Dinner at Shirley Farr’s House
Sticky buns and the eugenics movement.
I would have forgotten about Shirley Farr and her house if I hadn’t married someone whose family liked to eat in restaurants. I’m talking about those places with wait staff and baskets of bread and wine and maybe a brunch on Sunday, not the A&W’s and truck stops I knew from my childhood. A man, my husband was brought up to believe, takes the women and children out to eat, and when we would go to Vermont to visit my mother, he would look for restaurants to take Grammy and the kids. Imagine my surprise when, on one of our trips north, my mother announced that she had had dinner at the restaurant in Shirley Farr’s house with some of her friends at the high school where she worked in the kitchen. The food was fine and the price, while not as good as her favorite diner, affordable. Maybe we’d like to try that place, she suggested.
My mother was eating dinner at Shirley Farr’s house?
Shirley Farr was a wealthy woman who died so far in the past that I don’t know anyone who ever knew her or even saw her, just her house. You couldn’t miss it. It was the biggest and richest-looking place on Park Street, which was lined with big, rich-looking homes built at the beginning of the twentieth century and earlier. They were pretentious back then, perhaps, but time takes the edge off vulgarity…
