Remembering Sarah Mannix

To the Editor:

We first got to know Sarah Mannix in 1970. It was our second year in Newtown, and I was still adjusting to many changes in my life – living in a house in the country after being born and raised in New York, being a parent with a new baby, not being a teacher any more for the first time since finishing college, and totally unexpected and unwanted, a case of cancer.

It was that, really, that led me to Sarah: Pete stopped in to get me some flowers and told me about the greenhouse down at the bottom of Greenbriar, and forever after that it was the only place we would go to get tomatoes in the summer. When you went in there you stopped to talk, it was how it was. No matter how busy the place was, Sarah would stop to greet you and talk about your family and your life and what was happening. In those days every girl who went to the Newtown High prom had a corsage from Mannix greenhouse, and every wedding reception in town boasted flowers done by Sarah.

She was a neighbor – the first one we insulated city people really got to know. Our house on Park Lane was built on the first piece of farmland her father sold off during the Depression, for a hundred dollars an acre. It was originally a three-room shack, without plumbing or electricity, built as a vacation home by a plumber from Bridgeport. Sarah told us that.

She would come for dinner, now and again (she liked chicken), and tell us stories about the old Newtown, and about its people – how the park was named after Fenn Dickinson, the first selectman who was killed while it was being built, run over by a town truck that inadvertently backed into him (before trucks had back-up beepers).

She told us the story of every family that lived on our two streets – Park and Greenbriar – their history, their children, their troubles, always with kindness and generosity, never with anything mean or gossipy. She knew the children from her school bus, which she kept parked in her barn. The kids on her route were never mean or fractious – she had them under control. She loved that big yellow bus and she knew how to care for it. Back during World War II, as Sarah Farell, she had been made Captain of the Newtown Motor Corps, a volunteer group of mechanics, trained by Louie Lovell, of Lovell’s Garage on Main Street, where the police station is now.

She was a Democrat. Back when the Democrats were clearly a minority party here in town, you could find the group of them meeting every morning in the Village Luncheonette – the unofficial town committee meeting, just as the school bus drivers would meet at the Coffee Shop, which would grow into My Place. Sarah fit comfortably into both groups – the stuff of Newtown. I remember one year when a furious school budget vote was coming up, with angry words and feelings on both sides, and the day of the referendum brought with it a terrible hurricane. We saw Sarah on the road that afternoon, surprised that she was out in the storm. “I sure didn’t want to go out,” she said, “but I would never miss the chance to vote for education.”

She loved kids, and understood them. I remember some 26 years ago, before it was the stuff of mass marketing, she gave my five-year-old son a little book she had brought back from Vermont. Written by an English minister, it was about a locomotive called Thomas, the Tank Engine, and his friends, Gordon and Henry. He still has it somewhere, though by now it is falling apart.

Although she never had children of her own, Sarah always took pride in the young men she mentored, taking them as high schoolers come to help her in the greenhouse and going on to find careers in horticulture. The person who was most like a daughter to her, though, was her friend Betty Lou Osborne, with whom she served for so many years on the Town Hall Board of Managers.

It was Betty Lou who took her on trips to Florida that meant so much to her. It was Betty Lou who helped Sarah deal with the loss of a beloved pet by coming up with a new one. There was always the taffy cocker spaniel. When we first knew Sarah it was Bud, the old dog who loved bananas. When he died, sprightly little Maggie arrived to take his place, living in a baby’s playpen in the middle of the greenhouse, but demanding attention from everyone who came in. And then there was Josh, who lived a long time and eventually lost both his eyes and his hearing, but could still feel comfortable knowing that Sarah was nearby.

She never had much money. For years, after her husband Bill died, and when she retired from bus driving at age 70, she rented out half her house to Miss Dolan, the history teacher from the high school, and eventually she was forced to rent out the nursery property itself, in order to keep her home. It didn’t matter. Sarah gave of herself to anyone who asked or needed it. What was unusual was that she was able to accept help, gracefully and graciously. Gallant, independent, completely comfortable with who she was, to paraphrase the Kipling poem, she had the ability to “walk with kings yet not lose the common touch.”

I remember the last few years delivering Meals on Wheels to her, she would come to the door with a friendly comment, telling me how she was trying to tame some local feral cats into finding a home in her barn, where they wouldn’t be so cold in the winter.

I called my sons to tell them, and they were both very saddened to hear the news, although they appreciated that Sarah had lived a good life and finished it the way she wanted. My older son’s final comment was simply, “Sarah Mannix was part of what made Newtown so much more than just an ordinary suburb to grow up in.”

Julie Stern

19 Park Lane, Newtown                                           January 2, 2001