Eddie `Catfish' Banchero, Owner Of E & E Specialty-Meat Business

Newly married Eddie "Catfish" Banchero and his wife, Edith, opened E & E Meats in 1931.

On the first day of business in their shop at Rainier Avenue South and South Oregon Street in Seattle, they sold $7.68 worth of goods. With hamburger going at 3 pounds for 25 cents, Mr. Banchero figured that wasn't half bad.

Sixty years later, he had built a multimillion-dollar-a-year specialty-meat business that employed 40 people and served the white-tablecloth restaurants of Western Washington and beyond from a plant on Sixth Avenue South.

Mr. Banchero died Monday at 86. Services are scheduled for Saturday.

Up until he took ill a few months ago, Mr. Banchero continued to look after the family business. He was a longtime political booster and a sponsor of sports teams, especially soccer, and over the years his list of friends grew so large he had to stop throwing an annual Christmas party, choosing instead to give turkeys to food banks.

"He was a generous, good-hearted, caring and considerate person," recalled his younger brother Ralph, who will take over at E & E Meats. "He always thought of his fellow man and always supported the underdog - that's the type of person he was."

Mr. Banchero's life story begins in the days when Puget Sound settlements were still a little ragged around the edges, when a young man could make his way with hard work and a little luck. Turning points in his life stand out.

First, there was his nickname. Mr. Banchero was one of nine sons of a coal miner and was reared in boomtown Black Diamond, now a quiet village in South King County.

At age 9, he and friends Carl DeLauro and Louis Balzarini were swimming "in our natural bathing suits," as Mr. Banchero later recalled, at a nearby pond. "I didn't know how to swim, and the next thing I knew I was in deep water. When they pulled me out, they said, `Look at the big catfish we caught.' I've had the name ever since."

A year later, Catfish caught on to the meat business, getting hired to do errands for O.P. Fredricksen, owner of People's Meat Market in Black Diamond. At 20, he struck out on his own, heading for Seattle and a number of jobs.

Came another turning point in the 1920s. Mr. Banchero's older brother Angelo had followed his father into the mines and was severely injured at work. Catfish visited his brother frequently at Providence Hospital in Seattle and there became acquainted with Edith, a nurse.

Upon their marriage in 1931, she quit nursing and together they started the meat business. In 1933, they moved their fledging firm to 1007 Olive Way, where it stayed until bus-tunnel construction forced a move to 3922 Sixth Ave. S. in 1986. The meat business changed dramatically in the intervening years. Time was when people bought a whole side of beef, Mr. Banchero once said. By the 1980s, E & E Meats was selling ready-to-cook specialty cuts in portions.

With his success as a businessman, Mr. Banchero was fond of giving back. Maybe it was the rescue in that pond as a child, or maybe it was help he got along the way: "Friends - they're the key. They're what makes life worthwhile," Mr. Banchero once said.

He was a member of the Lake City Elks lodge, the Knights of Columbus, the Seattle Police Athletic Association, the Washington Athletic Club and the Pacific Northwest Soccer Oldtimers Association.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at St. Monica's Catholic Church on Mercer Island at 11 a.m. Saturday. Burial will follow at Sunset Hills Cemetery in Bellevue.

Mr. Banchero is survived by two sisters, Neda Banchero of Seattle and Helen McCuish of Black Diamond; two brothers, Modesto Banchero and Ralph Banchero, both of Seattle; and by 14 nieces and nephews.