Letter to the editor: Memories bitter sweet

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It was the winter of our discontent, ingloriously rent asunder by these makers of York. Everyday while going back and forth on my daily routine, I watched another part of our local world retrograding back to the Jurassic era.

Mighty metal mastodons munching, their masticating molars grinding into powder buildings, which once housed the productive lives of countless people over many years as another identifying landmark of Naugatuck and the valley goes the way of … Progress?

At the last few Thursday night meetings of the Cotton Hollow alumni at D&D on New Haven Road we made our usual nostalgic journey from 1940 onward, and now we have Peter & Pauls with our coffee.

It is with bittersweet recollections that we call up for review when the Candy Shop, before it went politically correct to Peter Pauls, had one or two buildings and the workers would brings their lunch pails down to the Cotton Hollow Brook, and pass out such things as Charcoal Gum and Walnettos, to the kids swimming in the brook and as they came down they passed through the blackberry bushes, which prevailed abundantly behind the factory.

It is natural to logically reminisce of some other places, which gave Naugatuck world recognition. The Synthetic, which proved after all to be just that-synthetic-the Chemical Twin towers imploding in on themselves the flame dying out, the area being reclaimed by Mother Nature, the Foot Ware Plant running off into the sunset on their Keds, the Eastern Malleable Iron casting its molten metal elsewhere. The Bristol Co., where I myself spent 35 years, is now on record as I write this caving in on itself.

But we spend part of alumni night recalling our salad days and the Candy Shop where even the rubble is leaving Naugatuck on giant trucks for a landfill named Thehellwithyou someplace Ohio.

And, as the literal buildings get deleted yet still exist in a main drive or two, we can honestly say we didn’t even get so much as a Hershey Kiss.

Jack Moffat Sr.
Naugatuck