I hated Sunday. It was the deadliest day of the week. Almost everything shut down except the churches. For me, it meant clean clothes, a tight collar, a tie and polished shoes. It was horrible. The forests, streams, railroad tracks and deserted cement mines all called softly to me to come and play but on Sunday their siren calls were drowned in the persistent clanging of church bells. 

My cousin and I would be shoved forth in clean clothes for the downhill walk to St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church. It had the loudest bell of all and still does. There was no escape. In desperation I would stand at the rear of the church where I could feel a hint of summer breeze and peer out at the railroad trestle that flew across the valley and disappeared behind the rocky tumble of Joppenburgh Mountain. 

After church it was our job to pick up the Sunday paper. That meant a listless walk down a deadly quiet Main Street. We'd find the Sunday papers stacked on a long wooden bench in front of Baxter's ice cream shop and on a shorter one down the street on the porch of Vaughan's drug store. That was about all there was to Sunday's except for the next boring phase that always took place on our front porch on Mountain Road when we got home. The grown ups, all dressed up, would browse endlessly through the pages of that blasted paper. While the summer bugs hummed and sizzeled in the tress the "big people" would gently rattle the pages of the Kingston Freeman, clucking over this or that, killing time until dinner. On Sunday it wasn't "lunch" and it wasn't "supper." It was "dinner" and it happened somewhere in the middle of the afternoon for some unknown reason. As the adults slowly turned the folded pages of their newspapers, my collar would grow steadily smaller, threatening to cut off my wind pipe completely. It never did and eventually dinner would appear. 

That was Sunday. The rest of the week the village of Rosendale bustled. Gruesome sawing sounds seemed always to be issuing from the doorway of Rossler's meat market. More wholesome sawing sounds came from Schryver's lumber yard. Cars chugged up to the gas pump in front of Henry Myers' garage and chugged away. Up and down Main Street you could hear the slamming of screen doors as customers entered shops and let them smack shut behind them. 

At the west end of the village was Kelder's ice cream shop. Next to it was Kelder's Hotel. No one stayed in the hotel as far as I could tell. Through a big dusty window you could see a deserted parlor. A bulb hanging from the ceiling glowed dimly night and day to reveal dark overstuffed chairs and several spindle legged mahogany side tables. Nothing ever moved. Nothing ever changed. It looked haunted. Ma Kelder was well along in years but rumor had it she knew how to entertain gentleman in the old days. Just rumors. (continued on page 4) 

Next door was a creaky old building that didn't seem to have much strength to it. The store front leaned a bit. It was dark inside and full of vegetable. A little bell on the door tinkled when you entered. The Goldwassers were short and fat with heavy eastern European accents. Mama Goldwasser always sounded a little short of breath. Papa was round, sweaty and bug-eyed. Maybe he had a goiter problem. Every day after school, earlier in the summertime, papa and son Joey would load up a droopy looking truck with vegetables and set off to sell them door to door through Rosendale and the neighboring villages. It was a hard life and everyone knew Joey was a good boy. 

The post office was a few doors down from Goldwasser's. Annie Auchmoody was the post mistress, already more than middle aged, very neat, pleasant and efficient. Once every summer Annie helped run a supper at the Dutch Reform church in the middle of town. The building still looks very much like a church with its arched windows and bell tower but it's a glass blower's studio these days. I can still picture Ms. Auchmoody, a bead of sweat on her brow, pulling ears of corn from a big pot to help diners overload their plates. The spacious interior of the church echoed to the clank and tinkle of dishes and cutlery. Everything was real - no plastic in those days. Many years later, apparently immune to the aging process, Annie Auchmoody began a long second or third career as the town librarian. 

Across the street from the post office was the Valley Inn, run by a hefty Slavic women named Nikoletich. The smell of hearty Croatian cooking always poured from her kitchen out onto Main Street. A year ago I passed the old building and thought my mind was playing me tricks. It seemed the odor of Mrs. Nikoletich's cooking had come flying out of the past to shoot right up my nostalgia susceptible nostrils. I stopped dead in front of the faded yellow building and began sniffing anxiously like a hungry poodle passing a Burger King. The delicious scent persisted. I learned a few days later that a knish factory had moved into the old building a few years ago. 

Nest to the Valley Inn there used to be a house that looked like a part of a Civil War movie set. Its broad roof sloped steeply toward Main Street, eventually covering a huge porch whose wide plank floor lay almost level with the earth. The building belonged to Annie Mack. Annie only had a couple of teeth but she was ready with a gummy smile if you said hello. Her brother, Johnny Mack, lived in a tar paper shack in the hills above Mountain Road. He painted birds and other wild life on pieces of tin he'd found and pounded flat. Because of the open hearth in his rustic shack, everything about Old Mack smelled like wood smoke, even his tin paintings. 

There's nothing but a parking lot where Annie Mack's house stood. I think there was a fire. Next to the empty lot is the Rosendale Café. It occupies a building that used to be an A&P grocery, then Rossler's meat market, then a liquor store. Now people sip coffee in there and munch on New Age "organic" salads and sandwiches full of sprouts. 

Across the street is a red brick building. It's been a hotel, off and on, as long as I can remember. It hasn't changed much. In the 40s mostly people just dropped in to have a drink at the bar. Mike Wasalewsky poured and told stories about giant fish that could be caught if only you were lucky enough to find and use a worm that lived exclusively in the heart of the artichoke. No one challenged him. Of course, no one had ever seen an artichoke worm except, apparently, Mike Wasalewsky. 

Sometime in the 40s Rossler moved out of the A&P building and set up his butcher shop down the block. He was a spare man who wore thick glasses and a bloody bib apron. He had a German accent and moist lips that always made me think of raw meat. He seemed always to be apologizing to someone. He would tilt his head to the side and hold his arms out, palms forward. It was like seeing Christ in a bloody apron minus the cross. No one was irreligious enough to refuse Mr. Rossler's Christ-like apologies which mostly involved disclaimers regarding tough meat. 

Across from Rossler's new store was Henry Myers' garage. Henry was short, wore rimless glasses like FDR, had a bit of a pot and always had a much-chewed cigar stuck in his mouth. He puffed or chewed all the time, pumping gas or not. There never was an explosion so I guess he chewed more than he puffed. 

Next to Rossler's was another cigar chewer, Sally Rosa. Squat old Sally would sit like a toad in front of his dry goods store tilted back into a substantial green chair. Mom took me inside several times to look for sneakers or something. It was dark inside and smelled like wet wool. My cousin was always puzzled by the contradiction posed by Sally's store that smelled like wet wool but professed to be dealing in dry goods. 

The stuff in Sally Rosa's was all brand new but came from eons past. He must have stocked up fifty years earlier and then decided to retire to his chair out front. Shoes sat in boxes with peeling labels that looked like printing from the Civil War. Sally, never too agreeable, would puff on his cigar and wheeze his way amongst the piled up tables of dry goods in an effort to locate whatever it was you might be looking for. He always came up with something, then would stand like a smoking frog, ready to be annoyed if you didn't like it. 

Sally Rosa wasn't the only grouch in town. Across the street was the shop of watchmaker/jewler, Emzy Lewis. Mr. Lewis spent most of his time at a work table, a loupe stuck in his eye, fussing with a pair of tweezers inside some time piece. Emzy Lewis was always cranky and had no sense of business. Any request for a watch that had been left weeks before would be met with a squawking response of, "Not yet. Come back tomorrow!" After several attempts, the watch would eventually be there in the front case with a cardboard tag attached. No matter how long it had taken or what the repair job entailed, the price always seemed to be the same. Without looking up, the loupe still in his eye, Emzy Lewis would sigh and then squawk down at his work table, "Twenty five cents!" They said Emzy had survived three well-off wives and didn't need the money. There were also whispered theories as the possibly irregular nature of Emzy's rise to financial independence. 

Doc Vaughan ran the drug store. To this day you can see his name bleeding through the layers of later paint jobs. Doc had a cyst in one eye. It didn't seem to bother him but it was whitish and looked like a bit of bird dropping. When Doc spoke to you it was hard not to stare. His wife helped out with the store. She was rolley polley and had a helmet of terribly tight, extremely blond curls that were held in place by at least fifty bobby pins. It didn't look at all natural. 

All the patent medicines, jars of prescription potions and pharmacy paraphernalia were behind the glass top counter to the left as you came in. On the right was a marble soda fountain where they served ice cream in metal cups and milk shakes poured thickly into coke glasses that rested in metal holders with handles. A row of marble top tables and wire back chairs occupied the space between the two counters. Oscillating fans hummed from the corners of the store and slow ones turned lazily overhead - flup, flup, flup. As with most Rosendale business establishments, curling strips of sticky fly paper hung here and there from the embossed tin ceiling. You could see the hapless bugs, wings going like mad at times in hopeless attempts to break loose. Great stuff, fly paper. Low tech but very effective and non-polluting. 

Doc didn't have any competition in the drug business but across the street to the west, old man Baxter ran a news stand and ice cream emporium. Baxter always wire one of those squashed down caps with a bill like a New York cabbie and had a lot of little red veins in his cheeks. Some time later he sold his shop to Jack Gilmartin. Gil didn't sound like he was from Rosendale. He came up from the City and had a Brooklyn accent. His wife, May, did too. She was on the heavy side and liked to talk a lot. The Gilmartin's had one beautiful teen age daughter and one a little older but much smaller who was retarded. Today, we'd say she was mentally handicapped. I always liked the little retarded gal. Most people did. Jackie was her name and whatever was wrong with her, it made her really tell folks off when she thought they needed telling. Maybe she had Turret's Syndrome or something like that. She was little and had a deep voice. When you'd least expect it she'd say damn, hell, or much worse. Nobody talked dirty in those days so people got a little nervous when Jackie would pipe up. One thing - you always knew for sure where you stood with Jackie Gilmartin. 

Every Sunday, when it was time for church, Jackie and her beautiful sister would appear from the stair well at the back of the shop all dressed up like a pair of fairy tale princesses - white satin dresses, white shoes and pretty handbags. Sometimes Jackie would say damn, hell or much worse anyhow. 

To the west of Gilmartin's towards the town clerk's office, is the movie theater. It used to be the firehouse and they'd move the shiny red pumper out onto the street when the town people wanted to see a movie. Sometimes, too, they'd show movies outdoors on the lawn down behind Mike Wasalewsky's hotel. It was fun to watch all the bugs swirling around the projector while people slapped and scratched in time to the dramatic musical themes of the 1940's black and white classics. 

Mr. Schryver, who owned the lumber yard, was very bald but had a thin mustache like movie star Roland Coleman. Schryver was always dressed meticulously in white shirt, tie, pressed slacks and brown loafers. To me, he looked out of place in Rosendale, like maybe he was a little light in those loafers. Who know? Nobody asked and nobody told. I always imagined the radio character, Great Gildersleeve, would look like Mr. Schryver if I could just see him behind his microphone in the radio studio. 

Pete LoBello was a only barber right in town. He was short, totally bald with a wart on his head and a vicious ccackle for a laugh. His Italian accent was so thick you could barely understand him. He liked to repeat about how he had taught some guy a lesson by sticking a long needle into his neck. I don't remember how the story went but it made me nervous. Pete felt severely threatened by another Italian barber who ran a shop at the top of the hill on Route 32 as you entered Tillson. It seemed to me the Tillson barber was completely non-threatening - short and round like a mouse in Walt Disney's Cinderella. At the end of a haircut, Pete LoBello would always hold the mirror up to the back of your head and say, "Nice, huh? I no givva you pineappela haircut lika dat guy up onna plains (Tillson)." I always agreed with Mr. LoBello, thinking of all the opportunities he had during a haircut to push a long needle into my neck. 

The merchants of Rosendale were a colorful cross section of America. There was tiny Ollie Moore who wore a bonnet like the women on the Little House on the Prairie. She ran a hand laundry where the Canaltown Bookstore is today. I never heard her speak. She looked lonely, very clean and subdued as though she'd been soaking for a long time in soapy water. 

There were several small groceries. One was tiny and belonged to a man named Eshker. Mr. Eshker tried to get the edge on his competitors by providing home delivery. He was almost deaf and used to rev his car's engine up so high you expected to see pistons and valves flying through the hood. 

At the other end of town was Roosa's grocery. Mr. And Mrs. Roosa used to run the cash register together, Pa calling out the prices as he bagged the groceries while wiry little Ma Roosa pushed the keys on the old cash register which let out a kerchunk-ding with each push. Their boy, Kenny, was awfully overweight. He was always dipping into the cold cuts and crackers while mom and pop worked the register. It was Kenny's job to carry the bagged groceries out to your car when you were done and also to fetch a block of ice from the ice house out back if you needed one. Kenny developed kidney problems at an early age and would admonish shoppers, "You've got real trouble when you've got trouble with the water works." I guess Kenny knew but I wonder what Jackie Gilmartin would have said on the subject. 

I can't escape the association in my mind of Rosendale and the vignettes of American life depicted by artist, Norman Rockwell. The details differ but the scenes of Rosendale I recall are so similar in mood and essence - Henry Myers, a lighted cigar in his mouth, leaning into the gas filler, listening to see if the tank was near full; Emzy Lewis scowling into the innards of a watch with an impatient customer leaning close to see what was taking so long; a little boy, top knot like a pineapple, sitting stiffly in Pete LoBello's barber chair; a line of parents and kids eagerly waiting in line at a church supper for Annie Auchmoody to fish out an ear of corn. 

It was all just as Rockwell painted it. In the early 1940's the world was a simple, sweet and gentle place. And like any other country village across the Nation, Rosendale, just 80 miles north of New York City, was a slice of the apple pie America that once stretched innocently from sea to shining sea. 

[Author's Note: These are my recollections after more than a half century. If I have spoken in error, forgive me. Perhaps your own recollections, or the facts themselves, may argue against what I have written. If so, the errors are honest and without intention to deceive. Santa Fe, New Mexico, April, 2000]