RIDES WITH JOE
Lunch In Springfield, Vermont, Then and Now
Part One
When Springfield, Vermont native Lena Kazak graduated from high school in 1938, landing a job wasn't easy. The Great Depression had its hold on this small factory town along the raging Black River, about 35 miles north of Brattleboro. The town's machine tool industry was struggling, but the Fellows Gear Shaper plant was still pretty busy. Back then, workers would come downtown to Springfield Lunch, a weird looking diner that sat precariously on its foundation on the edge of the river. Run by the Italian-American Gaspardino family, Springfield Lunch occupied a long, narrow piece of a building that housed Lovell's Market.
Jenny Gaspardino gave Kazak her first job at Springfield Lunch. Jenny's father Charles had died a while ago and left the business to his wife Mary, who retired and passed it on to Jenny. Still living in Springfield, Lena told me about her four years at the diner, in a friendly conversation we had at the beautiful Springfield Library, just a block from where she once worked.
"I was born on Mineral Street, but my father bought a farm about three miles out when I was three years old. It was just a small farm with a few cows, a few chickens, a few turkeys; you know, that type of thing. I'd never been to the diner."
"Jenny had a sister, Sally, whose husband worked there, too. He would work one shift and Jenny would work the other. Then there would be a waitress or two on both shifts. We took turns. One week you worked days and one week you worked nights. It was open from breakfast right up till about midnight. It was sort of a family restaurant, so it wasn't a honky-tonk type of thing."
"When you came in, there were three booths, and then a counter with about eight or nine stools, and then two more booths on the left along the windows. At the end of diner, there were stairs going down to the kitchen in the basement, and there was a back door from the kitchen out to an alley. We had a dumbwaiter, you know, by pulley, and it had several shelves. We'd holler down, and the cook would send the meals up. You didn't holler that loud, just loud enough so the cook could hear."
"I was a waitress, a cashier, and if someone wanted a sandwich, like a western, or a hamburger, I did it on the grill right in front of the customers. Under the counter, we had a sink, so we washed the dishes in between while the customers were looking right at you. They sold beer, and they had the jugs downstairs with pipes going up to the spigots in the middle of the counter. I guess those were pretty quaint times."
"In the morning, we had a lot of gear shapers. Many of them were coming from as far away as Barre and Rutland. They would come in and eat their breakfast, and then head for work. Right next door was Lovell's, so anytime we would run out of something, we'd just dash over there. We served regular meals at noon and at suppertime. Jenny had beautiful dinners like roast pork, mashed potatoes, and a vegetable. Her mother made a great sauce at home. They were known for their spaghetti dinners."
"At night, the gear shapers would come down for their big meal. I think they had a half-hour or three quarters of an hour, and you had to make sure you got the meals ready. They'd call in first and order, and then they'd dash in and we'd have the all meals set up. Lots of people would come in late for a beer or a sandwich and coffee after a movie, but it was never rowdy."
"I remember that there was a hairdresser who worked in the beauty shop at the hotel, and she'd order a sandwich and I'd run it across the street to her. Where the town office building is now, there was Brown's Fashion Shop, and we'd sometimes run down there with sandwiches. If the cook took time off to do some errands, I'd go down the stairs and put the dinner on a plate and bring it up."
"The reason I left was because one day, we were quite busy, and I saw that the coffee was boiling over. I stopped the thing from spilling, but I got hot coffee grounds all over my hands. I've still got a few scars, but not too bad. I never went back, because I got a chance to go to Bryant's (Bryant Chucking Grinder Co.) and work as a machinist. I had to work from 3 to 11, and then I had to walk home to the farm. It was about two miles, at 11:00 at night. Then I got on the day shift."
Long before Kazak waited on her first table or slapped together her first western or eastern, the 1889 building that housed the diner and the market sat across the street next to the opulent Adna Brown Hotel. According to the son of one of the longtime owners of the building, the city forced his father to move the structure to make way for a hotel parking lot. That was likely in the 1920s or early 1930s, when cars were coming into fashion.
According to Dave Dionne, who is the present owner, the tiny diner portion was not added on until the building was moved to its present location, nor had there ever been an eatery in the building as far as he knew. A few old city directories on the shelves at the library revealed that the Gaspardinos apparently opened the business in the early 1930s and sold their business in the early 1960s to Edward Granger, who continued to call it Springfield Lunch. In 1982, the restaurant was called Ma's Diner, and was operated by Christine Polczynski. Recently, under Dionne's watch, it had a brief spin as a Chinese take out place.
Dionne was not surprised at its short run. "When I check out a Chinese place, I always order Won Ton soup and an egg roll the first time. The soup was watery and the egg roll was dry. A few months later, it folded."
Now Springfield Lunch sits vacant with a sign on the door that says, "Sorry, we're closed." The hotel burned down long ago, but the parking lot is still there. Lovell's Market is just a memory, and probably couldn't compete anyway with the newly-expanded Shaw's Supermarket a half-mile away. According to several sources, Mary Gaspardino passed away in 1970 in a nearby nursing home. And Kazak told me that Jenny Gaspardino died when she got a blood clot while traveling home on a plane.
Dionne's got a buyer for the building. The folks are already living there in a converted street level apartment, where they breed all kinds of birds. They want to open a bird store, and use the diner for storage. So on a dismal, cold day, the soon-to-be former owner took me on a farewell tour of Springfield Lunch.
We had to step carefully over a big patch of ice to get through the door. There are now only two booths remaining, both near the door. Two stools have been added to the near end of the counter. The window for the dumbwaiter is still there, but the other end in the kitchen is sealed up. The beer spigots are gone. The narrow, winding steps down to the basement are barely negotiable, and they lead to a claustrophobic cooking area where you are eternally conscious of the river running underneath. As Lena says, "I guess those were pretty quaint times."
Springfield has a new "quaint" but very contemporary downtown restaurant and popular meeting place. Stay tuned for Lunch in Springfield, Vermont, Then and Now, Part Two, and find out about the Morning Star Café and how it's not only serving up good food, but also providing hope to this still struggling Vermont city.
UPDATE: Great news! Springfield Lunch has a new life. The people who just bought the building are turning it into a coffee shop. It should be open soon. More about this in Part Two of this column, coming soon.
