A personal look at my roots

Roots in Veteran

Great Grandma Crotty
Joseph
Shirley
Joan
William    
Grandma (Crotty) Frisbie
Mary
Eugene

It's funny how sometimes we get an image in our heads and can't get rid of it. I remember the toll booth that used to be on Rt. 212 in Veteran, above a bend in the stream we kids called the "Deep Hole". We fished there in the summer and skated on it in the winter. We had to walk past the little white toll booth with the dark trim to get there. It sat empty and abandoned my entire young life.

My mother told me it was a toll booth, that there were several on the road, and that when she was little, just coming up summers, it was in service. Right next to it was a tall pine tree with bluestone slabs leaning against it. I can still picture them in the shade, partly covered with brown needles and shiny green poison ivy leaves. I've had people tell me it was never there. So much for their powers of observation.

Conversely, once when I referred to the site as "where the old toll booth used to be", one local insisted that it was still there. The image of a tollbooth was in her head and no way could I remove it with the facts. Same thing happened with my mother. I remember after being away for a bit I returned to no tollbooth. When I asked her where it went, even she said it was still there. I had to open the front door of our Veteran home to let her look at the empty space where it once stood before she believed me.

That's the way it is with unchanged scenery. When it does change some of us see it as it was and some don't see it at all. The tollbooth, the house across the street, and the woman in it are long gone, now, but I can still see a little white booth, the somewhat gussied up old quarryman's shack we called home, and my mother in the front yard, stopping to smell the lilacs when they bloomed. It was the lilacs in bloom and the passage of Mother's Day that had me reminiscing so.

My vision of Veteran can be like that sometimes. When I pass through Veteran I look for Uncle Mike sitting in his open garage door even though I know he and Aunt Mary (my Father's sister) moved into the Village last year. It was the same with Great Uncle Bill. When my twin brother and I were little we had breakfast with him every morning. Then he would drive us to school in the school bus. Not just us, though. He had a whole route after the schools centralized and the little stone school house down the road was closed. We picked up everybody on the way into the Village and dropped them off on the way home. It was an early day-care arrangement for my Mother after my Father died.

Anyway, after Uncle Bill retired he sat in a chair on the side of the road and waved at everyone who went by. Everybody knew him. He used to be the bartender (and part owner) at Crotty's bar even though he never took a drink in his life. When it finally changed hands he was an old man sitting in his dooryard across from it all day. My first memory of gardening was of digging potatoes with my father in his back yard. I still look for Uncle Bill sitting there when I pass, although it's not his house anymore. It's Rothe's Engineering.

Crotty's morphed into another Irishman's dream almost forty years ago. It grew from my great-grandmother's Irish boarding house (Veteran Hotel) and livery stable into a chevy dealership with a chevron gas station. It was a transportation hub/garage her sons (William and Joseph) owned. Now it is Gallagher's. After all this time I should begin to think of it as that, and not the boarding house with a summer and a winter kitchen, a wrap around rocking chair porch and a big ice house in the rear. I should, but I don't.

I think that at one time my ggrandmother owned most of Veteran - that stretch anyway. The house next door to her boarding house was the one my parents moved into when they married. My mother always said it was haunted. Across the little lane (cousin Shirley lives at the end of it) cousins Joan & Al raised playmates for my brother and I the same way Aunt Mary and Uncle Mike did just down the street. Al built a miniature house for us in the back yard, a playhouse he called it, with Dutch doors, window boxes and an attic. What fun we kids had there.

Aunt Ethel's was one door down. (I never knew the people in between.) She had a great garden and beautiful flowers in the back yard. My mother said it was so warm the November my oldest brother was born that Aunt Ethel brought up a big bouquet of flowers from her garden. Seventy years later their garage is torn down now, and much of the lovingly maintained hedge bordering Uncle Joe's house next door is gone too. That whole stretch used to look so neat. Now the gardens behind the houses are parking lots. It would be ironic if the family who helped establish the supremacy of the automobile in the neighborhood could see how it destroyed the beauty they surrounded themselves with. But, they're long passed, and past that, I guess.

A grocery store was next to Uncle Joe and Aunt Marion's house. His sister (my grandmother) married a fellow from a Long Island family that had a summer place in the "Patch". (That's somewhere between Fishcreek and Highwoods.) His mother gave her daughter the building as a wedding present. Her husband's family gave the money (I seem to remember hearing of a figure of $1200) to stock it. That became Frisbie's Store. My father's parents ran it. My father worked there when he was growing up. There's a long line of merchants and hoteliers in our family.

I remember my first garden was behind Frisbie's Grocery Store. Grandpa Frisbie gave us a row in his vegetable garden. We planted green beans, and tended them as our own, as much as four year olds will. When they ripened, Grandma & Grandpa Frisbie let us sell them on the front steps of their store. They provided the scale, the bags and, presumably, the arithmetic. We undercut our competition (them) and sold the whole crop. That was the Summer they nurtured part of one generation while they buried part of another, their son, our father, but I only have happy memories of it.

Aunt Mary ran Frisbie's Store for awhile after her parents died. She and Uncle Mike lived across the street. After the store passed out of the family, and after Uncle Mike retired, he sat in his dooryard much as Uncle Bill sat in his, years earlier, looking across the road at what once was, waving to friends and relatives as they drove by.

Now Frisbie's Store is called Mezzaluna, a place that sells good food to the locals while providing a comforting, sit-down place for the artists and musicians it attracts. Mery Rosado tells me it's three years this month she's owned it. Before that it stood empty too long, the family ghosts lonely in the stillness. Now, with music performances, art shows and the aroma of good cooking coming from the kitchen, I can again think of it as my family's place. I know she tells everyone it's called Mezzaluna, but, in my mind at least, it's still really Frisbie's Store. Thanks for continuing the tradition, Mery.