 And he wasn't joking. You see, Papa came from a family of fishermen. For 300 years, the men in the family had been fishermen in Sicily. Papa himself was a fisherman. When he came to America, he worked on the railroad for a while, but only until he'd saved enough money to send for his wife. And then he headed straight for San Francisco to Fisherman's Wharf to become a fisherman again, to perpetuate the family tradition.