The French Quarter That Made Cosimo Matassa

In 2004, Matassa sat for an interview with historian and author Scott S. Ellis, who was then researching his book Madame Vieux Carré: The French Quarter in the 20th CenturyOpens in new tab (2009). Ellis donated the oral history material to HNOC in 2014, and it is available in full in our online catalog. Here are some highlights.

[My mother] was from Palermo. My father was from Cefalù, also in Sicily, and he came here in 1910, I believe. He went to a little town in Mississippi because he was sponsored by his uncle, who was at a grocery store in a little town in Mississippi in the Delta. He stayed there until about 1920, I believe—’20, ’21, ’19, I forget which—but there was a cotton crash after World War I, and the Delta was absolutely destitute. He used to joke that he left Italy—Sicily—because everybody was starving, and he came to the United States and there was a stretch when everybody was liable to be starving again.

But then he came to New Orleans, where he had another uncle, Vincent Matassa, who had a Matassa grocery store on Chartres and Barracks Streets here in the Quarter. He worked for him briefly. [It was] a grocery store, a neighborhood grocery store. And then he got a job managing a little A&P neighborhood store up on Magazine Street, and he came here to Dauphine and St. Philip Street—1001 Dauphine—in 1924, and somebody in the family has had it ever since. [Matassa’s Market stayed in the family until 2020, when it was sold to an outside party who retained the Matassa’s name.]

Yeah, [there were] a lot of them—horse and wagon or mule and wagon, hand pushcarts, and baskets even. There were a couple of people with handheld baskets who sold things like balloons and . . . pies. There were a couple of people who came by and sold . . . one guy sold the Sicilian version of pizza, called sfincione. It’s thicker. It’s more like the Chicago-style pizza, if you will. It’s thicker, and the dough itself has spices and stuff in it.

You have to remember, my mother and father were running a store themselves. It was not a case of hiring a bunch of people to stand around and watch them play manager. They themselves worked in the store. So from an infant in a washtub with blankets and pillows in it on up, I was down in that store all day long. That exposed me to people all the time, which, not knowing at the time, helped my verbal skills a lot. On top of that, my mother was diligent. Between customers she would take a teacup or coffee cup, for instance, and draw a circle and say, “Show me 2:00, show me 5:30,” you know, that kind of thing. . . .

My routine from the time I was eight years old maybe, when I came home from school, I got a snack. You know a snack’s coming to you. It’s been three hours since you had lunch, and you got a snack coming to you. The next thing I did when I was small, I put soap on the bottom shelf for an hour every day. When I got a little bigger, I put soup cans on the middle shelf. When I got a little bigger, I could put the cereal on the top shelf. But my father and mother let me know that there’s nothing wrong with work. It’s part of life. In this store you work because you are part of the family. Not because you could get another quarter on the weekend. We are not paying you to do this work. You’re obligated to do this work. And they made it plain that there’s nothing wrong with work. It’s part of life. And thank God for that attitude from them because even till today—I’m 78—I still work my ass off because I just couldn’t not do it. I have to do something, you know.

When I went to kindergarten at four, I could spell my name, I knew my address and phone number, I could do the alphabet backward and forward, and I could count, so they threw me out of kindergarten after about three weeks because I didn’t fit in, and so I was in first grade. So I got out of grammar school at 11, and I got out of high school at 15. I was in Tulane at 16 years old. And so I was always out of place. I was a little bit younger than I should have been and smaller than I should have been.

We had a principal, Mrs. Doerr, the typical—in those days—old maid principal. Loretta Doerr was her name. She walked the halls with a ruler, and you had two choices. You had better be straight up and down, or you’d get whacked. And it was very good. If you opened your mouth on the wrong side of the corridor, you got whacked, and then you got asked what happened. You didn’t get asked what happened the way they are now—“Can we help you?”—it wasn’t that. It’s whack, what the hell are you doing? And it made a difference, believe me. It made a difference. We worked.

At that time, [the French Quarter] was loaded with kids. It was loaded with people, literally, as opposed to now. Just oodles of people. . . . The whole French Quarter was one big neighborhood. Everybody knew everybody else’s kids and all that. In other words, there was a Junior League, and the uptown ladies would want to do good for the poor folks. They had a place on Bourbon Street that had a huge backyard where you could play ball, so a lot of times we would go over there to play softball or something like that. My parents didn’t have a problem with that because everybody knew everybody. You couldn’t get lost in the French Quarter if you were a resident of the French Quarter, I guess.

We were living cheek by jowl with Black folks. We were integrated, but the thing was that we didn’t know it. There wasn’t a social awareness of that. We played together in the street. Black families passed dishes over the fence to white families, and back and forth. It was when we went to school or went downtown that we were aware that segregation was in effect, but we didn’t really live as segregated people.

I went there [Tulane] to be a chemist because when I was younger, I was the kid who got the chemistry set. I built my own radio and I listened to the Schmeling–Joe Louis championship prize fight on the radio I built myself when I was about eight or nine years old. A crystal radio. I had the aerial strung up here. I had an oatmeal box to wind the coil on—you know. So they threw at me as much as I asked for or could handle. Again, I thought I wanted to be a chemist. The irony of it is that after two years I found out what a chemist really was, and I didn’t want to be a chemist.

By then World War II was going on and I was going to be 18, and I convinced my father to let me drop out of school. I said, “Look, it’s January. In April I’m going to be 18 and they’re probably going to draft me. I’m going to hang out for a couple of months.” The war in Europe ended. I’ve got a hammertoe and bad eyesight. I never got drafted. He told me, like a typical Italian, “You’ve got two choices now: Go back to school, or go to work, but you’re not going to sit on your ass.” So I was now thoroughly out of wanting to be a chemist, so instead I went to work in a jukebox business he had. He and another guy owned jukeboxes in bars, restaurants, and things like that on a commission basis. So I went to work for that and eventually I bought his interest in it, and me and the other guy were the partners.

There were a lot of bars when I was a kid, and liquor became legal in the early ’30s. We had bars all over the place, like grocery stores, but you had enough people to support them. In its own way it was thriving. It wasn’t that they were great times. I don’t want to give you the impression that everybody was swinging to make a lot of money, but it was great times in that life was complete. Everything was going on around here, and life was great.

The guy who runs the speakeasy would stand and he had a doorman there. Somebody knocks and he opens a little peephole. They had a thing. If you said, “Henry sent me,” or something like that, you could get in. Otherwise, “See you.” So if the guy doesn’t know the password and the owner says, “Get him in here. Hey, kid, did you say Joe sent you?” You know, “Hey, kid, did you say Joe sent you?” So not only did they not care if you were young; if business was slow, they would take your money. It’s that kind of thing. And it’s that kind of mentality that you have to appreciate. . . . I don’t know everything, but I saw enough.