A Family Legacy (Bacino's Market) – Your Family's Legacies?

[Paul Bacino]

Bacino's Market Italian Grocery

 

 

 

Butchered our Own Meat/ Italian products sold  

 

We delivered to families twice a day

 

Only ran by my dad/uncle / grandma

 

The demise was larger chain stores and quick markets

 

Sad

 

Just a little of where I came from!!

 

Feel free to contribute any family history

[lemniscate]

Family farm.  About 240 acres.  It was called truck farming, because we grew many types of produce that matured at different times of the seasons.  Pickles, sweet corn, melons, green beans, potatoes, cabbage.......

 

There were old-school Farmer's markets where farmers from miles around would arrive and rent a stall under a large roofed structure, shaped like a cross.  You would back your truck into the stall space and set up your produce.  We sold by the pound at the Wed and Sat market.  This market near Eastern European immigrant neighborhoods and urban downtown.  People moving to the suburbs, the older generation dying out and shoppers wanting super-large supermarkets with everything* eventually killed this market.  The gentrified pop-up shaded farmer's markets of today pale in comparison to what real farmer's markets were, just 2 or 3 decades ago.

 

The other market we went to was the 0:dark:thirty (3am-7am) wholesale market where we setup and sold bushels of our produce to stores.  They would buy 30 bushels of green beans, or 40 crates of melons or 100 bags of potatoes.  That was 2-3 times a week at high season. We would load them on their trucks and they would take off to the outskirts to the smaller supermarkets and resell the stuff.  Fresh almost everyday and local for sure.  There really wasn't too much trucked in produce in our area during growing seasons. 

 

We ran a small cow/calf beef operation and also swine for a while.

 

We switched to soybean growing and that was how the farm was until the end.

 

The farm was sold eventually to add to series of parkland, the fields went fallow and are heading back to the woodlands they haven't been for probably hundreds of years.

 

Full disclosure, I wouldn't have taken over the farm.  It was hard work for often little to no gain.  Especially during the farm crisis (Remember Farm Aid?).

 

Edited April 6, 2021 by lemniscate (log)

[weinoo]

1 hour ago, Paul Bacino said:

Bacino's Market Italian Grocery

Cool.  Where was the market, @Paul Bacino?

[Paul Bacino]

6 minutes ago, weinoo said:

Cool.  Where was the market, @Paul Bacino?

 

This was in Marshalltown Iowa.  

[Paul Bacino]

@lemniscate-- My Dad/ relatives had always said they would never let the kids take over the business.  Hours my Dad worked was 6:30 AM till 730 PM/  and would close Sundays  at 12:30.  His whole life

[heidih]

Not  my legacy but it felt like our biz. Western Packers wholesale and Golden West Meats retail. Started by a Jewish guy from New York and a loud cigar chomping Texan always wearing  Stetson. It took Rosemary in the front office to keep them from killing each other. Legendary arguments I could hear even out on the loading dock.They hired my dad to manage & purchase because he knew meat and had connections with LASKA meat machinery in Austria.  The retail stores were packed on weekends but I just had to say I was Johnny’s daughter and they were hilariously nice. Like the tales above – it was an era. The shift was starting to all inclusive big chain groceries. By a stroke of good luck the plant was smack dab in the path of the planned Century freeway. CalTrans bought it and leased back to them for a nominal sum until the project after much litigation got underway. Everyone was happy. Part of why I make a point of getting to know the butchers at my markets.

[lemniscate]

3 hours ago, Paul Bacino said:

@lemniscate-- My Dad/ relatives had always said they would never let the kids take over the business.  Hours my Dad worked was 6:30 AM till 730 PM/  and would close Sundays  at 12:30.  His whole life

My Dad was more colorful, he said he would kick my ass if I ever mentioned wanting to be farmer.   He had dirt in his veins as a generational farmer and knew there were better ways to make a living.  I listened to him about this advice.

[patti]

I come from a long line of smart asses. That’s about it. 🤷‍♀️

[kayb]

We had what was, in the West Tennessee vernacular, a "place," which, at nine acres or so, was bigger than a house and yard, and smaller than a farm. Daddy was an evenings-and-weekends farmer; three or four head of cattle (buy calves in the spring, fatten through the summer, slaughter in the fall), usually a litter of pigs, until the sow died and we never replaced her, and a huge freaking garden. I'm talking acre-and-a-half garden. Plus a "truck patch" in a low spot in what had once been pasture, for late peas and corn. Fruit trees -- apples, pears, peaches, cherries. Grapevines. Blackberry vines. Later, after I left home, an asparagus bed, which, after my mother died and my father remarried, stepmother had dug up. I wept.

 

I swore when I left home I'd never have a damn garden again, after 12 years of hoeing that one once or twice a week. And I didn't, for 40 years. Now I wish mine was bigger. (I also wish it was completely planted, but, oh, well.)

 

I don't think I knew anyone, growing up, that bought produce at the grocery.

 

[chromedome]

My father grew up in northern Newfoundland in the 40s and 50s, when the old-school "truck system" was still in place. Those of you from coal country would know it as the "company store/town" scenario: the merchant you sold your fish to was also the guy who brought in any/all supplies from outside, and set the prices for both fish and merchandise. The more you were able to grow yourself, the less likely you were to end up irretrievably indebted to the local merchant.

 

We moved around a lot when I was a kid so my father never had much opportunity to live out his ideal of self-sufficiency (for one thing, he was at sea for months at a time and a big garden was a lot for my mom, my little sister and I to deal with). He subscribed to Organic Gardening & Farming (as it was then) in the late 60s and early 70s, before it became a lifestyle magazine, and Mother Earth News from about its second year right up until he died. OGF and Mother were literally some of my earliest reading, and I may have been the only 2nd-grader in the province who could have given you a detailed off-the-cuff explanation of, say, Ruth Stout's no-till gardening method.

 

When he got out of the navy we moved to Newfoundland, and he took a serious run at the whole self-sufficiency game. When we moved in the only bits of our 7 acres that were cleared had a house and driveway on them, except for a few meters between the woodpile and the door. We cleared a couple of acres ourselves, and "hired" a pair of pigs to dig out a bunch of stumps for us in another section, and enlarged the little pond/large puddle that was already present not far behind the house.

We had ducks in the pond, chickens up behind the pigs, and a pretty big garden. We grew enough potatoes for us and our extended family for the winter, with enough left over to feed the next year's pigs (Dad scaled back a bit, the second year...), as well as cabbages and sturdy root vegetables (carrots, rutabagas, parsnips, beets), and peas and beans and a few other random things.

 

Dad quickly learned that northern Newfoundland is not necessarily the best place for subsistence homesteading, given that you can have a killing frost as late as early July or as early as, say, Labour Day weekend. Eventually he decided it wasn't the right time or place, so he put that notion on the back burner for a while. My folks moved to Calgary for several years, then back home to look after my grandmother in semi-rural Nova Scotia (it's now all subdivisions, but then it was still on the cusp). They gardened and kept a few chickens at this stage, and then bought themselves a property out in the central part of the province. It was part of what was once a large farm a century ago, and Dad built them a small off-grid shack which eventually morphed into a compact but fully-fitted on-grid house.

They started gardening seriously again when they sold off their bakery to look after my grandmother full-time (she was well gone in dementia by then); they had relatives come in on the weekends so they could take a break and go to their property. They grew pretty much everything they needed except for pantry staples (flour, sugar, coffee, etc) and meats. They gave thought to having chickens again, but decided that animals were more work than they wanted to take on again at that point in life (hitting 60-ish). Also animals would have limited their ability to visit my mom's family elsewhere in NS, grandkids in Alberta, Dad's family in Newfoundland, and me in NB.

They lived there until Dad passed away 4 years ago. Mom hung in through the summer and harvested the garden one last time, then moved into town.

So this is the context for my own intentions (previously laid out elsewhere on the site) to build a home on a small acreage at some point over the next couple of years. Like my father I've picked away at gardening pretty much everywhere I've lived, without having the opportunity to really take it on in a serious way. I've learned from my father's various experiments (high tunnels and greenhouses, thank you very much) and hope to keep it up for a couple of decades, as he did, through some forethought and good design decisions.

 

Nothing as formal as a family history of farming or a standalone family business (most of my immediate ancestors were fishermen and boat builders) but that's my legacy.

 

[heidih]

Chromedome - that is very cool that your long term honors your dad's dream. Oh and the magazine - for some reason we had a bunch and I devoured them. Wish they had not been trashed. 

[weinoo]

How about bagel bakers and seltzer men.

 

I have a deed somewhere where a great-grandfather and grandfather purchased a seltzer business, including seltzer bottles, horses, carts, and the delivery route. When I was a little kid, we lived in a two-family house, upstairs. Downstairs, my paternal grandparents, who owned the two-family. There was always plenty of seltzer.

 

Never really thought about following in anyone's footsteps.

[heidih]

Ah those old seltzer bottles and the wooden crates - big collector item

[chromedome]

3 hours ago, heidih said:

Chromedome - that is very cool that your long term honors your dad's dream. Oh and the magazine - for some reason we had a bunch and I devoured them. Wish they had not been trashed. 

They sell the entire archive in USB form, updated every year (currently includes 51 years' issues). I ordered two copies of the the 50th-anniversary version, one for myself and one for my stepdaughter.

[weinoo]

If I had all those seltzer bottles, I could retire comfortably.

 

Wait!  I am retired.

 

I remember the seltzer being 2¢ (yes, $.02. Or 2 cents) a bottle to refill. Then 5. Then, who knows.

Not for nothing, I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday, and wandered into a favored area (one with no one else around).

 

These are very cool...

 

 

But they are nothing like the seltzer bottles my mispucha delivered and pick up, which were more like...

 

 

I had no idea what people are charging for these, but I just looked...and wow!

[Steve R.]

Baldness & a Brooklyn accent.  One of these legacies keeps expanding, while I think that 6 years in the Midwest got rid of most of the other.  

[Margaret Pilgrim]

2 hours ago, weinoo said:

If I had all those seltzer bottles, I could retire comfortably.

 

Wait!  I am retired.

 

I remember the seltzer being 2¢ (yes, $.02. Or 2 cents) a bottle to refill. Then 5. Then, who knows.

Not for nothing, I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday, and wandered into a favored area (one with no one else around).

 

These are very cool...

 

 

But they are nothing like the seltzer bottles my mispucha delivered and pick up, which were more like...

 

 

I had no idea what people are charging for these, but I just looked...and wow!

 

Some dozen years ago we subscribed to seltzer delivery from a zany Laverne and Shirley couple aptly named The Seltzer Sisters.    They had acquired a collection of these fabulous bottles which they filled and recycled weekly.   Their product and service was sublime, but we eventually got kicked off the client list because we couldn't keep up with their deliveries.    We accrued bottles which were their stock and trade and slowed down their turn-around as we accepted more crates than we returned.    Fun while it lasted...

[weinoo]

There is allegedly one company, still operating out of Brooklyn, NY, delivering seltzer, refilling seltzer bottles, etc. etc. My guess is they make more money from selling stuff online than from the seltzer biz.

 

Gomberg Seltzer Works - Brooklyn Seltzer Boys

 

 

[Margaret Pilgrim]

Totally agree.    This is a tough gig,    Amassing, sanitizing, filling, SELLING, delivering -> collecting, sanitizing, etc., etc.     And even allowing for the charm factor, keeping the product moderately competitively priced.  

[Steve R.]

Reading this part of the thread, I have become depressed over realizing that my story of getting seltzer delivered in these bottles is now 40 years old.  The depressing part is remembering that my roommates and I laughed about it being "retro" back then, as our delivery guy was the last in the area & had been a solitary provider for years already.

Edited April 9, 2021 by Steve R. (log)