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Despite an increasing number of fully accredited Irish citizens with unusual surnames — such as Olympic badminton player Nhat Nguyen, world class sprinter Rhasidat Adeleke, and hip hop artist Denise Chaila — it’s a safe bet that any round-up of common family names here will produce the usual suspects: Murphy, Ryan, Walsh, Kelly and McCarthy, for starters.
This means that your average Irish person most certainly has a namesake. Indeed, more like hundreds or even thousands of them.
Growing up, I never had that experience. My surname was my own. Even in heavily Italian Medford, my siblings and I (plus a handful of cousins, produced by my father’s brother) were the only Coronellas in a high school population of nearly 4,000.
For the record, I graduated in 1977, when between classes the Medford High corridors were as bustling with transiting students as the main hall at Grand Central Station during rush hour.
A few years later, however, my relative uniqueness — in the name department, anyway — took a hit.
During my college days, I worked part time in the produce department of a busy supermarket located in Porter Square, just a stone’s throw from Harvard. The job provided some of the best experiences of my life, and I would encourage anyone drifting through life to undertake a spell of supermarket work. It’s a great way to meet new people and — at least in my experience — it’s the type of work environment that doesn’t tolerate slackers.
Also, supermarket jobs are unlikely to be taken over by AI. For instance, I doubt any robot could have dealt with Julia Child’s request for some fresher parsley as efficiently as I once did.
There’s another reason I’m advocating this line of employment. Because supermarkets are such bustling places, you might just encounter your doppelganger there.
My seven-year supermarket career commenced in the front end as a bagger. On occasion I also manned the store’s roller-belt collection system that ferried customers’ bags outside for easy curbside delivery to their cars.
I was good at the job, courteous and efficient and smart enough to know you didn’t put eggs at the bottom of a bag, joke about a customer’s poor dietary choices, or load someone’s groceries in the back seat next to a snarling hound.
After a few weeks up front, I was offered a chance to train as a cashier, but declined. I’d seen enough: the testy exchanges when a customer questioned the price of an item or the attitude of a staff member, the massive amounts of money cashiers regularly handled in those pre-credit and debit card days. There were also no barcodes then, so price checks were frequent and time-consuming.
Instead, I accepted an invitation to join the produce department at the rear of the store. And that’s when I discovered there was more than one me in the world.
One busy Saturday afternoon, as I was stacking bananas on an end display, an announcement sounded over the store’s P.A. system, directing me by name to the florist department to assist a customer.
Produce workers like me were expected to become amateur botanists when the flower ladies went on break.
I was back at my bananas only a few minutes when a middle-aged woman approached me. “Are you Stephen Coronella?” she asked.
Now, I may have been a gracious and accommodating Star Market employee, but my first thought was: Oh no, what have I said or done to upset this one? I decided to come clean.
“Yes, that’s me. I’m Stephen Coronella” I said.
“That’s my son’s name,” the woman answered, with a smile.
As I’ve demonstrated, my Italian surname, while not unique, is uncommon. So the coincidence was startling on that count alone. But then to share an identical first name with this woman’s son — down to the proper spelling of Stephen — that was plain weird. Plus, only a handful of years separated us in age.
We chatted for a few minutes — I had only a vague understanding back then of my father’s side of the family — and the best we could deduce was that this woman’s husband and my dad had likely been neighbors in Boston’s old West End tenement district in the 1930s and 1940s, before their immigrant families moved to the leafier suburban surroundings of Somerville and Medford, respectively.
Recalling that chance encounter over four decades ago, I did some research courtesy of Google.
The woman I met was Alma “Pat” (Fuller) Coronella, a native of Red Cloud, Nebraska, who settled in the Boston area in 1950. Her husband, William Coronella, and my father, Philip, were the likely West End compatriots.
As for my namesake, the other Stephen Coronella, he retired a few years back as the director of the Putney Public Library in Vermont. From what I can gather, he still works as a musician and storyteller.
Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of “Designing Dev,” a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who’s recruited to run for the Irish presidency. His latest paperback publications are “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations” and “Looking Homeward - Essays & Humor from a Misplaced American.”
