Date: Fri 26-Jul-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: ANDREA

Quick Words:

Vern-Knapp-Newtown-remembered

Full Text:

Newtown Remembered: A Country Life Of Enterprise

WITH FOUR PHOTOS

B Y A NDREA Z IMMERMANN

Wedding days are supposed to be memorable, but not in the way Vern Smith

Knapp's was. At noon on her special day in 1935, the fire siren sounded and

off went the minister and her husband-to-be - both volunteer firemen - to

battle huge blaze that engulfed and ultimately destroyed Quinn's ice house off

Church Hill Road.

But Al Knapp and Paul Cullens did manage to get back in time for the ceremony

at the Congregational Church, now known as the Meeting House.

This is but one of the many rich memories Mrs Knapp recalled of her 66 years

living in Newtown. Mrs Knapp was a high school senior when her family moved

here from Long Island in 1930. In New York, she would have graduated in a

class of 250 students; at Hawley, she was one of 19 seniors.

"The reason my family came here was because Lake Zoar had just been made with

the Stevenson Dam," said Mrs Knapp. "We had had a summer cottage there for

four years, and my father would commute back and forth to New York."

During the summer, the family came into Newtown to go to the movies at the

theater on Church Hill Road across from St Rose Church. "It was just a

barn-like building with long benches," said Mrs Knapp. "Jimmy Nichols'

daughter would play the piano and make the music go according to the pictures.

That's how my folks got interested in moving out here. They thought Long

Island was getting too built up."

Her father, Harold Smith, was an architect. During the Depression there was no

business in New York, so he shifted careers and became proprietor of the soda

fountain/luncheonette, which he called The Flagpole Fountain, at the head of

Church Hill Road. Besides the fountain, his establishment offered patent

medicines, and sandwiches.

Mrs Knapp, who worked there as a youth, remembered, "Mrs George Canfield used

to make the most wonderful pies - coconut custard, apple, lemon, peach." Coke

came as syrup, to which she would add carbonated water and cherry syrup to

create a cherry Coke for customers. And the creamy old-fashioned ice cream

soda was made this way: put chocolate syrup on the bottom, add a tablespoon of

cream, then add soda from the fountain and a scoop of ice cream, and finally

fill the glass right to the top with soda. It would bubble up over the edge,

she recalled.

The old A&P was also located in the Chase Building, along with Mr Pitschler's

barber shop, and Stuart Real Estate. Before Mr Smith purchased the business,

it had been operated by the wife of the manager of the A&P, first as a tea

room and later as a soda fountain, she said.

In her free time, Mrs Knapp enjoyed hunting and trapping. Her father showed

her how to shoot, and her uncle, who grew up in the Catskill Mountains, taught

her how to trap. "You have to get up before the sun rises - otherwise the

muskrat will chew its leg off to get free," she said. "I never got a mink, but

mink signs were there."

Mrs Knapp trapped in a big pond just above the dam off Orchard Hill, which

originally supplied power for the mill. At that time, the pond was filled with

snapping turtles. Mrs Knapp caught muskrat, skinned them, turned them

inside-out, and put them over a wooden shingle to dry. "A fellow in town

bought the skins for 25 cents a skin," she said. "I bought my first car with

money I made - a Chevy coupe. I paid $200 for it."

Mrs Knapp's father had a huge garden on their property - potatoes, corn,

beans, tomatoes - and she spent many hours canning fresh vegetables. Mr Smith

carefully banked the celery so he could pick some for the meal on

Thanksgiving.

At Christmastime, Paul Cullens took the young people to an inn in New

Hampshire so they could ski. He had a camp up there, but it was too cold

during the winter months for anyone to stay overnight, said Mrs Knapp. When

Mohawk opened in Connecticut it had only one tow, but it was a favorite place

to go, she said.

A Partnership

Al Knapp and Vern Smith married in 1935. They lived with her parents on

Orchard Hill Road until the couple built a house around the corner on Main

Street in 1939. Al's brother, Ed, was a carpenter and he helped out every

Saturday and Sunday. Mrs Knapp tried to paint the wood siding almost as fast

as the brothers hammered it up, she recalled. The couple just had an icebox in

their home then, not a refrigerator.

Al, who had begun working at the General Store as a delivery boy when he was

16, bought the business right before the US entered the war. He served in the

Navy for almost three years, while Mrs Knapp waited on customers and ordered

mechandise for the store, known then as Knapp and Trull.

"We had everything from boots to molasses, paints to hardware, fabrics, meats,

eggs, and produce, and newspapers. We had refrigerators and stoves," said Mrs

Knapp. "And we had delivery services. In Taunton we had good customers - they

were up for the summer from New York. They'd phone in their orders. They were

wealthier people than the farmers that were here," she added.

At that time, the only two other grocers were the A&P in the Chase Building,

and the General Store in Sandy Hook, she said. "So everybody in town would

come to our store. But when supermarkets came in on Queen Street, they could

outrun us in prices," she said. "My husband finally sold out in the '50s."

The owners of the General Store bought produce from local farmers. "Henry

Taylor had a peach orchard up on Mt Pleasant Road. He'd have beautiful peaches

- the best peaches in town," she said.

"It was dreadful during the war years, though. We'd get just so much butter

and so much meat," said Mrs Knapp. They would have to try and divvy it up

fairly. "It was awful to hold back on customers," she said.

A Girl Scout leader at that time, Mrs Knapp remembered having made "bundles

for Britain" - kits to supply the British with little sweaters, gowns, and

diapers for their children.

Mrs Knapp and her husband hunted deer, pheasant, and rabbits. She used a 30-30

rifle for deer and a 410 shotgun for bird. They also liked to skeet shoot

using a handtrap they had set up in the back yard. "We had the store when we

were doing the deer hunting in Nova Scotia - and had a big freezer. In

Southbury, then, there was a freezer and had lockers people could rent out.

They would cut up the carcass and package it for you," said Mrs Knapp. "At

that point, hunting was just a country way of life and any meat on the table

was a bonus."

The couple also raised springer spaniels and beagles. They enjoyed the

outdoors and traveled throughout the country in a trailer Mr Knapp had

fashioned into a sleeper - a "forerunner of the pop-up trailer," said Mrs

Knapp. When Candlewood Lake was created, they camped on Hog Island, now called

Pine Island.

When Al Knapp decided to sell his half of the General Store business, he went

to work for Heise calibrating and engraving commercial pressure gauges.

The couple always enjoyed nature, and Mr Knapp had a particular fondness for

the Orchard Hill area. When the town started talking about putting in a ball

field there, Mr Knapp and George Adams fought "valiantly" to keep it as a

natural park, said Mrs Knapp. As a testament to this, his name is inscribed on

a plaque at the entrance to the parking lot.

Al Knapp died in 1985. But Mrs Knapp said she keeps busy with sewing,

needlework, collecting antique dolls, volunteering at blood banks and at the

Congregational Church basement where thrift shop items are sorted and mended.

She also travels and recently returned from a trip to Alaska with her

daughter, Karen Lyons, who lives in Nebraska.