"Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo" (rustyvandura)
05/24/2020 at 17:53 • Filed to: None
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"Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo" (rustyvandura)
05/24/2020 at 17:53 • Filed to: None | 5
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Beacon Truck Stop, Somerset, Pennsylvania, 1978. The man with the suspenders, lower right, is my grandfather, Pappy . The man in the white shirt, facing the camera to the right far corner, is Ted. I can’t remember anyone else’s name. I’d have been 14 when I took this picture.
One great excitement visiting Pappy was going to the Coffee Club in the morning . Once in a while, Pappy would spring for a donut, which would be glazed, and served on a small plate with a fork. My brother Ttyymmnn ordered six donuts one morning and they arrived at the table in a stack on a small plate.
The Beacon is now long gone, as is Pappy and, no doubt, any of the other men in this photo. Pappy and Grandma were pivotally important figures in my life when I was young and parents were divorcing and we were moving around and Pappy and Grandma never changed.
ttyymmnn
> Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
05/24/2020 at 18:07 |
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The room where that photo was taken would have been the white addition to the left. Pappy always bought me two rolls of cherry Life Savers, and they’d be gone by the time we got to the block plant.
Where did you find that photo of The Beacon?
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Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
> ttyymmnn
05/24/2020 at 18:12 |
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I would have placed us in front of this window:
Do you remember getting that stack of donuts? Wouldn’t been some years before I took that photo. I believe Pappy died in 1978.
ClassicDatsunDebate
> Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
05/24/2020 at 18:21 |
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I love this photo and the story behind it.
It reminds me of going back and visiting my garanparents farm in the summer as a kid. If we had to go into town for something, Grandpa would bring me and we would end up in the grocery store cafe for a coffee. We never sat at our own table. There was always a group of men he knew at a table , other farmers etc, and he would just pull up our chairs to the group . My Grandma called them “ worse than a group of old hens” when it came to gossip . I never knew what that meant until I started working in a 50 person machine shop....Then I got what Grandma meant.
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ttyymmnn
> Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
05/24/2020 at 18:21 |
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1980.
!!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!
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Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
> ClassicDatsunDebate
05/24/2020 at 18:37 |
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It's priceless stuff, really.
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ttyymmnn
> ClassicDatsunDebate
05/24/2020 at 18:52 |
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You had to get up early to go to the Coffee Club with Pappy. He started his own business back in the late 30s, a concrete block and ready mix company. Even after his son, our Uncle Don, took over the company, Pappy maintained a wood shop at the plant and would spend his days there. We would go play in the giant sand piles, watch the guys running the cinder block machine, watch the fork lifts drive around, play in the cement mixers, or putter around the wood shop with him. I remember him making toy rifles for us one time. Good times.
GLiddy
> Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
05/24/2020 at 23:10 |
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That’s really cool. My teen years (I’m just a tad older than you..I would’ve been 17 in 1978) were occasionally spent with older men going to such coffee clubs. My dad had his bunch of coffee buddies he would go out at night to the local Dobbs House and grab a cup. (My dad was an MD and got into the habit of late night coffee in medical school.) Dad’s group consisted of an engineer from the gas company, an Emory educated real estate man who had a wife and step son who disappointed him to no end, and a 4th man in rotation as the years came and went. For awhile the 4th man was a Princeton educated Presbyterian minister who served in WW2, then it was a U of Chicago educated lawyer...also a WW2 vet (he would tell stories of being an artillery officer on Ia-shima in the Pacific). Then my elderly next-door neighbor (Ga. Tech electrical engineer) also came along.
These men would discuss and solve all the worlds problems in the course of a bottomless cup of coffee. Sometimes the places and times would change. In later years after Dobbs House closed, they met at a strip-mall pizza joint (Pasquales) , then at a regional fast foot chain (Jacks) and then that became a Hardees for a bit.
Saturday breakfast went on with about the same bunch (minus the gas company engineer...he parted on Saturdays usually playing golf or family outings). For awhile that was held at Denny’s, not because they loved it but because it was more convenient for the minister. One Sunday morning he (his name was John) was getting ready for church and he was sitting on the edge of his bed as if to put on his shoes, and he just laid back and never got up again. John’s sons came to Saturday breakfast occasionally after that but then no more. I guess they had a need to meet their father’s friends for a bit.
Anyway, separate from that, in the summer I would go to my grandmother’s house out in the country. I’d tag along with my aunt’s husband to his usual haunts. (they were all farmers). He’d meet up with the other farmers at the Dairy Freeze for lunch and talk about who was growing what. How this or that herbicide and how it was put down was better than the other. Mostly all farming stuff. We’d hit the tractor parts counter at the dealer or the farm supply places to pick up whatever (seed it seemed mostly). It was a great adventure. I think I learned a lot.
Hell, my kids don’t know shit about me or much else as far as I can tell.