York Corner
Acting on a tip from our old friend Jan Fawcett, we put a call in to Rick's Restaurant one day last week to arrange to meet head cook Tony Spohrer there at 2:30 p.m. after closing on Saturday.
And there, snug inside with the winds howling and the rain pouring down outside, we heard Tony's story. He's worked at Rick's for 25 years straight, from the time he was 16 and a student at York High School. He started as a fill-in for a dishwasher on Jan. 10, 1981, advanced steadily from prep cook to line cook, doing whatever was asked of him, until he became the kitchen mainstay, with work begun for 21 years under first-owner Rick Ciampa continuing for the last four years under new owner (and former waitress) Marge Curley. This month, however, Tony and his wife, Cathy, will be taking off for a trip cross-country in a camper they bought for the occasion, and when they're done, they're going to settle in Olympia, Wash.
Jan thought that Tony deserved some special attention and credit and, after talking with him for a good hour or more, we couldn't agree more. And that's not simply because he's endured, but because, modest, quiet-spoken, tolerant and humble, he makes no undeserved - or perhaps, indeed, any - claims for himself, focusing, instead, on interest in and praise for others.
When we started talking, for example, one of the first statements he made was, "I love the people. It's nice seeing the same people, day in and day out. It's like an extended family. In 25 years, I've watched kids grow up and those kids have kids…Everybody has a story and I enjoy listening to them."
But our job was to get Tony's story.
Tony was born in York Hospital 42 years ago, and he lived in York until 12 years ago, when he and Cathy moved to a house on Mousam Lake in Shapleigh. ("Property prices in York got too expensive.")
He and Cathy met, in a way, through Rick's.
"Her father," Tony said, "was a regular customer, and, after 10 years of feeding him, he decided to introduce me to his daughter. We went together for seven years and have been married for 14 years now."
Cathy's father, Tony added parenthetically, was Jimmy Freeman, active publicly in York and known to many as a school bus driver, dog officer and member of the ambulance crew. His own father, Al Spohrer, he reported, remains in York, retired from work on the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and active in golf and in flying model airplanes.
Tony credits Cathy for tolerating him and the long hours his job has required, and, he volunteered refreshingly, "I love her more and more every day, and I'd marry her all over again."
Cathy has also played a pivotal role in the moving plans. Eight years ago, Tony explained, she spent a month at Maine Medical Center following a car collision with a moose. In the hospital, Tony reported, she had time to think, and she concluded that the accident was not the moose's fault but the result of, as Tony put it, "People building where moose live." She began to think of a way to help animals who are being misplaced by humans, and she ended up involved in efforts to find replacement homes for exotic cats - really exotic ones like tigers, lions, ocelot and lynx. Much of that work, Tony said, is done on the Internet, but the Spohrers have also been to yearly exotic-animal conventions in Las Vegas, where they've met others with similar interests. Through them, they've made friends and living arrangements in Washington that will include some of that work.
Tony will eventually resume work as a cook, he said, but he doesn't yet know where. He's banking on restaurants on reservations that have casinos, where "they're all looking for help." His own decision to quit and move, he said, comes merely from a desire for change. Though he hasn't been unhappy, he can't, he says, "see myself doing this for another 15 or 20 years."
Meanwhile, he says, "no deadline, no rush. I'm going to enjoy a little bit of vacation before I start working again."
The hours he's been keeping suggest he deserves that. Typically, they total 60 or 70 per week - but just as typically for Tony, he turns that challenge into a plus. He likes, for example, arriving at work on Sunday morning at 3:30 a.m. to bake muffins, knowing that long-term York customer Verne Fuller will arrive at 4 a.m. (before official opening at 5 a.m.) to have the same breakfast (dropped eggs and sausage on wheat toast) with the same small group of friends on Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.
And he even likes his hour-long commute.
Once a week or so in summer he sweetens it a little by making it in a 1970 MG Midget that he owns, and he says of that, "There's nothing like getting out of work and getting into a convertible and smiling all the way home." But even in a different car, he says, the time is welcome for "winding down after work" and for "preparing before."
The trip past Dunkin' Donuts in Sanford also helps him predict how busy he'll be that day. On the day we talked, the first day of hunting season for residents, the parking lot there, he said, "was all orange," despite the rain. In York, Ken Doty appeared at Rick's with his son as he always does on that day, Tony said, and Tony, gifted with a memory that permits him to remember what every customer orders, even when whole years pass between orders, knew that the son would have homefries with onions.
Tony won't be taking the MG with him when he leaves, nor many other belongings. What he's taking instead, he said, will be "nothing but good memories. I'm taking those."
When we asked him if those memories included any high drama at Rick's, he just chuckled and said, "The library. The building of the library was dramatic to everybody watching."
He did say that Christopher Reeve had been a customer one year when Reeve had a boat in the harbor: "He came in for breakfast every day for a week and we all got autographs."
"I'd like to thank everybody who's been a customer all these years," he said as we were concluding our talk.
And he offered high praise for Jan. They've been friends, he said, since Jan and her husband Tom used to deliver the newspaper, and Jan still pokes her head into Rick's kitchen to say hello to everybody on her daily visits for breakfast there.
"She's a very special person. She makes everyone feel important."
Jan and others would probably say the same of Tony.
Tony's last day at Rick's will be Sunday, Nov. 5. We wish him all the very, very best!
