The voice is from another time, with memories of another place. The man on the videotape, Angelo Formosa Sr., is remembering his childhood in Sicily eight decades earlier. The tape itself is 15 years old. Formosa has been gone almost that long. But the tape remains a living chronicle, literally and figuratively, of where his family came from and where they went.
On the tape, made by Formosa’s grandson, Angelo III, the old man describes his birthplace, the coastal village of Trabia. He talks of his family’s farm, which stretched right down to the Mediterranean. He recalls quarrying the volcanic stone on their property and hauling it in a wagon to sell. “That’s where I learned to work,” he says proudly, in English still heavily accented. “I worked like hell.”
He talks of the olives, lemons, and peaches on the farm. He remembers trading peaches for fish still flapping in fishermen’s boats. He describes carrying fruit to Palermo in an open wagon, traveling through the night, often in convoys to deter bandits.
He explains on the videotape how his parents told him, after the outbreak of World War I, that they were sending him to America, alone, at the age of 16. “I didn’t want to come,” remembers Formosa, whose thick black curls from early photos had disappeared from atop his head and turned bright white on the sides. “My daddy needed me to work. But my brother Dominic had already been called [to the army]. They were gonna call my class of 1898.”
He remembers leaving Trabia on the train: “I never saw my father again.” In Palermo, he boarded a steamship, the Dante Alighieri, with a third-class ticket. “They put me downstairs with 500 boxes of Messina lemons,” he says, laughing. The family still has the ticket and the form, dated April 17, 1915, certifying he passed a health inspection at Ellis Island.
The old man’s stories are part of the family lore that has been passed down to a fifth generation of Formosas in Nashville. The wholesale produce business that Angelo Formosa started has been carried on by his son and grandson. At Angelo Formosa Fruits & Vegetables, a bustling warehouse at Fourth Avenue North and Monroe Street in Germantown, Angelo Formosa Jr. retells some of the family stories as he sits in a dimly lit office filled with old photographs.
Angelo Jr. is mostly retired; Angelo III oversees the operation six days a week. But the elder Formosa still comes in often, and the men still address him as “Boss.” Unlike his father, he speaks in the accent of a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner.
The family business has always been populated by Angelos, explains Angelo Jr. “There’s my great-uncle Angelo; my dad, who was also Angelo; there’s me; and then Angelo III. Uncle Angelo came over first, around 1888. They called him ‘Cap.’ He settled in Brentwood where the Texaco station is now. They cut Old Hickory Boulevard right through his land.
“By the turn of the century, Uncle Cap was pretty well established. He had his own produce route between Brentwood and Franklin. He came to Nashville because he knew a guy from Trabia who had come here, and he stayed with him at first.
“For-MU-sa was our original name. Uncle Cap married a lady here named Marinara—an old Italian name. She was quite a society lady, and she thought Formusa sounded too guttural. They changed it to Formosa. So when my daddy came, he went by Formosa too.
“His two brothers had already been taken by the Italian army. His parents told him, ‘You’re going to America to stay with your uncle until the war is over.’ Uncle Cap helped Dad get started in the produce business. Dad had enough money to buy a wagon and a bunch of bananas. He didn’t have enough to buy a horse, so he pulled the wagon himself with the 100-pound bunch of bananas. He was strong,” Angelo Jr. laughs. “He lived on Second Avenue, where the Sheriff’s Office is now, and he pulled that wagon up to the city square, Third and Deaderick.
“He sold that bunch of bananas, and next day he bought two bunches, and the next day he bought three bunches and a box of Messina lemons and some apples and so forth.”
The voice on the tape fills in the story. Angelo Sr. tells his grandson how he expanded beyond his spot on the square by calling on soda fountains downtown and selling them lemons, oranges, and bananas. He’d bring the fruit in a bowl. If they purchased from him, the bowl was free.
Eventually, he accumulated enough money to buy a horse. “When he bought that horse,” says Angelo Jr., “there was no stopping him.”
With a horse and wagon, Formosa developed a produce route that carried him to East Nashville, North Nashville, and back downtown. He’d call on customers six days a week, filling orders on the spot. “I used to sing right there on the street,” says the old man on the tape. “People would hear me coming and go check what they needed.” It was a hard life, from 4:30 or 5 in the morning to 7 p.m. some days. At night, he took classes in English, preparing to become a citizen.
On the tape, the elder Formosa describes a Nashville that no longer exists. There are memories of the old neighborhood, where his family shared a street with other immigrants, like the Marchettis on one side and the Yiddish-speaking newcomers from Russia on the other. There are memories of old restaurants like Zanini’s and hotels like the Tulane. And of a cholera epidemic—co-LER-a, as Angelo Sr. pronounces it from the Italian. “I remember coming down Fifth Street toward Broad. They had to put up a rope across the alley, there were so many coffins lined up there. They couldn’t bury them fast enough.”
By the time Angelo Jr. was old enough to be involved in the business, everything was delivered by truck from the Formosa warehouse on Third Avenue, where the Metro Criminal Justice Center now stands. But the workday still started well before sunup and lasted till supper.
“We had every major hotel in town, plus all the best restaurants,” Angelo Jr. recalls. “We would go into their iceboxes and see what they needed. We’d go back out to the truck and fill the orders because we knew what the usage was. We knew on weekends they’d go through, say, 10 cases of lettuce or five bags of potatoes. There was a great deal of trust. The owners all knew us personally and we knew them. Dad would bring them wine he would make. Oh, boy, he could make some awful good wine.”
With each generation, the family has cherished its immigrant roots while moving successively farther from the old immigrant neighborhood—first to a house on Fifth and Gay; then to Grand Avenue near Vanderbilt, where Angelo Jr. remembers walking to Father Ryan High School and the cathedral; then out Hillsboro Road and to West Meade.
And with each generation, technology has changed the scope of the business, though not the early hours and thin profit margins. Still smiling at the memory, Angelo Jr. recalls that his father only grudgingly accepted the idea of filling orders by phone, even though it enabled business to quadruple. “He said, ‘We’ll try it,’ but he didn’t like it. He wanted to go door to door and see people.”
“Angelo [III] has been in charge since I had my open-heart surgery about 12 years ago. He’s built the business a lot more than I was doing, because I had the old ways. I didn’t have computers then. We got salesmen in here, and now we cover Middle Tennessee from Murfreesboro, Clarksville, Bowling Green—a 50- to 100-mile radius.
“About three years ago, I decided to go over [to Sicily]. My dad had told me all about it. I saw the house where he was born, right on the ocean. His brother was still alive, my great-uncle Tony. He was 96 or 97. He had lost an arm in the First World War. His son, Salvatore, paraded me through Trabia—the whole town is maybe half a mile long—to let everybody know I was one of them. Inside the sportsmen’s club were some old guys who had worked for my grandfather. They couldn’t speak English, but they were just tickled to see me. They were drinking their wine, playing cards. I was in like Flynn. Everybody made me feel at home.”
The family videotape makes clear that Angelo Formosa Sr. kept great pride in his homeland. Sicilia, he maintained, produced the “finest peaches in Europe.” He insisted that the huge Messina lemons were unsurpassed. But there is also no doubt where, for him, home ultimately was. He spoke of America in the same reverent way so often that Angelo Jr. recites it like a favorite scripture, down to his father’s accent: “It’s da bessa country in da world.”
