LAWRENCE, Mass. — October 3, 2014 — Business started by Sicilian immigrant rolled with industry changes.
To see how the fishing industry has changed since Tom Pappalardo began working at his family’s seafood store on Hampshire Street in 1964, pull almost anything from one of his refrigerated showcases and read the fine print.
Or his wife, Mary Pappalardo-Raymond, will do it for you.
“Product of Indonesia,” she said Thursday, reading from a label of a frozen, shrink-wrapped snapper, probably caught in the South China Sea or the Indian Ocean by a factory ship months ago.
She reads on: Cod from Iceland. Kingfish from Taiwan. Shrimp from Thailand and Vietnam. Conch from Nicaragua. Calamari from China. Salmon from Chile. Mussels from Canada.
The shift to suppliers operating factory fishing boats and coastal fish farms in other hemispheres is just one of the changes the couple has weathered in the half century since Tom Pappalardo, fresh out of high school, first drove to the Boston wharves to pick up catch for the store. Virtually all of it was caught in New England waters by local fishermen a day or two before.
He’d toss the haul onto the flatbed of a family pickup and shovel ice over it for the drive back to Lawrence, something the sea of health code regulations passed in the five decades since then no longer allow. Back at the store, the family would scale and filet the fish, which now arrives mostly boxed, frozen, prepared and ready for the showcases.
Bigger changes followed: Americans eat out much more, including at national chains like Legal Sea Food and Red Lobster. And tastes and preferences shift quickly in churning immigrant cities like Lawrence, where the Pappalardos now sell almost none of the sole or flounder that once flew out the door, but can hardly meet the demand for deep-fried shrimp and crab empanadas. They sell up to 700 a week, every one made in the store, to serve a clientele that they estimate is 90 percent Latino, up from 0 percent in the 1960s.
Read the full story from the Gloucester Daily Times