Frank Scioscia, founder of riverrun, comes from a big family. He's the 7th of 12 children; the 4th of 6 brothers. Their father loved books and newspapers.
Frank is pictured here with his 2 younger brothers, Donald and Carl in May of 1980. They're talking books.
Donald and Frank both worked at J.K. Gills Bookstore in Portland Oregon in the 1950s. By the 1980s, each had his own small bookstore: riverrun and Books and Things.
Carl Scioscia had an executive position in the Harper & Row distribution warehouse in
Scranton, PA. Fran McCullough used to say it was a startling pleasure to see these two brothers at a sales conference, ironing out distribution problems together.
One of the older Scioscia brothers, Vance, didn't make a career of books. Vance didn't make a career of cattle ranching in the west either, which is what he'd always intended as a kid.
The oldest brother, John, did make a career in books. He opened a store in New Brunswick, NJ called Old York Bookstore.
Another brother, Gabriel, was a teacher and a union agitator. Decades ago Frank Scioscia and I spent about an hour with Gabriel, not in jail exactly but confined in different small interrogation rooms of a police station. We were all picked up because we were distributing Gabriel's pamphlets at a strip mall. The pamphlets advocated the formation of a teacher union. Apparently these policemen had no notion of the concept of free speech.
The Scioscia Brothers enjoyed one another's company. They played bocce, argued politics, and discussed books.
note: unremembered photographers - not LSS
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