One April first, Ray Baker and Herb Copland, they had soldered a quarter to a spike and then drove it in the sidewalk that used to be right out in front of the house. They were working up on the roof and keeping track of the people that was coming along, and by and by Ella came along. And she spotted that quarter. Of course she stooped down to pick it up and she couldn’t get it. But she worked on it, with her shoe, until she got it loose. And then they hollered “April Fool!” She says, “I got the quarter – I don’t know who the fool was”.
From this account in Hampton Remembers, we can infer that April Fools has been celebrated here for at least a hundred years, and from the chapter “Interesting People We Knew”, that our town has never known a shortage of “characters.” Harold Stone’s is not the only tale of Ella Sharpe.
One day Ella went to the post office and somebody told her I had a little girl. She didn’t believe it and she said she didn’t. And the first thing I know – I was in bed in a downstairs room – and I didn’t know anybody was around – and in she stalked. She stood there and looked at me. She said, “Where did you get that baby?” I said, “Where do babies come from anyway?” “They told me at the post office you had a baby girl and I told them I knew better. I’ve seen you out everywhere – you were out to church last Sunday!” And I said, “Well everybody don’t have to be big as a barrel.” Well as she went home she told everybody across the street in Hampton it was true, I did have a baby.
Gertrude Pearl
There are many others memorialized in Hampton Remembers.
Auntie Josie Smith was very superstitious in a funny way…she knew how to have a garden but she knew that you could only plant certain things at certain times of the moon. And it was quite a care to her to do it right, you know, and she told when I was there – I’m sure I hear her tell it – that it wasn’t the right time of the moon, and it was going to be too late if she waited and she didn’t know what to do. So she put on an old coat that had a hole in the pocket and put the seeds in the pocket and went out and jumped around on the ground. And that’s the way she planted her seeds at the wrong time of the moon!
Helen Mathews
Uncle Gene Darrow’s tin cart was a brick red, pulled by a pair of horses…he opened up his cart from the side and he had bread tins and pails and he had – why he had everything in that cart!
Harold Stone
Eugene Augustus Darrow was the “last of the tin peddlers” and was also renowned for following the adage – “revenge is a dish best served cold”. Retribution was always just and never cruel. “You don’t want to do nawthing right aways. Even if it takes ten years, get even,” Peggy Fox relays his advice in his dialect, telling of the time he gave a large gift to someone who, unwrapping it in her house, discovered it was filled with hundreds of crickets.
Harold Stone contributed quite a bit to Hampton Remembers. Tales of his classmate who called out, “I was put together wrong. Here it says you smell with your nose and run with your feet, but my nose runs and my feet smell.” The woman who tied herself to the railroad track for “publicity”, knowing that the freight train would see her “cause she wore her red outin’ flannel petticoat.” Harold himself was a character. Ever practical, he cut through the ice to bathe in Bigelow Pond all winter because it “wasn’t as bad as taking sponge baths in a cold room”, and he brought his bride Hazel all the way home from New Jersey in the side car of his motorcycle.
Andrew Rindge, who farmed at Trail Wood, was remembered by Edwin Way Teale in A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm: “…his poems, usually dealing with local happening and the foibles and misdeeds of his neighbors, were tacked to the bulletin board in front of the store.” Margaret Marcus was more specific in Hampton Remembers:
When anything happened he’d put it into a poem and put it on the town bulletin board at the store. One time he wrote about a certain lady who was very nice to all the gentlemen. Then she decided she’d settle for just one, and all the others weren’t welcome so all those others caught her lover and tarred and feathered him. Well when this poem came out, there were the names of all the men who patronized this lady, you see, and they didn’t want to be there at all – it was all very hush-hush, of course – and to have it come out and tell who they were – ‘cause most of them were married men – a scandal in Hampton!
Teale also wrote of other legendary residents such as “Thunderstorm Bill”, notorious for spitting when he talked, and the elderly countryman who thought he was losing his hearing until the doctor informed him of “the dirtiest ears he’d ever seen in his life!” Eccentrics were fewer in Teale’s time, though he mentioned the woman having trouble remembering who responded to his suggestion that she carry her name and address, “If I can’t remember who I am or where I live, I will just go to a police station and tell them I am a lost Russian princess. Then my picture will be in the paper. Someone will recognize it and come and get me.”
A few of our characters have achieved some measure of fame, most notably Stanley Gula, who appeared in On the Road with Charles Kurault. A Polish immigrant, he cut witch hazel and delivered it to Dickinson’s in his Model A, which he lived with in his garage, instead of in the house he built and never inhabited. He grew strawberries, but wouldn’t let small children or adults with large feet in his patch, and the “magic” eggs he wrapped in handkerchiefs to distribute to children would allegedly hatch “little Stanley Gulas”.
In “One Proud Yankee Who Kept Her Sox On”, the Willimantic Chronicle memorialized our “crusty, yet loving” librarian and “dispenser of literary taste”, Eunice Fuller, who for 75 years dispensed books and opinions. With “an askance look or a click of her tongue”, she would disapprove of a selection, and if she disliked someone on a magazine cover, she would “give them a mustache with her date stamp.” She never kept a card catalogue yet knew where everything was and let patrons borrow a book until someone else requested it.
Barney Pawlikowski was so famous in Hampton that in 1981 the town celebrated “Barney Day”. Residents gathered to pay their respects to Barney on the occasion of his retirement from, well, everything. A “Jack-of-all-Trades”, there wasn’t anything Barney couldn’t do, or any time of day or night he couldn’t do it. Furnace breaks in the middle of the night? Pipes burst at the crack of dawn? No problem. Barney always responded immediately. As his daughter, June, confirmed, “He thrived on emergencies.”
Last summer, seventeen residents remembered Paulie Tumel on the front page of the August issue, with his words of wisdoms, such as “Don’t go into a hole that you can’t back out of,” and “Paulisms”, like “I got two permits. One for me to mind my own business and another one for you to mind yours!” Affectionately referred to as Dr. Dirt, the Entertainer, the Teacher, the Bulldozer Whispererer, the Flirt, the Good Neighbor, the Welcome Wagon, and L’Artiste, Paul was remembered for hunting, excavating, and crushing hornets’ nests with his bare hands. And he was remembered for his stories, like the one Rich Schenk shared of an FBI Agent soliciting Paulie’s help with neighbors suspected of Communist activity: “He handed him a pitchfork and said, you’ll need this. When the agent asked why, he said – to clean my barn. The Agent said, I’m not doing your work, and Paulie said, then don’t ask me to do yours.”
Remembrances such as these, for a lot of reasons, make us smile, yet Paulie’s were somewhat bittersweet; when we said “good-bye” to Paulie Tumel, we were saying good-bye to an era, and to the last of its legendary characters.