It’s well-known that Salinas, California, native Sammy Hagar lived here briefly in 1969, during which time he acquired a taste for Garbage Plates from Nick Tahou Hots.
“Boy, I loved those Texas hots,” he told the Democrat and Chronicle in 1979. “I ate there every day when I was in Rochester.”
Only recently did he discover that his Rochester connections go much deeper.
Sammy Hagar on ‘Finding your Roots’
On the Jan. 23 episode of the PBS series “ Finding Your Roots ,” the Red Rocker and former Van Halen frontman learned that his great-grandparents on his mother’s side, Giacomo and Gertrude Naruck Alessi, lived in Rochester.
Gertrude was born in Rochester; Giacomo came here from Italy. In the city’s 1900 census, he was listed as a fruit dealer, as were his brothers Joseph, Samuel and Antonio, series host Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Hagar.
But an incident that happened here July 17, 1899, changed the family’s story.
On that day on North Street, Joseph Alessi shot a man named Joseph Lombardo in a dispute over a $13 debt, according to a Democrat and Chronicle story Hagar read aloud on the show.