At Traverso’s in Santa Rosa, it’s all relative.
Has there ever been a time when downtown Santa Rosa hasn’t been blessed with Traverso’s, the hub for delectable deli sandwiches and fine wines? Not in my lifetime—and probably not in yours, either. The Traverso family has been a stalwart force at the core of the city of roses for nearly 90 years.
“We’re at a critical juncture with the idea of ‘downtown,’” says part-owner (and wine guru) Bill Traverso ruefully. “There is, as always, a great need to attract businesses to the downtown area, the businesses that Santa Rosans want to be here. You look at what Berkeley has done over the years on Fourth Street there. That used to be a squalid place, and now it’s become wholly revitalized—a clean and wholesome place where people want to go.
“What you see there are the stores that customers want: Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, Restoration Hardware and the like. Our downtown area has the potential for the sort of revitalization Berkeley has experienced, but we need city planning with the vision to bring those sorts of stores here. We write letters to the city council, and the one person there who’s reliable in terms of responding is Bob Blanchard. He’s clearly making an effort to listen, gather information, understand the issues, and respond to his constituents. He seems to have some sense of focus on what needs to be done.”
Traverso’s has been comfortably ensconced at Third and B streets since 1973, but there are plans for a move within the year. “We’ve had a good run here,” says Bill’s cousin, George Traverso, who’s handled the counter and the bookkeeping side of the business for more than three decades. “We have one of the only privately owned parking lots in the downtown area, but we’re right next to the transit mall, and that’s been an ongoing concern.”
“The one thing our parents—George’s dad, Enrico, and my father, Louie—instilled in us was to treat every customer with the same respect, the same attention,” says Bill. “Customer service is how we survived the box stores coming to Santa Rosa Avenue, and it’s how we survive today. So even if someone is just coming in to get change for the bus, they’re welcomed here. It’s funny, in a way, that we have some folks coming in for bottles of wine that cost hundreds of dollars while others are coming in for potato chips and a soda. But they’re all customers.”
The move—while not in hurry-up mode—is occasioned by the recent sale of the present property. “We’re looking at Railroad Square as one possibility,” says Bill. “We do want to stay in the downtown area, and we’re open to other options. But that’s an area that really ought to be the central part of downtown activities, especially if rail service can be incorporated into the mix.”
Bill and George Traverso were both born in the postwar era (Bill in 1945, George in 1946), both did their college work at the University of San Francisco (Bill with a degree in political science, George with a degree in industrial relations; both earned teaching credentials). “We were both discouraged from coming into the family business,” says Bill with his typically disarming chuckle. “Dad and Rico warned us it was a lot of hard work and that we’d never get time off during the holidays to truly enjoy the parties that come with the season.
“Dad told me to get a job teaching or working for the county,” he continues. “He saw that teachers got the summer and all those holidays off, and he really wanted something better for us than to work from dawn to dusk. When I went to teach at Parkway Junior High [in South San Francisco], it was my first contact with the public school system. I’d been in Catholic schools, and it was an adjustment to meet stressed single parents, to have to deal with kids who didn’t have interest in school or the tough-love discipline from their parents to at least push them in the direction of a good education. That was hard.
“When urban renewal hit Santa Rosa in the early 1970s—partly in response to the damage from the October 1969 earthquake—we decided to buy the property at Third and B and move the store from where we’d been at Second and A. George and I had found teaching wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and we were happy to come back and become part of the family business. Keep in mind, when our parents and grandfather Charles had moved the store [to Second and A] in the 1940s, it was like they were moving ‘out of town.’ It seemed pretty far off the beaten path back then.”
A long family history
The Traverso story in this country starts in 1922, when Charles Traverso—Bill and George’s grandfather—arrived in San Francisco with his oldest son, Louis. “Charles’ father, a blacksmith, had come to New York City in the late 1870s,” says George. “Charles’ parents were actually married by the mayor of New York City, and he was born in 1882 in Hartford, Connecticut. But following the unexpected death of his wife, Charles’ father returned to Italy with his two sons.
“Charles married Frances in Italy in 1907, and Louis Traverso was born there in 1908. My father, Enrico, was born there in 1911. Charles came back, initially to Washington state, with Louis, and then came to San Francisco in 1922. He soon ventured north to work in Santa Rosa—he saw the small, outlying town as a better place to raise Louis as a single parent. He worked for Peter Muzio, the man who made ravioli popular in California. It wasn’t until 1927 that he was able to bring his wife and my father here from Italy.”
George has fond memories of customers who, over the years, would tell him they’d helped teach his father to speak English. “You have to remember, Louis came here as a youngster, so he picked up the language quickly, and even went to Sweet’s Business College to study bookkeeping. My father started kindergarten at 16 and didn’t finish at Santa Rosa High School until he was 22. No ESL in those days, but he finished.”
At the outset of the Depression, brothers Louis and Enrico worked with the Arrigoni brothers in Nate Bacigalupi’s store in downtown Santa Rosa. Early in the 1930s, the Traverso boys were ready to start their own store (as were the Arrigoni brothers). The first Traverso’s site was at Fourth and A, where Charles, Louis and Enrico sold fresh meat and vegetables and other grocery items. At the end of Prohibition, the Traversos were one of the first retailers in California to acquire a liquor license. “You have to remember that wine, in those days, was mostly sweet,” says Bill. “They sold dry wine: half-gallons of Gallo, Almaden, Paul Masson, Sutter Home and Sebastiani. I didn’t really begin to take California wine seriously until I tasted the 1969 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon in the early ’70s. We’d grown up with wine; my grandfather made it in the basement for home use. But it was just part of the meal.”
In the early 1940s, the market was moved two blocks south into an old house at Second and A. The bottom floor was remodeled to house the store. Enrico served in the Army, while Charles, Louis, Louis’ wife Alma and Enrico’s bride Adeline ran the store. Charles passed away in 1954. The 1960s saw the family expand store inventory and their reach, bringing in food items from around the world—especially from the old country.
The 1970s brought cousins Bill and George home to help build the new store at its present location. Additional space led to a typical Italian “sprawl” display style that let new gourmet items be seen; a much broader selection of wines, international beers and liqueurs were added; and party items were expanded. The full-service take-out sandwich counter became the centerpiece of the new store.
Generation four comes on board
Like his father and his uncle, George’s son Michael Traverso was encouraged to go out into the world and find a job he liked that wouldn’t tie him to long hours in a family business. (“I know I’m going to tell my son to go to law school!”) Like his father and his uncle, Michael took a good, long look at the outside world…and happily came home to Santa Rosa. Born the year the new store was opened [1973], Michael graduated from Montgomery High School in 1991. “Like my friends,” he muses, “I felt the need to get out of the ‘Sonoma coma,’ so I attended USC to get my bachelor’s in business administration. Southern California was very different: great looking girls, good weather. I loved school, from the academics to the social life, from the frats to football.
“I have a great interest in film, and USC has a great film library. I took film classes and considered going into marketing for the film industry. I spent my junior year as an intern with a production company working for Aaron Spelling, and met a lot of so-called ‘famous’ people. My senior year, I interned with New Line Cinema, a Ted Turner company. While both of those jobs were, overall, positive experiences, I came out with a jaded view of the movie business. It’s a crazy business. But I still love going to the movies.”
Upon finishing his degree, Michael discovered in his on-campus interviews that he liked people, marketing and sales—and he missed Northern California. So he took a job with a San Francisco startup that did marketing and consulting for software companies. “It was a small company and a really creative environment. It was a lot of work. A lot of what I learned there, I use today, from guerrilla marketing techniques to computer skills. Then I went back to Southern California, working for Heublein Spirits as a territory manager, doing support for chain stores. That was a crazy job. Out of the blue, a recruiter from the Chrysler Corporation came to me, and I went to work for them. The good news, twice the pay; the bad news, living in Detroit.”
Chrysler did get him back to Pleasanton for a time, but he was beginning to realize that the corporate thing and the startup thing weren’t what really made him happy. “I actually came home and went to work in the store just to kind of regroup and earn a few bucks.” What soon became evident was that he liked food, he knew a little about wine and he enjoyed working with, and talking to, the customers. What started as a six-month hiatus turned into 10 years, a wife and a new baby boy [Hugo George Traverso, born September 2007].
“I like the old-world charm of the store, but some of the old concepts had to be changed, and I was just the person to do it,” he says. “In the old days, we were open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and just sat there waiting for people to come through the doors. Now we’re more proactive. We never spent money on advertising; now we do. The accounting was weird, with hand ledgers; now we have QuickBooks spreadsheets to track sales. On the food side, we’re never going to be Starbucks, but Santa Rosa doesn’t need that. On the wine side, Bill was happy to have a little help. Our wine sales have really grown over the last decade or so.”
The wine club and more
Michael notes wine sales were once limited to customers walking through the door (adding that “we’re an island down here, we’re not in a shopping center and we’re closed on Sundays”). Now there’s a wine club that expands vinous horizons, there are wine tastings on Saturdays, Bill and Michael lead European wine and food tours, and the store’s customer base has expanded to include Internet sales.
“I had to lobby to get a computer in the store for marketing purposes. We have a guy who comes here from Atlanta once a year and buys $500 worth of wine and cheese. Now we can be in contact with him with our weekly email newsletter, which goes out to more than 2,000 customers. I think the store needed my youthful energy and new ideas. We remodeled in 2000, and now the store is pretty much half wine and half grocery-deli. This is my career now. My grandfather gifted me with his share of ownership, so now I really have a stake in it.
“We started doing Saturday wine tastings three years ago, which required a separate license from the state ABC [Alcohol Beverage Control]. It’s called a tavern license, and it requires us to have a separate little area designated for tasting. We have a different theme each week: a wine region, a specific varietal. We try to keep the wines inexpensive, and we offer a discount on the wines we taste. Fun wines, affordable wines.” Anyone interested can drop by the shop any Saturday between noon and 3 p.m.
Michael and his uncle Bill are leery of the assessments levied over the last couple of years for improvements to the downtown area. “Those assessments angered a lot of the property owners, because we didn’t have any input. There wasn’t any budget information, and it wasn’t clear who was making the decisions. I’m all for change, but now doesn’t seem to be the right time. The city is struggling—barely breaking even—and you really do have to fill the potholes first.
“The idea for a new square is nice, but I don’t think it’s going to fulfill the stated purpose of bringing people downtown. The Wednesday Night Market during the summer couldn’t do that either. That was only a carnival, clogging the downtown streets during rush hour. Better to scrap that notion and have it on Saturday morning. Bring the Farmers Market downtown on Saturday morning! The garages are empty then, and the parking is free. That would create the family atmosphere that’s desired, and it would have a positive economic impact on downtown. People might stay for lunch, maybe even come into our store and buy a bottle of wine or two.”
The Traverso clan has been a stabilizing core of responsibility and respectability in downtown Santa Rosa for nearly a century, and the family business has weathered many storms. Yet it remains a resolute force for good and wholesome fun, food and wine. May it continue on for decades to come.
