In Sunnyside, behind a small church called St. Finn Barr, on a piece of city-owned ground the size of a school bus, there is a regulation bocce court that has been open for league play since 1971. It has, over those 54 years, never had a closed sign on the gate. Not on Christmas. Not during the 1989 earthquake. Not during the pandemic. The reason is Aldo Pacelli.
Mr. Pacelli is 78. He came to San Francisco from Calabria with his wife, Luisa, in 1969. He worked as a glazier on Mission Street for 33 years. He retired in 2003. Since 1998 he has shown up at the bocce court at 6 a.m. every morning, with a stiff bristle broom and a small canvas bag of crushed oyster shell, to sweep the court and chalk the foul lines.
The job takes him 41 minutes on a dry day, an hour on a wet one. He does not skip wet days. The court is sand and crushed shell over a clay base; if it is not raked after rain, the surface dries unevenly and the balls drift. Mr. Pacelli rakes it level before the first league pair shows up at 9.
The court is run by the city Recreation and Parks department. The chalk and the broom are technically his own. The city has a maintenance schedule that calls for the court to be lined twice a week. Mr. Pacelli does it daily because, he says, “twice a week is bocce on a parking lot.”
The morning regulars are five men, two women, and a black retriever named Frankie who belongs to one of the men, Salvatore. Frankie has shown up at 6 a.m. every morning for nine years. The dog does not play. The dog sits at the chair near the equipment bench and waits for Salvatore to finish chalking with Aldo.
Aldo and Luisa have one son, Roberto, who lives in Modena, Italy. Roberto is 53. He flew to San Francisco for two weeks every summer between 1995 and 2019. He has not flown since the pandemic. The phone calls now are weekly, on Sundays, after Mass.
“I sweep for the dog,” Aldo says, in Italian, then in his accented English. “Frankie does not play. He comes for me. I would not let him sit in a dirty court. Then there is the league. Then there is the city. The city is last.”
In 2019 the city proposed converting the parcel into a small playground. Aldo, who had not spoken at a city council meeting in his life, attended four hearings and read a one-page statement at each. The proposal was withdrawn. Aldo has the four-page packet of his statements in a folder on top of his refrigerator.
He keeps a chalk-line notebook on a hook by the equipment bench. Every morning he writes the date, the weather, and one of three letters: D for dry, W for wet, F for fog. The notebook goes back to October 1998. Page by page, you can read 27 years of October mornings in Sunnyside in three letters at a time.
On the Saturday I visited, the page read: 18 October, D, 53°, three swallows on the cypress. He pointed at the third entry. He said, “This is the kind of thing you write down because nobody else will.”
Frankie was lying on the chalk line. Salvatore came at 6:42, late. He apologized. Aldo waved him off. The dog rolled onto his back. Aldo finished the foul line on the south end and stood up slowly. The first league pair would arrive in two hours. The court was ready.
