Vito Pietro Pinto, alternatively recorded as Vito Pietropinto, was born December 1869, in Portenza, Italy.

He came to the United States as a teenager, traveling first to Kansas City then to New York, where he married a fellow immigrant, Teresa, from San Fele, Italy. The couple settled briefly in New York before moving to Newport in 1897. Vito became a citizen in January 1899 shortly after his 29th birthday.

In New York, Pinto listed his occupation as bootblack, but when he moved to Newport he opened a fruit store on Broadway. For the next 33 years, the growing family lived in Newport. Teresa gave birth to 12 children, nine of whom survived childhood, seven girls and two boys. The family worshipped at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church at the corner of Broadway and Mann Street, and the children attended the parochial school there.

Pinto was almost 60 when he brought the family to Jamestown in 1929. By then, most of the girls had left home. Frances, born in 1896, had become Sister Mary Beata of the Sisters of St. Joseph and was living in Massachusetts.

Two of the girls had died in Newport. Minnie, born in 1897, died of tuberculosis in 1925, and Rosie, born in 1902, died during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Two others, Margaret (1898-1997) and Mary (1900-52), were married and no longer living at home.

The two younger girls, Lucy, born in 1904, and Theresa, born in 1907, also were not living at home during the early years of the Pinto family’s residence in Jamestown. Although officially a Jamestown resident from 1929 until her death in 1985, Lucy spent at least part of her time with Margaret’s family and traveled with them to Italy in 1955.

Theresa, the more adventurous of the two, attended Hunter College in New York City, earned a master’s degree and studied for her doctorate at Columbia University. She was employed as a secretary to Bernarr Macfadden, the health guru, before returning to Jamestown during World War II to teach in the Carr primary school.

Theresa’s tenure as a Jamestown teacher did not end well. In 1968, she was let go after 22 years of service. Among the charges that led to the non-renewal of her contract were lack of control of the classroom, unbecoming conduct in the harassment of other teachers and being “rigid, authoritative, coercive.”

Complaints were received from parents about her treatment of her first- and second-graders. One teacher reported seeing her shake a child and “slam” him into a locker. Another teacher resigned because of unspecified “unpleasantness.”

Theresa requested and received a hearing to defend herself against the charges, but the outcome was unchanged. Shortly afterward, she left Jamestown to teach in a parochial school in Iowa. She died at 93 in Huntsville, Ala., where her sister Margaret’s son lived.

When the family moved to Jamestown, Vito and his older son, Vincent, born 1908, opened a fruit store at 29 Narragansett Ave. at the corner of Green Lane. The family lived in a house around the corner at 16 Union St.

The store prospered and the father-son team were joined after World War II by a second son, Francis Anthony, known as Tony, who was a year younger than his brother. The business then moved to a larger store at 19 Narragansett Ave.