Nufri “Sammy” Fornaro

(b. 1931, d. August 14, 2022)

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.

Sammy’s early world was filled with school, work, scouting, sports, and friends. He grew up in the Ralston section of Mendham Township attending the local one-room schoolhouse that was built in 1830. After fourth grade, he went to the Brookside Schoolhouse, which today is the Town Hall.

He was an early member of the Boy Scout Troop 1 created by William “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt as the model for all boy scout troops. One of his friends was Ernie Maw, a builder, and local historian. While Ernie was two years behind Sammy in school, they shared a love of scouting and Troop 1. They eventually became good friends as adults.

Young Sammy had several side jobs, such as clipping hedges and selling nuts gathered in the Township woods. He also had time to play baseball and football after he did his various chores. He was always busy. When the residents were building the Ralston Firehouse during the 2nd World War, he was limited to simple jobs because of his age.

Young Sammy wanted to be part of the apple cider operation too, but he was too young, and the crude equipment was too dangerous. His father, who had bought the business from bootleggers in 1930, only made cider for sale. As he grew up, Sammy became more involved in the family restaurant which replaced the simple sale of cider and burgers at a roadside stand. The restaurant had a long bar in the basement.

He served in the Marines during the Korean War. He trained as an air controller and eventually became a member of the Marine Corps Shooting Team. After his service he attended Lehigh University.

Sammy’s Restaurant remains a local haunt today with a reputation which draws a wide following. There is no sign for Sammy’s which has made it even more famous. Early in the restaurant operation the sign fell down and was intentionally not rehung for fear of it falling and hitting a patron.

When I knew Sammy, he held court in the basement bar. We would enjoy brandies heated in his microwave.

Part Two of this narrative will cover the years of the Cider Mill and the Restaurant. The Mill was inactive for decades but its restoration was something he and Ernie discussed and planned extensively. In 2003 Mendham Township acquired the 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. 

Interview with Sammy Fornaro, March 14, 2000
By Marjorie “Marge” Davidson and Thomas “Tim” Timpson

Part One – The Early Years

[From interviewer notes: We are meeting with Sam Fornaro who is a long-time resident of the Ralston area of Mendham Township.]

Tim Timpson: We’re ready to go anytime you’d like. Maybe you could start with some of your earliest recollections about growing up in town.

Marge Davidson: Well, you were born here, right?

Sam Fornaro: No … actually I was born here but wasn’t born here. We lived here when I was born, but my mother went to her parents’ house in Madison, where I actually was born by midwife. They didn’t come out to this neck of the woods in those days, very often.

Marge Davidson: So, you really were born here … almost?

Sam Fornaro: Almost, yeah. Very shortly thereafter, we moved back here. But my best recollections probably would be going to school, when I first went to school over here at Ralston School on Roxiticus Road. But I do remember the first time I went there, and I would say the first grade, that is; not the exact first day I went there, but I can recall the first grade, second grade, through the fourth grade.

Ralston Schoolhouse, 1907
Built c. 1830 on land donated by Dr. John Leddell, it closed its doors in 1940

4 Grades at Ralston Schoolhouse, 1938

Girls

Back Row
Betty Backer Sisco, Dorothy Booy Smith,
Celeste Fornaro Bianco

Middle Row
Patty O’Brien Bolcar, Barbara O’Brien Brown

Front Row
Arlene Cumback Smith, Gloria Alpough Kind, Muriel Engel Ruderhausen

There are a lot of funny things about that school because number one, it was the first time I really saw an icicle. We had giant icicles coming down from the roof because, naturally, the roofs in those days weren’t insulated and the roof was quite high, and the windows were enormous. The icicles were the full length of the windows. Just a few little things that I can remember. Also, naturally, the outhouse, which we had at the school. I would assume that maybe my sister mentioned this. We had an outhouse and ..

Marge Davidson: Did you have boys’ and girls’?

Sam Fornaro: We had two outhouses, right … boys’ and girls’. As you went up the hill, looking out the front door of the school, if you went to your left up the hill, it was up there. As you went around the back of the outhouse, the boys’ were on the right and the girls’ were on the left. A very, very primitive type of deal, but as I recall, I think we had a one-seater, and the girls had a two-seater. Then the boys had a drain trough that they utilized.

Tim Timpson: When was this, Sam?

Sam Fornaro: Well, I went to school in first grade there … I was born in ‘31, so this would be probably the fall and winter of ‘35 because I got out of there after four years, which was 1940. So, I went there in September of ‘35. The first year would be ’36 through ’39. 1936 was my first year.

Tim Timpson: So, your first year you were five years old.

Sam Fornaro: My sister went there two years before me, excuse me. I have to think these things ‘back.’ So, I started in ‘36 and got out in ‘40 and then went to Brookside School. But anyway, a nice old schoolhouse; a lot of memories.

Neil Groenewegen was our janitor and I can remember in the wintertime we had the anti-room and then the major brick building, there was one big potbelly stove in the back. The water fountain, and that’s all it was a water fountain, we had no running water. We had a water fountain in the anti-way and that would freeze in the wintertime, so the teacher would do the best she could to get it inside and I can remember her one time using a match to try to unfreeze the little spicket that was on the bottom of the water cooler. It was quite a thing. Also, I can remember that it would be so cold that the kids when they had to go … and I remember this more so in the third and fourth grade, but the first and second graders would sit in their seat for the longest time and wouldn’t go to the bathroom. The next thing you’d know, there would be a puddle under their chair.

Marge Davidson: It was too cold to go!

Sam Fornaro: It was too cold; you didn’t want to go out. Just funny memories that are still around after all these years. We had, I think, three swings, and we did have a teeter-totter for our playground. The three swings hung from two trees with ‘Ys’ in it that were pretty close to one another. This big cross tree or beam was wedged between the two ‘Ys’ of the tree and they tied three rope swings from it.

Tim Timpson: A three-rope swing?

Sam Fornaro: Three swings, all were rope.

Tim Timpson: Oh, Okay.

Sam Fornaro: Three swings with the two sides being rope rather than metal. Of course, they would break. Annually, at least one of them would break and someone would go there and replace them. Then the teeter-totter was off to the side. That was actually a commercial-type see-saw or teeter-totter, or whatever you call it.

Also, in the front of the school we had our little, like a rock garden, and a flagpole was on it. Each day we would go out and the flag would go up when it was nice weather, and we would say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag after it was raised and then go back inside. There weren’t too many neighbors around. Across the street was the Nesbitt property. In back of the school, but on the same side was the Collichio house. I don’t know who lives there now. Also, I can remember when we were young, there were two families (one was East, and one was West) and I think West lived on the eastern end of the road and West was on the west end … I mean East was on the west end. One day we went to … she had a child in school, and I can’t remember, I think it was a daughter, but I don’t remember her name … but we went to her house, which is the big house on top of the hill, right there by the school … you know what I mean? The gray house, I think!

Marge Davidson: Yeah.

Sam Fornaro: Well, we were going to go there one day to listen to her play the harp. She had a big harp, which we thought was big, anyway. You know what a harp looks like. Well, we’re supposed to go there, and they oiled the road that day. Now, they used oil in those days.

Marge Davidson: Real oil.

Sam Fornaro: Today if you put a little oil down the EPA will arrest you, but in those days they used to oil the roads and then they used to cover it with gravel. Well, they used to have piles of gravel on the side of the road. What we did was we all grabbed handfuls of gravel and made a way across the road so we could walk on it to get across the tar because men would go along and spread the gravel to cover the road. So, we covered that, went there, and had a real, good time. I think she had cookies and milk for us, and she played the harp, which was quite an experience. Many, many good experiences in Ralston School.

Marge Davidson: What about the teachers? Who were the teachers?

Sam Fornaro: Miss Stringer, I think, was my teacher. I know my sister knows a few other ones. Hutchison was the Principal. Old Mr. Hutchison. The Morristown Free Public Library used to have a truck come out and the sides used to open up and the books used to be in the truck, and that was our library. The four grades, the teacher was at the front of the school, which is facing toward Peapack-Gladstone. The rear had the big potbelly furnace in it. As you looked forward, the left row was first grade, the second row was second grade, third row was third grade, and fourth row was fourth grade. I went through those four grades, one at a time.

A lot of the people I still hear of, once in a while, but I don’t see too often. The O’Briens were in my class; they were twin girls. The first time I had even heard of twins; I didn’t know they came two at a time. They were twin girls and were in my class. The Skinners … one of the Skinners was in my class. I think Neil Groenewegen was in my class in the fourth grade, but he wasn’t in my class in the third grade. He went from second grade, I believe, to fourth. They skipped him. He was quite a brilliant man. I’ll never forget that he used to draw. On the side blackboard he would make his drawings. I can remember vividly in the third or fourth grade, he put a drawing up of rocket ships. They looked like the rocket ships of today and of just a few years back. This was so much ahead of time. I mean, there were airplanes without wings, just short little wings, like Buck Rogers would do. I think Buck Rogers was just barely coming out in the comics in those days, I’m not sure, but he had a vivid imagination of aircraft.

Tim Timpson: Do you know what he did after school?

Sam Fornaro: He became a geological engineer. I haven’t seen him since high school, but as I understand, I think he went to the Colorado School of Mines, became a geological engineer and he worked on the Alaskan Pipeline for years. From what I understand, he just let his beard, his hair and everything grow for years and years. I don’t know whether he’s still living or not; I assume he is.

Marge Davidson: I believe he’s in very poor health but lives with his sister.

Sam Fornaro: Yeah, he had a sister, too, right. He was way ahead of time when he was a kid.

Marge Davidson: Yes, when we came here everybody said he was really smart.

Sam Fornaro: I can remember him skipping, I think, it was the third grade. He went from second to fourth. In school, I would assume he was doing more and knew more about the third grade when he was in second than he did his own second grade, because he was way beyond that.

Tim Timpson: Well, could you hear the instruction going on … obviously with a row behind you?

Sam Fornaro: Oh yeah, well. One row would be there, two, three and four. The teacher would sort of be in front of the row she was teaching. You would sort of see what’s going on in all the classes.

Marge Davidson: We have a bench in the General Store, and they said it came from there. So, did you have long benches?

Sam Fornaro: I think we had two benches; I’m not sure now. One was in the anti-room that we used to sit on when we used to take our galoshes off, and I think there was one in the main School House. But, basically, we had individual desks that opened up, and of course, we had a seat on the side. We didn’t have a dunce cap, but you did sit off to the side if you were being scolded.

Marge Davidson: And that was the main punishment?

Sam Fornaro: Yeah, that was the main punishment.

Marge Davidson: There weren’t many discipline problems, probably.

Sam Fornaro: No, we had very little. One of the funniest things I remember though, I was, I think, in the second grade. Fred Backer was there. Maybe he’ll think I’m telling stories on him, but anyway, it was springtime, and somebody’s mother gave somebody pussy willows to bring to school, which everybody had in those days. We had pussy willows. That was the first of the spring, sort of like, ‘flower.’ Anyway, Fred went to smell the pussy willows, and he got one caught up his nose and nobody could get it out. Nobody had a pair of tweezers or would even think about a pair of tweezers, but anyway, they had to get a doctor to get the pussy willow out. My sister remembers that more often than I do, or more vividly.

Marge Davidson: She mentioned that.

Sam Fornaro: There are so many things to mention, you don’t know what to say. As we grew up, after grammar school in Ralston, we went to Brookside. Well, first of all, the first time I got on a bus and the first two days when I went to fifth grade, I got off in Mendham because I didn’t know I was supposed to go on over to Brookside to the Township school, although they would have taken me in Mendham to go to school. Pretty soon someone was telling me, “No, you don’t get off here, you get off in Brookside, not Mendham.” So, like after three or four days at Mendham School, I started to go back to Brookside School. That was a much higher-class school because there were two grades in each room, as you probably know. So, we were all bussed over there. By the way, the first bus company that we had was McKinnell’s Bus Company.

Florence McKinnell’s School Bus, 1935

They drove like … it was like a panel truck, and it had wooden boards on each side that we sat on when they picked us up. Most of the times we walked to school, but sometimes a school bus in the wintertime would come along in foul weather and they would give us a ride to school and take us back.

Tim Timpson: Did you walk from here …?

Sam Fornaro: From there to Ralston. After that it was all bussed to Brookside and that was like five miles away. But I guess Ralston School was there quite a few years before I was going, and I was the last graduating class. After I got out in 1940 that was the last year; they closed it up. From then on they went either to Mendham or Brookside.

Entertainment … we basically entertained ourselves. At recess you played tag, or you played hide and seek and that was it; maybe the swings or the see-saw.

There was nothing else to do except we found a secret cave and we used to go this secret cave. Now, the Boy Scout road is right there next to the school, and it was always open, and they used that road quite a bit. I guess during recess or lunch hour one time, we were walking up the road and there was this culvert under the road to let the water through. Well, we thought it was a cave. We had no idea and that was our secret cave. We used to go there and eat lunch. I’ll never forget, we eventually told the teacher about, but she couldn’t imagine a secret cave. That’s when she explained that this is a rain culvert, that when it rains hard, so the road doesn’t get washed away. I think, I’m not sure, but I think it was made of stone. I’m not sure, but at least the two ends were made of stone so it wouldn’t wash away. What the center was, I don’t know whether it was galvanized pipe or what, but it was pretty big. It was big enough for kids to stand up in, so that’s how big it was, but of course, we weren’t very tall as kids. So, you know, what would be that high, would be tall. I guess that’s why we figured it was a cave. But that was one of our main recreational areas the last couple of years I was there. And of course, we had the mountains to run all around.

Tim Timpson: What did you do after school?

Sam Fornaro: After school we went home; that was about it. We had no …

Tim Timpson: Did you play in the hills or …?

Sam Fornaro: No, I guess everybody just seemed to go home. Although, as time went on and maybe we got to be in the sixth grade or so on, the school was closed, and Bill Hillcourt was in the Boy Scouts at the time.

William “Green Bar Bill” with Troop 1 Scouts, Schiff Estate House

Marge Davidson: Was the Boy Scouts there? Was that already …

Sam Fornaro: Yeah, Schiff Reservation was there. I think it went in in about the mid-30s or early 30s, when Schiff left it to them. Anyway, they wanted to start a Cub Scout Troop here in Ralston because we had the Skinners and Groenewegen and myself, and by that time, they started to move into Skunk’s Misery. You know where Skunk’s Misery is on Old Mill Road. Bobby Bentz was there, and up on top of the hill there, although he wasn’t in Mendham Township, Bobby Blaine … and we started a little Cub Scout Troop, and we met at the old schoolhouse Bob Colicchio got I guess, him and Hillcourt. Bob Colicchio was our Den Leader and he got Hillcourt and somebody to get the Township to open up the school for us or gave us the key and we’d go in there and we’d have our meetings there. It was a lot of fun. It was something to do and that was the start of the Boy Scouts. But basically, the Boy Scouts played a very important role when we were growing up as kids. Everybody was a Boy Scout. Myself, my brother, Ted Radzewisz, the Groenewegen boy, Skinner, Bobby Bentz, Bobby Blaine. There were quite a few of us.

Troop 1, Mendham Township c. 1948
Top row: 3rd from right, William “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt; 1st on left, Charles A. Moeri, Jr.
2nd row: from the left, Richard Hulbert, Jim Crammer, Ernie Maw
1st row, 2nd from right, Sammy Fornaro

Tim Timpson: This is Troop 1?

Sam Fornaro: This is Troop 1. We really weren’t Troop 1, but we went as Troop 1. Bill Hillcourt had us as Troop 1. The Boy Scouts eventually assigned us Troop 155 or something like that, I don’t know how we got it. But we went under the name of Troop 1 and it was really good for all of the kids in Mendham and Mendham Township, because we had Schiff’s Scout Reservation. We went camping every month; one weekend every month we went on a camping trip. In conjunction sometimes, it was tied into our five-mile trip. Like we’d meet in Mendham and walk all the way out to the Boy Scouts and camp overnight and walk all the way back. Well, the trip out and back counted as a 10-mile hike. We did a little extra. You know, long way around so we’d get the 10 miles in. We used to go over to Jockey Hollow Park and then back. But, the Troop itself, once we got past the Cub Scouts, met in Mendham as Troop 1, and we met in the old Fire House, which used to be a hardware store next to Gunther’s (Motors). That’s where we met, on the second floor. We met there for quite some time as the Boy Scouts go, and Bill Hillcourt was a great leader, a great Boy Scout leader. I don’t think there was any delinquency or anything … the kids were really good in those days. The Mendham kids, Ralston kids … there was very, very little vandalism and trouble among the kids. Mostly, I think, it was because of the Boy Scouts. It was actually our only thing. We had meetings every Wednesday night. There would be a Patrol Meeting on Wednesday and the next meeting would be a Troop Meeting, and then the next would be the Patrol Meeting, then the Troop Meeting. That’s the way it worked all year long, summer and winter. We had a 10-day camp out in the summertime. It started the Monday after the Fourth of July and ended on the Sunday two weeks later.

Tim Timpson: Was it part of the Jamboree?

Sam Fornaro: No, it wasn’t part of the Jamboree.

Marge Davidson: This was at Schiff.

Troop 1 Canoeing Trip

Sam Fornaro: This was at Schiff, and we used to complain, as Boy Scouts, every now and then. Why do we always have to put up tents? You know, they have such nice cabins. Well, the cabins were basically for the city Boy Scouts that came out. It wasn’t for guys like ourselves; we had to pitch our own tents. Also, I remember the Blizzard of ‘48. We were camped out in that blizzard, believe it or not. Then, is when we moved into the Dan Beard Cabins, because all the tents were collapsed. We had so much snow you couldn’t believe it. But we went to the Dan Beard Cabins, and they had the old Franklin stove in one corner. We got our wood, and we got the stove started, but we didn’t mess up our weekend camping trip, was like a four-day trip then, between Christmas and New Years, when school was out. That was the Boy Scouts. Getting back to younger days, we all used to like to work in those days.

There were not jobs around, just the farms, and the only thing you could do on the farms would be to help the farmer, but your pay maybe was a two gallon pail of milk that you brought home to your folks. The Bannister Farm and Palmerley’s Farm, a few of them. We used to do whatever we could on the farms. We also worked for the two nurseries in town, which was Groenewegen’s Nursery and Booy’s Nursery. Now, my very, very first paid job was at Neil Groenewegen’s Nursery, which was across the street from his house and next to the Skinner house. He used to grow a lot of hedge. Hedge was very popular in those days for borders around houses. Today they use many things, but in those days the hedge was the most popular. We got jobs with him to clip it and then picked up the hedge. This is in the spring when the dead branches froze from the winter before. You’d just clip it so it would start growing up bushy again. It was for two cents an hour.

Tim Timpson: How old were you then?

Sam Fornaro: Oh, probably 10 or 11 years old. All of us worked for him. Ted Radzewisz, who was a year older than I was, and myself, and Bob Skinner who is my age, and his brother Bill, who was a year younger. My brother helped out occasionally. He didn’t like to do too much of that work. The next year, we’d go back to work for him, and it was three cents an hour. That was a 50% increase per hour. That was a big raise, but I used to personally make about twenty cents a week. He didn’t “slave drive” us; we put the hours in as we wanted. He wouldn’t let you work too many hours, but I used to get, maybe in a nice springtime, with an hour after school a couple days a week and maybe four hours on a Saturday, so you got maybe six or eight hours in and over a two-week period you got paid between twenty and twenty-five cents. This every-other-week deal, used to go to church and put a nickel in the basket for the collection …

Marge Davidson: Where did you go to church?

Sam Fornaro: And fifteen cents … St. Joseph’s in Mendham … and put fifteen cents down on the counter at Robinson’s Drug Shop for an ice cream soda. That was a great ritual every two weeks. So, I enjoyed that.

Tim Timpson: That was during the war years then?

Sam Fornaro: Yeah, that would have to be during the war years, sure. Also, as we grew older, probably age 12 to 14 or 15, when we were in high school, we used to make our money in the fall and early winter. We used to all … that’s Teddy Radzewisz, the Groenewegens and the Skinners and myself, and up the street, the Markowitz’s, which were in Chester Township … we all used to go out and harvest nuts and sell them alongside of the road.

Marge Davidson: What kind of nuts?

Sam Fornaro: Mostly black walnuts. We were lucky because up here by the old limestone pits, there were two gigantic hickory nut trees, and we used to pick them also. The biggest crop were the walnuts. There were many black walnut trees around. Everybody sold them and everybody sold out of their nuts every week. We’d get … well we started out selling them at ten cents a pound and we had the old balance scales, so we don’t know whether we gave them a pound or a pound and a half for a pound. These balance scales, or whatever scale you could find, and we sold them, got bags, and saved all the bags we could from any of the stores, and put them in the little bags and sold them. People would come by every week and buy them. We’d sell on Saturday and Sunday. But it was always on the south side of Route 24; nobody sold on the north side because everybody lived on the south side that sold nuts. That was pretty good because in those days people used to come out from the city for their Sunday drives and go on up through Chester and out that way and then they’d turn around and come back and they were heading toward the city, back to the city, and they would be heading east and we’d be on the south side, so they could come to a stop easily enough and buy their nuts and go on into the city. We did this for years.

Also, most of the guys around trapped to make a few bucks. That would be also Neal Groenewegen and Teddy Radzewisz and myself. The Backers did it; they were older than we were and were probably much more efficient than we were, but we used to trap both streams on either end of town. This one and the one that went pass the Mill. There were many, many muskrats around in those days and they used to bring anywhere from $1.00 to $1.25. But, as time went by and we got a little older, they even brought as much as $2.00 a piece. That was a lot. I’ll never forget; Neil Groenewegen was the first guy to ever catch a mink. He caught a mink in a muskrat hole, and what the mink was doing in a muskrat hole we could never figure out. It wasn’t a true mink. It was what they call a cotton mink. Their fur wasn’t as good as a true mink, but that was the very first of the minks that were caught. Several guys around caught mink, but ironically, the best mink that was ever caught was caught, I think, by Martin Murphy. He’s no longer with us; he passed away, but he was about my age, and he caught it in Mendham in a little tiny pond right off Route 24, like in the center of right where … well, it was Gunther Motors, and across the street there was a little pond down there.

Marge Davidson: In back of Luke’s house …

Sam Fornaro: Yes … he put a little trap down there and he caught himself a pretty good mink. I think he got $20.00 or $25.00 for it. Actually, we’d all sell to the same person. We used to bring our animals over to Peapack. A guy by the name of Lamerson used to buy our animals from us and he used to do all the skinning and stretching.

Marge Davidson: You brought the animal as is?

Sam Fornaro: We brought the animal as is. Kenny Backer was quite a trapper in the area. I’ll never forget one day we went up to his house and he must have had 10 possums and a couple of skunks and a bunch of muskrats. He really had a hoard of pelts there. I’ll never forget this one possum. We were walking by and all of a sudden he opens his eye and looks at us. Well, they played dead an awful lot. That’s how I knew about playing possum. I said to him, “Hey, this guy’s blinking his eye at us!” He said, “Oh God, he’s playing possum again.” So, he had to put it out of its misery. But everybody made a few bucks in the wintertime that way. I’ll tell you how hard it was to make money in those days. My brother, sister and I saved our monies when we were … this is before we got into the real big walnut business and so on. But saving a little bit working for Neal Groenewegen, saving a little bit working for your parents and if you worked on the farm next door and you were putting the bales up on the hay trucks and things like that, they gave you a couple of quarts of milk to bring home, maybe my father would give us a dime and we would put it in to save for a bicycle. It took us almost two years to save enough money to buy a bicycle, which we bought.

Tim Timpson: The three of you?

Sam Fornaro: Yep, the three of us combined.

Tim Timpson: Now your sister was in that; did you get a boy’s bike or a girl’s bike?

Sam Fornaro: It was a boy’s bike, but it was a smaller bike, so that we could ride it, and she was a little bigger than we were so … anyway.

Tim Timpson: What about chores at home?

Sam Fornaro: Chores at home … well, …

Marge Davidson: Did your father have the restaurant, by then?

Sam Fornaro: We always had the restaurant, so my chores were a little different than other people’s chores. When I got into high school, before I could go play sand lot football or sand lot baseball or anything like that, I had to go home and do my chores, which might include peeling a bushel of potatoes or picking the ends off a bushel of string beans, things like that. But we could get them done in a hurry when we wanted to go play, but then and only then, could we go and have our recreational period. Right up the street here where Don Burke Nursery is, there was a little field in there and Bannister and Hobby who owned the farm, they owned it. It was a hay field, but in the fall we asked them if we could play sand lot football there. He allowed us to play sand lot football there, which we did on weekends and sometimes after school when we had enough light. But that was it. We had no playgrounds. Nobody even heard of soccer. We maybe had a soccer ball and just kicked it around, but we didn’t know what soccer was.

Tim Timpson: When you played sand lot, you had a team, or did you just go up and choose up sides?

Sam Fornaro: Just choose up sides; you had no teams.

Tim Timpson: Celeste [Sammy’s sister] told us about the lunches that you took to school. Your father insisted that it had to be Italian food, real food, and she used to go and trade those at school for a bologna sandwich. Did you do this?

Sam Fornaro: Yes, yes. You know, my family, we used to have a great garden and grow a lot of things. I can remember, for the restaurant, all the tomatoes were canned for tomato sauce. All fresh tomato sauce. We grew them in the garden. One year I think there was something like 1,200 quarts of tomatoes. That’s a lot of tomatoes that we made up, and we not only made the whole tomato and canned it, we also made like a tomato paste with no skins or seeds that we would use to thicken the sauce. That would be in bottles, but tomatoes would be in jars because you needed the large mouth. We used to grow eggplant, peppers, and all that stuff. So, when we went to school, we had Italian sandwiches, some of which were pickled eggplant and fried peppers, and little pieces of steak. Every Friday, salmon, because we couldn’t afford tuna fish. Eventually we got some tuna fish when we could afford it. But go to school … and the kids loved us.

I never had peanut butter and jelly sandwich at home, but I would trade a peanut butter sandwich or bologna sandwich for one of my sandwiches, whether it would be fried peppers or pickled peppers, or the pickled eggplant. You know, I would be embarrassed at these sandwiches, but these kids loved them because they didn’t have anything but peanut butter and jelly every day. I just never had one, but that’s true, yep. We had traded off sandwiches all the time. Another thing about Ralston School that I’ll always remember … every day at two o’clock in the afternoon, we had cookies and a cup of milk. Everyday. I don’t know who paid for it or who brought it or who baked the cookies, but they were baked cookies, they weren’t commercialized. We had cookies and milk every day. I guess this was because some kids didn’t have enough to eat and they wanted to make sure, you know, like the food in schools, they claim so many people don’t, but I don’t remember anybody really being hungry when I was a kid, because their parents all worked. Everybody worked in those days. But we always had that.

Another thing I can remember all my life and I don’t know why … and I guess I do know why, because we used to brush our teeth with baking soda and maybe a little salt or something. I can remember somebody came into school one day and gave us all a little tube of Ayapana Toothpaste. Everybody got a little Ayapana Toothpaste to take home, and I’ll never forget that. That was something. I don’t know what ever happened to Ayapana anymore. By the way …

Marge Davidson: Well, we’ve circled around because now they’re selling baking soda toothpaste.

Sam Fornaro: Yes, I know. Now the baking soda is back. But anyway, in those days … lead paint, so on and so forth, those tubes that the toothpaste came in were solid lead. Because I was going to the Picatinny Arsenal Apprentice School … this is a tool making school in about 1950 or so … it was just before ‘49, before I went in the service. But they brought us on a tour of factories, you know, like once every two or three months, and we went down to Newark and went to a factory that made toothpaste tubes. These toothpaste tubes were a disk of lead, like this, would be punched out, maybe a quarter of an inch thick, and a plunger would come down and plunge that thing and the tube would shoot right on up. Then they filled it from the back and folded it over and you brush your teeth. How come we’re all here?

Marge Davidson: Full of lead.

Sam Fornaro: Full of lead. But really, seriously, everybody had a pencil in school. We never even had pens in those days except for the quills … not the quills, but the …

Marge Davidson: Pen points.

Sam Fornaro: Pen points, right. But, you always had a pencil. What did you do? You chewed on it. I didn’t know anybody that didn’t chew on their pencil a little bit. You don’t put it down if you’ve got to turn a page to your book or something, you put it in your mouth and you chewed on it. They were all made of lead. Of course, that was before it was poisonous. It just became poisonous lately. As a matter of fact, as a young kid, I could actually remember mixing white lead into white lead paint to paint the restaurant years and years and years ago, the outside. Since then, the outside is all … the outside was taken off and it was re-sided with aluminum, then re-sided again with plastic, but I can remember when it was very common. You just brought a thing of white lead, and you mixed it with, I guess linseed oil or something … I can’t remember what. All I remember is that it took a lot of turns to mix this white lead from the concentrate into paint and then they would get a dye and put it in there and stir it until you got to the right color. When you ran out of the first one you were hoping that the second one was the same color. If you were trimming your windows in red, say, you wanted to come out with the same color red. But I can remember that, and I’ll never forget … this one won’t leave my mind because I’ve got the scars from it … we used to burn the paint out of the paint cans to clean them. I couldn’t wait for this one can to get done burning. I guess there was a little bit more paint in there, and I just went to kick it like that with my foot and I’ve still got my scar right there on my foot where that white lead splashed out, or paint or whatever it was, splashed out. So, I never kicked any buckets from then on. But that was part of ‘kicking the bucket.’ In the older days of Ralston, the General Store down here was our post office. I guess my sister went into that.

Marge Davidson: No, she didn’t.

Sam Fornaro: Well, I can remember walking from the house down to the post office and picking up the mail on nice days; we didn’t do it in the wintertime, my father would stop. But Mrs. DeMott or one of them was the postmistress. We always called them postmasters in those days. I mean whether they were men or women, they were postmasters. Now it’s ‘post persons,’ I guess, whatever. Anyway, we’d just go down there, and our box was Box 2. I still remember. The fire department was started in ‘48 here, I think.

Marge Davidson: Yes.

Sam Fornaro: What am I thinking … it had to be before this was here because I think we had Christmas parties here, eventually, for the kids. Weren’t there Christmas parties here for kids?

Marge Davidson: I believe that Dolores Crammer told us that they had the first Christmas party in the old store.

Sam Fornaro: In the old store, right? We had several in there. It was in the store, and I don’t know who sponsored it, but we had a little Christmas party, and I can remember in the olden days, almost every Christmas you had snow. You don’t have snow much today. But you had snow, and I think … we would come down there and they would have cider and cookies and a Christmas party, and they would have a little gift for everybody. It wasn’t much of a gift, but it was a gift for anybody who’d be there. And afterwards, we used to sleigh ride down the hill. When we first did it, it was the old bridge there, the rattling bridge. You could hear the bridge all the way down to the restaurant all the time, every time a car went over it. But they had an old bridge then. Then they changed the bridge to the iron, and it was like a honeycomb that was so thick, and they used the honeycomb, and the snow used to go right off it, right through it. But anyway, we used to sleigh ride then, but then what happened was when we got to the bridge you came to a jilting stop. But we still would sleigh ride down the hill. There were no cars on the road; nobody ever bothered you. I mean, there was so few cars on the road.

Marge Davidson: And especially when there was snow.

Sam Fornaro: Oh, and snow yes … there was never anybody. We had the greatest time at all the Christmas parties. Then I think at the end they were here and by that time I got to be a little too old for them to come here. As a matter of fact, I probably was out of high school by then. I graduated in ‘48. But we used to sleigh ride for entertainment in the wintertime. One of our favorite things to do and we were the suppliers of them, were barrel staves. We used to go downhills on barrel staves because we didn’t have sleds. Loved them! Every kid had their own little barrel stave, and we would go down a hill … my sister should have mentioned that.

Marge Davidson: No.

Tim Timpson: How did you do that? The barrel stave is only about so wide .. [ed. note: staves are wooden slats that make up the sides of the barrel.]

Sam Fornaro: Some of them were wide. We got the widest ones. Some are this wide, some are this wide, but the ones that were about six inches were fine. We had many, many barrels because of the mill and eventually they wouldn’t use them anymore, they’d fall apart … well, we got all the thick ones, and all the kids had their own little barrel stave to go down on. We used to get them, and we used to slide on them so much, it would get to be smooth like it was sand-papered, the bottom of it. All the outside brown would be worn off and it would be a nice, I guess, they were some kind of birch or hickory or some kind of wood …

Marge Davidson: Oak barrels?

Sam Fornaro: Oak, maybe, but they would shine right up. What we used to do is always slide on the same end so that the front end never got worn down, but the back end did. As it curved from here back, it was all nice and polished. But you could sit on it and put your two feet, one in front of the other, and down you used to go. We … a couple of us … used to walk all the way over to Mt. Paul. Like Kenny Radzewisz and myself, and maybe the Skinners. We used to go up to the top of Mt. Paul and slide all the way down on our barrel staves. They were our skis in those days, and sleds, and we had a lot of fun with them; really a lot of fun with them. But getting back to the post office again, with the parties … they had that post office, and I can’t remember the year, but then the Groenewegens moved the post office. That was a bit of controversy because most people wanted the old post office and she didn’t want it, and this and that, so they put the post office next to her house. It wasn’t really convenient because it wasn’t at the crossroads of the community.

Tim Timpson: Was she the postmistress?

Sam Fornaro: She was the postmistress. She went in after, I think, Mrs. DeMott, I think, or McDermott?

Marge Davidson: DeMott.

Sam Fornaro: And she took over when Mrs. DeMott got to be … God, I don’t know … see it’s hard to tell. In those days 60 seemed very old. Now, 70 is very young and 80 is young and 90 is young, but in those days, I would have to guess … you know, she would look to be a woman of 70 or something like that. Her white hair and she had a good posture, and she was back there every day at the post office. The windows … you could walk in the post office and the windows were here and the counter was back there and there was a counter there and there, but the little cubby holes were facing … as I recall, some of them had glass in front of them.

Marge Davidson: Yes, they had glass in front of them.

Sam Fornaro: You could tell whether you had any mail or not just by looking in your box. No matter when you went, even if you didn’t have mail, you always said hello and you chatted. We had a good time. Then it was moved down there, and people didn’t like it, including myself. It was just ‘off the beaten track’ and that didn’t last too long.

Marge Davidson: They closed it.

Sam Fornaro: Then it got to be closed, and we got to be on, I think, rural delivery, I’m not sure. From that post office it went rural delivery. That was quite a few years ago, but that post office never …

Marge Davidson: It never went.

Sam Fornaro: Nope; never went. In fact, more people, I think … I’m not sure … but I think my father even did it … got a post office box in Mendham and we used to get our mail in Mendham instead of here. It just wasn’t the same; then they got rural delivery, and it was delivered to us. But most of us remember that. We remember all the farms around. Backer was across the street and then the other Backer up on Ironia Road was a farmer. Bannisters and Palmery’s were chicken farmers. They brought chickens into the area, and they did quite well. I had never even seen a white chicken. I didn’t know there were white chickens. We always had brown eggs. I never knew anything but brown eggs. We all raised chickens; almost everybody had a little chicken house. In most cases they ran out in the yard. We didn’t even fence them most of the time, unless you had a whole lot of them, but they all knew enough to go back into the chicken house at night and they knew where to lay their eggs; there was no problem. We even had a cow. I can remember when we had a cow, and we got our own milk. Eventually we got rid of that, but then Palmerly’s came, and they were grain farmers, like corn and wheat and oats, and then they decided to put chicken houses in. Maybe it was before Palmery; maybe it was Sayer.

Marge Davidson: That was across the road.

Sam Fornaro: That was across the road from Bannisters. Maybe the Sayers put the chickens in. Somebody put chickens in because I could remember it. They had white chickens, and you know … but I found out that the white chickens were much more prolific. They laid an egg every day, no matter what. Whereas the brown ones didn’t lay every day. They maybe laid six eggs a week instead of seven, but the white leghorn laid every day. That’s when I first learned about how they used to candle the eggs, every single egg went by a candle … it was really a light, but I guess years ago they used a candle, and they used to hold it up to a candle. But in my day, they used a light, and they called it candling the eggs, to see if there were any blood spots in the eggs. They used to ship their eggs all over.

Tim Timpson: What was the blood spot for?

Sam Fornaro: Well, an egg might have a blood spot. It just picks it up from the chicken; not very often, but I guess it would happen most of the time when the eggs were being fertilized.

Marge Davidson: They say now that it’s stress; it’s not harmful. Of course, they tell you that although you seldom ever see that anymore. It’s not harmful, but it’s a chicken under stress.

Sam Fornaro: Maybe it was under stress when it was getting fertilized! Who knows. But, we all had … pretty much all had chickens around and we all used to just go to the farmer and drink the raw milk. Then eventually it became pasteurized.

Tim Timpson: Well, the farms out here were mostly grain? Vegetable?

Sam Fornaro: Vegetable, grain.

Tim Timpson: No dairy?

Sam Fornaro: A couple of dairies, yeah, two dairies. Bannisters was a dairy farm, and Backers was a dairy farm, and I think the Backer across the street here had a couple of cows in his barn, and I think he used to sort of put his milk with the other Backer up on the hill and sell his milk through there, but he didn’t have that many cows. He had very few. Bannister had a full barn and so did Backer have full barns.

Photo Credits

Ralston Schoolhouse, 1907, courtesy of Mendham Township Archives;

4 Grades at Ralston Schoolhouse, courtesy of Celeste Fornaro Bianco;

William “Green Bar Bill” with Troop 1 Scouts and Troop 1 Canoeing trip photographs, courtesy of Troop 1 Boy Scouts;

Florence McKinnell’s School Bus and Troop 1 Mendham Township c. 1948 photographs, courtesy of Ernie Maw.