Tony Viesto, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.
Sept. 5-6, 1974.
OK, I’m not really posting this calendar entry to give some carpenter in Connecticut a hard time. (Readers: Do restrain yourselves from making angry late-night calls to the phone number pictured. The person living there now doesn’t know anything about it, and just wants a full night’s sleep.)
I’m mainly posting this as a tribute to the random nature of the Internet.
Neglect your duties for so much as a day, and some person you’ve never met will call you on it, in front of the world, 37 years later. Tony Viesto might have completed every other job he ever had on budget and ahead of schedule; but this no-show is the one that gets noticed.
Isn’t technology wonderful?
The porch at 1107 Hope Street — which my grandparents expected Tony Viesto to repair on Sept. 5, 1974, and which he didn’t get to until the following day — was a particularly charming part of the house. (A picture of my brother and I on the porch, not tremendously long after Tony Viesto’s visit, can be seen on the Contacts and Credits page.)
In my memory, it was pocked with multiple layers of paint, the way wooden surfaces get when they are not painstakingly sanded down and leveled off for the latest coat. I don’t know what the white railings were painted with, but I remember they would leave a thin coating of white dust on your hand when you touched them.
Sometimes, when we heard sirens in the distance on a summer night, we would bustle out onto that porch just in time to see a police car or fire truck scream down Hope Street en route to some emergency.
And I imagine that my grandparents and great-grandma took to that porch for relief on thick and muggy summer days — though we’ve done that topic to death on this blog already, so I won’t belabor it.
My mom and my great-grandmother discuss family history on the porch, July or August 1975. My great-grandma appears to be calling shenanigans on my mom. Bonus style points for the Stew Leonard's bag.
For some reason, I always associated front porches with the South — iced tea and intrigue, and Yoknapatawpha County, and young men in gray waiting for their date to the Cotillion to come outside, and all that business. Wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized the nicest front porch I’d ever personally known was in New England.
It’s not there any more, of course. I wonder if the demolition crew had to take an extra couple minutes to erase Tony Viesto’s well-constructed handiwork on the porch corner post?
(A cousin of mine has been in the home contracting business in Stamford for many years; and I’ve sometimes thought about asking him whether he feels any pangs or tinges when he sees his old work being bulldozed to make way for something newer, bigger and shinier. My guess is he doesn’t care once he gets paid. But I could be wrong.)
Next week on 5,478 Days: Back to school with the Shrimp Boat.
Hope Street 
Some miscellany:
I remember sitting on that porch chewing spearmint gum during a rainstorm; somehow that must have struck me as cool at about 4 years old.
As Hope Street got busier and busier, the dust and grime on the porch got worse. It was hard enough to keep it in good repair (with Tony’s help); keeping it clean was impossible.
In the picture, your mother is looking at old photographs. The one you can see in her right hand is your great-grandma’s wedding picture, a copy of which I’ll send you via EMail. I suspect she is asking her son (my father) some particular detail of the photo we don’t see.
My guess is that your contractor cousin never mourns the demise of a current edifice. Not because of the pay, but because he knows he has just erected something much better that will last and both look and function better than what was there. In those cases where people with more money than brains are discarding appliances, furniture, windows/doors, etc. that are very recent and still very functional, he will ask if he can have them, and he installs them at his kids’ or friends’ houses. He wouldn’t have kept anything off the front porch of 1107 except for the number sign, which your grandfather did keep when they knocked it down, and which I have in the basement!
Thanks!
U Fadda
Thanks for sharing the spearmint-gum memory. That sort of trivial remembrance is just the sort of thing we’re all about here.
Funny how I don’t remember the dust and grime — though a kid wouldn’t notice something like that.
A month or two ago, during the run of entries about hot weather, there was a calendar entry that referred to hosing down the porch.
In.re. remodeling: I was thinking of the people w/more money than brains.
The detail about the white stuff left when you ran your hand over the railings reminded me that I grew up around the same porch, only it was on my grandparents’ house in Wisconsin. My mother envied it greatly because we had no such porch on our house. (They’ve since built a large deck, but I’m not sure it gets used much more than Grandma and Grandpa’s did.)
Today, our grandparents’ house has been remodeled inside, and my brother and his young family live there. The kids — the great-grandchildren my grandparents never met — play out there now.
I wonder how much lead and other chemicals that white dust probably contained.
(The pic on the Contacts and Credits page is somewhat uncharacteristic of me. As I remember, I usually did my best to avoid touching the white parts of the porch, specifically because I didn’t want the white stuff on my hands.)
Nice to hear the grandparents’ porch is still there.
Kurt-
You will be pleased to know your father just produced the watch Grossee was wearing. It’s a Timex with large numbers on the face. Drawing Boy used it after Grossee b/c of the size of the numbers and now Bood wears it on gigs b/c the numbers are easy to read. He put a new battery in it about 6 mo. ago.
No wonder our house is stuffed!
Mawd/Nana
Takes a licking and keeps on ticking, I guess.
John Cameron Swayze was a prominent (one of those old school, pompous by today’s standards) TV newscaster from back when all your TV showed was John reading – no, intoning – the news from sheets of paper. He used to do live Timex ads on other shows demonstrating the licking a Timex could take. On one, they strapped the Timex to one blade of the propellor of an outboard motor in a clear tank of water, fired up the engine for a while, then stopped. When they raised the engine, the Timex was nowhere to be seen (apparently fell off). Ol’ John was at a loss for words for the first time in his life. He looked for a moment like he was about to dive into the tank in his dark suit! I believe this was during the Steve Allen Show, and Steve had some appropriate wise-ass remark I can’t remember poking fun at John.
These days, Tony Viesto would be reported to Angies’ list!
[…] been active in the building trades in Stamford for many years, and is referenced in passing in this post from four years ago.) He shows up in my grandpa’s journal on one or two other occasions in the […]