Amy Spirito, 99, Remembers "The Way It Was"

At 99 years old, Amy Spirito is radiant, poised, and a wealth of information about the way life has been lived in Farmington over the past century. She’s happy to share her knowledge and her story with the public, and Wednesday during a event, she did.

Spirito was born in Farmington and has lived in town all but six of her 99 years, when she lived in Hartford with her husband, Peter. She has lived on Mill Street and Hobart Street and now lives on Colton Street.

“She lives in a two-family house and she insists on living on the second floor,” marveled Marcie Shepard, who coordinates special events for the Historical Society.

Shepard was among a small group of locals who crowded into the Historical Society cottage to hear Spirito discuss “The Way it Was” in town. The group of friends, fond admirers and probing historians showered her with compliments, many saying they had known her or known of her much of their lives.

Nancy Nickerson recalled how Spirito had welcomed her into her home when Nickerson was running for Town Council. Spirito served her tea, asking her where she stood on all the issues.

Spirito has seen changes in town – from the disappearance of horse and buggies to development.

The buggies were on the way out when she was a child, she said. When she was very young, walking was the way she got to Center School, which is now .

“In the deep, deep snow we had to walk. They never closed school in those days,” she said. “My father would get up early in the morning to do the sidewalks, and made a path for us to go to school.”

To get to the high school, which was farther away, Spirito said she took the trolley, which ran on an electric wire from Hartford to Unionville.

“We used to go to Hartford quite often to go shopping there,” she recalled. “It would run until 9 o’clock at night.”

In Unionville, the trolley would drop off at , which used to be a barn for the trolley car, she said.

Later, during her second two years in high school, buses came along and ran the length of Route 4.

To visit friends and relatives outside of town, Spirito said the man who ran a garage, where the now is, would give them rides. The garage also sold cars, she said, and on her brother’s sixteenth birthday, her dad bought a Star, which allowed her and her brother to go on double dates together.

But the family didn’t need to go out for many things, because most necessities were delivered.

“Mr. Mancini would come get my mother’s order for our food and bring it the next day,” she said. “Every two weeks he’d come back. There were no stores in Farmington.”

To supplement their groceries, the family had a garden on Town Farm Road, where they grew vegetables.

Milk, too, was delivered.

“The milkman would come deliver fresh milk every morning and leave it right on our doorstep. And of course, we’d go out and get it and put it in our icebox.”

The icebox was kept cold with ice delivered by the Maria family, which owned an ice mill. Much of the ice was made from a pond on Dorset Lane, she said.

One thing residents didn’t have delivered was mail, Spirito said. They had to go to the post office to pick it up. The post office shared a building with the Town Hall, where dances were frequently held with live music. Silent movies were shown there, too.

“That was fun. I used to love to go down there,” she said.

The other form of media Spirito enjoyed was a crystal set she had at home.

“When I was a little girl I used to run home from school to see Babe Ruth. I used to come home just to hear the ball games.”

A smaller police force kept the towns of Unionville and Farmington safe, she said, with constables. Her brother, Vincent “James” Capodiferro, and another “cop” used to trade off patrolling Unionville and Farmington each night.

“They used to come around to all the different streets and make sure everyone was okay,” she said.

Her mother was a midwife and helped to deliver most of the town’s Italian babies.

“Hardly anyone went to Hartford Hospital to deliver their babies,” she said. And few people even had the doctor come. Spirito’s mother would deliver the babies and return later to care for the mothers.

There was a doctor in town who took care of residents’ needs, though, and Spirito saw a lot of him when she contracted the Spanish Flu during the war.

“I missed a whole year of school. I’m really lucky to be here,” she said. Many were not so lucky.

Spirito said she started school with two years of kindergarten, as was the custom then, before attending the Center School.

Irving A. Robbins was the principal of Center School at the time, and Spirito knew him well. One day while walking to school, she found a check in the snow made out to Mr. Robbins.

“I marched in to give it to him,” she remembered. He was grateful and in turn gave her a special job, picking up money from each class and delivering it to the bank each Monday. “I used to love it because I could get out of school.”

Class sizes there were about 20 students.

At Farmington High School there were about 50 per class, with students coming from Burlington, Granby, New Hartford and Plainville.

Her husband Peter had to go to work and was excused from high school.

“When he graduated from the low grades, the principal gave him his card to go to Hartford to get a job. He went to the state capitol and got a job that day. He was only 16 years old. He worked there 39 years with a lot of jobs and responsibilities,” Spirito said.

She went to work in the dining room at , and took charge of the New Place dining room when the school’s growth demanded more room. 

“I used to enjoy it. I met a lot of people – Gene Tierney and her sister, such a pretty girl.” The actress was among the famous people Amy Spirito met at Miss Porter’s. Jackie Kennedy Onassis was also a student while Spirito was there.

“Jackie used to ride her horse a lot. She’d go up to the horse barn and get her horse and ride all over town."

She also met President Calvin Coolidge, but he didn’t say much, Spirito said.

Spirito married in 1933 – just one year after she graduated from high school. She met her husband at a christening in Hartford.

“He wanted to take me to the States Theater and I said ‘no,’” she said. But he made friends with her brother and would come stay the weekend. They would all go for double dates in her brother’s car, Spirito said, and eventually they married at .

“We had the reception in back of our house,” she said. “My father borrowed all the tables and chairs from Miss Porter’s School and a canopy in case it rained.”

The couple took the train to Washington, D.C., for their honeymoon.

More of Amy Spirito’s story is recorded as part of The Oral History Project at the .