone to make sandwiches instead of his family. Then he hires a cook named Mary who will stay with him for years and years, and even more people to assemble the sandwiches. He has a second truck and he is developing new routes.
Soon there are four little girls in the family: Linda, Paula, Susan, and Lucy Irene.

By about 1960 JoJo has a larger building on Harvard St. and twelve trucks.  Besides the Mystic Ave. route, he has developed a route in Somerville servicing car repair places, tire stores, and junk yards. A few years later Joseph’s business is in a building on Broadway in Somerville. He has 24 trucks and two more routes, one in Cambridge and one in Chelsea.
Medford Canteen, Inc. was one of the earliest industrial canteens but there were four or five others at that time in eastern Massachusetts. One of the others decided to try something new. One day he said to several of the other business owners, “I’m thinking of opening coffee shops. If you each invest $5000 you can be a partner.”

The other men laughed and one of them said, “Half the time we can’t even get them to come out to the truck that’s parked ten feet away from where they’re working. How are you going to get them to come to a store?” Another man said, “How are you going to pay the overhead on a store?”

None of those men put up the $5000 and years later JoJo and a couple of the others got together and laughed some more. This time they were laughing at themselves.

“Who the heck ever thought it would become Dunkin Donuts?”

But how did Joseph DePasquale happen to get into the sandwich business in the first place? Well,  once upon a time in 1908 a  young boy named Rocco DePasquale emigrated to New York  from the Italian province of Avelino. Some of  his family in Avelino made fireworks, but he envisioned a new life for himself in America.  He was about thirteen years old and he came alone but he probably had cousins in New York. After working in a bakery there for about three years, Rocco moved to Revere and worked for Bova Bakery. It was 1911 and he was 16 years old. In 1913 at the ripe old age of 18 he married  a woman who was 17 and after a few years he and his wife, Rosa, moved to East Boston where he bought a building and started a bakery.

He and Rosa had three sons, Anthony, Philip, and Joseph. Rosa almost put the kibosh on all of her husband Rocco’s dreams for the future when she told him one day that she had fallen in love and she was running off with an actor to New York.  The three boys were very young at the time. We will never know just how Rocco reacted to this startling news, but he did say this: “You can’t take my sons. They are staying here with me.”

He hired a couple to take care of them when they were little and he was at work. Once the sons began to grow up they all worked at the bakery.   Soon Anthony was doing the baking and Rocco, Phil, and Joseph (“JoJo”) delivered bread all over East Boston and the West End. DePasquale scali bread, round loaves of lard bread, and baguettes became the Italian breads of choice in those two areas of Boston.

When Anthony turned twenty,  his father left him in charge of the bakery in East Boston and rented a building in South Medford which is now La Casia’s Bakery. It was 1933 and Rocco, his second wife, Josephine, and his two sons lived up above the new bakery. 

Rosa got married to her actor and lived in New York with him until he died at a relatively young age . Then suddenly after about twenty years, as they say in the DePasquale family, “Grandma showed up.”  Although she and Rocco kept a certain, wary distance from each other, her three boys showered her with both affection and expensive presents in her old age. In general, she received a warm welcome back into the bosom of this family and came to almost all big extended family celebrations.

And by the time Grandma Rose returned from New York, Rocco and their three sons had established a bakery-restaurant dynasty. As Paula DePasquale says. “For my grandfather, Rocco, it was, ‘another son, another restaurant.’” So with Anthony in charge in East Boston, Rocco ran the bakery in Medford and then bought a larger building on Main St. (where Bocelli’s is now) for his sons Joseph and Philip so they could open up a larger bakery. Or maybe dream a larger dream…

Joseph soon went into the army and when he came back, he worked in the business with his brother. At first they had a bakery with the bread coming from Tony in East Boston.  Then they started making donuts-to-go for breakfast and then they introduced pizza for lunch. The next step was tables and chairs so people could stay and eat their pizza.  But after awhile, JoJo decided to start “Medford Canteen, Inc” in his house. Philip decided to creat a full Italian restaurant called DePasquale’s. One room was called the “Il Soto Room” and a larger room for parties and functions was called “The Allegro Room.”

Rocco, having nothing much left to do in East Boston or Medford, bought a large lot of land in Wilmington and built a restaurant called “Rocco’s”. He owned two houses in Wilmington but he always lived in the one above the restaurant.  He ran the restaurant for awhile. However, Rocco had a fourth son named Rocco by his second marriage and soon his son was running the restaurant instead. This son had five children and they all worked in the restaurant. “Rocco’s” was in business until 2017.

Meanwhile back in East Boston, Tony was watching what Phil did in South Medford,  so he put tables and chairs in his bakery and started to offer pizzas and whole meals. Soon it was called “Tony’s Restaurant.” This restaurant became famous: the Mayor  of Boston ate there, Gov. King ate there “all the time”, and it was the favorite restaurant for most of  the Bruins.

This was an era when men would wear a dress shirt and tie to eat out at a nice restaurant. Those who did not finish their meals at Tony’s had their ties cut off and displayed on the wall with their names written beneath. Soon it was all the rage to eat at Tony’s, leave a little bit of food, let someone chop off your tie, and put your business card on the wall with it. Good publicity for the restaurant and for everyone who ate there. An old –fashioned take on networking!

In fact there was a  story about Tony and the Bruins in the Boston Globe. The Globe reported that Tony chased Bruins star Bobby Orr down the street outside his restaurant.  And that was how many people in Boston learned that if you left anything on your plate at Tony’s Restaurant you were supposed to submit to having your tie cut off. Bobby Orr didn’t finish his meal but he tried to keep his tie.

Meanwhile back in South Medford, DePasquale’s Restaurant was doing equally well. If Tony had the Bruins coming for dinner, well, Uncle Phil had the Red Sox.  And he became close friends with Carl Yastrzemski and Dwight Evans. Also Connie Francis, the singer, ate there frequently and so did the Maguire Sisters and… Frank Sinatra. By the time the restaurant closed in 2003 the walls above every table and booth were covered with photos of famous people, all autographed and all sending messages of love and thanks to Phil DePasquale.

Lucy and Paula DePasquale remember those famous guests quite well. Lucy says,“One night my uncle called up my mother and father and said, ‘Bring the girls over. They have to see this!” We all went to the restaurant and when we got there Frank Sinatra was cooking at the stove with Uncle Phil and Dean Martin was at the slicing machine cutting up tomatoes. Sammy Davis, Jr was rinsing the dishes. But suddenly Sammy Davis stopped, his hands covered in dirty dishwater. “Wait a minute “ he said,  “How come I’m the one doing the dishes?”

This is the second story in the Medford-Italian American oral history project. We will be bringing you other stories from the D’Antonio family as well as stories from other Italian-American families.