TERRY MOSHER
Just recently I went back to my old hometown in New York State and its funny how things that looked as big as a kid now look so small. I’m thinking about something so innocuous that I’m sure most people would not have spent a second thought on it.
While visiting my brother-in-law at his house that is directly across Rt. 417 from the house where I spent my first 14 years I spent several minutes looking at the space between it and the little house my dad built right next to it.
There used to be a driveway between the two but the new owner years ago tore down the old garage and built a new one on the other side of the house on the side lawn where we kids used to play football and baseball.
I was in brother Ronnie’s car (he loaned to me to use on my visit) just before getting on Rt. 417. I was directly across from our old house and that space where the garage used to be seemed way too small to have even be a driveway at one time.
But it was.
Coal used to be delivered to us to be used in our furnace. It would be dumped in the driveway and I occasionally would be tasked by my father to shovel it down a chute through a cellar window. Now as I looked at the space I couldn’t fathom how it could have been enough space for a pile of coal.
That driveway always seemed so big to me and as I sat there and looked at it for several minutes I had flash backs of playing catch with a brother in it, of throwing pieces of coal through the window (instead of shoveling it down the chute) and I could not for the life of me imagine how that was all possible.
Even the house looked too small. There are four bedrooms in that old house, butwhile I sat there in the car it didn’t appear from just looks that there would be that many bedrooms. And as I recall, the bedrooms were roomy. But then that is when I was a young kid, so my roomy in my youthful mind may not be reality. That would also mean that the kitchen that seemed so huge when I was a kid probably is not huge.
Anyway, not all things were small back there. One day several of us, including my oldest brother, Ray, took a trip down into Pennsylvania looking for cemeteries where some of our ancestors were supposed to be buried. We found some of them in Austinburg, PA and at a little county cemetery at a nearby little berg – Little Marsh (Just this past week my brother and a few others took another trip down there and found more Moshers, including our great, great grandfather, his wife and their two sons that died at the ages of two and five) – and on the way back to New York State stopped at a place in Shinglehouse, PA where were got gigantic ice cream cones.
Bill Coles, son-in-law of Ray’s, had been to this place before and knew what was going to happen, but I had no clue. It’s called Pop’s and Nanny’s and is in a residential house owned by, yep, you guessed it, Pop and Nanny. They sell ice cream and assorted things like hot dogs out of their house, and have a side drive-up window, which is where we went to order our ice cream cones.
Since Bill had been there several times before he knew to order a small cone. I’m thinking Kitsap County where ice cream cones that are ordered small usually mean just that – small.
But not at Pop’s and Nanny’s.
I’ll take a large one, I said to Nanny. Bill quickly said, “I don’t think you want a large one.” Yes, I do, I repeated.
Nanny, leaning out the window, said I would have to come in the house to get a large one because there had been too many instances when the ice cream scoops fell off the cone in the transfer to the car.
C’mon, I thought, that is not possible.
“Trust me,” Bill said, “you don’t want a big one.”
Okay, I said, I will take a medium one.
Nanny then ducked back into the house and prepared Bill’s cone. Soon as she came back with it and handed it out the window to Bill I knew I was in deep trouble. Bill’s small cone had three huge scoops of ice cream shakily setting on top of a small sugar cone. It looked like enough ice cream to satisfy a small party of, say, four or five children.
Oh, oh, I thought.
Soon enough Nanny reappeared with my cone – four scoops of ice cream teetering on a sugar cone that looked like it would suffer a massive hernia from the heavy load.
Somehow Nanny delivered my cone to Bill, who gingerly handed it back to me in the back seat of the car. My arm is still sore from handling the Eiffel Tower of all ice cream cones, which I thought if I was not careful would be the Leaning Tower of Pisa and my shirt would be smeared with ice cream.
My nephew Matt, who was in the front seat, said that my ice cream cone looked to be have about a half-gallon of ice cream. I wouldn’t argue. I do know that when we got back to Richburg and Ray’s home I went upstairs and went to sleep.
Total cost for the two ice creams ‑ $7.
Before we got to Pop’s and Nanny’s we had dinner at the Roadside Restaurant in Shinglehouse. I had liver and onions with baked potato, salad and a dinner roll and it cost $5.99. There were three big slabs of liver, which were enough to easily feed those four or five kids mentioned above.
To be honest, though, not all places back in that neck of the woods were the prices so low for so much. Another brother (David) and I ate at a fashionable place in Olean, NY and we had queen-size prime rib for $22. The only reason I had prime rib was because the filet mignon was priced at $42.
The prime rib was average, at the best.
I did finally find some good pizza back there. There used to be a slew of them back in the day, but no more. Most of the local beer gardens and pizza joints that where around when I was a traveling teenager on the prowl are long gone, and I wasn’t going to go to Pizza Hut. I could go to Pizza Hut here and I certainly wasn’t going to fly 3,000 miles to go there.
And I found that good pizza in an unlikely place. Ray, and many others back there, hang out at the Bolivar Country Club (golf course) and on my last time out of several there I decided to try the pizza, even though the fish fry and spaghetti are famed dishes there.
Wow. The pizza was the best I have had in over 50 years (not counting Matt’s great homemade pizza we had while I was there) of seeking the unbelievable pizza I used to get in Olean at the old Roxy Beer Garden in Olean.
The Roxy disappeared sometime in the late 1960s (I tried to write them once to see if they would reveal their recipe; they wouldn’t) and I have been either trying to reinvent it in our kitchen or find it locally or on trips that I make. Sometimes a place comes close, like Tony’s in Bremerton, but until the country club I had not found a replacement that has come that close.
Okay, that is it for today. Time to go in a corner and think how the Mariners can be so good at losing close games and what the Seahawks will do to fix a leaky offensive line and a cornerback position that is almost not a part of the team’s defense.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.