Author: June Morrall

But the Depression didn’t stop Rina and Italo Pacini from having good times. On Sunday nights their friends congregated at a ranch house belonging to Dante Dianda and John Patroni. “There was no television, no radio. We made our own music and danced,” Rina said. At other times they went to a saloon in Moss Beach to dance.

Tragedy struck Miramar when the hot-tempered Pete Gianni was arrested for the murder of a tenant. He spent the remainder of his days at San Quentin Prison.

The “old” Coastside that Rina Pacini knew where “everybody talked Italian” was a place vastly different from today. “My husband and I used to farm lots in El Granada,” she recalled, “and we never felt we needed to ask permission to do so.”

When they were newlyweds, “everybody said we wouldn’t make it because Italo was 15 years older,” Rina said. [As of the early 1990s] they had been together for 58 years.

Ruddy cheeked Italo, who wore a maroon wool sweater and hat while working in the garden behind my house in El Granada every day, was planning to plant beans in the garden when he died at age 93.

Rina remembered that “the artichokes were really beautiful then, not like they are nowadays. The ground was virgin,” she explained. “It was beautiful. You didn’t have to spray. My father never sprayed. We used horse manure, no tractors, just four horses with a plow on the back.”

Trucks picked up the artichokes that were shipped from San Francisco by train to the East Coast. Sometimes when the “chokes” reached New York, the Pacinis were told they had spoiled and the farmers were forced to foot the freight bill. The Pacinis had a tough time making ends meet.

Rina said in 1932, one of the worst years during the Depression, it snowed on the Coastside, and the chokes rotted. One year they “had $1000 in sales but were $9000 in debt. People today don’t realize how bad things were.”

…to be continued…

 

Rina’s father set up a vegetable stand half-a-mile north of Half Moon Bay on the “Lopes Ranch.” As a teenager, Rina often worked there. Her future husband “Italo used to stop and visit. One time he gave me a ride. I was walking to Half Moon Bay with a heavy pack filled with clothes I was going to send to my grandmother in Italy.” After that Italo stopped by the vegetable stand regularly.

When they wed in 1931, the “padrone” John Patroni loaned his Cadillac car to the happy couple. Italo ‘s brother, Egisto, who later owned gas stations in Moss Beach and Princeton, drove them to Half Moon Bay–in style–for the wedding ceremony held in the “little” [by little, she meant the old, now gone] Catholic Church.

At their first home in Princeton, Rina and Italo farmed 75-acres in artichokes and sprouts. They rented the land from the Danieri brothers, who lived in what is today the San Benito House on Main Street. Two or three men worked for the Pacinis; Rina did the cooking.

….to be continued…

At Pete Gianni’s saloon, Rina’s mother met her father. They married and moved to a farm in Princeton across the way from the airport. Rina was born there in 1911.

“We were poor farmers; we never owned any land,” Rina said. Her family later moved to another house near Denniston Creek.

Diversions were few in those days. Even riding the Ocean Shore Railroad to San Francisco for entertainment was expensive. Friends and family gathered in Princeton “to play the accordion and they used a tub to play the drums. When they made red wine, they made gallons of it.”

Rina fondly recalls the “sour bread” her uncle made–and the delicious focaccia. “They put raisins in it God it was good!”

…to be continued…

has long been a popular bakery & a place to buy all kinds of things including fine wines, cooking utensils and flowers. On Main Street–but don’t look for anything that resembles the old photo above!

(Photo Italo and Rina Pacini)

Before 1941 and for a time thereafter Dianda and John Patroni were called “the padrones or the “bosses.” Patroni owned the Patroni House in Princeton near the present site of the Half Moon Bay Brewery Co.

“He [Patroni] and Dianda owned most of the property” in El Granada and Princeton,” said Rina.

In 1910 Rina’s mother came from Italy to work as a cook in Miramar for Pete and Iacopina Gianni, who ran a lively saloon where “all the Italians went dancing.” The building with a false front and bedrooms in the back is a private residence today.

“Pete Gianni’s wife was my mother’s paisano,” explained Rina. Iacopina and Rina’s mother had lived in the same Italian village, bonding their friendship.

“My mother was 18,” Pacini said. She was short, 4’11”, and as a child was called “the little blondina. She was poor. She lived up in the hills where they had cobblestone streets.”

Rina found it ironic that tourists now find her mother’s Italian village picturesque. Her mother was anxious to escape to America in the early 1900s.

…to be continued…

(Photo courtesy UCSC Map Room)

Note: I wrote this story in the early 1990s.

It was the 1940s, the beginning of World War II and the army was building a several million dollar airstrip at Princeton. When Rina and Italo Pacini received the official notice to vacate their condemned two-bedroom rented house nearby, they did not take it seriously.

“Italo was from the ‘Old Country,’ explained Rina, “and as old-fashioned people we didn’t believe we would really have to move.”

The first notice had given the farming family a comfortable three months but they were taken by surprise when the three-day order to vacate arrived in the mail. “We had to get out because they needed our site for the new airport,” Rina said.

Although they didn’t have much time to pack their personal belongings, gather the tools and round-up the horses, the Pacinis would hardly miss the old house that once stood behind the Princeton Inn.

“The water came in when it rained and the wallpaper buckled when the wind blew,” she recalled matter-of-factly. Skunks were serious pests and sometimes they died beneath the house.

“One times friends came a rat was rotting between the walls. My husband said, “Thank God, it’s not a cow!”

…to be continued…