Lary Bloom
Writer, Editor, Teacher
Excerpts from Lary Bloom's Connecticut Notebook
The following are chapters from Lary Bloom’s Connecticut Notebook, published by Globe Pequot Press in the fall, 2005:
My intent is to develop a strong sense of place. This requires immersion in the history, lore, issues, traditions, and personalities of the community. Even so, my own perceptions may easily differ from those readers who prefer more convenient conclusions. After this piece was published, a longtime Fenwick resident objected to my historical reference to discriminatory practices in the borough. He wrote that he hadn’t ever come across evidence of bigotry. This proved the publishing axiom that writers who report discrimination will be accused of discrimination. . (Originally published July 2004)
In the months following the death of Katharine Hepburn, real estate rumors floated around Fenwick, the secluded borough of Old Saybrook where the actress had lived on and off since her youth. Her nine-bedroom, eight-bath house, which overlooks Long Island Sound and went up for sale for $12 million, had been examined by Dennis Rodman, basketball’s most famous cross-dresser. And then by Tony Soprano himself, actor James Gandolfini.
These rumors proved false. But it is true that Robert Loggia, who appeared on several episodes of The Sopranos, summers in a house a short walk from Kate’s. Loggia plays the same nine-hole public golf course in the borough where the actress often demonstrated her considerable athletic skills. I watched him at the second tee one day. Loggia sent the ball in the direction of the beach instead of the green. This result elicited commentary directly out of The Sopranos script.
Fenwick, of course, has always had star quality. Kate brought it with her, from the early days, when Hartford’s Hepburns built their first summer “cottage” (as houses are called in the borough), through the devastating hurricane of 1938, and even in her later years, when the actress secluded herself at the end of a driveway off Mohegan Avenue where two similarly worded signs welcomed visitors: Private! keep out! (These signs were among the Hepburn goods later auctioned by Sotheby’s.)
There were decades when Kate was much more public. She was often seen in her straw hat fastened by a large scarf (she was an early advocate of “no sun”), riding on her rusty bike or playing tennis. She was as pleasant to strangers as any other Connecticut Yankee.
Earlier encounters were recorded by Marion Grant, Kate’s sister, in her book, The Fenwick Story. In the 1930s, when Kate was courted by Howard Hughes, neighbors were tuned in to the love affair. On a round-the-world trip by air, Hughes called his new flame regularly from exotic locales. The Hepburn family, like everyone else, had a party line. Nosy Fenwickians heard everything that went on.
The borough is small, only one hundred houses or so, so it’s hard to keep secrets. Still, family matters are not generally subject to public discourse.
The families that settled the place, and many that stayed for generations, were consummate Yankees who lived by unbendable rules. For one thing, they didn’t wear their wealth on their frayed sleeves. The Hepburn house itself, though large and ideally situated with private access to Long Island Sound, was never fancy. Those who inspected the 8,000 square feet for possible purchase noticed its lack of modern amenities.
The rooms have a cabinlike feel. The cypress-paneled living room is large, but not extravagantly so. The kitchen is not what one might expect: no granite countertops or Sub-Zero refrigerator. It looks much like it did in 1958, when Kate played the Shakespeare festival in Stratford and when, as every summer, the place was full of family and seasonal help.
A woman who worked there as a teenager recalls that there was always a pot of congealed hot fudge sauce on the Aga gas stove. Kate and her brother Dick dipped into the pot at all times of the day and night. Lunch was a casual affair—maybe some celery and a hard-boiled egg.
During high season, July and August, there was seldom reason for the Hepburn family or any other residents to drift from the borough. The produce man brought native tomatoes, lettuce, and fruit. There was a linen man and even a traveling knife sharpener.
Fenwickians, there for a summer’s privacy themselves, didn’t go out of their way to say hello to the actress. The borough, however, was slowly changing from the way Kate always knew it. Summer houses (many had not been winterized) that had been in families for generations were now being sold for millions.
An enclave that was once almost exclusively high-bred WASP was invaded by “those people from New Jersey,” a code for the large Catholic families, the only ones that could fill the many-bedroom cottages. And then came the Jews. And then the Fourth of July fireworks.
Presumably, devotees of the borough’s original charter have been unamused by the annual holiday noise fest. The charter gave Fenwick authorities the power “to prevent and quell riots, to prevent vice and immorality; to suppress gambling houses, houses of ill-fame, and disorderly houses; to prohibit . . . the use of fireworks, torpedoes, firecrackers, gunpowder . . . to prohibit the crying of newspapers upon the Sabbath . . . to regulate and prevent the location of pigpens . . .”
There were also demonstrations of public morality. Even after Prohibition was repealed, the Hepburn family didn’t serve alcohol. How horrified the family would have been to know that just down the street, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, certain young and flowery residents were enjoying brownies made with hashish. Ah, Fenwick had clearly gone to hell.
I don’t know what Kate thought of the changes. My relationship with her was not really a relationship at all. We worked on two projects, but I never met her. We had phone conversations. A typical one, on a day when I knew she was visiting her sister Marion’s house:
Kate: “Hello.”
Me: “Is Ellsworth there?”
Kate: “I’ll get him.”
Ellsworth Grant, a writer and historian and the husband of Marion (she died many years before her sister), was my go-between. I was intimidated by Kate. A lot of people were, though a friend of mine knew exactly what to say upon meeting her for the first time: “Hello, remarkable woman.” To which she responded, “Hello, remarkable man.”
The first time Kate and I worked together was on a memoir. I was the editor, at the time, of the newly minted Northeast magazine at the Hartford Courant. In anticipation of the first anniversary issue, I wrote to ask if she would write about her Hartford childhood. A week later, she sent me a note: “Dear Lary Bloom: If I can think of something. Katharine.”
A few weeks later, her car hit a telephone pole, and she was rushed to Hartford Hospital, where her physician father had worked. While her broken leg mended, she wrote about expectations of death and about her eventual burial place, Cedar Hill Cemetery, in Hartford’s south end, where the Hepburns own a large plot. The piece was full of dashes instead of periods. The way she talked. Everything was urgent.
This was the beginning of her efforts at memoir, culminating in the best-selling 1992 book Me. (Who else could get away with a title like that?) Kate also participated in Art For All, a public art project I was working on, recording taped interviews about her childhood for the Hartford public schools. But in my rare visits to Fenwick, I never thought to stop at her house and say hello. Such a thing just wasn’t done.
Fenwick has changed, obviously. But there remains an exclusionary feel to it. If you were to head there for the Fourth of July fireworks, you would have to ask directions, as there are no signs pointing to the borough and no indication you’ve arrived. If you locate it, you might have to explain your business to a security guard. Such guards are hired for special occasions, and though they can’t legally keep anyone off public property, they can, and do, offer a sense of courteous intimidation to casual visitors who might still be starstruck.
Kate’s house eventually sold, though at a much lower price than originally listed, in the neighborhood of $7 million. Star appeal, apparently, doesn’t add substantially to the value of bricks and mortar. Moreover, the kind of New York money that can pay $12 million might be obliged to spend itself in the Hamptons or Connecticut’s Gold Coast, where many more Manhattan business contacts reside.
In the weeks before the sale, interest grew in the property. And why not? It’s a beautiful setting, with a private beach. You can just picture Kate out there every day, going into the water, between the rocks and the lighthouse, living her life independently, frugally, and with every ounce of dash that she had. Quite a legacy for a piece of real estate
One of the most memorable pieces I published as Northeast’s editor was Nancy Metcalf’s account of a seven-year-old girl’s profound medical trauma—and the removal of half her brain. As the child grew up, I developed a friendship with her, and a little more than a decade after her surgery, I offered this update of her condition and outlook. I tried here to weave the past and present, so that those who hadn’t read Nancy’s original piece could still get a sense of what it contained. (Originally published January 1998)
Beth Usher answered the door and invited me in.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Awesome,” she replied.
Then she amended her answer to something akin to semi-awesome. She hadn’t gone to classes at the high school that day because of an ear infection. “Nothing serious,” but enough to keep her home.
I hadn’t seen Beth for six years, since I met her one night on the University of Connecticut campus when she was twelve. That was the year she had been in the newspaper again—her letter had convinced Fred Rogers, the star of the popular children’s television show Mr. Rogers, to come to Storrs to deliver the UConn commencement speech.
Now Beth was grown, or at least older, a wise eighteen, although not much taller than she was a few years before. She walks slowly, favoring her left side. She also favors that side in her conversations. She asked me to sit on the couch and then took a seat to the right of me, which, I understood, allowed her to see me comfortably, with full peripheral vision.
She told me about her part-time job as a teacher’s aide for an after-school kindergarten program at Dorothy Goodwin Elementary School, not far from her house in Storrs. “I play with the kids—make sure they don’t get into trouble.” I wanted to know if she liked the job. She said, “I know now never to have kids of my own.” She paused, then said, “Just kidding.”
She said the kids sometimes act up, and they think they can get away with it because she’s not as old as the teacher. “So I put the dunce cap on their heads.” Again a pause. “Just kidding.”
She didn’t kid about the sweet day several months before when the kids planned a surprise birthday party for her. They hid under the table, in the dark. She thought that something was wrong and that the school had closed for the day. But then the kids all started to giggle and said, “Happy Birthday, Beth.” That was June 29, the day Mr. Rogers called; he always called Beth on her birthday.
A few days before the visit, Beth asked me if I knew about the upcoming Dateline show on television. She explained that she and her parents would watch. It would make sense for me to watch, too, because the show was to focus directly on the issue that darkly colored Beth’s early life, and that still provides perplexing shades of gray.
Not that Beth or her parents were eager to see the program. Dateline would follow a child, in this case a thirteen-year-old girl, through the very same procedure at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore that Beth had undergone there when she was seven. This patient, like Beth, suffered from Rasmussen’s encephalitis, a very rare condition found in young children in which inflammation in the brain causes seizures and, if untreated, proliferates and totally debilitates its victim. The only reasonable treatment is what may seem like an unreasonable one, undertaken at that point only sixty-eight times in medical history—the timely removal of the entire diseased half of the patient’s brain.
The Ushers watched Dateline together. In observing the terrors and frustration of the particular family that was featured, Kathy recalled all of her own emotions during the time her daughter suffered one seizure after another, without their having any idea why. Kathy remembered being out of control, calling doctors, demanding that the hospital admit Beth. She remembered facing the news that her child would require the most radical surgery of all, and that Beth’s precious brain cells were dying, and that, if this risky procedure were not undertaken, she would be fit only for an institution. Kathy remembered how little patience she’d had for anyone. When friends would complain about their nails, “Internally I would say, ‘Oh, my God, they have no clue.’”
The television program showed it all, up close, and the Ushers recalled precisely what Beth went through at Johns Hopkins. It took surgeons several hours to remove the left hemisphere, the part of the brain traditionally thought to control language. The surgeons also split the thick band of nerve fibers, the corpus callosum, cutting off communication between the various lobes and preventing the spread of seizures. It was, of course, a traumatic operation—so much so that four patients have died during or soon after surgery. Beth’s response was a thirty-two-day coma.
Kathy Usher remembered all this and got up from the floor, in tears. Brian squirmed in his seat. Beth was stunned. “I couldn’t believe that I went through all of that.” She doesn’t recall her own operation, except through the documentation of family photographs and stories.
People who come into contact with Beth for the first time and observe the clearest residual effects of her surgery wonder about her limp and her weak right hand. So they ask. Beth tells them, “I was injured in Vietnam.” Or, on other days, she might say, “My scientific experiment went totally wrong.” Or, “I went bungee jumping without a cord.”
She was, her mother remembers, always a child who had great humor. And now humor serves Beth well, as her weapon and as her shield. The day of my visit I heard it many times, particularly when Beth and I were alone in the hours before her parents came home from work.
“What should I ask your dad?” I said to her.
“Does Beth get an allowance?” she replied.
But there were serious questions, too. It is a crucial time in Beth’s life. She is on the cusp of her independence. After graduating from E. O. Smith, she plans to go to college. But she feels the very strong pull of home and is of the opinion that her parents won’t want her far away. “They’ll be worried,” she said.
“Should they be?” I asked.
“No.”
Then she said, in typical Beth fashion, that perhaps she could do something to make them change their opinion about wanting her nearby. “I need to be more evil. I can change, honest I can.”
Not likely.
For here is what happened not long before when Kathy Usher received flowers at work (she is the head of UConn’s scholarship office): She thought, how nice of Brian to send her a bouquet. (He works as assistant admissions director and was, for several years, an assistant football coach.) Her coworkers were impressed that Kathy’s husband would be so thoughtful. But the flowers were not from Brian. They were from Beth. Everybody who had a teenager at home, or ever knew a teenager, or ever was one themselves, commented on how unusual and special it was for a mother and daughter to be so close. Beth, in a moment of candor, said, “Give most of the credit [for her recovery] to my mom and dad. They never gave up.”
Their closeness is one of the rare benefits of what Beth and her family endured. Yet all these years later, with Beth still limited physically, she has forged other relationships that point to the good that can come from awful turns of events.
She is a pen pal to children who face the disease she had. She is highly thought of by her classmates at E. O. Smith for her positive attitude, and for always having a good word to say.
One of the teachers, Ursula Laak (now retired), told me, “Beth’s thoughtfulness has many times almost made me cry. When a day was tough and she realized other students were hard [for me] to manage, she would leave a little note. ‘Hang in there,’ it would say . . .”
The enthusiasm for Beth’s attitude and work habits extends up the scholastic ladder. During my visit, I saw a letter from the superintendent’s office. Beth was one of two students who would be honored at an upcoming award ceremony.
“Why were you chosen?” I asked Beth.
“Maybe it’s for being the friendliest senior. Or maybe I cut class, or punched a freshman, or swore at the teacher.”
We are caught, as journalists, in an emotional and professional trap. We seize upon an inspirational story—the story of Beth Usher is surely that—and yet we tell ourselves, and our readers, that we are dedicated to truth. What is the truth here? There is truth in the notion that Beth has made a courageous return from a terrible illness, and has done so with the help of a loving family (including her brother, Brian Usher Jr., who is studying at UConn’s Avery Point branch). It is true that she is doing well at E. O. Smith, well enough to be regularly listed on the honor roll among students of her level (she still requires some special education classes).
But what of the real, lingering issues in the life of Beth, and of the Usher family? Can we put a smiling face on those? It’s complicated, to say the least. There is some difference of opinion in the house about how far Beth can stray from home when she goes to college. Beth is confident she’ll do nicely wherever she is. There is, perhaps, too, a difference between Beth’s dreams and the realities that might be commonly predicted for her. She desperately wants to become a teacher. Will her physical limitations disqualify her? The things that many teenagers take for granted—a driver’s license, for example—may be beyond her reach.
And there is this lingering matter: the trouble she has with short-term memory, another souvenir, apparently, of the radical surgery. It may have something to do with the limitations of a single brain hemisphere trying to accommodate all learning and experience. Because of the condition, she must study harder than “ordinary” students. She must write everything down. She must rely on the commitment of her parents and of special teachers who understand both Beth’s limitations and her gifts.
And there is the matter of dealing every day with the looks and assumptions that can come from anywhere, from any source. Her former teacher, Ursula Laak, says, “She knows what prejudice is. People look at her and may make a comment. [As a result] she feels very deeply for others. She tries to protect them.”
Beth has her own way to express the phenomenon, in poetry, the medium where honesty comes most naturally. She writes:
Don’t stare at me,
Stare into me.
See the real me.
Feel my loneliness and my hurt.
I am me but
could be you.
And still there is something unquantifiable about Beth Usher, something her mother, Kathy, knows inherently—a quality that can’t ever be measured by IQ tests or ordinary yardsticks. The Usher family was reminded of it a few years ago after a dispiriting visit to a doctor who revealed that Beth had to undergo a major operation on her back to correct severe scoliosis, another consequence of her old condition.
Kathy remembers, “We were driving home. We were so shocked we couldn’t even speak. Beth was sitting in the backseat. She said, ‘Come on, guys. It’s not like I have to have more brain surgery.’”
And so the somber mood changed. The family stopped at an A. C. Petersen store and, Kathy remembers, “We went bananas and started throwing ice cream at each other.”
Also from the works of Beth Usher: When she was twelve, she wrote a booklet for children who were about to enter the hospital. It was called The Sun Can Come Out Again, or: How I Got Rid of Something Bad! She dedicated the booklet to Ben Carson and John M. Freeman, the doctors at Johns Hopkins who saved her life, and she listed 50?fifty rules for surviving in the hospital, including:
Make your brother or sister wait on you . . . It’s the only time they will.
Make sure doctors talk to you. As an adult.
Pretend you’re asleep when people you don’t like visit you.
The last reminded us, oddly, of Mr. Rogers, whose visits solicited no pretending on Beth’s part. During Beth’s profound illness as a small girl, Kathy wrote Mr. Rogers to tell him the magical effect he had on her daughter. The only time of day she could be certain Beth wouldn’t suffer seizures was during his afternoon show. Kathy asked if Mr. Rogers would be so kind as to write or to call. As it turned out, he didn’t do either.
After Beth’s brain surgery, when doctors feared her coma might have profound consequences, he traveled from Pittsburgh (his headquarters) to Baltimore to visit his new little friend in the hospital. Fred Rogers sat at Beth’s bed that day, took out his puppets, including King Friday and Princess Tuesday, and performed a private show for her. He spoke to her as if she were listening.
A few days later, Beth emerged from the coma with these words: “Dad, my nose itches me.”
Years later, she wrote to ask Mr. Rogers to speak at UConn’s commencement, explaining that her mom was head of the committee. “It would be an awesome idea if you spoke.” He accepted. Then he asked Beth for advice. What should he say in his remarks? Beth wrote back with suggestions. “I told Mr. Rogers to tell students to do good deeds for other people so those people could help other people.”
She, of course, went to the ceremonies and remembers well his opening words: “It’s a lovely day in your neighborhood.” He then read the letter that she sent to him.
A few days after my visit to the Usher house, I called. Beth talked about some of the things she’d meant to tell me, about her swimming (she’s very good at it) and how rabid a fan she is of the UConn women’s basketball team (she once went on the team bus to a game in Providence, and she goes to all home games with friends and relatives).
I asked Kathy about the letter Beth had received from the superintendent of schools. Kathy told me about the ceremony the family attended and the special award given to Beth. It was for being the most improved student at the high school. “She had to go up there on the stage, stand there while he talked about her. He talked about how she had the ability to look on the bright side and to cheer people up.”
There have been times, Kathy said, when she has felt a sense of profound loss—about how Beth will never take Irish dancing and never experience the feeling of getting on the stage to perform.
On the other hand, Kathy feels blessed that she still has her child—her child who is about to go off on her own. But, perhaps, not too far.
Epilogue: In 2005 Beth turned twenty-five. She is still living at home, and she still volunteers every afternoon at the Dorothy Goodwin Elementary School. She never enrolled in college but did join AmeriCorps for two years. In this capacity, she taught “the love of words and reading” to four- and five-year-olds in Windham. Beth told me that her greatest satisfaction during this time was a breakthrough with an autistic child who started to communicate with her.
Communicating with children remains an important goal to her, and she hopes that the booklet she wrote as a twelve-year-old will have wide circulation.
Her more recent writing includes an appreciation of Mr. Rogers, which Beth wrote when he died in 2003. In the piece, commissioned by Northeast magazine, she wrote, “The universe was crying today, birds stopped singing, children stopped laughing . . .” And she went on to recall his important role in her recovery, giving him much credit for the restoration of her sunny outlook and for setting the kind of example that “can make the world a better place.”
Readers often ask where I get my ideas. Most are developed from whims or from a strong sense of inevitability—the subject simply calls out to me, as here. I noticed a one-paragraph newspaper article that carried the headline “Driver Hits Deer,” not exactly news in Connecticut. But buried in the paragraph was this minor point: The injured buck ran from the accident scene into a nearby shop. No further details were given. It appeared up to me, then, to fill in the blanks. (Originally published July 2000)
Jerry Morgan’s eyes light when he is asked to tell a story. Of course, it is what you expect of a fisherman, of someone who instructs you to call him “Cap’n” because that’s what everyone calls him aboard his 17-foot guide boat and even in his retail shop.
It is something you expect of a man who wears his rich
and still largely ebony hair in an abundant ponytail (“because I can”) and
who is not shy of delving into any subject except his age (easy enough to
conclude, as he was a classmate of Johnny Egan—the basketball star who graduated
from Hartford’s Weaver High in 1957 and went on to college and pro fame).
Cap’n Morgan had a story to tell, for certain, and I was an eager listener
who had traveled across the shoreline to hear it. Police reports from a few
nights earlier indicated that his shop, Captain Morgan’s Bait and Tackle,
on the Boston Post Road in Madison, had been visited by an unusual intruder.
A deer circled the interior a few times and then departed the premises. The report had the young buck injured by a car. In his confusion, he sought out the Cap’n’s shop for, well, what would a deer do in a bait and tackle shop?
Cap’n was on the phone when he heard a commotion at the front door. Must be some kids out there. You know how, on clear evenings, they hang around shoreline towns. So he went to investigate and was startled to see a young buck, who on his way in had deftly sidestepped the lobster pots. The Cap’n had no idea about the injury—the buck’s eyes were “crisp,” if a little wide. For a bait and tackle shop is confusing enough, with T-shirts that say shut up and fish and saltwater lures that say assassin and squirmy live eels.
The Cap’n, of course, could boast of some experience with deer, but always from a distance. The area in which he makes his living is hard by Long Island Sound and the East River, where there is no shortage of sightings of deer, osprey, and herons. But he had to confess that he had never actually sold anything to a deer during the shop’s three seasons.
He could see that the buck was a young thing, about three-quarters grown, and with antlers enough to stay away from. “It was my thought at the time,” the Cap’n observed, “to become a part of the environment and not part of the problem.” And so he watched as the deer, clearly frightened, surveyed the interior, looking past the Ocean kayaks, past the display of LaCrosse boots and the tank of shiners toward the back, where he saw what he needed to see—daylight.
The trouble was that the daylight was showing through a glass door, and the young buck, not having a lot of experience opening glass doors or considering their purpose, decided to employ the direct route: He ran at the door as if it weren’t there, aiming his antlers at the glass. But the door didn’t budge.
This did not deter him. He backed up a few feet, lowered his head, and set out to overcome whatever this thing was that kept him from his natural habitat. Again, he hit the door. Again, the double-paned, safety-tempered glass didn’t give, and the buck was stunned. He was not one to give up, however, and he tried again, and again, each time with the same result, except that now blood was evident and cracks in the glass began to appear. He had been injured and was certainly in a panic, which spurred him on to a different and more unpromising route to the outdoors—circling the goods over and over.
In his mind’s eye, the Cap’n could see his young business trashed by a runaway buck who surely would not come out the better for it—perhaps even kill himself in the process of ruining the place. But there was no trashing going on. The buck, though clearly dazed, was the most graceful of animals in the extremely tight aisles of an enterprise consisting of a mere 600 square feet.
The Cap’n had always noticed how many inconsiderate customers brush the fancy Star Rods (costing up to $250), but the buck never touched them. Nor did he threaten the $350 stained-glass representation of Faulkner’s Island by artist William Rasche; nor did he disturb the ceramic coffee mugs that say bluefish, blackfish, or mako shark, or the lamps above them. The delicate fly-fishing gear and other lures that could have caught on him never became an issue because the buck, though bulky, was as deft as any animal could be in a terrified state. He couldn’t help that he was dropping blood on the display cases and the floor.
Of course the panic wasn’t limited to the buck. The Cap’n wanted to open the back door, but each time he tried the buck would come frighteningly near, and the Cap’n was not eager to serve as a cushion.
He managed to reach the phone and call Bruce Beebe, owner of Beebe Marine, the complex in which the shop is located. Bruce was in the back and didn’t respond to the unusual phone call with, “You must be nuts. Couldn’t be!” He took quick action and, with his assistant, opened the back door. The buck, however, had apparently learned his lesson back there—no longer trusting that the outdoors was the outdoors.
He tried, instead, the front door—but when he saw the traffic he got spooked. So he made more tours of the merchandise until, at last, he took a chance and went out of the door that, a few minutes earlier, he had entered, and, for an animal that had every right to complain about how he felt, ran swiftly across the field as if he had never faced misfortune.
The Cap’n went outside and saw his roadside sign moved—the work of the deer. And he saw the woman who had hit the animal with her now slightly damaged Toyota. She had been driving slowly, she said, but she hit him all the same, though there was no sign of blood near the car.
The Cap’n offered the woman a cup of coffee, which she accepted, and they talked of the incident for a while, for it was a story, a true one that, without the help of embellishments, could be told by great-grandchildren.
I asked the Cap’n how the incident had changed him. He didn’t fall for the bait of a reporter, however. No self-reflection. No philosophizing. His dark brown eyes twinkled as he said, “Now I have a new motto. I tell people that the buck stops here.” Yes, Cap’n. And shops here, too.
Lary Bloom • Telephone: 860.526.2067 • Fax: 860.526.8088 • Email: