From the Projects to the Mission Field

My grandfather, Michel DeTellis, was an immigrant from Italy. In the 1950s he sold produce off the back of his horse-drawn wagon.

He would ride up and down the side streets in the neighborhoods of South Boston selling to families living in tenement houses. Monday through Thursday he would sell fruits and vegetables and fish on Fridays. On Fridays, as he drove his horse and cart down the side streets, he would shout out, “Get your haddock fish!”

On his way home from the wholesale markets in Boston in the early morning of February 18, 1953, a car crashed into the back of my grandfather̓s cart on Southampton Street, killing him near Andrews Square in Boston. He was thrown off the cart, hit his head on the cobblestone street and was killed. The driver of the car was charged with manslaughter. His horse named Sam survived the accident without injury.

My grandfather never owned a car or any real estate. My family lived in the third-floor apartment at 50 Dorset Street in Boston, Mass. My father was just 17 years old and a high school dropout who was working odd jobs to make money. After his father died, my father George and his mother moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a government housing project at 12 Crowley Rogers Way in South Boston.

Some women from Boston Christian Assembly came and knocked on the door to my grandmother’s apartment. They came with a box of Italian cookies and shared the Gospel with her. My father told me that on that day, my grandmother got down on her knees in the kitchen and gave her life to Jesus Christ. On that day the Kingdom of God came into the DeTellis family. How beautiful are the feet of them who bring Good News! The next Sunday, Joseph Bombara and his family arrived at the project to give my grandmother a ride to church.

One Sunday at church, my grandmother spoke to Pat Bossio the youth pastor. “Pat, my son is not doing good. He’s not going to school, and he is getting into trouble.” Pat called my father and came to pick him up in the project to bring him to the mid-week youth group. Soon after, my father made a decision for Christ and felt God leading him into ministry. Another young man in the church, Sam Bombara, was attending New England Bible Institute in Framingham. My father called the school and talked to the president, Carl Lindberg, and told him he was a friend of Sam’s and wanted to attend Bible school. In the fall of 1955, he moved into the dormitory to attend Bible school in the missionary course curriculum.

On June 2, 1956, my father returned home from Bible school by taking the bus from Framingham. My grandmother prepared lasagna for my father’s homecoming. The next morning, my father found his mother dead in her bed. She had died that night from asthma. After the funeral, the housing project told my father he had two weeks to move out because he was not eligible for government housing. Without parents, and only twenty-one years old, my father rented a furnished room at 25 Hancock Street, for $25 per week. That summer he worked in the kitchen at the Beacon Hill Hotel—saving his money to go to Bible school in September. In June of 1957, George DeTellis graduated from New England Bible Institute. ~George DeTellis, Jr.