By Pam Hersh
Thirty-five years ago this week, I met the then-37-year-old Frank Porcaro, renowned Princeton tailor and gardener of Carnahan Place. As a novice or “green” reporter for The Princeton Packet, I was assigned to do a green feature story describing his Jolly Green Giant vegetable garden. Frank, who emigrated from Benevento, Italy, in 1971, had transformed the backyard of his modest suburban Princeton home into a sublime agricultural villa.
I now can report that 72-year-old Frank recently accomplished another transformation. Last Wednesday evening, as I walked past his house, he invited me into his home and backyard. It took only five minutes for me to be transported from the stressed life of a grumpy, little, old lady to the wonderful life of a still little and old, but-young at heart, lady.
Former Princeton Township Mayor Phyllis Marchand, dubbed “Mama Mayor” by Frank, suggested for the past few years that I needed to do a Loose Ends column featuring Frank. She thought I should focus particularly on his weekly Friday “lunch fetes” for dozens of his close — and not so close — friends, which include a variety of government officials, police officers, and the doctors at the hospital.
I could see no point, however, in writing about a man who may hold the record for Princeton’s most media-celebrated citizen. Hanging on the walls of his house are at least a dozen newspaper articles, including the full-page Packet Lifestyle article that Pam Hersh wrote. Reporters and feature writers have gravitated to him like sauce to pasta. He is celebrated for his vegetables, his flowers, his chickens, his ducks, his tailoring, his heritage from Benevento, Italy, his tight-knit Italian immigrant community, and his Friday lunches of pasta e fagioli with sausage and peppers. Certain physicians were upset about the hospital moving out of Princeton, for no other reason than they were losing convenient access to Frank’s Friday lunch. The former site of Princeton hospital was a block from Frank’s house; now the hospital is three miles away.
”What’s the point of doing a story,” I said to Phyllis. “There is nothing left to say.”
After sitting in his kitchen for more than an hour the other night, I concluded that I did have one thing left to say. The ingredient that makes his coffee so perfecto, his tomato sauce so mouthwatering, his pasta e fagioli so memorable, has little to do with his coffee beans, his 140 tomato plants or anything else in his spectacular garden. It has everything to do with the genuine warmth and welcoming manner that define Frank and the members of his family, who sprinkle the friendly joy generously into all their interactions with friends, neighbors, family members, and random acquaintances walking past his home.
In addition to Frank, I chatted with his 31-year-old son Gerry, accomplished musician (piano and harp) and music teacher; his 29-year-old daughter Rita, a cartoonist and restaurant manager (PJ’s in West Windsor); his wife Palma, now retired from her career as retail store manager (for many years at Kresge’s in the Princeton Shopping Center and then at Conte’s Pizza, when it was owned by her uncle Lui Lucullo); sister-in-law Amelia Conte; and Rosa (wife of Giuseppe) Boccanfuso, who lives around the corner from Frank.
The first time I met Frank, he talked vegetables, flowers, how he was able to immigrate to America, thanks to his brother Luigi, and how at St. Paul’s Church he met his wife, an immigrant from Ischia, Italy. This time, however, he was less interested in talking about the garden and more interested in talking about the accomplishments of his four kids.
Frank asked me to make Gerry “a star,” even though from what I have seen, the Westminster Choir College graduate already is somewhat of a celebrity in Princeton’s music world with performances at a variety of elegant events, the most recent one being a fundraiser for Housing Initiatives of Princeton. His two daughters who were not at the table “are very, very talented,” said Frank. Maria, who graduated from Pace University, is working in New York as a band manager, and Christina, working in Hillsborough as a hair stylist, is mother of his only granddaughter, now 20 years old. Rita has her mother’s retail managerial skills, but also dreams of pursuing an artistic career as a cartoonist.
Rosa came by to deliver a bottle of her homemade wine from grapes grown in her backyard. “Why grow wisteria, when you can grow grapes,” said Gerry who, in spite of his joking about growing flowers, adores his flower garden with the same passion he devotes to his music.
The five of them bantered back and forth and lapsed into Italian in the same way my parents would lapse into Yiddish. The difference was that my parents spoke Yiddish when they wanted to hide something from me. Frank spoke Italian just because it was easier for him to be enthusiastic and passionate when conversing in his native language.
”I have a little slice of Benevento right here in Princeton… And I love sharing it,” he said. According to the tour books, Benevento is one of Italy’s “hidden treasures” and is “intoxicating.” Those same words can describe the Porcaro Villa on Via Carnahan, whose residents convey the richness and beauty of a country populated by immigrants.
