By Diana and Norman Boggs
A good, welcoming host always finds people in his/her
kitchen. No matter where you set up the
snacks and drinks, people will always congregate there. That is the way it was with the kitchen at
Henry’s store. It was attached straight
in back of the store. There was a
large, black kerosene stove with six burners and a generous oven. The cookware was all cast iron, and there
were all sizes. Across from the stove
was a red coca cola
cooler with beer on one side and soda on the other. It was about 6-8 feet long, waist height. .
I think the whole top assembly must have come off because the inside needed to
be periodically washed and drained. The cooling circulator in the middle
acted as a separator of the two halves: left beer, right soda. It
was such fun to open the sliding door and look at the bottles before making a
final choice. There was also a
supplementary large refrigerator.
When the
circulator circulated its last, the cooler was simply kept full of a mixture of
chopped ice and water. The water was normally so cold that if you
plunged a bottle of beer in too fast, it would explode. The soda bottles
seemed to be sturdier. Henry would make periodic trips to Kingston or
Saugerties to get 50 lb blocks of ice. He kept the ice in an
older coke cooler outside the kitchen door. He had all the tools to
move the blocks: a long handled cutter to cut the blocks (looked like a
relic from the old chopping ice out on the pond era), a tongs to carry them or
their parts and any number of ice picks to finish the disassembly.
You had to be careful of dangling flypaper that could catch you by the hair if you
were not careful. It worked pretty well to keep the fly population down.
The blue/gray cabinets were built low. They were SPOOL CABINETS.... serious antiques...wish I had'em.
This is a picture of Bill Wilgus in the kitchen.
William (Bill) Wilgus and Ernie Short
There was another cash register in the kitchen for the
convenient purchase of beverages to be consumed on the premises. Of course,
there were various sign up sheets for the annual fishing contest, and other
notices if they were important to the community, and funny pictures of who
“skunked” whom in the ongoing card games.
Henry always cooked Sunday dinner for the family and he
would invite anybody who happened to be hanging around in the kitchen to join
us. The variety of meals is discussed
in another blog entry, but chicken was the most usual choice. Boiled or canned veggies were included, and
there was always a plate of white Bond bread and butter never margarine.
It was not unknown for him to suddenly have a party that
included a clambake with lobster and plenty of corn. He was, after all, a Jersey boy and had grown up near the ocean.