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From the Editor
MIRO FARMS
For a nine-year-old the move from Redfern City Housing in Queens, where you weren’t allowed to walk on the grass between apartment buildings, to Fairfield, Connecticut, where in 1958 you were surrounded by open woodlands criss-crossed by winding streams seemed like a waking miracle to my brothers and myself.
The woods started right behind the 1820 mansion my parents rented an apartment in and the path went through open fields, a swamp and along a twisty stream with trees with an occasional tree-house and now and then a raft pulled up on the mud. The first day I moved in I met John Gallagher in the garage, hanging up muskrat skins to dry and cleaning his traps. John was a couple of years older than I and seemed to me like an experience frontiersman. After walking a full mile in that country you ended up at Andrew Ward High. If you climbed the fence behind the football field you entered acres of pumpkins, vegetables and flowers that lead to the Black Rock Turnpike and the Miro Farms roadside stand.
From the mid-1950s until 2000 or so Joe and Barbara Miro ran the stand with the help of Joe, Jr. The Miros were friends with everybody in the neighborhood; a trip to Miro Farms as an occasion to good-natured humor and laughter.
It’s all gone now: the woods, the fields and the streams are all covered up by development. Black Rock Turnpike is a busy center of banks and chain stores. Joe Miro, Barbara Miro and Joe, Jr. have passed away and with them the last rural memories of Fairfield.
Max H. Peters
Publisher and Editor
Header photo by Skip Broom, HP Broom Housewright, Inc.