A Hefty Serving of Memories

About a year ago, the Fulton Library decided on its next Memoir Project theme: The Dizzy Block. The Memoir Project’s goal is to help people collect their memories about an important part of Fulton’s history and The Dizzy Block sure fits that bill. Anyone who grew up in our city in the ‘40s, 50’s or ‘60s surely has memories of the many stores clustered in downtown Fulton. I was a frequent visitor to downtown, but I wasn’t looking to buy clothes or school supplies. I went there for my favorite afterschool snack, and I found it at the Green & White Diner.

Set on South First Street, just off the east end on the Oneida Street Bridge, the Green & White Diner was my go-to place when I was in junior high and high school. Thirty-five cents would buy me an order of French fries, ruining my dinner more nights than not, but I didn’t care. Those fries were heaped on a platter and tasted so good after a long day of school.

With a memory as tasty as that, I was hoping we could include stories about the diner in this year’s Memoir Project. I hit the jackpot when I got to talk with Andy Butler, who ran the Green & White between the late-1950s and the early 1970s. Last summer, I met with Andy and his daughter Kelly. Andy was 93 and his short-term memory wasn’t what it used to be, but his recollections of 50+ years ago were excellent. We started talking about how the diner looked. I remember it resembling a trailer, but Andy clarified its appearance.

“That diner was purchased in Rochester, New York, by a guy named Richard Baker,” Andy explained. “Richard was in Rochester on business and he happened to walk by a used car lot, where he saw several old train dining cars for sale. Richard thought one of those would make a good small restaurant in his hometown of Fulton.”

Andy explained that Mr. Baker had the dining car shipped by train, He remembers seeing it being unloaded at a train station at the foot of Broadway, “and then they moved it with horses to the where we all remember it being.”

Andy’s daughter Kelly was a young child when her dad first ran the diner and she remembers the vibrant green and white colors that gave it its name. “The diner was white, with green lettering at the top, and it had several entrances, which were green. When you walked in, there were all those green padded stools. I had a favorite spot to sit, at the end of the row of seats where the water fountain was. Dad always asked me what I wanted and I’d always say ‘Toast’ and he’d make me a giant stack. The other great memory I have of Dad’s cooking was that he toasted the buns for hamburgers. They were crispy and tasted so good.”

Andy had learned he liked cooking when he was younger. His mom worked at Nestlé, so he learned how to prepare meals to help feed the family. While he served in the Navy, Andy became a baker, which got him a job in Syracuse at Ma Tuttle’s Bakery after his discharge. At Ma’s, he learned how to make pies and cakes and many of us remember those yummy desserts at the Green & White Diner.

The diner was already in operation (It was first known as Augie’s Diner) when Andy decided to lease it, continuing with its already established hours. “We were open from 5 am until late at night,” he explained, “so people could get all three meals there.”  Andy had some interesting stories to tell me about his regular customers. “There was a guy named Norman who always wore a large overcoat with big pockets. He’d order his meal, eat some of it and then leave. Before he left, he’d stuff the rest of his meal in those big pockets and eat it on his way home.”

Andy employed several people and one worker I remembered seeing while eating my fries was a tall man who walked with a limp. “That was Louie Caldwell,” Andy confirmed. “He worked many years for me as a handyman mopping floors, cleaning and washing dishes.” Andy also employed several waitresses. “There was Barbara Southworth, Shelba Green and Marie Phelps. Nina Welch was one of our cooks and she also made a lot of our pies.”

Andy ran the diner until Urban Renewal changed our downtown Fulton. The diner was torn down, like many of the other structures on the Dizzy Block, and Andy took his cooking talents to the Holiday Inn in Syracuse, where he worked until he retired.

Though the Green & White is only a memory for most of us, Kelly recently received something that keeps her dad’s diner in today’s world.  Not long ago, her friend, Linda Thomas-Caster, met Kelly for lunch and surprised her with a gift. “It was a Green & White Diner coffee cup,” Kelly explained. “Linda had found it at an estate sale, and now, I have my coffee in it every morning.”

Today, if you stand in the city parking lot adjacent to the Lock Restaurant, with the Oswego River to your back and the lower bridge to your left, you are standing where the Green & White Diner once served our city. Andy reminded me how close the diner was to the river. “Our big window had quite a riverside view. I remember how kids would gather on the diner’s steps and lean over the railing to look at the locks below.”

Sometimes when I walk through that parking lot, I’ll think of the diner, the smell of fresh food cooking when I walked in its door, and how lucky I was to have a friendly place in my hometown to visit after school. Thanks to Andy Butler, I now have other Green & White Diner memories to go with my heaping plate of French fries.

The Green & White Diner, one of my favorite restaurants in my hometown of Fulton's Dizzy Block.

Remembering a Favorite Teacher

One of the joys of working on the Fulton Library’s Memoir Project is learning I have a lot in common with other Fultonians. By collecting memories from others who’ve grown up in our city, I’ve found  out that the favorite stores of my childhood were special to others, and those towering factories I once walked by were  also monumental for many. The fun I had at our city’s parks has been echoed time and again. But what a surprise to meet someone who had the same favorite teacher as me.

The teacher was Mrs. Robarge. When she made my second grade school year so special, back in 1962, Mrs. Robarge taught at the Phillips Street School. She later moved over to Volney School, where she taught until her retirement. Her first name is Mary, but even 56 years after being in her classroom, she’s still Mrs. Robarge to me.

I’ve never been able to put into words why I considered her such a special teacher. I have vague images of her in the classroom and only remember a few highlights from that second grade year, such as a field trip to Fort Ontario. But that didn’t seem like enough to make Mrs. Robarge stand out from my other teachers. Then I met Sue Martin.

In 2014, Sue showed up for a Memoir Project meeting at the library. She explained she had already written her memoir for that year’s theme: Fulton’s Businesses and Schools. Offering to read aloud what she called her “rough draft,” Sue explained that her memoir was about her favorite teacher. Without revealing the teacher’s name, she began to read, starting with her kindergarten and first grade experiences and then explaining what was called “Moving Up Day,” when first grade classes met their new second grade teacher.

“I was completely swept away by the teacher, Mrs. Mary Robarge,” Sue wrote.  “My first glance told me she was a kind woman because she didn’t just smile at her pupils, she ‘smized,’ – that is, she smiled with her eyes.  Just the way she looked at us let me know that here was a teacher who was going to give me the keys to the kingdom of knowledge.  It was as if the world was now seen in Technicolor, instead of mere pale shades.” 

As Sue read that section, something clicked for me: It was Mrs. Robarge’s smile that had made all the difference in my second grade class and, in fact, my whole elementary school experience. Sue had felt the same care from her teacher that I did.  She even titled her memoir “The Teacher Who Smized,” to emphasize how important a smile can be to a child. Here’s more of what Sue wanted us to know about Mrs. Robarge:

“Her room was always a safe haven for us, where never a cross word was spoken by her.  I never recall anyone being reprimanded for ill behavior, as Mrs. Robarge brought out the best in each of us.  Encouragement and respect were what we received on a daily basis, along with our assigned classwork.

“That year, Mrs. Robarge exposed us to people who were less fortunate.  This came in the form of very tall, heavy-duty brown paper sacks; large enough that any second-grader could have easily fit inside.  We were asked to bring in clothing for the less fortunate in the world.  Whatever we brought in was collected in those sacks and shipped overseas. 

“Of course, everyone wanted to participate in adding to the pile of goods, and multiple brown bags were filled.  Quite a satisfying feeling for a child to know she had helped someone else, and all she had to do was outgrow her own clothing.  We learned that, even as a seven-year-old, we could make a difference.

“One lesson Mrs. Robarge taught us was that the word “if” was the smallest word with the biggest meaning. It made sense to me, and I recall relaying that information to my parents.  If Mrs. Robarge said it was so, it had to be true!  Today, I contemplate what would have happened to me “if” I had not been challenged by Mrs. Robarge with advanced work.

"The 'smizing' of her eyes, her loving kindness and encouraging words were not the only attributes I loved. She was the only teacher I ever telephoned and talked to at her home. She was the only teacher who came to visit me at my home. If a teacher could be like a second mother, then Mrs. Robarge fir the bill for me.

“I have always looked back with many fond memories of the 1959-1960 school year, and I always knew how blessed I was to have had Mrs. Robarge as a teacher.  I believe she was truly the one who made me excel at school and to want to further my education.  Almost every experience in my life can lead back to her classroom and the belief she had in me.  I would go on to college, travel the world and, likewise, become a teacher, thanks in part to her encouragement.”  

Sue Martin taught English for over 20 years at the Fulton Junior High School. She also was quite a history buff, especially interested in the Civil War, visiting Gettysburg numerous times.  Unfortunately, I learned all this by reading Sue’s obituary after she passed away in January 2017. Though I only got to meet and work with her once, what a memorable meeting it was, where two people got to share their admiration for one special teacher.

Sue Martin, a former Fulton teacher who wrote a touching memoir about her favorite teacher...and mine.

The Competition for Our Snowiest Winter

When I was writing my book about the Blizzard of ’66, I interviewed over two hundred people who either fondly or regrettably remembered the storm. Many of them agreed with me that for Central New York I was writing about the storm of the century. But there were a few people who told me flat out I was wrong; the 1958 snowstorm was the big one. I made a note to find out more about that storm and I’ve finally gotten around to it.

The December 1958 “big snow” in the Fulton/Oswego area was certainly not a blizzard, which the National Weather Service (NWS) defines as “a major weather event that features cold temperatures, sustained winds of 35 miles per hour or greater, and falling or blowing snow.” A severe blizzard raises the fear factor, with its winds “over 45 mph, snowfall producing near-zero visibility and temperatures plunging to 10°F or lower.”

Without a doubt, the ’66 blizzard was severe. There were reports of 60+ mph winds, frigid temperatures and, of course, upwards to 100 inches of snow. To find out why some people would consider 1958 worse, I logged onto the NWS’s handy historical log of weather. I checked the 1958 reports for both Fulton and Oswego and found out that during a few days in early December both cities did get a bundle of snow. Here are a few statistics:

The snow began falling on Saturday, December 6, with Fulton reporting four inches of snow and Oswego 3.6. Small stuff. But over the next five days things got worse and the numbers added up. Not ’66 snowstorm totals, but significant amounts: The NWS observer for Oswego reported 40 inches on December 8 and had a five-day total of 66 inches. Fulton’s National Weather Service observer recorded a total of 39 inches spread over five days.

Though those numbers were significant, in my mind they weren’t enough to make 1958 a memorable winter. But I’ve learned that when writing about our region’s snowy history, recorded numbers don’t always tell the full story. For example, with the 1958 statistics, both cities’ observers put a note next to their daily numbers, with Oswego simply stating, “It snowed,” and Fulton admitting to filing a “Late report.” Those phrases are “meteorology slang” for weather conditions so bad that observers had trouble getting into the station to properly measure snow.

December 1958 temperatures certainly felt blizzard-like, with numbers never rising above freezing through the entire storm; most days the thermometer was stuck between 10 and 20 degrees. But it was the third characteristic of a blizzard, significant wind, that proved 1958 didn’t qualify as one. Neither the weather observers nor Oswego’s Palladium-Times mentioned any problems associated with wind. No, 1958 wasn’t a blizzard, but reports in The Pal-Times helped me see why some people might have considered it one.

Newspaper stories show the brunt of this storm centering in the Oswego, Fulton and Mexico area. In fact, a few of our county’s other towns, such as Pulaski, reported sunshine on the snowiest days of the storm. That’s another good indication that the ’58 storm was not a blizzard but a more common lake-effect storm, which can bury one area and barely snow a few miles down the road.

There’s another way to gauge how bad a storm is and that’s by hearing from people who lived through it. Local newspapers did their job by reporting what people endured: The mayor of Oswego was only able to get out and survey his city in a sled pulled by Alaskan huskies. Children in Fulton and Oswego had no school for the entire week, which rivals the ’66 blizzard for kids’ unplanned vacation days. Even the Oswego State Teachers College, which we now know as SUNY Oswego, closed for a few days.

A woman who grew up outside Mexico told me the ’58 snowfall was so big that her younger brother didn’t enjoy the winter weather. “And he never got tired of playing in snow,” she explained. “At one point the snow was up to my knees. The next thing I knew, it was over my head. Long after the storm passed, my dog loved to climb from the tallest snowbank up to the roof of our barn to watch the school bus come by.”

One of the big stories in The Palladium-Times was how heavy snow collapsed a barn roof in the Mexico area. Fifty head of cattle were trapped and the farm owner was understandably worried. Thankfully, he didn’t lose one cow buried in that avalanche of snow and rooftop debris, but it did take the sheriff and volunteers to rescue them.

Retail stores were concerned how the storm would affect holiday shoppers. With Christmas Day a little over two weeks away, store managers were concerned. They figured they’d lost between 30 and 80 percent of their usual holiday business during the storm and its aftermath. People would have to do a quick dig out to get those gifts bought and wrapped by holiday time.

Lou Woods was sixteen in 1958 and working at a bowling alley in Oswego when the snow started getting heavy. “I had a lot of trouble walking home. There was so much snow people started getting worried that their roofs would crash in. I ended up making more money than I would have at the bowling alley by shoveling roofs, including the one at the high school.”

In 1958, Oswego’s NWS observer was Elmer Loveridge and he had been keeping weather records for 34 years when the December storm hit. Through his work in meteorology, Elmer had travelled around the world, witnessing hurricanes and tropical storms, and he’d racked up 14 years of tracking Oswego weather. After the 1958 storm was properly logged in his record book, he stated that he’d never seen anything like it. My guess is that eight years later, when the Blizzard of ’66 came barreling through, Mr. Loveridge would change his mind.

Photo: A 1958 Life magazine photo taken in the city of Oswego after Central New York was hit with an early December snowstorm.