MID-MORNING BIRDS
The “Early Birds” on Main Street, up with the crack of dawn, have already been discussed and it seems appropriate to consider the mid-morning variety as well. Main Street in every small town, I suppose, marks the center of life and business and traffic but in Hanover the main thoroughfare has the added significance that here town and gown really meet and mingle every day in the year. The town is, generally speaking, in the seller’s seat and gown in the buyer’s role and this inevitably brings the two together, particularly since store delivery services are very largely a thing of the past and Mohammed must go to the mountain. “The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker” greet professors and instructors and deans and lesser ad- ministrators, and their wiyes, and even undergraduates, in one common fellow- ship, with little or no visible feeling of superiority on either side. And Main Street encourages in the mid-morning, along with these business transactions, more visiting and greeting and gossiping and collection of debts and stories, or both, and payment in kind, than you would ever be able to shake a stick at.
Main Street, in fact, acts as a veritable lodestone for all the people of Hanover and surrounding areas, drawn there ir- resistibly for many different reasons, and mid-morning is one of the busiest hours. Though most of the places of business do not open now until 9:00 a.m. (much to the disgust of the “early birds”) there is a tendency to come for shopping about 9:30 or shortly thereafter while there is still some morning freshness in the air and it is still possible to find a place to park. Kitty Larmon greets Esther Cam- pion, Norman Stevenson exchanges late news with Fannie Ames, and Del Ives embraces Dean Joe McDonald with a glad welcome home. The Tanzi store long since an institution has opened its doors and with Harry and Harriet and Charles has all the latest in local devel- opments on tap with the beer. The Co-op food store starts its rushing business for the day except as carts stalled for small talk block the narrow aisles and Christina Dickey may be seen comparing notes with Bessie Ward, and Madeline Bowler exchanging political notes with Alice Monahan.
And when one thinks of town and gown on Main Street, one thinks inevi- tably of that recent invention of the do- mestic, and the business and professional world, the so-called coffee-break, which has so warmed the hearts of all in the coffee business, whether wholesale or re- tail. This innovation seems to have caught on in all the sophisticated areas of the country and has certainly for some years been a fixed part of Hanover life at all levels. People who in the old days would have been tied down at home or behind some desk or counter now appear on Main Street sometime between 9:30 and 11:00 with clock-like regularity. There are various spots where the mid- morning birds alight for their cup of coffee, either before or after or in the midst of other business or shopping. These spots range from Eastman’s to the Beefeater and the Inn Coffee Shop, but Lou’s probably gets the largest patronage at these hours.
There are, to be sure, coffee groups apart from Main Street, in such spots as the hospital and the library, and in sev- eral departmental centers in the College. What makes some folks still choose Main Street is an interesting question. It un- doubtedly involves such factors as ease of access, habit, pressure of work, group loyalties, time-schedules, and status seek- ing, but that need not detain us here.
To give a full list of Hanover’s Main Street “Coffee-breakers” would require too much space but I may mention a typical sampling including some names you may remember. Among the business devotees are Jack Gile, Bob McLaughry, the Jim Campions junior and senior, Leon Fiske, all three of the Rands Dick, Buzzy and Bobbie, Wilbur Good- hue, Dick Putnam, Nance von Metten- heim, Helen Hawes Start, Pete Cavaney, Sarah Naylor, Harry Tanzi, and Jim Huntley, not to forget Town Clerk Mar- ion Guyer* and Police Chief Ferguson. Among the members of the College ad- ministrative staff are Thad Seymour, Charlie Widmayer, Nick Sandoe, Adrian Bouchard, George O’Connell, Cliff Jor- dan, Don Cameron and Ray Buck, along with the two inseparable librarians Dick Morin and Ed Lathem, and the dollar-minded Mason Ingram and Steve Welch. Faculty both ex and active include Fletcher Low, Don Stone, Clyde Dankert, Mart Lindahl, Bill Carter, Don Bartlett, Van English, and a number of others.
The coffee-break and Main Street in general are naturally the source of latest information world or local, true or otherwise and though the HanoverGazette serves its own good coffee, its staff is always represented on the street, usually by Dave Hewitt in person with coffee cup in hand, to catch and report the latest scoop. “Spud” Bray is usually stirring by mid-morning and “Rob-the- rich-and-give-it-to-the-poor Fletcher” is standing by, though not so much for cof- fee these days.
We are proud of the fact that we are not a highly-stratified society, but even a “class-less” society, God knows, does have some class distinctions and the cof- fee-break seems to illustrate this fact for it is in some ways definitely a middle- class institution. Both the top and the bottom of our mildly stratified population miss the joys and the contributions of this mid-morning break. The reasons are fairly obvious. The top brass are either too busy, or too dignified, or perhaps too much the butt of coffee-klatch conversa- tion, particularly in the form of ques- tions, to be able or willing to join in, and thus, unfortunately, they miss one of the most pleasant and most therapeutic of Hanover institutions. And those on the lower rungs of the ladder miss out be- cause the coffee-break idea has not yet trickled down to their level. One has to be at least a little way up from the lower echelons to be able to say “I’ll be back in a few minutes” and then disappear for half an hour. The so-called “workers” take their breaks to be sure but in other and less obvious ways.
The next time you hit Hanover make a mid-morning excursion down Main Street. Stroll up and down a few times, or stop in for a cup of java, and you will be bound to see someone you know. If it is in the summertime you will see a lot of “strange folks” you do not know, and even though they are mostly gone by the first of October you will note that even in the winter time there has been a marked dilution of old-time Hanover and Nor- wich characters with a lot of new intel- lectuals and cosmopolites. But take a look anyway and make the most of the survivors from your day. And have some faith in the blending power of Hanover’s mid-morning Main Street. It is still a force which helps mightily over the years to keep us in touch one with the other, and to make us a united community.
