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Hi everyone! This week I’m republishing My Family’s Produce Story in honor of my grandfather, Mike Barranti, who recently passed away. Seeing the Barranti family story published online made him extremely happy; he loved telling us all about the produce stand, his dad’s produce truck, and Cici Sam, the Champion Banana King of San Jose. Miss you, G’Pa!
This story was originally published on November 25, 2021, so you’ll see a few references to Thanksgiving of that year.
Introduction
It’s Thanksgiving! I’d like to do something a little different this week, and I think I can get away with it. I mean, its Thanksgiving Day! The turkey is in the oven (if it fits – yes, I do have a funny story about this), the sides are prepped, and the whole family is together. So it’s only fitting that this week I’m going to share the Barranti produce story.
As my grandmother recently told me, what I write about here on The Produce Pack is in my blood.
I might be from the heart of Silicon Valley, and have a “fancy tech job,” but that’s not where my roots are. Long before the Bay Area became famous for dot-coms, social media companies, and Apple, it was known as the Valley of the Heart’s Delight. The town I grew up in was famous for its cherries and peaches, and the Libby’s packing plant. The old water tower was decorated to look like a can of Libby’s fruit cocktail, which still makes me smile when I see it every once in a while.
The Barranti Produce Story
My great-great-grandfather, Ignatius Barranti, was born in Sicily in the late 1800s. When he came to the United States, he worked on the New York docks to make enough money to bring his family over from Sicily to America. Once the entire family was here, he made his way to San Jose, California, where he started selling produce by going door-to-door in all the different neighborhoods. He started with a cart full of bananas.
Ignatius had nine children and four of the boys continued the tradition of selling produce. My grandfather, Mike (I call him G’pa), is very fond of telling the story of Cici* Sam, who sold bananas wholesale and became the biggest dealer in San Jose. When he started, he purchased the bananas in large, heavy bunches, just as they grow on the trees, including the tarantulas. Later, the exporters shipped bananas in cardboard boxes, much like how we see them in the supermarkets today. Cici Sam became known as the Champion Banana King of San Jose (that’s quite the title, no?). Cici Naish was a wholesale produce seller, supplying all kinds of stores and restaurants in the San Jose area. Ignatius’s youngest son, Frank, only dealt in produce on and off.
My great grandfather, Mike (I’ll refer to him as Grandpa Barranti, ’cause there are a lot of Mikes to keep straight), started selling produce house to house in his truck. He is the one pictured above. Later, he upgraded this truck to a state-of-the-art bus with a sprinkler system that kept the produce fresh as he was driving around the different San Jose area neighborhoods. Later he began selling wholesale produce to restaurants and stores, and he ran his own produce stands.
My great grandmother, Mama Rose, was one of nine children. Her father, Ignatius Piazza, owned a tavern in San Jose and also bought prunes from the local orchards to sell wholesale. He was very strict, and each family member had to work until dark picking prunes. When Rose met Grandpa Barranti, she went against the family’s tradition of waiting for the oldest sister to get married first. The story I have been told is that she climbed down a rose trellis and ran away with my great grandfather to get married.
My grandfather (G’pa) started selling produce after graduating high school when he was sixteen. Together with his father, they would bring in fresh produce and set up the display tables at the family fruit stand. Frontier Fruit Stand was on a busy street in San Jose and was very successful selling fresh produce from the wholesalers, as well as directly from the farmers. G’pa created the advertising and signs to bring customers in. After working at the fruit stand for five years, he met his first wife, my grandmother, Betty. They had two sons, Jeff (my uncle) and Brad (my father).
The fruit stand required long hours (it was open every day), so after G’pa started his family, decided to find employment elsewhere for insurance and better hours. After he shut down the fruit stand, he worked for Westinghouse, Fairchild, and Synertek (a Honeywell subsidiary). In some ways, you could say he was the first in my family to work “in tech.” Both my dad and my uncle have worked in the tech industry in one way or another. My dad worked for Maxim Integrated Products (a semiconductor company, for those who don’t recognize the name, or think of a certain magazine) for about twenty-five years as an equipment engineer. He now works as an equipment engineer at a biotech firm.
As for me, you can read more on my about page.
So there you have it, the story of the Barranti family. Big thanks to G’pa and G’ma for sharing much of this story!
*According to G’pa, cici is Italian for “uncle.” Now, I can neither confirm nor deny this (my family never passed on the language to the younger generations). Google Translate seems to disagree with him and says that zio is “uncle,” and a number of other sources agree with Google. However, I can 100% believe that cici is either a local Sicilian dialect, or a diminutive version of zio. If there are any Sicilians out there reading this, is my theory right? Is this a local term of endearment? Please let me know!
