Jeff Savastano has been around Boothbay for so long, you might think he's a native. But other than the three-story Victorian-style farmhouse he and his wife, Adele Bielli, share in East Boothbay, there aren't many similarities to his childhood in Providence, Rhode Island.

As his name implies, Savastano's father, Americo, was Italian. His mother, whose surname was Winfield, was pretty much everything but.

Americo Savastano came over by boat from his family’s little hill town outside Naples, Italy, alone, when he was 6 years old. Family friends had come earlier and settled in Providence. “My whole family wanted to come to America,” Savastano said. “They told my grandmother to send them over. They had plenty of room.”

By 1923, Savastano's grandmother and all his aunts and uncles were settled in a three-story house on Federal Hill. Savastano said his grandfather, Carmine, a blacksmith, was the last holdout. “He wanted nothing to do with moving to America, so he stayed in the little mountain town in Italy.” His grandfather finally gave in and made the trip to Providence. “He was here for a while, but he missed Italy, so he went back and forth a few times.”

Savastano's father, who couldn’t speak a word of English when he arrived in America, became a doctor after graduating from Harvard Medical School. “I don’t know how he pulled it off,” Savastano said. “My old man was shining shoes on street corners in Providence when he was 12 years old.”

At that time, Providence was full of, and run by, Italians. “Up on the hill, when I was growing up, the New England Mafia was there,” Savastano said. “Ray Patriarca's family, who lived nearby, controlled it. I once played golf with one of Patriarca’s lieutenant’s golf clubs. The lieutenant was in jail at the time. I was told, ‘go ahead, he won't mind.’ I remember thinking, I'd better not damage them.”

Savastano also remembers walking across a park to a small Italian bakery for huge, fresh, warm loaves of bread, and being given little sips of anisette to warm him up when he and his siblings, and cousins, came in from snowy winter days. “And at Thanksgiving dinner the kids were all allowed to have orange soda with a splash of red wine.”

After around 10 years of living in the large house, where the basement was always full of drying pasta and the kids played stoop ball out front, Savastano’s family moved to the suburbs of Providence.

Fast forward a few years, when Savastano came to Maine for the first time, to attend Colby College. While there, he dated a woman from Bar Harbor, and he fell in love with the coast of Maine. After graduation in 1962, he went to law school at Boston University. “Law wasn’t my cup of tea, and I left after a semester and went to work at a boatyard in Rhode Island.” But his heart was back in coastal Maine. He couldn't stop thinking about it.

Savastano ended up in Boothbay Harbor when he married Paula Hartford.

The couple was renting a house in East Boothbay in 1973, when he heard that the owner of his present house was filing for bankruptcy. “I used to walk by this house and drool,” he said. One day he knocked on the door and introduced himself to the owner.

He was invited in, and immediately fell in love with the spacious rooms and the unusual house. Within an hour a settlement was reached. “We made a deal,” Savastano said. “And I got money to her before the bank foreclosed on the house.”

Now Savastano had his dream house on the coast of Maine, but he was at a loss for what to do for work. His wife was a songwriter, and she was making demos. Savastano was setting up gear for her recordings one day, and she heard him humming tunes. “She came flying down the stairs and said, ‘You can sing!’ Before I knew it Leonie (the owner of the Thistle Inn) appeared at my door and asked me to play a couple tunes.”

He had learned a little about playing guitar, and Leonie liked what she heard. Savastano enlisted his wife and her sister, Ruth Hartford, and a new band was born. “I was like Forrest Gump,” he said. “He had no idea he'd wind up being a shrimp boat captain. That was me. I had never even considered playing music in public.”

The band continued to perform weekly at the Thistle, and Leonie named him “Jeff Who.” He started recruiting band members, and they began getting gigs all over Maine, under the name Skybound Station.

Personality conflicts ensued, the band was disbanded, and suddenly Savastano found himself a single father of three young children, aged 8, 9 and 10, when his wife left to pursue her music career in Nashville. He stopped playing music and got a daytime job, to better care for his kids.

A few weeks later, he got a call from a restaurant/bar owner in Brunswick, and ended up playing there as a one-man band for 14 years. “I had a synthesizer, a guitar, a harmonica and I was playing church organ base pedals with my left foot.”

In 1988, Savastano agreed to a blind date in Rockland. “When Adele walked through the door of that restaurant, I said to myself, ‘You are going to get your heart broken.’ I met the love of my life that night. I had to stop playing because I had never known anyone like Adele, and I didn't want to be away from her three nights a week.”

The couple married five months later. Their 30th anniversary is coming up next year. Savastano likes to say, “It's tough being married to Adele.” He means it in a good way.

Savastano now owns Slicks, a boutique in Boothbay, with Adele and her identical twin sister, Andy. “I do all the behind the scenes stuff to free them up, and so they can keep their creativity flowing.”

The small mountain town outside Naples that Savastano's ancestors came from had no running water when they left. Savastano visited the town in the ’50s. There was still no running water. And his grandfather's ornate ironwork still adorned many of the balconies.