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Life’s No Beach
Not all shoreliners spend summers wriggling toes in the sand
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Business New Haven
6/1/1998
By: BNH
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Let others grill their Ball Park turkey franks on their patio gas grills on warm July nights. Attorney Richard Hershatter of Clinton's idea of summer heaven is to wash his cars.
He has a 1989 Chrysler-Maserati of a deep red hue known as Royal Cabernet, a limited edition no longer made. It's a “detachable hardtop” convertible, with about 8,000 miles on it. He doesn't drive it often, he says, but he looks at it more than he scans the tide in front of his home, and he washes it on summer nights just for fun.
Let others play bingo.
Let the tourists go clamming at low tide.
He also has a 1998 Acura 3.5 RL sedan which is his “working car,” colored heather mist.
He likes to wash this car, too.
His wife, Mary Jane, drives a 1996 Saab 9000 five-door, light gray. For more summer excitement, Hershatter washes it.
No sand castles for him.
No sunscreen.
He doesn't wax his cars, though. He has a man, whose name he won't reveal, who does that.
“This guy's an artist; used to do the detailing on Chryslers,” says Hershatter. “Now he only works for me.”
“I read in the evenings or work on briefs, write or wash my cars. That's it,” he says.
Bag the shore.
Hershatter is finishing work on a court-case novel he's written, working title Hung Jury, and is shopping for a publisher.
No surf's up. He prefers a long hose and a chamois cloth.
But don't get him wrong: he loves the shoreline.
Peter Palumbo owns Palumbo Autos of Guilford. Call and while you wait, classical music plays. Palumbo's summer pleasure isn't cars at all.
It's a tandem bicycle. “I steer and my wife, Teri, helps pedal,” Palumbo says.
He also cooks. He's created his own “mean barbecue sauce” for ribs he slow-broils on his grill for family and friends.
No Ball Park dogs. Ever.
But sometimes he experiments with variations on his baked stuffed artichokes.
Palumbo is one of the “Men Who Cook” who dish up dinner every year in October for a fundraiser for the Women's & Family Life Center in Guilford. Then he goes all out on the stuffed artichokes “prepared with different cheeses and other secret ingredients” he won't share. In the summer, he experiments with the stuffing for the 'chokes.
Before Palumbo cooks, he likes to take his family out in their 19-foot pleasure boat for a cruise along the Sachem's Head coastline of Long Island Sound.
Finally, somebody's on the water, if not in it.
Jay Ardolino of Branford, senior mortgage officer for CTX Mortgage, is a boat buff. Summers he crews in sailboat races on the Sound, sloops 40 feet long and up.
But he doesn't get himself wet, either, if he can help it.
A “play boy,” Jay cavorts at tennis as often as five times a week, attends outdoor summer concerts with his wife, Karen, and together they shop for collectibles at charity auctions.
Karen Ardolino works out year-round with a personal trainer. June, July and August, she doesn't slack off.
“She's ripped,” Jay says.
But no water ballet.
The Ardolinos let the dogs do that.
A former equestrienne, Karen Ardolino used to show horses. Now she helps Jay train their two Labrador retrievers, one black, one yellow, to swim and fetch.
So no late-nights wiggling toes in the sand?
No midnight Scrabble?
No time.
Dolly Mezzetti, Guilford's tax collector, prefers macadam to salt water, too. Like Palumbo, she rides a bike in the summer, but a far different kind than a tandem.
Mezzetti zips up in a black leather jacket with fringe (a Mother's Day gift from her kids), and throws a thigh over her black-and-silver Harley-Davidson Road King, a 1340 cc motorcycle beauty she'll ride to Milwaukee, Wisc., for Harley-Davidson's 95th anniversary this summer. She'll make the trip in three riding days.
Her husband, Joe, will be right beside her on his Harley Dresser, a top-of-the-line “midnight-red and champagne” hog that's as big as it gets.
Oh, those shoreliners.
No skinny-dipping by the light of the moon.
No Connecticut River boat ride to sightsee.
No pruning the azaleas.
“Not this year,” Dolly Mezzetti says.
Clinton's first selectman, James McCusker Jr., gardens, though. He likes to putter about on his grounds with his wife, Judy, and enjoy his four grandchildren there.
Still, McCusker, like so many other shoreliners, has the sporty wheels.
He drives a 1997 Chrysler Sebring convertible the color of money. He and his wife enjoy the summertime touring the shoreline, eating at different shoreside restaurants and taking in the local theater scene.
No long walks in hot, damp sand.
No underwater snorkeling.
“I'm looking forward to marching in Clinton's Memorial Day parade, and spending all three days at Clinton's Bluefish Festival, August 14th, 15th and 16th,” McCusker says.
No badminton in a bikini?
“Don't do it,” he confesses.
But don't get McCusker wrong. He wouldn't live anywhere else but the shoreline.
Richard Kramss, a research scientist at Bayer Pharmaceutical Division in West Haven, lives in Guilford, and he says his summer fun is typical.
He doesn't know how unusual he is.
“I like to work on projects for the house,” Kramss says. “Maybe I'll get around to painting the outside this year. I always plant a vegetable garden. What's nice about that is I finally get to be outside and chat with my neighbors.”
Kramss and his wife, Susan, like to browse the tag sales and take day trips around the community, like the annual Guilford Crafts Fair in July.
“We're family-oriented,” Kramss says. “We bike together, us and the two kids, we go hiking. We like it here.”
But he doesn't have a lobstering license, and he and his family have never Frisbeed at the public beach.
For Gregory Scott, president of Beazley Co., Realtors, who lives in Madison, work is his top summer fun.
“Work, work, work,” he says with no apologies.
No fly-fishing?
“Flies are for swatting,” Scott says.
He spends what leisure time he has in the summer with his family.
“We picnic out,” Scott says, “go to the beach. I golf. And I fish off my boat, once in a while, when I get the chance. My biggest catch was a 250-pound marlin off Montauk waters. And then there was the 200-pound tuna.”
Oh sure.
No Sundays checking out houses for sale?
He laughs. “Good luck,” Scott says.
Michael Merlini is a Guilford dentist with a family practice. He likes to spend his free summer time painting watercolors or, on dull days, taking pictures.
“I continue my running,” Merlini says, seriously. “I run year-round.”
And he and wife take day trips. “We like shopping in antiques stores,” he says.
So no kayaking?
“Never considered it,” Merlini says, considering it. “Maybe next year.”
Gerard McGuinness of Madison, senior vice president of United Mortgage Services, has one of those boy-toy convertibles.
His is a black-and-tan '95 Saab, and he has a black-and-tan cocker spaniel named Murphy to match it.
“I pop the top down, ride ol' Murph around,” McGuinness explains. “And I like to walk with my daughter, Margaret Mary [who's not yet two]. Work's fun. I work in the summer. Golf a little; swim. Mostly, though, I like to work.”
Mortgage rates are going to be great this summer, he says happily.
No sitting on the dock of the bay.
No watching novice boaters ground on the rocks of the Sound at mid-tide.
But McGuinness wouldn't live anywhere but the shoreline.
Finally, there's someone after some hot fun.
Ray Mitchell is CEO of Ramco Sales in Baltimore, Md., agents for hardware lines. Mitchell lives smack on the edge of Long Island Sound in Guilford, and is a recent widower.
He's going to spend the summer “looking for action,” he says.
He's perfecting a dangerous alcoholic concoction he calls a “Mulberry Point Sour,” and he's going to “scour the shoreline looking for cooperative ladies to enhance my life,” he says.
Mitchell is in the process of selling his business, but he's keeping, he says, the silver Cadillac. It's not a flop top, but he says that liability won't slow him down.
He keeps a Sunfish on the beach, at the ready, for dolls who like to slow boat.
“Tell the girls to call me,” he says. “I'm in the book.”
And then there's Jonathan Bush, brother of former President George Bush. Jonathan Bush is president of J. Bush & Co., an investment management firm in New Haven, and an affiliate of Riggs Bank N.A.
Bush lives in Killingworth, likes it, likes the shoreline.
But no, he won't tell what he does for fun in the sun in the summer.
“He doesn't care to contribute to articles on that sort of thing,” his spokesperson says.
Well, does he, maybe, sneak over to a Dairy Queen stand when there's no line, once in a while, for a chocolate Blizzard?
No comment.
Maybe he doesn't have a convertible, either.
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