John Nappi died the other day. The name will mean nothing to you.
He accomplished little of what most people would call public achievement.
Who is he?
He is the guy you perhaps saw walking along Gorham Road, near the Maine Mall, in the Eight Corners section of Scarborough, at any time during the day or night. He looked a bit like Jesus Christ, minus the organized facial hair.
He officially lived at 201 Gorham Road. But that address appeared nowhere on the house or mailbox.
His claim to fame? His parents, in the 1980s and 90s before they died, refused to sell their ramshackle farmhouse to a real estate developer. Instead, they kept the house and land. They lived there until it was so beat up and decrepit that they were told by the town to leave the structure. Go live elsewhere.
There was a detached tiny structure. People often thought it was a former antique salesroom.
Like the main two-story house, it got run down. Eventually, it got torn down by the town. They do that when a building is so bad that they need to bulldoze it down before it falls down, unexpectedly, suddenly and hurts somebody.
John Nappi was a “litmus test” in the late 1980s and early ’90s in Scarborough. You either understood him or you didn’t.
What was there to understand?
He turned down thousands and thousands of dollars from real estate develpers at least five times.
The rumor always was that Walmart first looked at his property before they looked at their original location in Scarborough – the Thibodeau house at 456 Payne Road, or their current location.
The Nappis said no. Why sell, they asked rhetorically? We like our house.
What good was the money if they had sold their house and had to move from Scarborough. “We like Scarborough,” John told me 20 times over the years. “We don’t want to move.”
Some other big box stores also reportedly looked at the location of the Nappi house.
Nope, nope and nope.
Not selling.
Yuppies in Scarborough were aghast at this news.
How could they turn down all that money?
Townies admired the Nappis and secretly hoped that, if they were one day in the same situation, they would do the same.
John walked everywhere he went. He had no car. He also had no driver’s license.
People told him to slow down.
“If I slow down, I am afraid I will stop,” he said.
He supported himself through government assistance. It was not much. It did not buy much.
He had a hot plate, and a small refrigerator. He was a daily customer of Eight Corners Variety on Mussey Road.
“I hate to take his money,” the former owner, Pete Walsh Sr., told me once in 1993.
“I know he doesn’t have much.”
Did John like the changing Scarborough?
“A lot of people still honk the horn at me to say hello,” he bragged one day with pride.
R.I.P, John. Scarborough has lost a true original.
Planet Earth lost a happy guy.
Dan Warren is a Scarborough trial lawyer. He can be reached by private Facebook message at the Jones & Warren Attorneys at Law page, or by email at jonesandwarren@gmail.com.
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