‘He knew
every piece of fruit in the shop. If anyone touched anything, he could tell!’
So says Julie Lomax, whose father
Norman (Gaetano) Santamaria ran Mac’s Fruit Shop at 138 Beaumont Street,
Hamilton, spanning the years of World War II, from 1939 to 1946.
I wondered how someone from the
Aeolian islands in Italy’s far south, with the name Santamaria, happened to call
his shop by the very English-sounding ‘Mac’s.’