Sorry, I can’t tell you why Frank Scarito is dressed as a cowboy in this picture, but I sure love the outfit. The photograph comes from the North End Neighborhood collection at the Portsmouth Athenaeum. That’s a precious local archive containing hundreds of digitized images.
SEE: Tom Mix, cowboy hero, comes to town
Long-time locals still have deep feelings for the urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 70s that impacted the city, north and south. “Your articles stirred up tremendous emotion, I have to tell you,” one former North End family member responded. “[It] absolutely grabbed my heart and squeezed!”
Sorting through hundreds of images from North End family scrapbooks, this shot of Frank Scarito (1903-1974) jumped out. We may never know the occasion, but movie cowboys were boxoffice gold prior to World War II. It sure works as a Halloween warm-up.
Here’s what the Athenaeum archive has to say: “Emigrating from Italy in 1921, Frank lived on Hanover and then Hill Street. He ran a business called the Roma Cafe, which through the years also moved about the North End including Market Street and finally at Vaughan Street in a storefront ell of the historic Meserve-Webster House (now gone). His marriage to his first wife, Rose Busceme, was an arranged marriage. They had four children.”
The collection includes two formal photos of the couple from their wedding and another image of the bride standing alone holding a rose. Rose (1908-1932) died tragically young, according to our records. She named her four children Mary, Josephine, Frank, and Salvatore (after her father Salvatore Busceme). A fifth family image from the collection includes Frank’s brother Rosario, who also arrived here from Italy in 1921.
SEE ALSO: North End Reunion
(c) J. Dennis Robinson, SeacoastHistory.com
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