Fishermen, and a Way of Life, Endure in San Pedro

By 6:15 a.m. on a recent Friday, Canetti’s Seafood Grotto in San Pedro was packed with men whose hands show their work history as much as any resume.

Old World San Pedro gathers at Canetti’s, as always, by groups. At one table, the village gossips sit; at another, city employees. Once a month, the firefighters stop by. But most of the action takes place at the center, where a long table is reserved for the fishermen.

It’s easy to spot the fishermen. Their faces are deeply lined and tanned, their fingers calloused and gnarled, hardened by nylon ropes and the sting of sea salt, their nails ragged. At Canetti’s the morning I visited, some of the fishermen had just returned from all-night ocean runs. While their catches were being packed into trucks outside the restaurant bound for canneries and processing plants, they filled up on French toast and pancakes; as the morning progressed, they left to repair nets or go home for a few hours’ sleep.

I stood by the door for a minute, waiting to be seated. I felt conspicuous. Except for the waitress, I was the only woman and the only person under 40 in the place. So I sat down at one of the communal tables, covered in jaunty blue-and-white checked plastic, and introduced myself. To my surprise, they already knew me.

What did it was my name. In the late 1940s and 1950s, my grandfather and my great-uncle fished together out of San Pedro’s harbor on creaky diesel-fueled boats, using nets they crafted and mended by hand. Even now, DiMassa cousins pull the nets and work the docks.

The fishermen remembered my grandfather, Pasquale DiMassa, who was born in Italy and moved to San Pedro in 1945 from New York City. San Pedro had one of the world’s largest commercial fleets back then; fishermen took orders from the many wholesale markets and canneries that lined San Pedro’s wharves and filled them with the sardines, anchovies, barracuda, tuna, swordfish, mackerel and bonito that teemed in California’s waters. Italian Americans in San Pedro had begun sending substantial checks--hundreds of dollars at a time--to relatives in New York who had been barely subsisting.

Pasquale was a regular at Canetti’s from 1949, when Joe Canetti Sr. started the restaurant with his grocer family. Now 70 years old and animated, Canetti still wakes up at 4 a.m. to make “sinkers”--lead-like doughnuts--from scratch before the fishermen arrive. Darting around the restaurant that Friday, he bellowed hellos to customers he knew by name and made shopping lists on small index cards.

Almost 30 years after my grandfather’s death, Canetti can recite the names of boats Pasquale worked on--the Santa Cristina, the Santa Lucia, the Santa Teresa--and remembers my grandfather’s famed lasagna, which was prepared for the Fisherman’s Fiesta, an annual San Pedro event, in the restaurant’s kitchen.

On the morning I visited, Frank Iacono greeted me--and my name--with a smile. Iacono, 72, is one of the regulars at Canetti’s; dressed in a striped blue and green shirt, his face framed by square wire glasses, he sat at the fishermen’s table, critiquing Canetti’s jokes and sharing intelligence about where to find a Catholic Mass in Latin. Iacono remembers the house his brother rented to Pasquale on 10th Street near Cabrillo. He and my grandfather were both purse-seiners, he told me, fishing with nets that reached down into the sea and snapped shut like a woman’s handbag, trapping mostly sardines inside.

Canetti’s is on 22nd Street, across from the old Fishermen’s Wharf, in a warehouse-like building, its presence announced by two neon signs and a stack of wooden piles--covered with nets to resemble a fishing dock--that frame its glass door.

Inside, where 20 tables fill the crowded main room, pale blue walls are lined with fragments of San Pedro’s history: a model of an old schooner, the kind of boat on which Italians first arrived in Los Angeles; black-and-white photos of fishing boats from the 1940s; a framed Los Angeles Times screaming, in a banner headline, “Sub Attacks Southland”; posters admonishing the regulars to buy war bonds; a packing crate from the Catalina Fish Co., headquartered in San Pedro; and a slightly warped chalkboard advertising the breakfast catch of the day--halibut steak served with eggs, hash browns and toast.

I have never lived in San Pedro; I grew up worlds away, in landlocked Pasadena. But this port city perched on the Pacific Ocean is a part of me, of my history. And in the restaurant, memories came flooding back. The smell of the ocean and its bounty, which permeated the fishermen’s clothing, once a symbol of success as palpable as a gold watch or a new car, was a scent of my great-uncle’s kitchen as he cleaned the calamari he had caught the day before, extracting dark ink and then cooking the flesh in a rich tomato sauce.

I recognized the boats that lined the waterfront outside the restaurant--their snarling, spitting hulls rusty, covered with bright pink and yellow buoys and a complicated array of lines and nets; they hadn’t changed much since the 1950s, and they still take their names from the Catholic saints.

There have been changes in San Pedro’s fishing industry since its heyday in the 1950s; the fishermen who once crooned songs and organized festivals to the ocean, all to ensure that the gods would bless their harvest, have come smack up against the realities of the contemporary marketplace.

Stringent catch laws and the mysterious disappearance of the sardines from the waters off California in the mid-1960s diminished the size of their harvests and local canneries moved to Puerto Rico and American Samoa to avoid tightening environmental restrictions and rising labor costs, cutting into profits even further.

In the years that have passed since my grandfather fished here, the size of the fleet has shrunk from 400 boats to fewer than 30. These days, a fisherman’s net-making skills are used more often to make batting cages than fishing gear.

But sitting at Canetti’s, none of these hardships seemed to matter. There is still life in this industry, and by uttering my name, I found a kinship with the fishermen who remain, men still rooted in the world my grandfather cared passionately about.

Now that the fishermen know my name, I’m a regular.