Joseph, Grace, Paul & Frank Longo Memorial Scholarship Fund

Joseph Longo and Grace Ripa were born in Sicily in the late 1800’s, but courageously left their families behind and immigrated to the United States for a better life when they were only teenagers, with very little money in their pockets.

After arriving at Ellis Island, they eventually married and lived in Lawrence and the North End before eventually settling in Wakefield in the 1920’s, where they established a variety store on Water Street that served the town’s growing Italian-American community.

Besides selling everything from meats and vegetables, to fine clothing, shoes, washing machines and linoleum, Joseph acted as a banker to fellow immigrants who could not qualify for mortgages from established banks. Through the family’s generosity and philanthropy, the Longo family is credited with helping many impoverished, local families survive during the financial crisis known as The Great Depression and beyond.

Their eldest son, Paul, was a visionary who established one of the nation’s first car hop restaurants in Medford, MA, Fells Acres, and then one of the country’s first open-air, drive-in movie theaters in that same city.

The Meadow Glen Drive-In opened in 1949 and, after Paul’s tragic death at the age of thirty-nine, his younger brother Frank managed the theater, eventually procuring adjacent land and adding a second screen in 1956.

Frank managed the Meadow Glen Twin Drive-In until it closed in the lte 1970s to make way for the Meadow Glen Mall to be developed on that same property, with Frank acting as one of the mall’s managing partners. The mall underwent extensive renovations and reopened and rebranded in the fall of 2017, anchored by a new Wegmans Supermarket.

Paul and Frank’s younger sister, Frances, was married to the late John J. Murphy, Jr., a former selectman in Wakefield.