When his mother, Lucrezia, was diagnosed with cancer, then 25-year-old Frankie Gaetano Balistreri cared for her at home. She craved her favorite Sicilian dishes and called out her wishes from her bed. “ ‘Frankie, pasta con sarde!’ ”(Pasta with sardines); “ ‘Frankie, sfingi!’ (powdered sugar donuts with ricotta filling) “I was running back and forth, ...
He was in the sixth grade and really wanted to be in the school band. But his parents told him there was no money to buy or rent an instrument. His older sister was dating a guy whose brother had a trumpet in his closet. The horn soon made its way to the wannabe musician ...
When 17-year-old Jose Heriberto Garcia came courting the young girl who’d become his wife, his future mother-in-law was so outraged that she ran him off her property – waving her pistol and shooting at his feet. “I beat it out of there, oh si, senor,” Garcia recalled. “I came back the next day to state ...
SENIOR BEAT COLUMN: I got my first job in San Francisco nearly 40 years ago, in the Flood Building at Market and Powell streets. A chubby, cheerful, uniformed lobby attendant pressed the elevator buttons for me. The lobby was marble and, oh wonderful, there was a Woolworth’s on the ground floor. I loved to sit ...
How do you eat If you are on a fixed income and live in a single-room occupancy hotel? When the pandemic closed a lot of your favorite cheap food spots? If you are Christopher Coleman, you get creative with your mini fridge and microwave. “The way you cook a juicy porkchop in a microwave, you ...
Imagine having such a vicious toothache and no access to a dentist that you take a pair of pliers and extract your own tooth. Meet Chester Moody. It’s 1958 in the Jim Crow South: Lorman, Mississippi, to be precise. He is 17 years old, attending Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, a historic black college. At ...
