John Pente is the indispensable man for the Little Italy Open Air Film Festival. He's got the window the films are projected from.

The amiable Mr. Pente can be found on most of these warm summer evenings sitting with a couple of friends on the bench on the Stiles Street side of his house watching life go on in Little Italy. He's lived in his house at Stiles and High streets almost all of his 92 years.

"People say, 'You're 92?' Sometimes they look at you: 'How come you ain't dead?' "

Pente is wonderfully alive, an active, agile and amusing gentleman, often witty, but never unkind.

"I remember Abraham Lincoln. I remember the Gettysburg Address," he says, playfully. "When I say that, sometimes people look real funny at me."

He's the third-generation Pente to live in Little Italy. He loves the neighborhood.

So that's why he let the film festival folks project their films across Stiles Street to an unused billboard from a third-floor bedroom in his house. They said it was for the good of the neighborhood. He said let's go.

"I'm very proud to say I have the projector in my house," Pente says. "We're going into the fourth year. We average 2,000 people out here every Friday night."

The festival begins tonight with the splendidly patriotic classic, Yankee Doodle Dandy, wherein James Cagney gives an Oscar-winning performance as George M. Cohan, the great vaudeville and musical comedy star.

Pente's favorite, coming back for the fourth year, is Moonstruck, the bittersweet romantic comedy with Cher as a moonstruck young Italian-American widow.

"You know, these movies have been a great thing," Pente says. And he's become modestly famous, quoted everywhere from The New York Times to in-flight movies on Northwest Airlines.

"We had four foreign countries down here. We had Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Buenos Aires. I got a call from Italy. They saw me on Italian TV.

"Do I make any money?" he says, with a pre-emptive question. "No, I do not make any money. I want it for the neighborhood. I love my neighborhood."

Back on the block

It's a pleasure to sit in his kitchen and listen to him talk about his neighborhood. He's a small man, 5-foot-3, he says, wiry and energetic.

"Seventy years I've been like 124 pounds," he says. "I'm still the same weight."

He was born about a block away in a house that was torn down for a convent for the nuns who taught at St. Leo's School. They're not there anymore, either. And the building is now a residence for retired priests.

He went to St. Leo's, then to Calvert Hall, where he graduated in 1930.

"That's about 72 years ago," he says. "Oh my gosh, 72 years. You say, well, where did 72 years go?

"I don't know," he says, cheerfully.

A pair of parakeets named Minnie and Mickey chirp away on the kitchen table as he talks. His tiny curly-haired dog - Gina, named for Gina Lollobrigida, the pneumatic Italian film star of the 1950s and '60s - pads around underfoot.

When he was about a year old, his father bought this house. His sister, Rose Lancelotta, lives next door on High Street. She's only 90.

"The Italians have a tradition of taking care of the old people," he says. "So when my father became handicapped, my sister would not leave the neighborhood. She took care of him for years, until he died in 1969. He was 89.

"Yeah," he says, "we're a long-lived family."

Family roots

Pentes have been around the neighborhood since before it became Little Italy. John's grandfather, Angelo Pente, arrived in 1893 from the Abruzzi region of central Italy.

"When my grandfather came," John says, "down President Street, near where the museum is, there were all homes there."

He's talking about the Civil War Museum, which used to be the President Street railroad station. The homes disappeared long ago, and the museum nestles within a clutch of towering hotels.

"When they came from the boats - they all docked down there - they all settled in those old streets down there," he says.

Not a trace remains.

His grandfather opened a shoemaker's shop. Angelo Pente did a little bit of everything.

"My grandfather was a unique man," John says. "He repaired pots and pans, made keys, did odds and ends, loaned a few dollars sometimes. My grandfather was a musician, too. He played drums."

John Pente's father, Joseph, and his uncle, Nicholas, were both musicians, too. They played in the Frank Votta Band, a popular dance band in the early 1900s that not only played weddings in Little Italy, but dances and crab feasts and oyster roasts at places that recall a lost Baltimore: the Germania Maennerchor on Baltimore Street, the Highland Academy on Eastern, Walnut Grove in Dundalk and Gus Franke's tavern at Poplar Station.

Joseph Pente left music when the band broke up around 1924. He spent the rest of his working life making brooms. Uncle Nick carried on and became well-known around Baltimore as a trumpeter and cellist and as a fine instrument repairman.

"He was No. 1 in the city of Baltimore," John Pente says.

Uncle Nick lived in the house on High Street until his death in 1941. John Pente took it over, gutted it and rebuilt it the way he wanted it. He and his wife, Margaret Frances, had been living in a house on Fawn Street that his father owned.

"I got married in 1936," he says. "Things were tough. I came out of Calvert Hall. No job. It was the Depression. I wound up in a factory, putting handles on paper bags."

But in 1941 he took some electronics courses, including one sponsored by the Army Signal Corps, and went to work at the old Western Electric plant on Broening Highway. He stayed 30 years.

"I loved that place," he says. In one of those odd coincidences of a long life, the Western Electric plant was built on the site of Riverview Park, where his father had played 30 years earlier.

"I retired in 1972," Pente says. "I became 62 years old and my wife had gotten sick and I had to get out."

His wife died three years later, and he's lived alone ever since.

'I love to cook'

The bells of St. Leo's Church ring out a noontime peal and a passer-by shouts a greeting outside Pente's kitchen window.

"Hi, John."

"Hello, Mike," Pente says without looking. "I got good neighbors. That's one of my neighbors, lives on Exeter Street. Mike, Mike Flamini."

Pente's a bit of a Renaissance man of Little Italy. He built practically everything at the house, including a porch and a deck. He paints a little. He's made a lovely stained glass window of flowers and grapes for his kitchen door. Another stained glass flower hangs in his Stiles Street window.

And he grows flowers everywhere.

"I'm a bug on flowers," he says. "I go down the Home Depot and I buy a lot of flowers. Anything I like that's beautiful I buy, because I don't have a yard. I have to put everything in pots. Up on the porch I have a number of evergreens. I have rose bushes up there.

"Some survive. Some don't. I put them there. If they want to make it, they make it. If not, too bad.

"I do that every year. I do love flowers. That's my hobby. I like to keep the neighborhood nice."

And at 92, he still drives, but he limits himself. The wheels on his car, he says, only go toward Dundalk.

And he observes some traditions of his own.

"I cook for my kids every other week," he says. "Eight or nine every other week. I got two boys and one girl. My oldest boy's about 62."

His name is Joseph, after Pente's father.

"Then I got another one named John. Now how'd he get that name?" He smiles. The movies, in fact, are projected from what used to be the boys' bedroom.

"And I have a daughter - Margaret, after her mother's name," he says.

He counts eight grandchildren off on his fingers.

"Then I got great-grandchildren, too. I would say roughly about four."

No great-great-grandchildren?

"No, hey, take it easy, kid," he says.

"At Christmastime, I had 18 for dinner and I fed 'em all. I think I had lasagna. Everything Italian style. I love to cook.

"I love my life," he says. "I enjoy my life."