There’s a lot of nostalgia lately about Spag’s, the unique retail store that did business in Shrewsbury for more than a half-century. The building that housed it is being demolished.
The man behind this legendary establishment was Anthony Borgatti, nicknamed “Spag” because he liked spaghetti. Italians all know each other, and my family knew Spag. He was born in 1917, and my father was born in 1916. My mother’s sister Edea (Edith) lived down the street from Spag in Shrewsbury, and he waved to her every day as he passed by on his way to the store. From everything I’ve heard he was a very nice man, as Dianne Williamson indicated in her recent column about him.
There’s an oft-told tale that may be apocryphal about Spag walking into a Cadillac dealership on Shrewsbury Street in his work clothes and cowboy hat. He was ignored, so he went across the street and paid cash for two brand new Buicks.
Spag was profiled because of his appearance. Here’s a profiling story that happened after he retired and his daughter was running the business.
It was 1992 and my wife, who’s African American, was shopping there. She wasn’t wearing a hoodie but rather an expensive business suit—not that either item of apparel should have made a difference, but I’m setting a scene here.
She was carrying a box (no bags at Spag’s) that contained a bottle of rose fertilizer and a few other items. She reached into a refrigerator that was inside the store and pulled out a sports drink. As she was putting that into the box an old white security guard materialized. He said, “Excuse me, ma’am, but are you going to pay for that?”
She was so shocked she didn’t know what to say. After realizing what had happened she became outraged and went looking for this fool, who by this time had slithered away. He was nowhere to be found. Twenty minutes later at the checkout counter she turned around and there he was. He had been following her.
“I don’t suppose the color of my skin is the reason you’re stalking me,” she said rather loudly. Both the security guard and the cashier looked around nervously and denied it, but it was painfully obvious that was what had happened.
My wife was a college graduate and a teacher. Her father was a successful businessman whose income put him in the upper-middle class. Again, that should have made no difference, but this was an example of the typical treatment Black people, regardless of economic class or education, received in retail establishments. They still do.
I wrote to Spag’s daughter and related the incident. I suggested that if they hired some people of color as employees they might do better with minority customers.
She wrote back and apologized, but she defended the store’s diversity hiring. “We have many ethnic groups employed here,” she wrote.
Here was a store that once graced the front page of the Wall Street Journal, but the person running it didn’t know the difference between race and ethnicity. She thought she was covered because they hired some Swedes and Lithuanians.
I told this story in a diversity workshop I taught at North High. One of my colleagues, a Puerto Rican who’s darker than Big Papi and almost as big, said that when he went to Spag’s the security began following him when he got out of his car in the parking lot.
Fast forward six months. It was just after a Christmas blizzard. There was a wall of snow on both sides of my hundred-yard driveway in Sutton. A man in a dented old automobile drove up to the front porch and got out. He handed me a package and said, “Compliments of Spag’s.” Then he got back in the car and drove away.
My wife and I went in the house and opened the package. It contained a box of Florida oranges.
Reparations.
Well, as the Spanish proverb goes, “Algo es mejor que nada” (something is better than nothing). What are you gonna do?
EPILOGUE: Several years later we went shopping at Spag’s. As a keen observer I noticed all the customers were white folks. We couldn’t find what we were looking for, so we went up the road to the newly-opened Home Depot.
It was as if we had entered a foreign country. There were Black, Latino, and Asian people shopping there. They had their little kids riding in the shopping carts. There were Blacks, Latinos, and Asians employed there. They outnumbered the white employees.
People of color tend to shop where people who look like them are employed. It’s a good decision to hire non-white employees.
Apparently Spag’s didn’t see it that way. That wasn’t the major reason the store went out of business, but it may have been a contributing factor. It certainly didn’t help.
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My aunt taught Spag when he was just a poor Italian kid. She was only 18 herself but the kids loved her. She bought the poor kids warm clothing for the cold weather. He gave her oranges every Christmas until he died. She outlived him by 20 years. I guess oranges were his way of saying thank you or I have not forgot you. Oranges …?