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It’s all gravy: out of the 1900s, marketing comes full circle

When my grandparents traveled from Italy to Boston in the early 1900s, they didn’t speak the local language, and Yelp and Google were decades away. Within this section of Boston, where many Italians settled, they were part of a community that provided each other with mutual support. For example, let’s say my grandmother was making a gravy (for the uninitiated, that is spaghetti sauce), and the pilot on her gas stove wouldn’t ignite. Without that gas flame, there would be no simmering gravy. Those Italian grandmothers felt as though they were placed on this earth for the sole purpose of feeding people, and this would have presented mine with a problem she couldn’t solve on her own. So, she would turn to her trusted community and ask one of her closest friends for a recommendation. All she needed to do was to walk down one flight of stairs onto the busy streets of Boston to find her friends. One of those friends who experienced a similar problem had her stove fixed by someone just blocks away. This person, let’s call him Enrico Pallazzo, had a reputation in this section of Boston for being able to fix any stove. In addition, he was known to be reliable and his fee was reasonable.