(b. 1931, d. August 14, 2022)
PART 2 of an Interview with Sammy Fornaro, March 14, 2000
With Marjorie “Marge” Davidson and Thomas “Tim” Timpson
Introduction by Sam Tolley
Nufri “Sammy” Fornaro was a consummate restaurateur. His legal name was Nufri, but his father nicknamed him Sammy, after himself. A hard worker, he helped his father from an early age in the family restaurant, Sammy’s Ye Old Cider Mill.
Part Two of this narrative covers the years of the Cider Mill, Korean War Service and the Restaurant. The Mill was inactive for decades, but its restoration was something he and Ernie Maw discussed and planned extensively.
In 2003 Mendham Township acquired the Cider Mill property and a private group raised funds to restore and run it. It reopened in 2008 as the Ralston Cider Mill Museum. Sammy lived to see it restored and operating, a testament to his vision and to public/private partnerships. The Mill remains an iconic structure of Mendham Township and annually operates in the fall producing cider for sale, along with tours of the mill.
The interview continues:
SAMMY’S CIDER MILL
Sam Fornaro: My father originally bought the place (the Cider Mill) in 1929, but he couldn’t buy it because he wasn’t a citizen yet. Non-citizens, I don’t think, could own property years ago. So, my uncle was a citizen – his brother-in-law, his sister’s husband. He bought the place and then a couple years later or a year later, something like that, my father became a citizen. I can give you the exact dates … I don’t know for sure … because I still have his citizenship papers … but my uncle bought it under his name and then just transferred it to my father’s name. But he never lived there or never ran the business. My father ran the old mill in those days, and we actually had cider.
Marge Davidson: That’s what we want to hear about.
Sam Fornaro: Okay, we’ll get to that.
Marge Davidson: Good; oh, wonderful. How long can you stay?
Sam Fornaro: As a kid, I can remember that apples used to come in by the truck load and this had to be before 1937, because in 1937 our house got struck by lightning and burned down. I can remember the trucks coming in and going on the scales, which was sort of in front of a scale house that was attached to the house. Ernie Maw has pictures of the house that they took from pictures of the mill, inside the restaurant on the wall. Well, it looked very much like that, but in front of that was a scale house. The trucks used to come in and get weighed and then dump their apples and they used to go out and get weighed and go on again. This used to happen all the time. Even if you knew every truck that came in, you knew what it weighed yesterday, it didn’t necessarily mean that it weighed that today, if you know what I mean. So, you wanted to get the apple weight; you didn’t care about the truck weight yesterday. It was a truck weight as it left. But I can remember that every truck was weighed in and weighed out. They would dump their apples in this big holding pen and in the holding pen there was a conveyor belt that went and dumped into a second conveyor belt. Then that second conveyor belt brought it all the way up to the top of the old mill. That’s where the apples were eventually dumped. They got dumped into a hopper and then from the hopper, they opened the hopper and mashed them. Then from the mashing they went onto the trolley cars (flat cars). They’d put a row of apples crushed. I think they started with a layer of burlap then apples then slats. There were wooden slats, but big … I don’t know what you’d really call them … they were like one-inch slats, one inch wide by maybe a quarter inch think. They would run one way then the other way and were nailed together so there were spaces between them. They left little spaces so the apple juice could run through them. They had the burlap, the apples, the mat, the burlap, the apples, the mat and maybe five or six layers. Then they would push these trolleys underneath the presses, and they used to press the cider. The cider went from there into the three big vats that you really can’t see in the restaurant … in the old mill. But they went into those vats first. They had spickets on the bottom then from there they bottled the cider or sold it in bulk elsewhere, but most of it was sold in bottles in gallons. One thing I don’t have and that I remember very distinctly when we were playing around were little vials. I’m sure these little vials were for the apple jack that they used to make before my father got there. My father never distilled any apple jack because then they’d put the kibosh on it. It was Prohibition time.
Marge Davidson: He got it when Prohibition was in force.
Sam Fornaro: Yes; that’s how it bought it. Because the people who had it couldn’t make the apple jack anymore and I guess they sold it to him. There was no … after my father took over … there was no distilling apparatus around. I don’t know what happened to it; I guess they just took it out and sold it. They probably sold it for copper or something. I think it was mostly copper because it retained the heat so well. But the old distillery that they used to use during Prohibition was, is under ground. That was underneath the part, not the part of the stone mill, but as you look at the front of the mill, it was on the left side. It was then made into garages. There was a tin shed there with the furnace in it that they used to use to try to through a little heat into the old mill from this furnace. But this furnace was only put there because they wanted the smoke from the distillery under the ground to run up through the same chimney stack so you wouldn’t know they were distilling alcohol from the cider.
Tim Timpson: So, in the middle of July, you would see smoke coming through the …
Sam Fornaro: Well, I don’t think (in) the middle of July, but I would think up until probably in May when you really didn’t need it, because they would run out of cider to distill into their apple jack. But it was Tiger Applejack. We still have a sign there, which you can barely notice, and it was Tiger Applejack. That was used for a while, then I guess they really clamped down on the applejack business and they sold to my father.
Tiger Applejack Distillery, postcard
Like I say, my father bought (it) in 1929. He officially took over, I think, in 1931, and then in 1933 when repeal came, he opened up a liquor license and a bar.
As the apples and orchards got fewer and fewer in the area, he stopped making cider, but my father did run the cider mill probably until about ‘38 or ‘39, I think.
In the meantime, the building across from the old mill was a stand. They used to sell apples in bushels and baskets of apples. They used to sell the cider in the fall and so on and so forth. That started out as a small building and then it was added on, and the small original building had like a … what do I want to say … like a shelf and a lot of windows in back of it. They served through the windows. They served hot dogs and hamburgers, and so on and so forth, if they had hamburgers in those days, but it was used as a stand. We always called that place the stand, for years, never the restaurant, the stand. People used to go to the stand and buy their cider and apples and they used to maybe have a hamburger or something. In those days there was a soda company in Morristown called Schiff Soda. It was on the same street as the high school was on. I think it’s called Early Street.
Marge Davidson: Early Street, yes.
Sam Fornaro: Schiff Sodas were there, and they used to sell bottles of soda that came from Schiff Soda Company. That was up until, I think … we still sold … because I can remember seeing gallons of cider there, but in the meantime, my father had transformed it into a restaurant into the other portions. Like weekends, he’d sell the cider and the hot dogs and hamburgers at the stand, but then eventually we closed down the stand because we didn’t sell cider anymore and we didn’t have the apples coming in, and he made it a regular restaurant. This probably … it started as a restaurant in the early 30s then when Prohibition came in December of ‘33, I believe it was, he started serving liquor. It was the first liquor license in the Township. Luckily, my father was a very liked person and this attorney from Morristown by the name of Mesler (he was called Judge Harold R. Mesler), was the one who found the property for my father and who made the arrangements to sell it to his brother-in-law, who in turn sold it to him.
But Judge Mesler ….
Sam Fornaro: … is the one that got the mortgage for my father to purchase the mill, and the woman who held the mortgage was a person by the name of Mae Cramer. She lived on Old Mill Road, and I can remember the mortgage was $50 a month. It couldn’t have been a big mortgage, but it was a mortgage in those days, and she got her $50 a month for how many years. Sometimes I even used to walk up to her house. I used to like to go to her house because she had, she was a great gardener, and she grew all these berries in the spring and summer. She’d have blueberries and raspberries and wine berries and things like that. It was fun to go to her house because she’d let you pick a few berries and eat them. In those days you didn’t have to worry about sprays or anything. You ate them right off the bush and they were delicious. That’s how my father purchased the place. Through Mesler with a mortgage from her and he started his restaurant. As the apples and orchards got fewer and fewer in the area, he stopped making cider, but my father did run the cider mill probably until about ‘38 or ‘39, I think.
Marge Davidson: Wow! Did you actually help in running the cider mill?
Sam Fornaro: No, I didn’t.
Marge Davidson: Too dangerous, huh?
Sam Fornaro: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Timpson: Was it still water-powered then?
Sam Fornaro: It was still water-powered … no, it was when I first remember it, then it became electrical-powered. Then he bought a big motor, and the motor … I can remember the motor was so high, but what he did, it was still water-powered, because the water turned a generator which was pretty big, and the generator made power into the motor. It was more versatile than just direct power from the water turbine. Now, we never had a water wheel while we were there. The water wheel was before my father’s time, but the turbine was there. I can remember, God, sometimes we’d have to go down there and pick it up and get stones and sticks and stuff that would come through that would get caught in the water turbine. All there was a like a grill, so eventually not all the leaves and sticks would be held away; we would have to clean the turbine out every now and then. That was a pain in the neck because they used to have to hoist it up with block and tackle to get the turbine up and then we used to have to clean the turbine out. We had our boots on, but in the summer or warmer weather … spring and the fall when it was still warmer weather … we used to just be in an old pair of sneakers or something and no boots to clean that thing out. Then, it was put back together again. I do remember drinking cider right in the old mill when it was coming down … you know, how do you like this? Really good. They didn’t really particularly care to have our friends come and taste it because that was profits going down the drain or being eaten or drinking. But my father didn’t mind it. It wasn’t so much my father, it was the people that worked for my father that didn’t want the kids drinking the cider, or around because of safety reasons.
Tim Timpson: How many people worked at the mill?
Sam Fornaro: I can only think of it had two people. One major operator and one helper.
Marge Davidson: Were these people that were kind of ‘left over’ from the previous owner?
Sam Fornaro: I think so. I’m not sure who we bought the mill from. I think it was Thomas Laughlin. It was his family that we purchased it from, but I understand that he got killed in the mill. [correction: Laughlin sold the mill to George DuBucs, whose widow sold it to the Fornaro family.]
Marge Davidson: Now, we’ve never heard this!
Sam Fornaro: He got killed in the mill. He got tied … his clothing or something got tied up in a couple of gears that were going a different way. There were shafts, not gears then. As I understand it … I can’t swear to it, but it was always known that he got killed in the mill. This happened, probably in the mid-20s; probably ‘25, ‘26, ‘27, in that area. I think he got killed when they were still distilling the apple jack and this is the big reason why the apple jack distillery was cut off, because the owner now is dead and it brought a lot of attention with a man getting killed there, and so on and so forth, so they couldn’t continue with the apple jack business.
Marge Davidson: Do you think that was ever in the newspapers? We might try to find out … probably not.
Bernardsville News, February 6, 1930
Sam Fornaro: I don’t know, I don’t know. It could have been. I wouldn’t have any idea what year it would be, but it would have to be the mid-20s. I do know that they did a lot of distilling there. They made a lot of peach brandy there because when we were kids, we used to play in piles of peach pits that were four or five feet high. You know, and ten, twelve in diameter. Pit after pit after pit. I mean, many peach pits. So, they tell me that they made the brandy from the peach pits. They made peach brandy … no the pits was what was left over after they made it.
Tim Timpson: They made it from the pulp.
Sam Fornaro: They made it from the pulp, but the pits were left over, and they were just bare pits. That is pretty evident because there’s a branding iron with brandy on it that they used. It’s in the mill and people see it. It’s on display when it’s open. That’s still around. They used to burn ‘Brandy’ onto the end of the barrel when it was brandy, meaning peach brandy. I guess the apple jack was just a regular barrel.
Tim Timpson: How long was the mill operating during the course of a year?
Sam Fornaro: You know, I can’t really remember, but I would think that up until … see apples held. They held the apples in root cellars, and they held quite a while. There is a root cellar on the property. It’s under the old garage that’s falling down in the back.
Marge Davidson: Oh, it’s probably good yet.
Sam Fornaro: But if you put a top on it and a front door on it again it probably would work again, but I can remember we used to store apples and potatoes and carrots and things we used in the restaurant in this root cellar. We used to buy potatoes from whoever farmer we could get … many, many bags … and store them all there, and they used to last pretty much all winter and into the spring. Until they started bringing potatoes on up from the south. The earliest potatoes would come up from the south. But, we had this root cellar, and you went into the root cellar from the garage. There was a trap door in the garage, and I would assume that maybe before it became a root cellar they, after they took the apples out, they would store a little bit of apple jack in there, too. Then it would be cool, and it would be a safe place. You really had to know where the trap door was to know there was a trap door in this garage.
Tim Timpson: What about the mill pond? Did that require maintenance of any kind?
Sam Fornaro: The mill pond was pretty big. It had the mill race next to the restaurant. I don’t know why, but it seems to me that it didn’t need as much maintenance, you know. What they used to do years and years ago, and I can remember this, they had two big flood gates that they used to open. They used to drain the pond completely, but what they did is they used to shovel all the leaves from the main pond, prior to the mill race, shovel them all into this mainstream that would be coming down. See the stream was bigger in those days. After a few storms, upstream it broke through, and the other stream gets a lot of water now. But, at one time, all that water came down this way. That was just a little swampy area; it was draining down from the back. It was just a swamp area in there and that was just a trickle. Eventually, it broke through, and I would guess it started to break through in the 40s around during the war time and became a bigger stream so it was split. But, prior to the war, I can remember they used to scrape the leaves down into the mainstream and they would all wash down the river. That would be the way they cleaned the pond out each year. The pond was situated in the back and then the mill race came off the pond. Now, there was a way of blocking the water from the mill race to the pond. If they wanted to drain the mill race, they could do that too by putting up these wooden planked barrier dam. Then it would just go down a regular stream. We had a major storm … I guess it must have been Hurricane Hazel or one of them, which was in the 50s. The pond overflowed and the one ‘sort of’ low spot, a weak spot, eventually went through. You know, I can remember my father trying to get people to you know, damn the pond back up, build it back up. You know, he couldn’t’ do it because that’s when it first started that you needed all kinds of permits and everything to work on any waterway. That was just starting, and he couldn’t get a contractor to come in there and put the thing back up again, to move the dirt back into place. Eventually, we never did it, but of course, that played a second role. We didn’t mind it because the restaurant was going well, and the State used to stock it with fish and we used to get all kinds of fisherman around and it would interfere with the parking, and we didn’t have room for our customers to park that wanted to come in for dinner and things like that. Plus, the fact that the fisherman decided their fishing days were over, and they may want to come down and would go to the bar and would flop their fish on the bar and order a beer, and somebody sitting a ways a way, didn’t particularly care to see that because they were waiting for dinner. It didn’t happen that often, but it did happen. Then of course there was a customer … “Oh my goodness. What beautiful trout you have.” They enjoyed it, so it was a give or take situation, which you didn’t know how a customer was going to take it. But anyway, also, the restaurant used to get quite damp in the cellar. We had to put a sub-floor well above the cellar floor because the water had to drain back out. Because of the canal, it just had to seep through. Since that was no longer there, we didn’t have any trouble with flooding in the restaurant anymore.
SAMMY’S YE OLDE CIDER MILL RESTAURANT
Marge Davidson: Did you have any celebrities or well-known people that used to come to the restaurant?
Sam Fornaro: Quite a few. You know, we never bothered the celebrities when they came in, but we had many, believe me. They used to come from all over. Mostly starting in the 50s and maybe late 40s and 50s. From then on, right on through, but the older celebrities that would be coming in that I know were in there … maybe you would remember him … Galen Drake of the Housewives Protective League … remember him? He was on radio. Phil Cook, who was one of the very first ukelele people. Arthur Godfrey, Jack Stirling, who took Arthur Godfrey’s place on television, on the radio. And Jo Stafford was in one night.
Tim Timpson: Really?
Sam Fornaro: She was a singer. I believe she was related somehow to Galen Drake’s wife. Now, whether they were sisters-in-law, or sisters, or what, but there was a relation there. But I can remember this group would come in every now and then on a Saturday night and we used to stay there until five o’clock in the morning. He used to tell stories and jokes and entertain, you know. They used to come maybe with a group of 10 or 12, and of course, the help used to stay around and a few of the customers got to know these people. We’d stay there until four or five o’clock in the morning having a good time. A good time. On through the years, Carol Burnett came in. She used to come in quite often. Her sister went to school up at St. John’s.
Marge Davidson: Right.
Sam Fornaro: She used to come out to see her and come down quite often. I wasn’t there myself, personally, when Jackie Kennedy was there, but I know she was there because she wrote an article that was sent to us by many customers in the Woman’s Wear Daily, or some kind of magazine. They interviewed her and they said, “What do you do out in the country,” and she mentioned the steak house, Sammy’s Steak House, in one of the articles. Many sports figures would come out. A regular was Phil Rizzuto because his son went to Delbarton. Then he’d go back, and he’d tell other Yankees and other Yankees used to come out. Ron Guidry came out a couple of times. He was the Yankee that had 23 wins and 3 defeats one year. Really, the terror of the American League. He would be out. Many of the football players would come out. The Giants football players and so on and so forth, and many of the football players from other teams. Otto Graham was a regular whenever he came East. Kyle Rote from the Giants was a regular. The Mets announcer, Ralph Kiner, has been out to the restaurant several times. Going back to the football Giants, Roosevelt Grier and Jim Katcavage. This is the late 50s and early 60s when these football players would come out. When they eat, they would eat! Some of them would order an appetizer of spaghetti in a plate that was oblong, 12 or 14 inches long, and eat a plate of spaghetti and then polish off a lobster and then maybe end up with a steak for dinner in one seating. They could eat!
Other celebrities that came in, it was written in The Washington Post and also, I think it was in the American Airlines In-Flight Magazine, that Bill Bradley said that Sammy’s was his favorite restaurant in the world. He used to be a regular whenever he wasn’t in Congress, when Congress wasn’t in session, and he lived in Denville. He used to come out regularly with his wife. I had Ronald Reagan’s … give me a word … Chief of Staff and his Air Force One and Marine One pilots and the co-pilots and so on all come out. I had written Reagan a letter. I knew he was going to speak at Seton Hall, so I invited him for dinner or lunch. He wrote me back a very nice letter and said, “I’m sorry, I have a previous engagement, and I definitely have to be flying out,” but he said, “My Chief of Staff and the rest of my staff will be in Jersey for another day or two; can they come up for dinner?” This was not gratis; they paid their way, but that was another time we had a great time. In the meantime, he sent me a gold pin, autographed by Ronald Reagan.
Marge Davidson: What was the price of a dinner when you started there?
Sam Fornaro: Golly, the price of dinners was in the $5.00 range, which was quite expensive for dinner in those days. Then it went to $6.00, but at $6.00 you got everything; your entree, vegetable, and everything else. These people came a little bit later than that.
Tim Timpson: So, I understand this … was your father named Sammy?
Sam Fornaro: My father was Sammy.
Tim Timpson: So, Sammy’s is named for your father?
Sam Fornaro: For my father, not me. I am really Nufri, and he called me Sammy. I was named after my grandfather. The first son was always after the grandfather. The only Nufri’s around are all cousins of mine because they were all the first sons and named after the grandfather. Also, other celebrities. On his presidential campaign, George Bush, and Jeb Bush both were in my restaurant. It was at the time that Nick Brady was Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush, and he lived in Far Hills and the Bradys, going back to ‘Diamond Jim,’ were all customers of ours. The Bradys brought the Bushes in. One of my regular customers was Helene von Damm who was Reagan’s personal secretary. She had an estate in Far Hills that she would visit. She was really from California, she was his secretary, in California and through the White House. He eventually made her Ambassador to Austria, but she used to come anytime she came to New Jersey. She would always bring her entourage, husband, and friends, up to the restaurant. Very, very nice person. Other celebrities include Jackie Gleason. He had been there several times. He was not noticed for some reason. The reason why I know he goes there is because a friend of mine from Chester, who belonged to the New York Athletic Club, used to go there to the Athletic Club. He was a social climber; he wasn’t much … he came from his family’s money, but he used to go to the Athletic Club in New York and used to rub elbows with whoever he could, one of which was Jackie Gleason. He got talking to Gleason one day and Gleason says, “Where are you from?” and he says, “I’m from Chester.” “Well, where the hell is Chester?” “You know, near Mendham, Morristown, New Jersey?” And Gleason says to him, “You know there’s a restaurant … I’ve been there a couple of times,” he says, “One of the best restaurants I’ve ever been to in my life.” And he says, “The nicest part of the whole thing, they never bother me when I come in the restaurant.” Which we never did, but I can vaguely recall seeing him there, but I can’t prove it, because this would be when I was not really working in the restaurant, I was still in school. But anyway, he mentioned it to him, and he says, “Well, what’s the place like?” And he said he described it to a ‘T.’ Downstairs, bar, upstairs, meals come out … steak, lobster, lamb chops, primarily. And that was it; so, he apparently had been here. On through the years, Celeste Holm, John Amos when he was in the area, used to always come out. Downtown Julie Brown. The one person I don’t remember in the restaurant while I was there (now I left in ’95), was Whitney Houston, but she used to send a lot of people down to the restaurant. I couldn’t understand that; she had never been there herself as far as I know, but she used to send people down. Her mother was a regular, from what I understand, but I didn’t even know her mother. She’s the one that sent this Downtown Julie Brown who was a disc jockey and became a color commentator for the Saturday Races from Aqueduct and things like that, but interesting person.
A lot of celebrities were in that were brought in by customers of ours, but only once in a while. Sue Blakely, I think, was brought in by a friend of mine that had a summer home or a winter home in Aspen, Colorado, and he met her out there and he would invite her East and then bring her out to dinner. But, we had quite a few celebrities over the years. Many of the Senators and Congressman or Representatives would be in. One night there was a rap on the door, and we were closed. Knock, knock, knock … this guy comes in and he had a southern accent and outspoken, and so on and so forth …. “You know I come all the way here to eat. I was in New York, and I’ve heard about this place, and I want to eat.” It turned out to be Senator Pryor from Arkansas, who got lost; he couldn’t find his way and he didn’t get there until about 9:30 and we had just closed, but we fed him anyway, don’t get me wrong. But sooner or later people found us. I’m trying to think … the Frelinghuysen’s used to come in and many of the ‘horse people’ used to come in that had famous horses over the years. The owner of … I think his name was Rice, I’m not sure. The owner of Needles, who was quite a famous horse years ago, and the owner of Iron Ruler and Pass Catcher. Pass Catcher won the Belmont Stakes one year; his owners came in regularly.
But many of the ‘horse people’ came in and still come into the restaurant. I know there’s quite a few of them. A lot of them lived in the Far Hills area. Our busiest day of the year, which included New Years Eve, was the day they had ‘The Hunt Races’ in Far Hills. We’d be swamped. From five o’clock until twelve o’clock people were eating dinner. So, everybody went out that night and that was one of our busiest nights.But, also getting back to the restaurant, my first real ‘super job,’ was I took care of the Coat Room on New Year’s Eve one night and made myself … and this probably was about 1944 or 1945, made myself $50. In the Coat Room, hanging coats and putting hats away. In those days, everybody wore a hat. We had hat racks that looked like chicken hole nests that you used to put the hats in, individual. When it got to the point where you had too many hats, you started doubling them up and putting two numbers in each hole. Today you don’t have to worry about that; nobody wears a hat like they used to wear in those days.
Marge Davidson: Was [your sister] Celeste ever a Hat Check Girl?
Sam Fornaro: Oh yeah, she was a Hat Check Girl, sure.
Marge Davidson: She never mentioned much about the restaurant.
Sam Fornaro: She worked in the restaurant also. She was very good, very well liked.
Tim Timpson: There are two things about your restaurant that interest me. First, you don’t have a sign outside.
Sam Fornaro: Right.
Tim Timpson: Why is that?
Sam Fornaro: Well, we used to have a sign on the restaurant, and it was on the restaurant itself. In a windstorm, one time, it sort of broke down and it fell. It didn’t come off, but it fell, and my father thought, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t have it there because, God forbid, somebody might come walking by and it should fall … you know, it was …
Marge Davidson: Hanging.
Sam Fornaro: Hanging, right. You had the thing coming out and the thing going up. What had happened was the one pulled out on top in the windstorm, and it just went down but stayed against the building. So, we had it taken down and he had a new sign put up with two high posts on the right side of the parking lot as you look at the restaurant. Well, then, another storm came down the very next year, and that really ripped it down. My father didn’t have it put up yet, and as it wasn’t put up, people used to come in and say, “Sam, where’s your sign? Sam, your sign is no longer there.” More people talked about no sign than a sign, so he left it off and it was known as the place with no sign. He got a lot good publicity out of that, and that’s the story of the sign. But it went down twice in two years, and this has to be probably in the late 30s or very early 40s, so no more sign.
Ye Old Cider Mill, restaurant photographs
Tim Timpson: There’s another thing that’s unique about your restaurant; your menu. You really only serve three dishes.
Sam Fornaro: Well, now I understand they sell quite a few more, but years ago my father was way ahead of his time in restaurants. First of all, he didn’t mind people coming casually, but the people that came in casual were the money people who could afford anything they wanted and could afford to dress formally to go out to dinner in a suit and tie. And they liked to go to a restaurant where they didn’t have to dress up all the time. I can remember a couple of them asking my father if they could just come in maybe a jacket and no tie. Then it got to be, “Can I come in a sweater or whatever?” And my father said, “Sure, you can come any way you want. You’re a customer of mine; you can come any way you want.” He got to be the first casual restaurant around. Now, you can go casual into almost any restaurant; any of them that I know except I think The Grand Café in Morristown, which I think is still a dress code, which is very nice. We should have some more like that. But the same people used to go dressed up to The Grand Café on Friday and used to come to our place on Saturday in casual clothes or come Sunday in casual clothes. One of the most casual people … and I’ll never forget this … is Kerby Saunders. His family is still in the Mendham area, but Kirby is long since gone. But Kerby Saunders used to come down and basically, he was sort of like an eccentric millionaire. He used to come in the wintertime in a horse and sleigh to the restaurant. This is years ago when the roads weren’t plowed as fast as they are today, so he could come up in his horse and sleigh and he’d have dinner and then he’d take everybody for sleigh rides that were still left when he was ready to depart. Then he used to trot on back home to Mendham in his horse and sleigh. He also used to come in his open Jeep, right after the war, and he’d come in coveralls or whatever, and a sheath knife strapped to his side … very casual, but everybody knew he was in the area, so they didn’t mind. So, this is basically how it got to be casual, not dirty casual, casual. People were very presentable, don’t get me wrong, but they liked to be casual. He also decided that by serving very few dinners … not numbers, but the types of dinners … he could serve the best and that’s what he wanted to do.
He basically served steak, Maine lobster and lamp chops. He would, for any regular customer, if the customer said, “Sam, I’ll be in Friday … can you give me broiled fish?” You’ve got it. He would make a special dinner for anybody who asked for it, you know, who he knew in advance. He would get fish and serve fish. If somebody wanted pork chops, he would get pork chops and serve pork chops, whatever they might want. Chicken … he would serve chicken. But he felt that if the product didn’t move and it wasn’t fresh, he didn’t want to serve it. So many restaurants today have a lot of things on the menu but they’re all portion controlled and frozen. You throw them in the microwave, they defrost them, put their sauces on them and they serve them. I mean it’s real simple. You can have a menu that is as long as your arm, but in those days, we didn’t have … first of all, we never had a freezer except for the ice cream. We never had anything frozen.
A very interesting thing I’m going to tell you about is how we really got to be well, well known. We always had great steaks, and my father only had big Frigidaire refrigerators to age them in, and he could only age a couple at a time. This Kerby Saunders said to him, “Sam, let me see your refrigeration.” My father showed him, and he said, “This isn’t refrigeration. You’ve got to have a walk-in box, you’ve got to have this, you’ve got to have a good aging place.” He says, “This isn’t real good for aging. There’s not enough air.” He says, “I open the door a lot; it gets the air.” “No,” he says. “I’ll fix you up with a refrigerator, a walk-in refrigerator.” “A walk-in refrigerator, where am I gonna put it?” So, he looked around and we had a small room with cocktail tables in it. Maybe couples used to go in there. It was off the bar room, what was downstairs. He says, “We can put it in here.” He says, “I can’t have a refrigerator door in my bar.” He says, “No, we’re going to put the door on the side. The wall here … we’ll go in the other side and put the door.” Well anyway, he became famous in his refrigeration deal. He was the first person to completely air condition a major building in the world, and that was the Look Building in New York City. His outfit did that and they had some kind of contract with Carrier Air Conditioning. So, they did that and that turned out to be … they had a lot of air conditioners in windows and small units, but he’s the first one to really do a major building after it was built. So, he gave my father the cinder block, the cork insulation and all the hardware, the big 10″ door, wooden door, the blower, and the compressor. He said, “There it is all you have to do is to get a mason to build your refrigerator, put the block up and set the beams for the door and then put the insulation in and then put batons down and then plaster it with cement, all the sides and the roof, the ceiling. Which my father did; he got the Grassis from Mendham, who were masons, and they put the thing up. I don’t think it cost my father $100. in those days to have them do the cement work for this room, and they build the walk-in box. Then Kirby Saunders sent refrigeration men and hooked up the compressor to the blower and put the door on and balanced it and all, and that was it, we had refrigeration. It turned out to be probably the best aging box the country’s ever had. It aged beef beautifully. All the refrigeration men that used to come in to work on the refrigeration stated that they had never seen a box with temperature/humidity perfect all the time. We had no humidistat in there and just a thermometer for the temperature, but the refrigeration system that Kerby Saunders gave us was a blower unit that kept a constant temperature and worked wonderful for years and years and years. Of course, over the time while I was there myself, the compressor was replaced four times that I know of and the blower was replaced only once, but this blower ran 24 hours a day from approximately 1946 or 1947 … it ran 24 hours a day, every day of the week for … I’m trying to think of when I replaced the blower. It was probably 1988. Forty years this blower … same blower, same motor … ran night and day and never went off in 40 years. We never even replaced the motor. The only time it would stop is when we had to replace the compressor and then start it up again, but it went and went and went. I could never understand it. It was very, very efficient. They don’t make things like they used to make years ago. I mean, this thing just ran and ran and ran and ran. Anyway, that’s how he got started with his major aging box and the box is still there in the restaurant.
Marge Davidson: And it’s in use?
Sam Fornaro: Still in use. I don’t know whether anything has been changed since or not, but it could be.
Marge Davidson: Your father hadn’t gone to so-called cooking school or the CIA …
Sam Fornaro: No, no.
Marge Davidson: Was he just a self-taught?
Sam Fornaro: He was a great cook. The foods I cook today, I learned from him. He just had knack for cooking. I guess his mother was a good cook and I guess after he came to this country he had to cook for himself and so on and so forth, but not only could he cook his steak and lobster and lamp chops, but he could make a Chicken Cacciatore, and he could make roasts and all kinds of great food. To this day, I’ve got older customers that will call me up and say, “Sam, when am I coming over to your house and having a homemade dinner like I used to have at the restaurant, like your father used to make?” “Well, come on over.” I had a lot of good times, a lot of good customers there. The customers became friends. The only thing I miss about the restaurant, basically, are my friends, but I run into them all the time, a lot of them. It’s nice to run into them. Going on with Ralston again, we got away from that … we got into the restaurant.
Marge Davidson: Yeah. Well, I was fascinated by the restaurant.
Morristown High School, 1948
Marge Davidson: Well after you went to high school, you kept on working in the restaurant, I suppose evenings and Saturdays …
Sam Fornaro: Oh, yeah.
Marge Davidson: What did you do then? By that time were you able to take over the restaurant?
Sam Fornaro: Well, I started working as a bartender. Actually, I wasn’t old enough to tend bar in those days, but I still worked in the restaurant. I was going to Picatinny Arsenal. They had a tool and dye making school up there and they taught design and drafting and everything and that’s where I went on the trip where I saw how they made the toothpaste tubes out of lead. But I worked in the restaurant, then I went into the service. I was drafted into the Marine Corps and was in the Marine Corps from ‘51 to ‘53.
Tim Timpson: That was Korea?
Sam Fornaro: The Korean War. After school … I mean after the service, I went back and worked with my father and applied for college and I went up to Lehigh University. I used to come home on weekends to work Friday, Saturday and Sunday to help defray costs. I did that until I got out of Lehigh and then basically, I had a couple of day jobs in designing, but the restaurant got to be more and more work and busier and busier and I got to be in the restaurant pretty much full time because we would always do all our own buying. We didn’t have deliveries because when you get something delivered you have to take what comes. You’ve got no choice. If you don’t like the tomatoes, you’ve just got a bunch of bad tomatoes that were not palatable. So, my father used to always go to the market to buy his vegetables and I carried on the same tradition.
Marge Davidson: Was that in Newark?
Sam Fornaro: In Newark … went down to the farmers’ markets and we did that. I did that right up until the day I sold the restaurant in 1995. I still went out and got fresh vegetables twice a week and did all the grocery shopping. The meat was delivered, but we had a good rapport with the meat companies, and they knew exactly what we wanted, and they brought exactly what we wanted. If we would find just one that wasn’t right, the whole load went back, and they didn’t like that. So, we got pretty much what we wanted, our lobster was brought in fresh, every day. We had six days a week delivery. The only day we didn’t have a delivery was on a Tuesday. It worked out quite well. I enjoyed the restaurant all those years.
Tim Timpson: Lobsters came, not from Maine, from Long Island?
Sam Fornaro: The lobsters would come from Maine down to Jersey and they were pounded, you know, put in a pound with sea water. Some Jersey lobsters would come along, and they would be put in the same water, but they’re all the same lobster. So, the lobsters basically came from either Maine or Jersey, and they were delivered to us every day. I would guess that 90% were Maine lobsters and maybe 10% Jersey. We didn’t have lobster fisherman down here that you have up north in Maine, Massachusetts and along the coast there. They have quite a few lobster men. That’s how we got them. There are funny things you remember about the town. We had an old bus driver by the name of Babbitt. He was very conscious and very, very safety-minded about his buses. This man was so conscious that he used to put chains on the front wheels of his bus in the wintertime in snow. Some people didn’t even put them on the back for crying out loud, no less the front, but he had chains on the back and the front wheels so that he could maneuver his bus properly. He must have drove until he was 70 years old. He was up in Mendham. That’s just certain things you remember over the years.
Marge Davidson: What do you remember about the summer camp that was up on Old Mill Road?
Sam Fornaro: Oh, Okay! There was a sign near the restaurant, a billboard, Nature Lovers’ Club. The original name was Nature Lovers Club. It was a big sign and then on top of the sign was an arrow and it said 1/4 mile turn right, and it had the big arrow, but it had the sign advertised. They were mostly city people that came out there and I would think that most of them were Jewish, and it was a nudist colony.
Marge Davidson: Well, see we’ve never been able to find this out for sure.
Sam Fornaro: Nature Lovers Club. They were out there in the buff, and I know because every once in a while they used to have parties up there and my father used to cater the alcohol. He used to bring barrels of beer and barrels of birch beer up and he used to set it up and ice it down and they used to have their parties. He used to deliver it, and sure enough, they’d be out there in the swimming pool all naked, whatever, doing whatever they want, their thing.
Tim Timpson: This was too casual a dress for your restaurant.
Sam Fornaro: This was too casual of a dress. Although, surprisingly, we used to get customers from up there. That’s how we got to know them. Also, they had all kinds of recreation. They had a swimming pool, they had croquet, a lot of things for the people to do up there, including their parties, and it didn’t matter whether you were big or little. They were all running around in the buff. Sometimes a couple of kids wouldn’t be, but they would be up there, and my father would have to bring up, say a keg of beer and two kegs of birch beer, or something, and we’d bring it up there and set it up and people were all there. They had their little cabins here and there, and also in the back they had a livery stable where you could ride horses, or you could go out with a pony in a cart. I’ll never forget … they had a wicker cart that they had up there. It was gorgeous. We wanted it in the worst way, my brother, my sister, and I; we could never get it, but it was for sale. I think the guy wanted $200. for it; for the pony and the wicker cart. I mean if you could find that cart today and sell it over in Far Hills, it would probably bring $10,000. or more, but it was the neatest thing. It had wicker seats on either side and the driver actually sat and would be like this in the wagon, it wasn’t a straight seat across. You’d walk up through the back. They had horseback riding up there and everything. They had trails through the woods. Just below that was called Skunk’s Misery. That’s where the Swains and Snedekers and that group were and then in the back they had cabins, but they weren’t Nature Lovers, they were regular summer resort cabins there. They had dammed up the river or stream and they had a pond back there for swimming and they had picnic tables around.
Tim Timpson: Do you have any idea how it got the name ‘Skunk’s Misery?’
Sam Fornaro: I have no idea. Somebody once said something to the effect that even a skunk would be in misery up there. You know, it was out in the woods and down a dirt road and sat in the back, but it was centered around the river that runs past our restaurant, the old mill. That was there but they weren’t nudist, but up on the hill there were nudists. Then it changed. Then it got to be Pine Hill. Pine Hill Camp that’s when it became a camp. It was a colony before and then it became a camp. That’s when people used to have little cabins up there and also they had a big building with a house … kids that went to camp up there while their parents were in the city working or something like that. This went on quite a bit until they really opened up Randolph Township, Mt. Freedom. Then they had Mt. Freedom, which became very, very popular. The Pine Hill Lodge in Mt. Freedom and Sains Hotel and Saltz Hotel and all of them. That used to be a real summer resort. It was mostly kids and their mothers. The husbands used to come out weekends and go back to work in the city, but that became very famous. And from there, they went up to the Catskills. Mt. Freedom became a ghost town. But one of the very first ones around was the camp up here on Old Mill Road. That was in Mendham Township and Skunk’s Misery is half in Mendham Township and half in Chester Township. But the kids, even though they lived on the other side of the stream, used to come to Mendham School and Ralston and Morristown because it was sort of considered all Mendham, that whole area. But I know Bobby Bentz lived on the other side of the river or the stream, which meant he was really in Chester Township, but he went to school with us and all through high school. That flourished for quite a few years, that place. Even the cabins … what they called Skunk’s Misery … they called them, I think after a while, the name Skunk’s Misery didn’t sound too good …
Marge Davidson: And the people up there …
Sam Fornaro: They called it Swain’s Cabins. Now Swain, he was in the vending business. He was probably one of the first vendors … vending machine, candy machines. He used to have candy machines all over, wherever he could put one. Bobby Bentz’s father worked with him and that’s how he got one of the cabins and they converted the cabin to a winter house, and they converted a lot of them back there into winter homes. But he used to work for Mr. Swain. Mr. Swain ran his business out of Morristown. If chocolate had been in the machines in the summertime, say for three or four weeks, if it didn’t sell out, it used to turn a little white and he used to bring chocolates to us kids here in Ralston. We used to have our share of candy bars because they couldn’t sell them. The chocolate was good …
Marge Davidson: Oh, sure.
Sam Fornaro: But people didn’t, wouldn’t eat chocolate that had started to turn white on the outside. So, we used to be pretty luck in that way as kids. Then Otto Snedicker, who eventually became the electrician in town (we’re talking about Bob’s father). He originally worked for a juke box company, and he used to service juke boxes, one of which was in the restaurant. We had the nickel juke box in those days. I’ll never forget him. He used to bring the songs in. Every once in a while … we never had a Victrola … we were able to talk him out of a record that we could bring home. We didn’t have a Victrola, but we’d say, “Someday we’re going to have a Victrola.”
Marge Davidson: Cause you were going to get one.
Sam Fornaro: Yeah, and eventually we did. But he came to town, an electrician in this area, and I guess almost everybody used him. Who else?
Tim Timpson: You used to have some really great games down in that basement.
Sam Fornaro: Oh yeah.
Tim Timpson: They had just been around for a long time, or did you make a point to just keep those as a tradition when everybody else was buying electronics?
Sam Fornaro: Well, we had electronic games too, but we had the old ones. There again, my father was way ahead of his time. He talked this guy into putting some games in for the kids. Now you can go to a lot of places, including McDonald’s, and they all put games in for kids. But we were the only restaurant in the whole country that had games and kids used to love to come there and the parents didn’t mind it because they weren’t in their hair; they’d be playing games, and they could relax and sit down and have a drink and then go up for dinner. By the time dinner came along the kids were ready to eat. Then if the parents wanted to sit down and have an extra cup of coffee and a little dessert and the kids wanted to go downstairs and were getting restless, they’d go down and play the games. So, it worked out quite well. I guess my sister must have told you about the slave that was over here in the Manor House.
Marge Davidson: No, she didn’t tell us about it, but we know that there was supposed to have been a slave lady there.
Sam Fornaro: What did my sister talk about? I can’t imagine her not talking about that.
Marge Davidson: She talked about when your house burned.
Sam Fornaro: Yeah, well that was in ‘37. It was struck by lightning.
Tim Timpson: She was telling stories about you, really.
Sam Fornaro: That could very well be, too.
Marge Davidson: No, she really wasn’t.
Sam Fornaro: I can remember a story about my brother. He’s only maybe three or four years old and he disappears and we’re all looking for him. “Phillip, Phillip, Phillip, where’s Phillip.” Nobody could find him and we’re yelling. He didn’t say a word. So, we’re walking, fearing the worst you know, in the streams. We walk in back of the mill because the water went through the mill and there was a little stream in the back. He found this old pan and he was sitting next to the water, and he was going like this. “Phillip, why didn’t you answer us?” “Shhh … you don’t make noise when you fish.” Because he heard other people say this when he was a kid, that you shouldn’t talk and make noise when you fish, because the fish hear you and you scare them away, which is, an old wives’ tale. But he was there, and he was dipping the pan in the water. “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m fishing.” “Did you catch anything?” “Nothing yet, but I’m going to catch something.” I’ll never forget that.
Marge Davidson: Were you eventually the chief cook down there or were you always the bartender?
Sam Fornaro: Well, I used to cook. Once a week, primarily, I used to make the spaghetti sauce and things during the day. I used to do that cooking and I did the bartending, and I did the ordering during the day because people would come around. But, when I was there, it was pretty much a 24 hour job, but I used to work every Monday night and sometimes Sundays I used to cook. I did a little bit of everything, believe me.
Marge Davidson: Well, sure.
Sam Fornaro: When you’re in the restaurant business, in those days, you had to be a plumber, you had to be an electrician, you had to be a whatever; whatever it called for, I was. To this day I still do a lot of my own work around the houses.
Tim Timpson: Well, you’re a tool and dye maker, right?
Sam Fornaro: Right.
Tim Timpson: Is there anything we’ve forgotten that we should be covering?
Sam Fornaro: There’s just so many things such as this fire house here. They started building the fire house and they were very, very particular. At first, us kids used to come around and we used to help work on it. You know, do everything. We used to mix the cement, and we used to carry mortar or carry the blocks when they were building the bottom here. As they started going up, carried the lumber. Somebody got the idea that kids shouldn’t be helping out here and we better not have them work on the building so they wouldn’t let us there anymore.
Marge Davidson: Maybe that was when child labor laws came in with Prohibition.
Sam Fornaro: Child labor laws … you know, we didn’t have child labor laws then. We wanted to work. We used to go to the farmers, like I say, and never get paid, never. And who cared. I can remember going out and husking corn off every stalk and putting it in a bag and carrying it to the side and dumping it in a big pile. Then you’d go back to where you left off and you’d husk more corn. Then I can remember afterwards where you got the corn cutter and cut the corn ‘shocks,’ what do you call them? Corn husks? Corn stalks.
Marge Davidson: Stalks.
Sam Fornaro: And we used to collect the corn stalks and pile them in big piles just like you used to see in what’s his name … the artist on the Saturday Evening Post …
Tim Timpson: Norman Rockwell.
Sam Fornaro: Norman Rockwell in his paintings and stuff like that. And back in David Frost’s paintings when he used to paint outdoor scenes … we used to do all that, put the things in, and I don’t consider myself that old.
Marge Davidson: No! Well, we were surprised at what the DeVore told us. When they moved out here there was no telephone, and they had a generator for electricity.
Sam Fornaro: The first telephone in this whole area was in the restaurant. I can remember the telephone number, it was 172, Mendham 172. That was the first telephone in this whole area. Then eventually everybody tied into it, but when they first were here, they were all party lines. You had maybe four people on a line. But being that that was a public telephone, and I recall that it was a stand up telephone and there was a little box that the coins were in there to call, something like that. How it worked, I don’t know. I’m sorry we don’t have it today, but that was the first phone call, I mean first telephone, and then everybody had either two rings, one long and two short, or two longs or whatever. It was really funny because you could tell when I used to call somebody down here, say the Skinners or somebody. You could tell when somebody picked up and was listening in on you, but you couldn’t do anything about it. On Roxiticus Road here, the house opposite Groenewegens used to be a two family house and I can remember when it was two family. The Skinners lived on the one side and an old man lived on the other side. I don’t know what his name was. I can’t remember; I did know it, but I can’t remember. That was a two family house. The house … the two houses on the corner, I don’t think were here, on the other side … but the house that’s right next to the road, that used to belong to a man by the name of Schaefer (spelling). He was a Merchant Seaman, and he used to go all over the world. He was friends with my father and also was a frequent visitor of the bar and restaurant. But I can remember he brought back from Italy one time, an Italian Pointer hunting dog for my father and he gave it to him. My father says, “What’s his name?” Schaefer says, “Mussolini.” “No,” I says, “Whatsa the name,” in his broken English. He said, “Yeah, that’s what I named it, Mussolini.” So, we always called the dog Mussy. He turned out to be a really good hunting dog. I can remember one time he brought back a monkey for us and …
Marge Davidson: My golly!
Sam Fornaro: And, he not only brought back the monkey for us, he bought us a cage to keep him in. He had the cage made up for us. It was like chicken wire, and it had a door on it, and we used to go in a play with the monkey and he used to like to play with us and sit on your shoulder, and he used to sit there and peel bananas, you know, and eat it, and his jaws would get big because he’d store all the banana in his jaws, and then eventually chew it down and swallow it. But he was a lot of fun. We got tired of him after maybe four or five or six years and we gave him to a family in Peapack that wanted him. They had him and the last I heard, one of the kids let him out and closed the door and he couldn’t get back in the door of his cage. Anyway, it was during the summer, and the last I heard he was running around through the trees in Peapack and then I don’t know whatever happened to the monkey. I guess he just died when winter came along. But he was quite a guy. He’s the first person I know that had a goldfish pond, and this is back in the 30s that I can remember his goldfish pond. He had it nicely landscaped and flowers, and I had never seen goldfish before. I mean, what the hell? All I knew was trout, but they had goldfish over there. I’ll never forget … you know how the green slime gets in on the water … the green used to come in on the water and they used to have to clean it out. So, they used to have to catch all the goldfish and put them in a bucket and clean out the pond and put fresh water in it and put the fish back in it. I used to ask him what that green stuff was. It was long … they used to call it ‘Angel’s Hair.’
Marge Davidson: Yeah.
Sam Fornaro: The angels would come down and they would comb their hair in the water and their hair would be left there and it would turn green because it was in the water. What the hell; I didn’t know any different. I thought it was true! I thought it was angel hair that was in these ponds.
Marge Davidson: Do you think that that water from the pond came from the spring up above? I’ve been trying to trace this water works that was in Ralston.
Sam Fornaro: The spring up above … that, for some … they had a way of cutting, either cutting the water off partially or fully when they cleaned the pond, but I know it wasn’t completely empty when they cleaned it. They just took the goldfish out so that they could clean it.
Marge Davidson: Do you think the water may have come from up above?
Sam Fornaro: There were several springs up there, as I understand it. There was one spring, I think up in back of Engles. Then there was another spring further toward the Boy Scouts or the Sisters, over that way. I think it was the one in back of Engles that fed that pond.
Marge Davidson: It would be right straight down from there.
Sam Fornaro: You know, I think what he did … I think what he did, he went back a ways and he may not have even been on his own property, and he tapped into it, put a pipe underground and then, you know, brought it down into the spring, I mean into his pond.
Marge Davidson: Well, I’ve just been on this kick of the waterworks and … because there was a lawsuit of Mrs. DeMott saying that the nursery across the way was using too much water.
Sam Fornaro: Oh, that was Booey’s Nursery.
Marge Davidson: Booey’s Nursery … that he was watering all his roses, I guess, what he was growing there. I know that the houses across Roxiticus Road also got water from there.
Sam Fornaro: Yeah.
Marge Davidson: So, this is another one that I bet they got water.
Sam Fornaro: Well, the house probably got water from that spring.
Marge Davidson: Okay.
Sam Fornaro: Definitely the house, and I think he came off that somehow and tapped into it. Now, the other spring down below, fed … as far as I know … that double house.
Marge Davidson: That’s the Wagner’s … they still use that, the people in it now.
Sam Fornaro: Oh, they still have it. But that spring was into that house, and I think it went to Groenewegen’s house across the street and then down to the river again. But the stream that ran down there …
Marge Davidson: There’s a little stream.
Sam Fornaro: There is a little stream. It was much bigger years ago.
Marge Davidson: Oh.
Sam Fornaro: It seemed to me it was much bigger. And we used to play in that stream. And we used to play there with our soldiers and our cars and everything, and we used to play right next to the stream and get all wet and muddy. Our parents didn’t like that, but we did it anyway. But we had a great time there with that stream. Now, there used to be another spring up on the Parmerly property, which became Buchanan which became Frank Sera. Frank Sera lived up there opposite the Bannister house, but there was a spring there that came up through the field and down and around and it ran down the side of the road, all the way down to … where did it go? How far down did it come? It came down and eventually the county put a storm sewer in for this water, but it did come down along the road for a long ways up to about Nesbitt’s driveway. Nesbitt had a driveway there. Then they put a storm sewer in, and it went from there down to the brook. The town did, or the country did. By the way, the county also put a storm sewer down in front of the restaurant….That is going through a wooden pipe, and that wooden pipe is still underground and still in good condition.
Marge Davidson: No!
Sam Fornaro: When they were doing the road, you know, my father told them, “Look, down here there’s a pipe that goes to the old mill from the mill race. Just be careful when you get to it.” Sure enough, as they were digging they were very careful and they found it, and it was an old oak pipe that probably was three feet or more in diameter that runs under the ground right over to the mill. It’s still there. But …
Marge Davidson: That’s a gem to do that.
Tim Timpson: Oh yeah. I had heard that report, but we always see the … coming out of the top of the pen stock, is iron in your mill down in the water …
Sam Fornaro: Oh yeah, yeah.
Tim Timpson: So, I thought it was an iron pipe going underneath, but it’s wood.
Sam Fornaro: No, it’s all wood. Then they fixed it up a little bit, but that was the original pipe that fed the original great big wide, what it is 10′ wide, the waterwheel? We feel that it was a gravity, not an overshoot, it was a gravity wheel. That’s the way we sort of think it was. But water was very important in this area.
Marge Davidson: Oh sure. People didn’t want to go out and dig a well when they could get it from a spring.
Sam Fornaro: Sure. Also, years ago, and I don’t remember this, but I saw the remains of it … iron was very predominant in this area. Up our stream, mostly … not so much down this way … but up our stream mostly toward Chester Township and Chester and Mendham Township up the far end. There was another mill up there but that had fallen down prior to anything I can remember and there was a mill there. I think it had something to do with the iron ore that they were getting. But they gave up on the iron ore in that area because it was just too much water, and they couldn’t control the water …
Tim Timpson: That’s right.
Sam Fornaro: … to get all the iron ore out of the ground. So, they abandoned that idea quite early, and they concentrated on the iron ore up in Chester, which was on high ground and less water. But there always was a good flow of water through this whole area here, between the two streams and then they met down below and eventually became the Raritan River, the North Branch. I’m trying to think of some other people on the street, as I recall them. The Radzewisz’s on the corner here.
Marge Davidson: Oh yeah.
Sam Fornaro: They lived in this … I guess they call it the mill house, don’t they?
Marge Davidson: They call it the mill house. The Miller’s Cottage.
Sam Fornaro: I don’t ever remember it being tied with the old mill across the street or any of the buildings around.
Marge Davidson: Well, you talk about you going through the conduit or the pipes down on Roxiticus Road … my son and the kids that lived in the mill, they used to go all through the pipes there, across the highway underneath where the tail race was that went over there. It scares you to think of it now.
Sam Fornaro: I know.
Marge Davidson: You don’t think that those were connected?
Sam Fornaro: Oh, I don’t know. See, it was before my time.
Marge Davidson: Heaven sakes, yes. It was way before.
Sam Fornaro: Yeah, but I don’t remember it being the same piece of property. Talk about celebrities in the area, you know Imogene Coca was going to buy the house on top of the hill. They bought it but she didn’t live there very long. The Gunther house now, way up on top of the hill, Imogene Coca had that place.
Marge Davidson: Wow.
Sam Fornaro: Candy Jones’ husband owned the old mill here. The modeling agency.
Marge Davidson: Yes, we were told that when Mr. Paige owned that, lots of models came there.
Sam Fornaro: Well, I thought that he was going to buy it or bought it, her husband or whoever it was. Yeah, Lemoine Paige was quite a guy. He had a lot of people in. I thought that they bought the place. I’m not sure or rented it, I think.
Marge Davidson: I think I rented it.
Sam Fornaro: Rented it. That’s what it was. They lived here for several years. The Radzewisz here, I think they had three boys and two girls and the parents. Seven of them lived in that little house. Ted was my age, one year ahead of me, and he had two brothers, one of which is, in his own right, quite famous. He went into the Merchant Marines, and he was really ‘Merchant Marine gung-ho.’ I could probably get Ted Radzewisz to talk to you, too.
Marge Davidson: Yeah, that would be great.
Sam Fornaro: Maybe I’ll try to get him down here to talk to you and get some of his stories. But he’s living way up around the Delaware. But I keep in touch with him and hear from him every Christmas at least. Once in a while we call, but maybe he could give some advice on what went on here, stories. His brother was in the Merchant Marines and then stayed in the reserves for ages. He eventually solicited enough money and built a Merchant Marine memorial. A memorial for Merchant Marines during the war. I think this memorial is in Mississippi because after he got out of the Merchant Marines he became sort of like a geologist and a wildcat oil driller. He drilled oil down through Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama, and he made money on all the wells, no matter what. If it came out dry, he would sell the information to people like Esso and Shell and Sunoco and things like that. But when it produced, he had a piece of the action, and it produced the oil and the people who invested in that particular well all got royalties that went on for years and probably still do. I know Teddy, the brother, invested in a couple of wells, a couple of which really hit, and he used to get checks from them every month on the royalties that came out of the oil wells. He was quite a guy. He made a name for himself both in the Merchant Marines and in the oil business down in Mississippi and so on and so forth. I don’t know whether he’s still living now. I used to hear from him regularly and he always used to send me information on all his oil wells and his new expeditions and things like that. I may have some stuff some place along the line. If I do I’ll save it. He was the first one I knew that rode motorcycles. He had an Indian Motorcycle. That’s when Indian made motorcycles regular-sized.
Marge Davidson: Right.
Sam Fornaro: It was the first time I ever rode on a motorcycle, and I’ll tell you it was the last time for a long time because he scared the hell out of me. But he was well, you know, equipped to do it right, but I was only on a bicycle. I never knew what the hell 80 miles an hour on a motorcycle would do, so it was enough to scare me enough not to ride motorcycles for quite a while. I eventually got on later, but he had motorcycles, and he was the town adventurer, you might say?
Marge Davidson: He went out into the world.
Sam Fornaro: Yeah, yeah.
KOREAN WAR SERVICE
Tim Timpson: There’s one segment of your background we didn’t touch on at all and that was Korea.
Sam Fornaro: Korea. Well, I was in during the Korean Conflict. I went into the Marine Corps, but I was drafted into the Marine Corps. I went through Parris Island and so on and so forth and then they had me as an Air Controlman Forward Observer. They sent me to Camp Lejeune, or no, Cherry Point, the Marine base. When I got to Cherry Point they sent me to a small airfield in Camp Lejeune that was called Peter Field Point. They would teach you to write backwards on charts when you’re a Forward Observer, to direct the military aircraft coming over to bomb and so on. You were a Forward Observer. That didn’t set well with me, so I spoke to my Sergeant. I said, “Sarg, you know, I’m Air Control, why can’t I get in the tower? I hear there’s an Air Control School.” He said, “Yeah, there’s an Air Control School out in Olathe, Kansas.” And I said, “How do I go there?” He said, “Well, you just got to apply for it. You’ll never go because they only take two Marines a month and there’s 50,000 on the list.” So, he says, “The chances of you going are no good.” But when I first went in the service, I got to know this other Sergeant. I was a little guy, and he was a little guy, and he says to me, “If you’re ever going to make it in the Marine Corps, you better do the best you can, no matter what you’re doing. Every test you take you do the best you can. If it’s multiple choice, eliminate two and guess, but make the best scores you can possible do.” So consequently, I did quite well on all my test scores in the Marine Corps. I don’t know, I had like an MOS of 138 or something like that. Anything over 130 was super. So, I applied for school. Damn, it wasn’t 10 days later, I get orders to go to school and man, was everybody mad at me. So, I get out to Air Control School and I became a Control Tower Operator. Now, there’s only a few towers in Korea, but everybody wanted to go back to Korea. All the guys that were there and they went back for R&R and so on, so you had to get in line to go back, but I volunteered to go as a Tower Operator, to go to Korea. Couldn’t get there because there were so many people ahead of me. In fact, almost every Sergeant, Staff Sergeant, Tech Sergeant that was in any control tower I was ever in, all got their second orders to go back to Korea because they signed up for it, plus the fact that they were used to it. They knew what was going on and they sent them, so I never myself got to Korea. I was in the Korean War and so on, but I didn’t stand a chance. The best they could do with me was I was supposed to go to the Mediterranean and Europe for a year with the Navy aboard a carrier out of Norfolk, Virginia. Another fellow that was a little ahead of me … he was in the class ahead of me in Control Tower School … he was from Long Island. Eventually I was two weeks behind him at every base we ever went to, but we get back to Cherry Point, he gets sent up to Edenton, North Carolina and I get sent to Edenton, North Carolina. This was Marine Air Group 11. We were the ones that were supposed to go overseas, and they needed two tower operators that were school trained, and Rowan and I were the only two. So, we’re supposed to go, we get all our overseas shots and everything. We’re supposed to leave our base on Friday to meet the carrier in Norfolk. On Wednesday, we get COG’d out of MAG 11 (Marine Corps Group 11), and we get shipped down to Opala, Florida. Now we have no tower operators going with Marine Corps Group 11, so they canceled the whole group from going overseas and they got another group out of North Carolina out of Cherry Point to go on the carrier to go out because they had no tower operators that were qualified to go over. What we had to do, we were trained in land unit carrier practice where you stood at the end of the runway and when a plane was coming in on a carrier, you guided him, meaning bring one wing up or the other wing and so on and so forth. When he got over you told him when to cut his engines and so on. Well, we were supposed to do this on this ship. Well, we got COG’d from Marine Corps Headquarters down to Florida because they had nobody down there and they were messing up royally. Everybody complained that went into this air base. So, we get down there and everything went pretty good. Actually, our Master Sergeant, who was in control of the control tower, couldn’t control traffic. He was our boss. So, if the boss couldn’t control it, you know … the only people left down there were the guys that came in from Korea and so on, and they weren’t even used to anything like this. So, as fast as they’d get snapped in on it and knew how to run the traffic, they got transferred back to Korea. So, they decided to send Rowan and I down and eventually they sent, I think, four or five more tower trained, school trained tower operators down there. But that was as far as I got. I always tell them whenever we go to our Marine Corps reunion that I was in the invasion of Miami Beach and the battle of Ft. Lauderdale. That was it; then I eventually got out. But before getting out, I went down to Miami International Airport, and I got my Senior Tower Operator’s license from the FAA from Miami International. They wanted me to work for them in the worst way. I used to go down at least twice a week and guide traffic into Miami International. A lot of fun.
Also … getting back to Ted Radzewisz and his brothers … in those days, you know, everybody had guns. Ted’s brothers had a few pistols. Now we all knew safety guns and safety and everything because we were all hunters. We used to borrow his brother’s pistols and go out here to the old railroad tracks and we could shoot up against the railroad track because in some places it was high. We used to put our targets there and the bullets were safe. But we used to go back there and shoot these little Deringer’s and things like that that his brother had. Well, that was the extent of my pistol shooting. So, in the paper one day, in the Marine Corps paper, it said Pistol Tryouts. So, naturally, I’m a pistol shooter! I sign up for it and the nice part about that is that you could go while you were on duty, and you automatically got to the pistol range and shot. You fired at their expense. So, I’d go to the pistol range and I’m trying to shoot, and I can’t even come close to a target. They were safe, but I never hit the target. So, we fired out at the FBI range down there. So, one guy is sort of worried about me, the guy in charge of the range. He comes over to me and says, “Have you fired a pistol very often?” Basically, the only time I fired it was in boot camp and out here in Ralston. I said, “Well, basically not too much, but I fired in boot camp more than any place.” He says, “You don’t know anything about the pistol, do you?” I said, “No.” He says, “You’re the kind of person I like to teach.” He took me under his wing and 225 people showed to get on the pistol team. They narrowed it down to 11 and I was one of the 11, so I fired with the Marine Corps Pistol Team. But it all started right here down in Ralston. We loved to do it out here. I mean, we weren’t good, we didn’t know the balance and so on and so forth and didn’t know that you must hold your breath before you squeeze off your shots. I mean you’d put it up, bang and you’d talk and shoot, but safely. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t unsafe, but that was how I went on and all the way up to the Marine Corps Pistol Team. We had some fun. I’m sorry I didn’t get to Korea in a way, but in a way I’m happy.
Marge Davidson: But you did get back to Mendham, back to Ralston.
Sam Fornaro: Yep.
Tim Timpson: And now you’re leaving for Saratoga Springs? When will that be?
Sam Fornaro: Yeah, next month. But I’ll be coming back. I hope to come back … if I know enough in advance, the meetings … I hope to get back to the Historical Meetings and participate in them.
CIDER MILL RESTORATION
Marge Davidson: Great. Well one thing … if you just had all your wishes, what we do with the mill? What’s going to happen to the mill?
Sam Fornaro: Personally, I’d like to see the Township buy it. I got a letter the other day from appraisers in Somerville and they wanted to come and appraise the property. I told them, “You know, when you appraise it … .” He said, “Well, we’ve got to appraise it for what it might be worth. You’ve got a lot here, a house there.” I said, “No, you can’t appraise it for that.” I said, “What you’ve got to appraise it for is historical value. I don’t know who it is, but there’s a right person out there that might give three times what the value of the property is as compared to an old historic mill.” I said, “So when you do it … I don’t mind selling it at a reasonable price, but I want a reasonable price, and I think the Township could get it.” Basically, the Township has Green Acre funds, they get historical funds from the State, they get Federal funds … I could get them too; not Green Acres, but I could get Federal funds and State funds if I wanted to fix it up, but I’m too old for that.
Marge Davidson: Yeah, we can understand that.
Observer Tribune, Thursday, November 27, 1997
Sam Fornaro: The Township will be here for the next millennium and that old mill can be here for the next at least a half, or maybe full millennium.
Marge Davidson: Well, places in Europe are there for centuries and centuries.
Sam Fornaro: I know, so I would like to see the Township get it at a reasonable price, and that’s it. Now, Ernie Maw worked on our old mill with his father, too. His father worked on this old mill down here. They both seemed to feel that that mill is older than this mill. I don’t know why, but they feel that way because they worked on both of them.
Tim Timpson: Are you talking about this little mill here on the corner?
Sam Fornaro: Yeah, the one on the corner down here.
Tim Timpson: The 1734 …
Sam Fornaro: Yeah. They feel that my mill is older than that one. What I think happened was I think that Nesbitt’s purchased the mill and changed the mill into like a grain mill or whatever.
Marge Davidson: It was first a grain mill.
Sam Fornaro: I think the Nesbitts changed it from whatever mill it was, into a mill, and they called it The Mill, but I think the building was already there when they purchased that. I really do because when they dated it 18 something, that’s when he bought it, and I think he gave it to somebody … I’m sure that’s when he bought that mill. Because all the papers and records for everything around that I can remember as kids, it was 1750. This was, you know, people like the Loughlins that were there and Mae Kramer who would say that that was old mill that was supposed to be from 1750, and all these people had a 1750 date on it. But for some reason they say it’s 1848. Well in 1848, for crying out loud, they’d put it together with cement, wouldn’t they, instead of hayseed and lime and sand? That’s what it’s put together with. I mean, I go up into Saratoga and I see 1784, 1790 and they’ve got cement buildings up. Why wouldn’t they use it here? I just don’t understand it. They could put any date on it that they want, but I wanted to get John Cunningham … I’ve spoken to him about this … I wanted John Cunningham to come down and I want to speak to Dr. Horan if he’s still there.
Marge Davidson: Oh, they’re there.
Sam Fornaro: I’d like to speak to him, and I’d like to bring John Cunningham into his mill and bring John Cunningham into our mill just to get his idea. I mean, Ernie says that some of the windows that are in there are made in a period way before 1848; way before that. This house he bought in Morristown is a 1700s house or maybe even 1600s. He said some of the windows in the mill or all the windows in the mill were put together like some of the windows were in that house down there. So, it makes me think that it’s much older than they seem to want to say, and I do think that Nesbitt bought it, and they call it Nesbitt’s Mill, just like they call it Sammy’s Mill now, Sammy’s Cider Mill.
Marge Davidson: Yeah, they call it Sammy’s Cider Mill.
Sam Fornaro: But, when he took over and purchased it, I think the mill was already there and that he started some kind of manufacturing, whether it was grain or what it was, whether it was a sawmill … I even heard the place was a sawmill at one time.
Marge Davidson: Yes, I think that’s been mentioned, that it just went through whatever was popular …
Sam Fornaro: And this mill here, I’m sure, is older than the one on the Black River, the one down there. I don’t know what the date is on that one, but I think that one goes back to the 1700s, that the county owns … I’ll have to get the date on that; I can find that out easy enough.
Marge Davidson: Well, that’s one of the problems. The county … you know, when we tried to talk to them about it, well they say, “Well, we’ve got this mill up here in Chester, we wouldn’t be interested in you know, making another center, you know.”
Sam Fornaro: Yeah. You know why? Because it would take away from the other one. This is a much prettier mill than that one ever was.
Marge Davidson: Oh yeah.
Sam Fornaro: But it should be done; something should be done about it.
Marge Davidson: Well, I said if no governmental agency would buy it, I’d like to … you know, people that buy and restore a mill like the Herron’s… Well, they didn’t do the restoring, but it does …
Sam Fornaro: No, that was Paige.
Marge Davidson: … but if it does get into private hands, it’s better than nothing.
Sam Fornaro: Oh sure, sure. But I do think that it should go into good hands. I would like to see the Township get it. Maybe they don’t have to worry about the county. Maybe they can go different ways; maybe they can go Federal government and Green Acres and things like that. I mean, they pay millions of dollars for plain old land …
Marge Davidson: Plain old swamp land.
Sam Fornaro: … and nothing on it; here at least you have something on it that’s historical and it would fit right in with the era around here in the olden days. You know, Jockey Hollow and Mendham and Chester. I understand they’re restoring the old mill up in Long Valley now.
Marge Davidson: Oh, but that’s been going on for quite a few years. It’s a tremendous undertaking. Really, and it still is not near restoration.
Sam Fornaro: Oh, it’s a big undertaking; don’t get me wrong. This one … it has to be a governmental agency that would do this, of some sort, because today prices are just too high to do it. There are individuals who have enough money to restore it into a house of some sort, but an old mill starts with walls four feet thick and then three feet thick and then two feet thick and then one foot at the top. Even if somebody took it for commercial purposes, like antique shops and maybe a seasonal shop like Christmas season, Easter season and things like that, make it a seasonal shop … something on that order, I think would go good. Then of course you could have fine antiques as well as big antiques. You could put a couple office spaces in there.
Tim Timpson: Sell cider.
Sam Fornaro: You could sell cider. You could get somebody in a corner of that and make cider.
Marge Davidson: Well of course Ernie would like to get it back to a cider mill.
Sam Fornaro: Yeah.
Marge Davidson: Operational.
Sam Fornaro: Yeah, I think it should go back to a cider mill …
Tim Timpson: That would be fun; that would be nice. It would be educational, and it preserves some of our history.
Tim Timpson: I’m going to have to … I’m out of tape and I didn’t bring any more, so I’ve got to …
Sam Fornaro: And I’m done and have to go, too.
Marge Davidson: We’ve kept you a long time.
Sam Fornaro: Well, I enjoyed the stories.
Marge Davidson: My goodness, we so appreciate it. We were afraid you were going to move, and we wouldn’t get this done.
Sam Fornaro: No, no, I’m still going to be with you people, believe me. I don’t mind driving down.
Marge Davidson: Well, you can always move into the mill.
Sam Fornaro: Yeah, yeah.
NJTV Spotlight News, October 19, 2018
“The juice is worth the squeeze at Ralston Cider Mill”