Dan the meat man, of Dan’s Food Market, is finally retiring at age 87

Tuesday evening, Daniel Tocci Jr. plans to lock the door of his grocery store in Fishtown. Having worked at Dan’s Meats since he was a schoolboy in 1949, he won’t be coming back.

He’s retiring.

Six days a week — and for 25 years it was seven days a week — Tocci crossed the Burlington-Bristol and slogged up and down I-95 to Frankford Avenue and Norris Street. Forty miles round-trip to Burlington County, N.J.

This may be an obvious question, but why now?

“Because I’m 87 years old and I think it’s time for me to retire,” said Tocci, matter-of-factly. He’s a genial man who moves smoothly behind his old-fashioned deli counter, where wood-paneled walls throw back to the 1970s and rowhouse Fishtown, before developers discovered the neighborhood.

“I always hoped he would retire,” said his daughter Susanne Romanoli. “I don’t think he knew how to do it.’ ”

Dan’s has morphed over the years from butcher shop to corner store. In the last decade, it’s become a sort of off-the-grid destination for hoagie lovers.

Like Dan’s and Tocci himself, the sandwiches are retro. “I just make them like we did in South Philly,” he said. “They just caught on. It’s all good stuff — Dietz & Watson lunch meats, tremendous Provolone, Amoroso rolls.”

“He’s very particular about his hoagies,” said Angie DiCecco, one of his few part-time workers.

Tocci, in good general health, said thoughts of selling did cross his mind, “but I was still a young fella and I had to do something.” He’s been widowed since 2009, when he lost his wife of 51 years, Jackie, who traced her English roots to the Mayflower and learned to cook Italian food from his mother, Fran.

Tocci said he may hunt and fish more, and spend more time with his Lionel O Gauge trains. “I don’t smoke and I have a little bit of wine with dinner,” Tocci said. “I keep busy working on my feet, and I think that’s what keeps me to the way I am.”

“He’s going to be bored,” DiCecco said.

“The store gave him a purpose, something to do, after my mother passed away,” Romanoli said. “I don’t know why he kept going, other than that it kept him busy and he couldn’t let go. My dad’s very sentimental. He’s still in the store and he really shouldn’t be. He’s a little bit hardheaded. It’s hard for him to give up memories and give up things.”

One might say that Dan Tocci has had a love-hate relationship with Dan’s Meats. It’s mostly love, though. He just hated the idea of his three children’s taking it over.

”They all worked here when they were going to high school and college,” Tocci said. “My son [Dan, age 63,] asked me when he got out of the Marine Corps if I wanted him to come into the business and work with me, and I told him, ‘No, it’s not a good thing. It’s like having a big iron ball to your leg and you can’t get away from it.’ I said, ‘Go back to college and get into something else.”

Dan, the middle child, became an electrical engineer. His older daughter, Dawn Wood, 64, is a dental hygienist, and the youngest, Romanoli, 58, owns a CBD company, Country Roads Cannabis, with her husband and son.

“I would help out in the front,” Romanoli said. “I’m the youngest, so I would help; my grandmother would run the register and I would help bag groceries and that kind of thing.”

“They all worked here, so they knew how to work for a dollar,” Tocci said.

“He’s not a wealthy man at all,” Romanoli said. “He’s worked for a living, and he always sacrificed for his children. Growing up, I probably thought we had a lot of money. But we didn’t. We were just regular people. They sacrificed.”

Dan Tocci could not see it any other way. His father opened his first butcher shop in 1934 in Kensington. The business failed after a year. “It was tough times back then,” said Tocci, who was born in December 1936. The family lived in South Philadelphia before moving to Merchantville, Camden County.

His father took a job at a meat market, saved his money, and in 1947 bought a small butcher shop on Frankford Avenue near Norris Street.

Dan Jr. was 12 in 1949 when he started working for his father on Saturdays.

“I made $3,” he said. “I went home and I gave my mother the $3 because that’s what you did. She gave me a dollar. Well, it was only a quarter to go to the movies Saturday night and I had 75 cents left. During the week, if I needed 50 cents or something, my mother gave me money. That’s how it was.”

Dan was an only child, “but my father was one of nine and my mother was one of nine and they didn’t want to spoil me. That’s why I had to work for every damn thing I got. I worked after school on Friday nights after school till 9 o’clock and all day Saturday.”

In 1950, the Toccis bought the building two doors away on the corner and moved the business, and that’s where it has remained.

“It was the first ‘superette’ market,” Tocci said. “We had everything — full groceries, frozen foods, produce, meat. My father had seven meat cutters working for him. We did one hell of a business all through the ’50s and ’60s and even into the ’70s. All the customers are mostly neighborhood customers. My father spoke Italian, he spoke Jewish, and he spoke Polish. There were a lot of Polish immigrants in the ’50s in this neighborhood, and they loved my father because he could talk to them.”

By the time Dan was 16 or 17, he was a full-fledged meat cutter. “I could do anything as far as meats go and I got involved in the business,” he said. “It was a good thing I did.”

In 1975 at age 60, Dan Tocci Sr. died of a stroke in the store.

He and his mother took over, he said. “Good thing I knew the meat business,” he said. “She took care of the grocery end and the register and I took care of the meat.” Soon after, he took over the business and his mother retired. She died at age 92 in 2008.

He said he has not had a vacation since his father died.

Moreover, from 1980 till 2004, he worked seven days a week.

Why? “Because I did business,” he said. “That’s why.”

He was feeling new competition. A supermarket opened a few blocks away and had Sunday hours. “Now, Silverstein [a corner grocer] was down two blocks away and he was never open on Sunday,” Tocci said. “But when these guys opened Sunday, he opened Sunday, and I’m in the middle, so I had to open Sunday.”

The blue-collar neighborhood began to suffer in the late ’70s. “A lot of drugs,” Tocci said. Break-ins became frequent. Once, he said, thieves crashed through the ceiling by cutting the floor of an upstairs apartment. “Back in the day, I only needed a wooden door in the back,” he said. “I got a steel door.”

“He just kept working, even when times got a little tough,” Romanoli said. “He had to change things up and it became more of a sandwich shop. He still made his homemade sausage.”

Finally, around his 87th birthday last month, having signed an agreement of sale for the building, he began to tell customers that he would retire at the end of January. He said he is not certain what the new owners’ plans are. “It probably won’t be a corner store,” he said.

As the inventory diminished from the shelves, customers began coming in to share their goodbyes, and it seemed as if Dan’s and Dan Tocci would just fade away.

Jason Bradley, 30, a plumber who grew up nearby, said he knew about Dan’s “my whole life, but I’ve only been coming here probably the last six months. I didn’t know that they made the food that they did.” After hearing about it on Facebook, “I’ve been coming here ever since. Their hoagies are delicious. Roast beefs are good. Meatballs are good. It’s going to be sad to see them go.”

Two weeks ago, thieves smashed through Dan’s glass front door and stole a few things. A customer set up a GoFundMe campaign in hopes of raising $2,500 to help make Tocci whole. Contributions were cut off at $8,160.

“The customers,” Tocci said. “That’s who I’ll miss.”