My Favorite Little Grocery Store By Stella Faria My hometown of Pinole was famous for having a motorcycle cop named Officer Buck, who parked daily in the shade of a tree on Tennent Avenue about 100 feet from San Pablo Avenue, which at the time was old Highway 40. Officer Buck was ruthless when it came to writing tickets for speeding, and his reputation traveled far. Another popular description of Pinole was that there was a bar or saloon on every corner. That was the case in the late 1890s and early 1900s, but as the city’s population grew, grocery stores took over some of the corner locations. At the east end of town, Bill Lewis had a grocery store on the southeast corner of San Pablo Avenue and Pinole Valley Road. In the next block, next to Pinole Creek, was the T.W. Woy grocery and bakery. In midtown, on the corner of San Pablo and Fernandez avenues, was the store owned by Louis Ruff. On the northeast corner of San Pablo and Tennent, in a brick building (now occupied by Tina’s Place), sat the grocery store that played a big part in my family’s life. When my parents came to Pinole in 1925, they were immediately introduced to the Barroca and Pontes grocery store. The proprietors were Antonio Pontes, the original owner, and his partner, Antonio Barroca, both natives of Portugal. That made it very convenient for my mother, who did not speak any English at the time. Mr. Pontes had started the business when he arrived in Pinole in 1910, and he may have at first worked on a small scale in the basement of the John Bispo home on Quinan Street, where he was a boarder. Mr. Barroca joined him as a partner a few years later. He was from Ilhavo, Portugal, and had been a fisherman as a young man. It was just a coincidence that Mr. Pontes came from the same village as my mother, Ligares, in northern Portugal close to the Spanish border. Mr. Pontes had a brother, Carlos, who lived with his family in Newcastle, and farmed fruit orchards. He was to become an interesting link in this story. The store owned a little pickup truck, and Mr. Barroca made the rounds in Pinole and Hercules in the morning, taking grocery orders from the stay-at-home mothers of that era. He would return in the afternoon with filled orders, along with a tag indicating the amount charged to that family’s account. The tags were placed in a storage locker and added up when the patron came to pay the bill, usually when cashing their paychecks. The owners were very generous and understanding and were known to extend credit if needed. Barroca and Pontes was a typical small-town grocery store with a little bit of everything, but Antonio Barroca Sr., and John Bispo boarding up the front windows of the store, broken during the 1944 Hercules Powder Company explosion.
Contra Costa Marketplace - Oct 2015
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