Oral History: James Rossi — June 11th, 2021

Summary:

James S. Rossi was interviewed by Andree Duggan on June 11th, 2021. He is the grandson of Serafino Rossi Sr., who emigrated from Italy at age 16 in 1906 and eventually farmed pears, peaches, plums, apricots, figs, and grapes on his 158-acre farm in Reliez Valley. James tells how his father, Angelo, who was a member of the first class that graduated from Acalanes High School in 1941, was awarded two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for his valorous service as an infantryman in World War II. After the war he returned to Lafayette and joined his brothers Frank and Serafino Jr. in operating the Rossi Brothers Furniture Shop near the present day Lafayette Park Hotel. Rossi Street and Angelo Street, as well as Hillside Terrace, are all located on land that was part of the original Rossi farm.

Oral History:

Andree Duggan: I am Andree Duggan of the Lafayette Historical Oral History Project, talking with James Rossi on Friday, June 11, 2021. Welcome James, and I need to ask you id you could tell us your full name and the spelling.

James Rossi: James Steven Rossi, R-O-S-S-I.

AD: And is that Steven with a “V” or a “PH”?

JR: “V”.

AD: Okay. Do you have a nickname?

JR: No. Jim.

AD: That was my dad’s name. When and where were you born?

JR: I was born at Alta Bates Hospital in Alameda. 1949.

AD: How long have you lived in Lafayette?

JR: I lived in Lafayette from about 1950, ’51 and basically when I went away to college back in the late ‘60s, after that I really didn’t live in Lafayette, but my parents still lived there, same house.

AD: Is this the same house that’s been in the family for a long time?

JR: Well, no. Not my grandfather’s… this is the house that my father built on Angelo Street, and when the property was subdivided, my grandfather gave each son a lot, two lots on Rossi Street, for my uncles Frank and Serafino, and the next street north is Angelo Street and that was for my dad because he had to go to World War II so my grandfather thought we would name the street after him and, of course, give him the lot there.

AD: That’s great. What are the street addresses, the specific numbers, of these homes?

JR: Well, let’s see. Ours is 3384 Angelo Street, Uncle Serafino’s was 3384 Rossi Street, and the one on the end, I’m not quite sure what his address was, it was way down right at the end of Rossi Street, these streets aren’t that big. It’s now… I went to school with a fellow named Joseph Schnichler and his son bought the Rossi house at the end of Rossi Street, and kind of an interesting thing, the way it happened, and the old tractor, 1932 cleat tractor, was housed at Uncle Frank’s house and they asked if they could leave it there, it was just out getting rusty, so I guess it’s still there.

AD: That’s great. How long do you think it’s been there?

JR: Well. Let’s see. My Uncle Frank passed away, oh, I’d say, about 2003, I want to say, somewhere in there, and it hadn’t been run in a long time, so it’s probably, they stopped disking their acreage and everything some time ago probably at least 30, 30-something years.

AD: Tell me a little bit about the backstory of your family and the farm, the one… well, I‘m just gonna let you tell the story, I think this is your first oral history project, isn’t this? With the town?

JR: Yes.

AD: Well, why don’t you tell us the story in your own words of the farm.

JR: I know you have a history from my grandfather and grandmother, and my mother and father, although that one was 2013, wasn’t it?

AD: I think that because this is an oral history piece, I don’t think there’s a problem with repeating any of that.

JR: Okay, well there’s a little bit and that was the last year of his life and he wasn’t that well to begin with, so a couple of things, when I read the article again, I’m going, “No, there are a few things that aren’t quite right here”, and not by writing it down, it’s just probably that my dad just didn’t remember. Now, going back to 1906, is when my grandfather came over between ’06 and ’07 from Italy, and he was sixteen years old, I think he had seventeen bucks in his pocket, and he started working at a candy factory about a year before he got his bearings, and then he came out to Lafayette as there are some Italian landowners, Ghiglione’s, Bruzzone’s, that were already out there farming. And he hooked up with, I believe, first Ghiglione and was basically sharecropping for him, and what that meant in those days is, basically, say you’ve got an acre or two of property, and he’d hire my grandfather to tend to all the vegetables, and the owner would buy the seed, and once they grew all the vegetables and brought them to market the money was split in half, so what he did was, he was pretty frugal with his money, and he started buying property above Ed Roland on Reliez Valley Road, he was probably the first individual on Reliez Valley. The land was very fertile up there, and he knew it, you know, not clay or anything like that, just really good dirt and good growing, so we’re about a mile up from Pleasant Hill Road on Reliez Valley, and that’s where you see one of the photos of the second house that he built, a barn, which there’s nothing around it as far as the picture, you can see, and you can see a faint road in the background… are we looking at the same picture?

AD: Yes, he’s with his family, and it looks like there’s a…

JR: This is just a house. No people in it, and it’s taken far away, it’s the original era, it’s the first house my grandfather built that actually had running water and inside plumbing, and that’s

AD: And your grandfather was Angelo?

JR: No, Serafino. There’s a Serafino Jr. and that’s my dad’s brother, Frank, Angelo and Serafino Jr. were all brothers.

AD: Okay.

JR: And, let’s see, so that house, well, there was one before that had no running water or anything that he built, that was just for the time being, so he went back over to Italy to get Mary, his wife, my grandmother, married her and, whether she liked it or not, she became a… basically, that’s what they did in those days, they just got up and worked, one way or another on the family ranch, She tended the chickens, and they always had, one, two cows that they’d fatten up for the market and take it to, believe it or not, in those days, it was still theirs, still around was Lawrence Meat Market in Walnut Creek, and they had them butcher it, so they’d live off one cow a year, basically, so anyway, through the ‘10s, my grandfather stopped working for somebody else, you know he had his own property to start his own little ranch. I think he started with fifteen acres, and then by the time he was done he had about a hundred and fifty-eight, one report says a hundred and fifty-two, one says a hundred and fifty-eight, I saw one says a hundred and eighty-nine, I guess that’s, who knows? I’ve heard a hundred and fifty-eight for years, so he’d do all his planting and did all his crops, they had a plow horse, and then the way they got to market was, since there was no tunnel, they had to take the cart and the horse, and that is in one of the pictures I have in there, and they had to up and over Fish Ranch Road, so my grandfather would leave at midnight to get there at 4:30 in the morning.

AD: Wow! And is this the same horse that did the plowing?

JR: I believe so. His horses weren’t riding horses. They were working horses. As a matter of fact, my Uncle Frank laughed one day because I was hearing him talking at a dinner table, you know, family dinners, he said, “Well Frank tried to ride one once, and my grandfather got pretty pissed off at him, and of course the horse bucked him right off, ‘cause he wasn’t a riding horse, he was a working horse.

AD: Sounds like he did his fair share of work with fifty-odd acres. What kinds of crops did your grandfather grow there?

JR: Peaches, pears, he was really noted for his pears in that area, plums, apricots, figs, grapes, on the hillside, I think there’s a picture of the water tower that he built, and the well, you know, of that picture, I don’t know if I can find the picture, yeah, here it is, it’s from… April 13th, which shows his first house without running water, and the next picture down was the water tank, well, and then the pump, and then above that you can see the vineyards, and this was right where Hillside Terrace is right now, and is eventually our house was right to the right of that picture, the last house he built.

AD: Now, with the water tower, was that for irrigation or for animals, what did he use that for?

JR: Mainly, it was gravity-fed to the house, and that’s how they got running water, and then he started putting irrigation as well, but he did a few wells around the property just to be closer, but this one actually, because it was higher, they actually got running water right down to the house.

AD: Well, it sounds very industrious and clever.

JR: He was extremely clever, they say, and word was, what he got going was, if you didn’t know how to do anything, word around town was, go see Serafino Rossi because he’ll know, because in those days, they didn’t have a lot of plumbers, electricians, and carpenters and everything hanging around Lafayette, there weren’t that many people, so you’d better be able to do everything yourself.

AD: So interesting. Why do you think he came to California?

JR: I think one of his brothers, he had a couple of brothers who came out here, and I think he heard that, number one, there was a lot of territory and land to be had, it wasn’t very, there weren’t that many people around, plus the land and the climate was great for growing, and so he had to of course take the train from Ellis Island or New York or wherever he landed, it’s Ellis Island, I’m sure, and then take the train over, but we had relatives around the Oakland area, so that’s kind of how he got to that area and they heard it was pretty nice.

AD: And then your father grew up on that farm?

JR: Yes. All three of the boys, Uncle Frank, let’s see, was born about 1916, Uncle Serafino about 1918, Angelo, my dad, about 1920.

AD: When all three of the children attended various schools here and Angelo graduated from Acalanes in 1941, and then was drafted into the 27th Infantry Division in World War II, and then he came back after the war?

JR: Yes, as soon as it was over, you know, they went to Lafayette Grammar School, first off, and my grandmother didn’t start the kids until they were a little older, and we don’t really know why that was, and perhaps it was because she wanted to make sure they knew English better. When they were first born, their writing was all Italian, and then they said, “Well, we gotta get you to learn English.” Both my grandparents were, they knew enough English to get along in… to become citizens and everything, but it was very broken English, and a lot of words in there interjected with Italian so it was pretty tough on the kids, and not much different from today’s Mexican Americans, when they came over and they talk in the language and anybody else, whether it be German or any of the minorities came over they always speak in their native language first, so they started a little late and once they started going to high school it had to be Mount Diablo because that was the only one around so they took the train to get there, I think it was the Northern-Southern or Southern-Northern (Sacramento Northern) or whatever it was, came in through Lafayette, and then Acalanes, which we just mentioned, was built in 1940 so he started school then, and then that first graduating class was ’41, so going back to what you just asked me, he was welding, my dad was welding in the shipyard, and he got called into action and drafted.

AD: It’s not the shipyard down in Richmond?

JR: It’s either Richmond or Martinez or something, I think it was Richmond, so anyway he had to go into the Army, and my other two uncles got differed, one for farming and the other for flat feet, I guess that was a big deal then.

AD: Well, Angelo, your father sounds as though he was a bit of a war hero.

JR: Yes, and the first thing is Saipan was the one he was on, and the Invasion of Okinawa, he got wounded in both of them, and as a matter of fact I made a little note, that I sent the letter and one of the pictures, if you got a letter and your son was in the war, that was a good thing, that means he was still alive, and if they drove up to your house in a vehicle, that was a bad thing, so if you got the letters, that means that we was wounded, which he was, so there was two letters that my grandfather and grandmother received…

AD: And he received a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

JR: Yes.

AD: That’s amazing.

JR: He was a staff sergeant, and like he said, in those days, once you were a private and you were still alive, you went up the ranks pretty quick, if you had anything on the ball, though he became staff sergeant and he had a machine gun patrol of five guys, including himself.

AD: I was just looking at your mother and wondering how they met and what that… they were together 56 years in the house?

JR: Yeah, they met in Oakland in I think Sweets Ballroom, which was a big dancehall I guess, and every kid around would, and by kid I mean teenagers that could drive, would go down to Sweets, and they met, and then unfortunately my grandmother washed his shirt and washed the phone number from my mom with it, so he never saw her again for about a year, and then they touched base again, I think they were out of… Frank Sinatra might have played there or something like that, and they met again, and I’m sure she gave him hell when he explained to her what happened, because you know they didn’t have any way of communicating very well. So anyway, they met and right afterward, of course, he got shipped out, so they communicated whatever they could through the mail, and he made it out of the war, came back, started working for her father, my grandfather, Antonio Buttaro, on the market in San Leandro-Oakland, and he was working for them and then at the time, that was about 1945, then they got married of course right away, built a house in Ashland, at the time, this is prior to the Lafayette, and then my two uncles started the furniture business in the barn, that barn that’s in that picture, and then when my grandfather started subdividing, selling off all the property, he ended up buying a few lots in Lafayette and he built two cinderblock buildings, one he gave the eventual Rossi brothers have their business, and the other which was just down the street, as a matter of fact he sold that in 2019 and that was, Diablo Auto Parts was in there, Napa Auto parts for thirty years or so. We just sold that building, or I did, and my two cousins were also a third owner, Frank’s daughter and Serafino’s daughter, so they asked him basically to come and work with them, which he said yeah, and they had already earmarked a lot which he started building in around 1949-1950, and I was born in 1949 so I guess I was a little over one year old when we moved to the Reliez Valley address on Angelo Street right around 1950-1951, and the shop, basically what they did is they, and this was, they stopped making furniture early on right off the bat because that wasn’t cost effective, you can work like crazy for a month on a project, you wouldn’t get much money but what was lucrative was we were finishing, we were repairing furniture and antiques, so the business really became not a furniture selling shop, but a finishing or repair shop, and that’s what it stayed until 1977-78.

AD: Now is that the one that was on Mt. Diablo Blvd. near the Park Hotel?

JR: Right next to Sun Valley Lumber and then Park Hotel bought that whole area there and it was right next to, well, the building’s still there, and that’s where I worked on my summer job a lot of the time sanding furniture and going out on deliveries with my uncle because he didn’t want to lift everything by himself, so…

AD: What are some of the family memories of Lafayette, what it used to be like?

JR: Pretty sparse. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in Lafayette, especially for three teenage boys, so as soon as one got their license, and that was close to around the time they installed the tunnels, 1936, so you figure Frank, he was probably nineteen, twenty years old, and two years, two years, two years, so they started going to movies and things like that. They didn’t really do a hell of a lot in Lafayette to be honest with you.

AD: You had mentioned that the horses were working horses, was there any interest in riding horses in town?

JR: No, they were farm animals and they were so tired from working on the farm at the time because my grandfather never let him go out for sports unless it was a stand-alone type of sport like track and field and stuff like that, no team sports because that would take up too much time, and they could always run so they were all runners, and good too, very good, because they’re all tall, they’re all 6’2’’ and 150 to 175 pounds so they’re very athletic and my dad, finally he let them, his senior year at Acalanes, he let them go out for football, the only problem is they found out he just turned 19, so in those days if you were in high school and 19 you couldn’t play, so it ended up he couldn’t play football. It hurt him really bad, because Norman Van Brocklin was from Acalanes as well.

AD: Now how about you, when you were growing up, did you have siblings?

JR: No. I’m the only child.

AD: Okay. What are your memories of Lafayette?

JR: Well, the memories of Lafayette are… before Highway 24 came in, which was 1956, we used to go into LaRosa’s Market, this was kind of smack dab, almost in the middle where the freeway was there, the first one, and you’d go in there and you’d go into town, I can’t remember if it was Luis’ market or La Fiesta Meats in La Fiesta Square was there and La Fiesta was where they used to shop all the time, La Fiesta Market, which is kind of where, let’s see, well you know where Lafayette Square is? And where you turn in, there’s a restaurant, there’s a little pizza place now on the corner there, that whole bank of new stores, that was kinda La Fiesta Foods, not a big market, small market. My memories were going down to the drug store on the corner which Lafayette Pharmacy and they added a fountain, it’s now Starbucks, and of course that was a hot spot for me to go to and the kids because you could go and get your Cherry Coke and a grilled cheese sandwich and it was probably a quarter back then, and then go back home, but it was really the only, other than the homes that were starting to be built all over, and then it stated to grow right in the ‘50s there and basically it started growing after they put the freeway in in ’56 because every professional person wanted their kids to be raised out in the country, not the city, so they all started coming out to Lafayette, Walnut Creek, Moraga, Orinda, and Lafayette is a pretty sleepy little town.

AD: So you were a teenager in the ‘60s, I guess.

JR: Yes.

AD: And do you remember the Park Theatre?

JR: Yes I do, and that was around early on because the matinees on Saturday were great, I mean there was always like three shows, and all the kids I went to school with were all there, and that was a big deal back then, “Hey, we’re gonna go and see Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” or whatever it was, and then there were two or three others as well. It was nice, and the theater was good, I mean we ended up going to the Park Theater all the way through high school, but then the new Rheem was built, it was always the Orinda, Lafayette and El Rey in Walnut Creek were the ones we visited until the Rheem went in, and then that was the big deal because they had seats that rocked.

AD: Now, when you look back on your family history, do you have any inkling to garden or farm?

JR: Not farming, but garden, I still like to plant herbs and vegetables, my wife does most of the gardening, she likes to get her flowers going and everything, my grandmother, around the houses, my grandmother was the one who really liked to put flowers in, and she was pretty good at it, her houses were an abundance of flowers, you know, annuals or whatever you call them, and her herb garden was huge, it was probably about at least like a couple of hundred square feet, and she had carrots and all the little stuff there, basil, of course, rosemary, and anything they used in her cooking and it grew, nowadays you can’t get a basil to grow worth a darn, but in those days it was like a bush, so yeah, she did all that stuff.

AD: Is that Mary you were talking about?

JR: Yes, and since is was real close to our house too, I would go up all the time and get the vegetables, because my grandfather kept, when they sold everything else, he kept four acres up on Hillside Terrace there, which was just up from Reliez Valley, and there’s houses still there, not sure who owns it now but when you go up Hillside it’s the first turnoff to the right and his vegetable garden is straight ahead to the right where there’s a big house there now, so the people they bought it from, my dada and his brothers when they sold it, subdivided it all up and got four lots out of it, so they sold them off and destroyed the properties. It was nice, we had… every Friday my dad and brothers used to drive up there on the way home, and my grandmother used to give them a box or a bag full of fresh vegetables, fruit, and a tourine of minestrone soup that she always made on Friday.

AD: Wow, that’s delicious!

JR: Oh, it was, and every Friday they did that, and everything was so close, you know, it didn’t take much time, but she had it all wrapped and packaged and ready to go, so that continued all the way through there. I used to be able to go up to my grandfather’s house and he taught me how to shoot his rifles and everything and I was able to go… you know where Silverdell is? I was able to walk over there and shoot the guns freely, and I was only about 8 or 9 years old at the time but it was a little different back then, there wasn’t any houses past La Caminita, and then there was a big hill… now, my grandfather was going to buy property, there was about 15-20 acres in Silverdell before it was Silverdell, but my grandmother wouldn’t let him.

AD: Why is that?

JR: She told him, “You have enough property. All you’re gonna do is work more”, so he didn’t, and it was kinda swampy in there at the time, so he didn’t buy it, he took his wife’s advice and he didn’t buy it, but kind of jumping around here, getting back, when he sold his property, subdivided it, he also bought a couple pieces of property, one on Danville, and a couple in Oakland, and as a matter of fact, he sold one to Bill’s Drugs, no, Bill’s Drugs was in Lafayette, there was another big chain drug store at the time, I can’t remember the name of it…

AD: Again, he was pretty entrepreneurial, getting in on the good prices.

JR: When he went to sell his property, my grandfather was not known for dressing the part, a pair of overalls and an old cappello, or hat, as you might know it, he walked into this meeting with that on and one of his old coats, and there was a board of directors on one side, him on the other, so he has this little notepad, a price on it for the property, and I don’t know what the price was but he handed it to the lawyer or whoever, and the guy looked over at him and he goes, “Is this all you want?”, he said, “That’s what I want” and they guy looked at him right away and he says, “Write him a damn check.” My grandfather only knew that was how much he wanted, he didn’t really care about anything else, and he was very happy because it was certainly a profit, but that’s the way he was, very simple, this is what I want, you pay that, everybody’s happy. There wasn’t a lot of negotiations going on but that’s kind of how he did his business. Eventually, he sold all his pieces of property, and he kind of kept the money going, since he didn’t have ranch work or anything, so it made sense, I wish my dad and his brothers did stuff like that but they didn’t.

AD: How long did, do you remember some of the dates when your family members passed away, your grandparents and…

JR: My grandmother was really the first to go, and she passed away right around 1974, the beginning of ’74, could have been even the late part of ’73, and then my grandfather, he stayed alive ‘till around… let’s see, he went to our wedding so that was ’75, so I think he made it to right around ’76, ’77, and… you know, he didn’t have any business being in a house, as far as cooking or cleaning or doing anything, so they rented the house and the flatbed truck, which was the furniture truck, housed his chair and every two weeks they’d drive it to another brother’s house where he stayed, so he stayed on for a couple of weeks, and he paid everybody and everything like that, but his chair had to go with him.

AC: “Where is the chair?”

JR: Who knows? It was pretty old and probably decrepit, but nobody kept…

AC: Are there any other stories you were hoping to tell today?

JR: Well, I was kind of finding seeing how it would go from here but I kind of covered quite a bit of it, I think, and maybe straightened out a few things but once Lafayette started going, it wasn’t as exciting for the old pictures that I had or anything like that. The funniest one that was told around the dinner table way back when is that because they had to watch their water, true of all ranches and farms, whether it’s irrigation or anything, they only bathed in Saturday night, and it sounds pretty gross but that’s just the way it was, and my dad was always pissed off because he got the water that my two uncles bathed in before he went in. They didn’t change the water every time they bathed, and that’s why—and I told this in one of the stories—that’s why all those pictures of families were always on Sunday, because, and not only our family, but all of them, they were all clean then. You just didn’t waste stuff.

AC: Exactly.

JR: Nobody had big lawns or things like that back in the old days.

AC: Right. What do you think about the future of Lafayette, and since you have this incredible perspective of its history?

JR: I’m extremely disappointed at Lafayette and the people who are running it because they never allowed and thought of expansion, a lot of them said, “Oh, let’s just leave it the way it is.” So, you know now, the biggest problem is Moraga Road, people get off work and a lot of them have to get off the freeway and got out Moraga Road and there’s a big congestion right there. They never thought past what would happen when more and more people came in, because they come from Moraga and everything, but surely they can go out Orinda and got out to Moraga as well, but they didn’t really think of the infrastructure of Lafayette very well in my opinion. As you notice, going down to Lafayette can be pretty damn crowded right now and…

AC: What do you think of all those apartment buildings going up everywhere?

JR: I think they’re crazy because here again, money’s talking right now unfortunately, and all the apartments are going in there, that means more people, more cars, more everything, so I guess it brings more tax dollars and everything else for the city, but there’s got to be an end to it because right now its getting overdeveloped in my opinion, and when I go down that way, I pretty much stay away from Lafayette, it’s just not… I can’t relate to it anymore, really, ‘course I was there when there was not much around there.

AC: Okay, that’s fair. You know, from your perspective and how long you’ve been here, how long your family’s been in here…

JR: Well it’s going over to be money instead of values and things like that and that’s why I say, it’s sad to see the old businesses go one by one, and then they just put in big complexes, tons of more people and more cars…

AC: Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts today and your memories, and you’ve been a great help in supporting Lafayette.