Rose Tricomi was born in 1926 and was brought up in the West End. A cousin of John Harrison (subject of the previous article on Oct. 17), she grew up a few blocks away from him on Leverett Street.

Her grandfather, Salvatore Passanisi, came from Augusta, Sicily, and started the business which John’s grandfather would join him in, selling sandwiches from baskets he carried on his shoulders. He sold to the workers in factories and shops all within walking distance of the West End.

“We had the most wonderful life in the West End,” says Rose, who goes by the nickname of Rolly. “Everything was there. We had beautiful cobblestone streets; we could walk to the Boston Common in 10 minutes. We could walk to Tremont Street and all of downtown Boston. My mother took us to Filene’s Basement for their ‘dollar days.’ We would buy two or three pairs of shoes at a time when I was a kid if they were on sale.

“We swam in the Charles River – it was right there! We’d walk to the Boston Garden in about six minutes ad go to the Barnum and Bailey Circus. And we’d see all the parades.

“We had a very good life. When I was 12 or 13, we had the first ‘Frigidaire’ in the neighborhood, the first phone, and the first car. Although the North End still had no bathrooms, we had bathrooms with showers and tubs in the West End.

“But we were living on prime real estate and the Boston Redevelopment Authority took it away from us. We were Italian, Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian, Russian. They said we were living in a slum, but we weren’t. I was married by this time and I had a beautiful apartment in the West End. They just told those lies to get rid of us so that lots of people could make money. They took it all by eminent domain. The BRA made the decision in 1958 to raze the West End to the ground. None of us had any other choice except to leave. My husband and I found a house to buy in North Medford and moved that year.

“They got rid of all of us, they demolished all the houses, they destroyed three or four Jewish synagogues, and all of the churches except St. Joseph’s. We still have a Mass every October at that church for all the West Enders who were forced to leave.

“Mrs. Blood, who was related to my sister-in-law, was the last person to leave the West End. She refused to go. They pulled the truck up in front of her house on Charles Street and loaded her stuff onto it. She was the last hold-out. There is just one original building left standing in the West End to this day. Nobody knows why it’s still there.”

Rolly’s grandfather, Salvatore Passanisi, made a good living selling his sandwiches. Unfortunately, he died in the flu epidemic of 1918, and then his wife died. This left Rolly’s mother to bring up her three younger siblings. She was 16! Faced with this dilemma, she got married that same year, still 16, and her husband adopted her three siblings. Then the new couple went on to have three girls and four boys of their own. Salvatore had owned a house in Cambridge and when it was sold in 1927, Rolly’s father, Vincent Guarino, was able to buy a fishing boat.

Vincent eventually owned two fishing boats called draggers. He bought the second boat right after World War ll. The boats were the Anna Guarino, named after his mother, and the Margaret Marie, named after Rolly’s two kid sisters who were born 14 years after the other five children.

The Guarinos had been fishermen in Augusta, Sicily, and one day, according to Vincent, he met a mermaid there. He was a little boy, sitting alone on a rock overlooking the sea when he saw her: she was a beautiful woman with very long hair and a long fish tail. She came halfway out of the water, looked intently at the little boy, and then swam off.

“My father told that story his whole life. We weren’t sure what to make of it,” says Rolly.

As an adult in Boston, Vincent Guarino did not meet any mermaids. But he made a good business for himself and others with those two boats. He generally had two or three fishermen with him and sometimes a cook. At the end of the day’s haul, they would all get shares.

“My father’s specialty was whiting and he sold it for a penny and a half a pound. There was no sonar at the time. But they knew where the whiting were.

“He also brought home lobsters and crabs and swordfish and tuna for us all the time. A couple of times he brought home a lobster so big that we had to cut it into pieces to get it into the ‘guarda’. In our Sicilian dialect ‘guarda’ is the name for a large, handmade copper pot.”

This was her father’s life for more than 40 years. First, he fished out of Boston and sold his catch on the Boston fish piers, and then he started to sell in Gloucester instead. It turned out that he knew the owner of one of the fish companies in Gloucester who happened to also be a “West Ender.”

For this reason, the family bought a house in Rockport and Guarino docked his boat right near the iconic Rockport landmark, “Motif #1.” Many postcards were printed of Motif #1 with his boats in the background. By 1941, he was fishing out of Rockport in the summer and Boston in the winter. The family still lived in their West End apartment except for the summer, and were there until the BRA forced them to leave in 1958.

The kind of fishing Rolly’s father did was day fishing using nets. He and his men were not gone for weeks at a time. But most days, they were taking the long journey to George’s Bank. They would leave at three or four in the morning, even in the winter, and they would be back just before dark. The men often did not live nearby. They slept on the boat in Rockport harbor for several nights in between the day trips, which was one of the reasons Vincent hired a cook.

However, Vincent, himself, also packed food and wine for the men each day. The best food of all to take on these trips was called “The 60 Miler.” It was a stew made with zucchini, onions, a little tomato, and pasta. It would still be hot 60 miles later! And it will come as no surprise to anyone who has been reading this series of oral histories, that the wine Vincent brought on the boat was made in his own cellar.

Rolly’s father did a good business in the war years, making a lot of money selling to the Armed Forces. Vincent Guarino was not yet a citizen of the United States, but because of his help providing fresh fish to the troops, they made him an honorary citizen.

Earlier on, he and other fishermen found themselves a part of another kind of U.S. history. During Prohibition in the 20′s, smugglers would often throw their cargo of alcoholic beverages overboard if their boats were about to be seized. Sometimes, Vincent would bring home several boxes of Four Roses, which he “caught” along with his whiting.

Not everyone in the West End was as successful in business as Vincent, and in the Depression years and during the war, people had to do whatever it took to make ends meet. In Rolly’s memory such inventiveness involved onions at least twice.

“My father-in-‐law bought a whole train of very wet onions for $1. I don’t know where he bought them, but no one else wanted them. Well, he and his family cleaned them up and they were just as good as any other onion. His family was selling those onions and making good money for weeks until they were gone.

“My Uncle Jim was in the Navy during the War, on the USS Nicholson docked in Charlestown. One day he came into my mother’s house with a load of onions on his shoulder. My mother was so excited because right then there was a terrible shortage of onions. During the war, there would be different shortages at different times, you know. Right then it was onions.

“Well, my mother asked where they came from and my Uncle Jim said ‘Oh, they fell off a truck.’ Well. she was delighted and didn’t ask any more questions. Good thing she didn’t because those onions did not fall off of any truck. Uncle Jim stole them from the Navy. He was the cook. Anyway, nobody else had onions for weeks. Except us.”

In the West End of Rolly’s childhood, her uncles sold lemons on one corner and when they were young, at least one brother shined shoes on another. Rolly remembers the Ice Man calling out “Ice! Ice! Twenty cents a piece!”

“You would make money any way you could in those days. I remember there was an old, old lady picking through the remnants of fabric her sons got from the factories. She was just across the street from me. Her sons would bring her the cuttings in bales and she would stand there in the dark sorting through them. She was very poor and the kids in the neighborhood would make fun of her. I was in her house once and she had piles of eggshells everywhere. She was a little crazy, but her sons did well with that business. Well enough to buy homes in Newton.”

The Rag Man came around regularly like the Ice Man.

“He was a very old Jewish man. We would buy the rags from him and we all knew he wasn’t really right in the head. He sang out “Rags, rags!” in a beautiful voice and we found out that he sang at the synagogue. When the West End died, someone left him money for the rest of his life. Left him money so he could survive.”

Those days in the West End are now long ago and far away. Gone are the rag men and the ice men, and the wonderful location in walking distance to the circus and all of downtown Boston. But, for Rolly, both the West End habit of neighborliness and the Italian love of food remains.

When her cousin John Harrison and I visited Rolly this past summer, she was sitting in her back yard chatting with a neighbor. Later in the interview, she talked about cooking Chicken Marsala and sending it over to another neighbor when he was sick. Every year on Christmas Eve she and her daughter, Jaquelyn, make baked stuffed lobsters for a dozen family members.

Rolly is small and despite all the cooking she still does, she herself doesn’t eat very much.

“However,” she says. ” I love sea urchins. They’re my favorite. They’re hard to get now. We used to get them on the rocks in Rockport. And we still get the lobster bodies when we’re in Rockport. There’s a guy up there we know so we just call him up. He gives them to us for nothing. Sometimes we just go and sit on the rocks and eat them.

“In fact, when we were in Nova Scotia on vacation, we did the same thing. Sat on the rocks up there too and ate lobster bodies. Well, why wouldn’t we? That’s our heritage.”

In Rolly’s yard in North Medford, there’s a float from one of her father’s boats hanging on a tree. As you head upstairs to the second floor of her house, there on the landing is the beautiful old steamer trunk which belonged to her grandfather, Salvatore Passanisi. He first traveled with it in 1900 from Sicily to Alaska to take a job shoveling coal in the engine of a fishing boat. The next trip he made was in 1908. This time he was emigrating with all his worldly goods from Sicily to the West End of Boston.

If you have comments or questions about the Medford Italian-American Oral History Project, contact Sharon Kennedy at 781-­393-‐7566 or email sharon@sharonkennedy.com. The next installment, in December, will be about Main Street in South Medford when it was “The Hub of the Universe: Everything Was There.” If you have any old photos from that time, email them to Sharon or medford@wickedlocal.com.