Setting the Scene

I was born and raised in Monroe, New York as the son of a small business owner and nurse. Dad owned Monroe Lumber, or Monroe Lumber and Building Supply, or Monroe Lumber and Coal if you go back even far enough. Dad was the third generation to run the lumber company. He took it over from his dad, Rodney, who took it over from his father-in-law. Mom was a nurse. She graduated from SUNY Plattsburg with a nursing degree and worked in hospitals and schools. My best memory was of her being the campus nurse at Harriman Junior College before taking a job down in The Bronx. 

In the 1970s through early 1980s, Monroe was still far enough from New York City that not a lot of people had moved there to make the town "the suburbs". We were about 50 miles from Manhattan but we were still surrounded by farms, lakes, and a general easy going life. 

It was a different time. 

Before there was Walmart there was K-Mart. Before K-Mart in Monroe there was Grant's Department Store and Jamesway. Grant's became K-Mart (the site of my first long term job and a fire that I got caught in) while Jamesway spectacularly burned to the ground in 1990.  The K-Mart and Jamesway fire stories are for another time. The town was big enough that we had three grocery stores(!); Grand Union (the site of my first real job), Shop Rite, and A&P.  

Then, there were no fast-food locations, only The Monroe Diner, Sit n' Chat, and a small storefront diner on Mill Pond. The town had a one screen movie theater that in it's hey day must have quiet the place. It had a huge screen, a small stage, and forty foot tall red curtains on the sides of the screen.  

We had a volunteer fire department and ambulance squad - of which dad (circled) belonged to the Mombasha FD and mom belonged to the Monroe Ambulance Corps. We had a small police force who knew everybody. In fact the one time I got in trouble (for cursing out in public), the police called my dad instead of dealing with me directly.  

There was a shoe cobbler, an old Italian barber, and a pharmacist that were all part of my life because we used their businesses. I remember the pharmacist had big bell that would ring when we came in - because we entered from the back of the store where the parking lot was - we never used the front entrance.  He always had the big Charms lollipops, which somehow we left the store with.    

There were a few pizza places in town and getting pizza was always an event.  When Andy and I were kids mom would take us to order the pizza, we never called it in for pick-up and there was no such thing as delivery then. We'd stand on our tiptoes in order to watch them flatten out the crust, flour it, roll it, toss it and then spiral on red tomato sauce and add cheese. The pizza was so hot then they gave it to you in the box that you had to hold the box perfectly level or the cheese would slide to one side before you got home.  

Monroe comprised both the town of Monroe and the village of Monroe. At the center of the village was the Mill Pond, or as we called it, the "Duck Pond". The pond had a man made waterfall at one end where the mill once stood, thus the name. The waterfall had four states depending on the time of year; frozen, gushing, trickling, and dry.  Every once in a while we would take stale bread down to the pond and feed the ducks and geese. The fowl would be all over the pond but as soon as they saw kids heading down to the water with plastic bags in hand they would start to congregate towards us.  

We had a couple of parks, Smith Clove Park and Airplane Park. Smith Clove is where we played Little League baseball and the Airplane Park had swings, and teeter totters, and a 1950s, Korea War era Sabre jet that had been converted into a slide.  You could climb through the air intake at the front of the plane and end up where engines used to be. It was fun, but it always smelled like pee so mom didn't take us there too often. 

The backdrop of a story is important because it provides some context and color to the telling of the tale. In this case it is also important because so much of that small town feel is gone. The Grand Union and A&P grocery stores no longer exist. The pizza place we went to is now a Domino's. Many of the businesses in the village are boarded up or gone, to include the pharmacy - who needs a local pharmacy when you have CVS? Monroe Diner has changed hands and there's a McDonalds and Burger King and Dunkin'. Monroe Lumber has been gone for close to twenty years. The jet was saved and restored through a community drive. The Mill Pond is still postcard picturesque. 

I lived in Monroe for all of my young life. I lived in the same house for 22 of the 23 years I called Monroe, NY my home. Back then it was still a small town so close to bigger things. Monroe, NY, only an hour from NYC, fifteen miles from West Point, and nestled on the west side of the Hudson Valley serves as the backdrop for the stories I want to tell.