John Harrison was born in South Medford, but he can also remember the West End. Some of his mother's family, the Tringalis, were still there.

He can close his eyes and smell the wood stove in his grandfather's house on Leverett Street, remember the thrill of having a few cents to buy the penny candy at Kramer's, and see his grandfather and his uncles, Jimmy and Guy, making wine in the cellar.

He was just a child, but he was allowed to sip a little of that wine and "it had a wonderful robust taste much more distinct than anything you can buy in a store. My uncles probably bought the grapes in Chelsea and they were making the wine constantly since they gave it away to so many friends and family."

Sebastiano Tringali, John's grandfather, called "Pa Yano" by his children and grandchildren, came to the West End from Augusta, Sicily on the S.S. Taormina in 1914.

A few years later, when he was established here, he sent for his wife, Francesca Caruso, from the same small fishing village. There were many people from Augusta in the West End and they were referred to as Oostanizzis, "Oostis" for short.

Sebastiano and Francesca had four girls and two boys.

One of the girls, Rosa Santa Tringali, became John's mother. Rosa married a Coast Guard engineer she met when he was stationed at the Coast Guard base in Boston. His name was Benjamin Francis Harrison from Norfolk, Va.

They settled in South Medford and began to raise a family. Soon Benjamin and his two sons were steeped in Italian traditions.

It was a world of extended family filled with grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. And this Italian world encompassed not only the West End and South Medford, but also the North End.

"I had two uncles, Ignazio and Jimmy, who had pushcarts at Haymarket. They were there selling produce every Saturday and Sunday. This was not really for the money. Ignazio was a fish cutter on a pier in Boston," John says. "That was his regular job. Because of him we had fresh fish all the time. My mother made breaded filet of sole every Friday night. I can still taste it. But Ignazio just loved being at Haymarket. He sold all kinds of produce but his specialty was carrots."

"My uncle Jimmy had a canteen truck for more than 30 years and by today's standards that was more than a full-time job. But he would never miss Haymarket on the weekends. Right up until he could barely move he had that pushcart. Finally, in his mid- 80's, he wasn't well enough to go, and he missed it terribly. He was a great showman. A lot of the pushcart drivers were. They put on an act for their customers."

"'Hey, fresh lettuce here! Hey, hey! Fresh lettuce, 20 cents!'"

And besides his pushcart chants, Jimmy also sang songs.

"My cousins and friends used to go to Ted Hilton's resort in Moodus, Connecticut when I was little. Everyone knew my Uncle Jimmy could do a mean Frank Sinatra. The entertainment director of the resort would say, every year, "'Let's get Jimmy Tringali up here to do his Frank Sinatra.'"

John's mother, Rosa Santa, was also "a natural singer." She too was called up to sing at Italian weddings and events. Rosa worked as a waitress at several different restaurants, including DePasquales.

Phil DePasquale would ask her to sing any time there was a special event. She sang many songs in Italian and her two specialities were "Bill Bailey" in English and "Mala Femina" in Italian. People often said, "She's better than Connie Francis."

Amazingly this tight-knit Italian world of the West End, the North End, and South Medford, reached all the way to Paris at least once. One night when John was having dinner with his cousin Rose Tricomi's son, Johnny, they began talking about their European travels. Then Johnny launched into this tale:

"I've going to tell you a story that you're really going to like. One time I was visiting Paris. I left my hotel one evening to walk along the Left Bank where the bistros are. I came to a beautiful big bar and the doors were open and there was a piano playing and a woman's voice singing. I said to myself, 'Well, isn't that amazing, whoever she is, she sounds just like my cousin, Rosa.' I walked into the bar and there's your mother sitting on top of the piano, singing."

It turned out that Rosa had come over to Paris with a girlfriend for a few days. When she and her cousin compared notes they found out they were staying in the same hotel and they had come on the same plane.

And John adds, "Of course if there's a place to sing, my mother's going to sing. So there she was."

In this story of food, singing and cousins, it's not too surprising that when Sebastiano Tringali emigrated from Augusta, Sicily, he went into a food business which was started by a cousin.

The cousin's name was Salvatore Passanisi and he was the first one in this extended family to sell sandwiches. He came from Augusta around 1900 and he made sandwiches in his house and went around selling them out of a basket he carried on his shoulder.

Cousin Rolli remembers

Rosa Tricomi, who goes by the nickname of Rolli, is Passanisi's granddaughter, and she is now 93 years old, living in North Medford. In other chapters of this Italian-American history project we have heard about food trucks. I wondered if we could ever go far back enough with this canteen model to encounter someone selling sandwiches out of a horse-drawn carriage. Instead here is Rolli explaining about the 1900 version with baskets!

"He went to the factories with the baskets full of sandwiches and he made a living. He was right there in the West End close to everything. He did a good business. Then he died in the 1918 flu epidemic and Sebastiano was working with him when he had just come over from Italy and then Sebastiano took over when my grandfather was gone."

By the 1930's Sebastiano bought a pickup truck and turned it into a canteen, working out of the West End. "In fact" John says, "Sebastiano is often credited with originating the canteen concept as we know it today." By the 1950's, Jimmy, his son, took over the business, and by 1960, he was operating out of South Medford.

"Uncle Jimmy named his business 'Supreme Canteen' and he was up at 3 a.m. making coffee and sandwiches and buying donuts. The cellar was his work area and he did this all by himself. He didn't get married until later in life. His routes were mostly in South Boston. I worked with him in the summer and on school vacations, when I was 12 and 13 before I worked at Bob's Foods."

"We would get to South Boston and we would drive down a mysterious alley and find a place to park. Then we would find the freight elevator and load the food onto a dolly and go floor by floor. I remember that one of the businesses was Bolita Ballet which made ballet shoes. We would also go to the rum distilleries in South Boston. There we would just park in the yard and people would come up to the truck."

"Every day, once Jimmy had his schedule established, he would take his lunch break by driving to Boylston and Tremont streets and exercising at the YMCU which was right there in the theater district. No problem at all parking! And there were no parking meters either. I usually had my lunch in the truck while he was in the Y, but one time I told him how much I loved wrestling and he mentioned that Killer Kowalski worked out at that Y. In fact, many other wrestlers such as the Tolos Brothers and Don Leo Jonathan worked out there as well."

"So the next week Jimmy set it up and took me in to meet Killer Kowalski. I interviewed him for my 9th grade class at Lincoln Jr. High School while he was taking a shower. Kowalski offered to do it after the shower, but I was so afraid I might miss my opportunity that I just kept asking the questions the whole time he showered."

John's grandparents, Sebastiano and Francesca Tringali, had a love that endured. Their six children remember that their parents always ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner out of the same plate! Francesca was only about four and a half feet tall, but she could be tough on her children if she felt that was what was needed.

One day, when John's mother, Rosa, was a young teenager, she said to her mother, "Ma, when I grow up I want to be a singer!" Francesca minced no words telling her that she would be no such thing and to banish the idea from her mind at once. Years later, Rosa told her two boys that her mother reacted as if she had said, "Ma, when I grow up I want to rob banks."

So Rosa grew up to be a respectable wife and mother (fulfilling her own mother's expectations) and she was also a waitress. But she found a way to sing whenever the opportunity presented itself. And cousin Rolli Tricomi says, "John's mother was a little ball of fire."

The West End where the Tringalis and the Tricomis made their homes was demolished by the Boston Redevelopment Authority in the late 1950's to make way for new, high rise buildings for the wealthy. All of the working class families who lived there (more than 20,000 people) were displaced when 41 acres were razed to the ground. It was a terrifying time and everyone scrambled to do the best they could for their families.

Sebastiano Tringali apparently saw it coming and he managed to buy two houses in South Medford. One two- family on Eliot Street now housed John's family on one floor and his cousins and an aunt on another ; the second house, on Newburn Avenue near Tufts park was for Uncle Jimmy, Uncle Guy, and grandmother, Francesca.

However, Sebastiano, himself, did not quite make it to Medford. He died in 1956 in the last days of the West End as the community he loved was dying around him.

Years later, his grandson, John, was attending a funeral when he met someone who also had roots in the West End. John happened to mention his grandfather's name.

"Sebastiano Tringali? From the West End.? That was your grandfather? I know about him. He helped my family. Your grandfather was responsible for my father coming to this country. He gave him advice and told him what to do and where to look for housing and he loaned him money, too. He helped a lot of people. Your grandfather was a big man in the West End."

The West Enders who lost their homes, and their descendents, will never forget or accept what happened. For years there was a sign on Storrow Drive which especially rankled all of the ousted inhabitants. It was an advertisement for one of the new expensive high rise apartment buildings and it said, to all of the commuters stuck in traffic, "If you lived here you'd be home now."

In the next article in this series on Italian-American oral history, John's cousin, Medford resident and former West Ender, Rose (Rolli) Tricomi will share her memories. If you have comments or questions about this series you can contact Sharon at 781-393-7566 or at sharon@sharonkennedy.com