The Baldasera brigade

He prospered on the back of an ice cream cart, began an east Durham dynasty greatly known and no less respected, died in 1950 and is remembered as affectionately as ever.

While essaying the story of the Baldasera brigade - and particularly of Arisilia, his eldest son - today's column will also turn up the McCoys, another familiar clan in those once deep-seamed parts.

Whether they are the real McCoys, of course, is another matter entirely.

Angelo Baldasera, at any rate, joined an uncle with an ice cream parlour in Musgrave Street, West Hartlepool. Other parts of the region had Italian ice cream families of their own - the Rossis, the di Palmas, the Marcantonios who became Mark Toney and for 104 years have flourished by the Tyne.

Angelo soon realised - where there's muck - that the real money lay in the thriving colliery communities around Wheatley Hill and Thornley. East Durham was to be home to the Baldaseras.

"In those days they were so poor in West Hartlepool that they were even pawning their beds," Arisilia - forever Aris - once recalled.

At first Angelo would push the cart the ten miles or so each way, later loading it daily into the guard's van at West Hartlepool station, returning to compare takings with his wife, Rosaria. Angelo usually had three times as much.

He moved to Thornley, opened six shops and cafes within a few tight terraced miles, became known for his ice cream, his Oxo and cream crackers - half Thornley grew up on them - his devout Catholicism and his heart of gold.

"He used to have this thing about little bairns in the street," recalls Aris's widow Elsie, 93. "If he saw a poorly shod bairn he'd take them by the hand straight into the shoe shop. Dozens of children had shoes from Angelo."

Known thereabouts as Boss Baldasera, Angelo also fathered ten children with his two wives, Aris the eldest by the second. Two survive, Mary still in Thornley and Rosalina a nun in Newcastle. Several stayed in catering, another could write simultaneously and at high speed with both hands, another became a consultant anaesthetist in Sunderland.

"There's no doubt Aris had the ability to do other things but he was the eldest son and was expected to stay in the family business," says Mike Baldasera, his son.

Aris began an open-all-hours confectioner's next to the Constitutional Club, the Houses of Parliament, in Wheatley Hill. Officially it was on Vincent's Corner, if not quite a corner shop. Later he called it Perpetua House.

"It's a thank you," he once explained, "to our Blessed lady, the Mother of God, for perpetual succour and for the way that the people of Wheatley Hill have made us part of their families, too.

"There's been no question of us going back to Italy. With the people of Wheatley Hill, it would have been folly to be anywhere else in the world."

ARIS spoke almost no Italian, except for a few words about food. He loved his grub, and a glass of wine, too.

He was also a writer and poet, perhaps the only man ever to rhyme "eighty" with "tatie" - on the occasion of Elsie's 80th birthday. "I just love my potatoes, never have a meal without them," she says.

They'd met at a village dance, though Aris claimed to have eyed her in Blackpool. "He was selling the ice cream and just came up and asked me to dance, offed with his apron and away we went. I think it was meant to happen really."

In the army at Catterick he'd suffered a double detached retina after being accidentally struck by a sentry's rifle butt, spent six months on his back in York military hospital but had suffered irreparable damage. Gradually his eyesight worsened.

"He ensured that the sweet jars were always put back in the same place so he knew where they were," recalls the delightful Elsie. "There were even ridges on the scales, because he couldn't read them."

Mike recalls an affectionate exception to the enveloping myopia. "If there was a £20 note blowing about, he'd spot it 100 metres away."

In truth, Aris - Arissey, Wheatley Hill called him - had inherited his father's benevolence. No Sunday School trip left the village unless fuelled by Baldasera's ice cream, no cause went unsupported.

The story's also told of how he'd get up in the middle of the night to take ice lollies to an aged miner with breathing difficulties, those being all he could eat.

Aris also donated a handsome football cup, recently rediscovered. "There were some wonderful colliery welfare teams," says Mike. "Better than Sunderland are today."

He was finally persuaded to retire in 1990, moving with Elsie to Darlington, where Mike was a classics teacher at Carmel School. On the wall at Elsie's bungalow there's a tribute to his great grandfather from one of the bairns.

"He was very kind, always giving me sweets and making life nice to be around him. He also never went anywhere with an empty stomach. He was a brilliant eater and loved his wine. He was a five foot gentleman."

Elsie has followed his example. "I always have a glass of wine with my meals. I told the doctor, but he said it was good for me.

"We didn't think Aris would settle in Darlington but he loved it here. Even now I go places, the hospital or wherever, and when they hear my name they say I must be from Wheatley Hill.

"Aris was in every way a good man, tolerant in everything he did. It's so uplifting when people remember him as they do."

He died in 1999, aged 83. "His funeral was in some respects like a scene from The Godfather," says Mike, "lots of men in pin-striped suits, big hats and bulging waistcoats.

"He's buried in the North Cemetery, next to the primary school, and he'd have liked that. Dad loved all sorts of things in the world, but most of all he loved children."

So that's an attempt to weave the Baldasera story. It has been the Aris tweed.