BRATTLEBORO-"I always thought that the Sportsman's Lounge on Canal Street in Brattleboro was our own version of the television show Cheers," says Gordon Bristol, a regular customer for many years.
The vacant structure burned in a spectacular explosion of flame early in the morning of Nov. 7, days before it was scheduled to be demolished.
The last chapter for the 104-year-old building at 45 Canal St. began in 1963, when Dessaint's Food Center, a small, neighborhood grocery store, took on life as a new restaurant, the Colonial Café, which would "serve dinners and luncheons at booths, tables and a counter with seating for 65 persons or more," as described in the Brattleboro Reformer.
In 1972, the Colonial's second owner, Gino D'Alessandro, sold the business to Peter Faridoni, his friend and employee, and Peter's wife, Barb Faridoni.
The Faridonis renamed the business the Sportsman's Lounge - "Sporty's," for short - and for the next 40 years, the restaurant and bar, open seven days a week for lunch and dinner, was a neighborhood institution.
Bristol remembers that Peter Faridoni's friends called him "Little Pete" even though he was 6 feet, 4 inches tall, because his father, Edmundo Faridoni, was also called Pete.
Pete was a graduate of the Brattleboro High School class of 1951, and was, according to his obituary, "a gifted athlete [who] lettered in baseball, basketball and football." He was also a veteran of the Korean conflict.
"We sponsored so many sports teams over the years, I can't remember them all," Barb Faridoni remembers.
"One year we had two men's baseball teams, one woman's softball team, and a bunch of basketball and bowling teams," she says - and they all would come in for drinks after the games.
"Lots of good folks came through those doors," she said with a wistful smile. "It was a good, old-fashioned, local neighborhood bar and restaurant."
Gordon Bristol agrees.
"All of Brattleboro went to Sportsman's. Everybody knew everybody, and the place served the community well," he says, noting that people didn't talk politics inside and everyone was welcomed.
"The only time of the year anything political might have been said was the day we held Representative Town Meeting," Bristol remembers.
On those days, "45 people or so would pop in for lunch, but even then, there was no wheeling and dealing. You enjoyed the company and then went back to the meeting for the afternoon," he remembers. "It was that kind of a place."
Barb Faridoni agrees.
"The Bristol family was often there. Gordon's father and his in-laws would come in. Years later, they would bring their children, and we'd have three generations sitting at a table. That happened with a lot of local families."
The business closed in 2017, according to Commons archives.
"And then before we closed, I was waiting on those kids and their families. I really enjoyed that atmosphere. We met a lot of great folks over the years," Faridoni says.
You never knew who would come through the door, she observes.
"At one table, there might be two or three lawyers enjoying their lunch, and at the table next door were a few guys in from G.S. Precision," Faridoni says.
"People all mixed at Sportsman's. There just aren't many places like that around here anymore," she noted.
From 'rough place' to local institution
The beginning of the couple's tenure was different from the welcoming place the restaurant later became.
"The Colonial had become a rough place when it was sold to us," Faridoni says. "Right away we decided to run a tight ship."
That meant some changes.
"We had a standing rule - if you caused a problem, you could never come back in," she says. "It didn't take long before the difficult drinkers were a thing of the past and Sportsman's became more family oriented."
Sportsman's served lunch and dinner, and the bar stayed open until midnight.
"The menu hardly changed at all over the years," Faridoni says. "We had dinner, beautiful sirloin steaks, [and] lots of fresh seafood" that they purchased from the former Adam's Seafood Company.
People liked the predictability of the menu, she recalls.
"We'd run something different for a special, but we had a homemade soup every day at lunch, served up plenty of club sandwiches and burgers. Every Wednesday and Friday we served fish and chips. Every Thursday was a hot turkey sandwich," Faridoni says.
Plenty of well-known cooks worked at Sportsman's over the years, including Ralph Ferullo, who for many years kept the kitchen open until midnight.
"We had a lot of business from the Hinsdale Raceway," remembered Faridoni, referencing the racetrack that operated across the river in New Hampshire from 1958 to 2008.
The Raceway staff and owners were busy all day. "They ran full tilt. In the morning, they did all their work, then they trained, then they raced, and when they finished, they'd come over to eat their dinner. Many of them hadn't eaten all day. We sold steaks by the case on those nights," she said.
For almost 20 years, Greg Holden cooked for the restaurant and never missed a day of work.
"Who ever heard of such a thing?" says Faridoni, laughing.
She describes him as "a tremendous cook" and "the calmest cook we ever had."
"He could have 15 orders in front of him and he'd just get to work putting them out," Faridoni says, recalling that he specialized in the fresh seafood platter ("a beautiful mix of fish").
Faridoni was usually the only waitress during the week. With seating for 70 people, it could get very busy.
She recalls that during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the television comedy Alice was popular, one part-time weekend waitress would tease Faridoni by calling her "Flo," after the breakout waitress character portrayed by Polly Holliday.
"Sometimes I'd be taking a very quick break leaning against the door to the kitchen, and she'd yell over to me, 'You got time to lean, you got time to clean,' and we'd both laugh," Faridoni says. "We had some good times in that place."
In the early 1970s a professional football camp was run at Mount Snow and some famous members of the NFL would come off the mountain for a meal and a brew.
"I honestly don't know their names, but we had some pretty famous people stop by," said Faridoni, quickly adding with a hearty laugh, "We also had some infamous people who would come in, too. Every town has its characters, but we were a more wholesome kind of bar and restaurant."
Before Vermont Yankee shut down, the restaurant would enjoy surges of business from the temporary workers hired to support the periodic refueling of the nuclear power station in Vernon.
"Those were the glory days," Faridoni says. "Those men made money, and they liked to spend it."
'That life is gone now'
The early 1970s saw the town issue almost 40 liquor licenses to the many bars and restaurants in town, including Ransom Hastings and Alice's, on Elliot Street; the Village Barn, at the back of the Harmony Parking Lot; and Quarter Moon and Emil's Pub on South Main Street were just a few of the many in town. Each one had its own clientele and personality.
A 2012 Commons story marking the closing of Emil's described Sportsman's Lounge as "the last of the species."
"That life is gone now, along with the three-martini lunch - nobody does that anymore," Faridoni says. "I don't know if today's life is any better, but it is different now, and all those places are gone."
She thinks back on the "funny things [that] happen in bars."
"I used to go down on Sunday mornings and clean up from Saturday night before we opened," Faridoni says. "There used to be popcorn all over the floor on those mornings. One day I bent down to sweep up, and there were somebody's false teeth in the popcorn!
"Nobody ever came back for them, though I kept them for years," says Faridoni with a chuckle.
During one of the early years, one of the horse owners from the racetrack parked his horse trailer in front of the restaurant.
"Next thing you know, he brought the horse right through the front door, gave the animal a sip of beer, and took him out again," Faridoni says.
Bristol remembers Pete Faridoni's reputation as "one of the kindest men around."
"The Faridonis were the personalities of the place. They became part of your family," he says. "They'd go to your families' weddings and funerals [and] were the kind of people who would slip the kids a few quarters for the machines."
Pete Faridoni, who died in 2007, "was so nice to everybody, no one ever had a bad word to say about him," remembers Barb. "I'd see him slip a $5 bill to folks who needed it.
"There were over 500 people at his service," she says. "It was so big we had to hold it at the American Legion."
By 2012, Barb Faridoni was tired and decided to sell the business. By then she'd had to close on Mondays so that she would have one day off per week.
Land records paint a story of increasing difficulty for the Sportsmen's Lounge leading up to the business's closure and the subsequent sale of the property in 2017 to Andy Shapiro, who owned it for a few years.
In 2021, Green Hills Real Estate LLC of New York City, with a statewide presence in Chester, purchased the long-vacant building with plans to redevelop the site with housing.
"I know that a bar is a bar, but I have to say, there were an awful lot of nice people who walked through those doors," Faridoni says. "It was just fun. You never knew who was coming in. We had a lot of good times and good years at Sportsman's and I'm grateful for them."
She's been thinking a lot about the place in recent days.
"Plenty of good memories there," she says. "I'm just grateful nobody was inside and that no one was hurt because of the fire."
This News item by Fran Lynggaard Hansen was written for The Commons.