Lina Lourenco is now in charge of her family's butcher and grocery shop on Barton Street. But when she needs her father's help, he's as close as a broom handle pounded on the store ceiling.
Joao Rumor and his wife, Maria, live upstairs. They retired last June after 35 years running the store.
No sooner does Lourenco demonstrate her broom method ("I just go boom, boom, boom and he comes down") than her father strolls through the front door.
He is proud that his daughter has taken over the business, splitting the ground floor space with her brother John Rumor, who operates a safety retailer called Rumor's Safety Zone, on the other side of a new wall.
"I have enough to take care of myself," says the elder Rumor, a Portuguese immigrant who worked for Highland Packers before buying the store near Wentworth Street in 1978.
"Lina was working for someone else and I thought why shouldn't she work for herself?"
Lourenco, a cheerful and chatty mother of two, says the butcher business has been in her blood since she was a young girl working at her parents' sides. Her three siblings didn't take to it but she sure did, working as a butcher for years for Fearmans and then Maple Leaf in Burlington.
She acknowledges that there aren't a lot of women in the business and she sometimes gets funny looks from new customers when they realize she does the butchering.
"I just love the people who come in. They are so friendly," she said.
"We really need to keep the little stores here."
John Rumor, who works full-time for a water main contractor, started his retail operation with a small booth at a flea market.
But it grew so busy, he decided to open a permanent location, says his wife, Julie, who staffs the store packed with bright safety clothes, steel-toed boots and other construction gear.
Lourenco, 45, did away with some of her parents' decorating touches in the shop.
A 2009 Paul Wilson StreetBeat column in The Spectator described it this way: "It's pure whim at work at Rumor's. A forest of plants fills the front window. On the wall, Jesus in 3-D, the Last Supper, the Pope, pictures of Joao's great-uncle Luis (the guy who gave everyone candy), a completed jigsaw puzzle of Venice, a place Joao has not yet seen."
Jesus, the disciples and the Pope are all gone.
So are Venice and the plants.
Lourenco painted the walls and laid tile. She wants to buy new glass topped freezers, big blackboards and overhead displays for sausages and other cured meats. She wants to convey the atmosphere of a European market.
She's also cut down vastly on the range of merchandise sold. The store used to sell everything from snowboots to appliances and neckties to Portuguese hats.
Lourenco is focused on deli and fresh meat and frozen seafood, along with a small display of canned food, oils and produce.
"I used to work old-fashioned, but she wants it nice and clean," Joao says of the store's new look.
He's just happy the store lives on, he says, while watching his daughter and granddaughter Ashley serve customers.
"When I see that, I feel I'm a great man."
http://www.thespec.com/news-story/43...s-a-cut-above/
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