Salem Observer : Salem, renovation

Salem senior center is local hangout for old friends to play pool

Salem Editor — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:44:00 GMT

A couple of days every week, a group of old friends gets together on the second floor of the Ingram Senior Center to swap stories, tell jokes and shoot pool. For Joe Swift, a retired police officer, the morning sessions are an opportunity to reminisce and spend time playing a game with some good friends that he has loved since he was a schoolboy.

“We used to play hookey to play pool,” said Swift. “That’s when you could play pool for a nickel.”

“We had nothing else to do,” Nick Sambataro, a postal worker for 30 years before retiring 26 years ago, said as he interrupted Swift. “There was no such thing as going any place.”

Swift and Sambataro are part of a group that changes in size from day to day, but has as many as 12 regular members.

Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday they get together and shoot pool on an old, worn table from about 8:30 in the morning until 1 p.m. Flipping coins to divide up into teams of two, they take turns trying to outplay each other.

“We get a lot of laughs and have a lot of fun,” said Ronald St. Amand. “We enjoy it.”

On Aug. 6, St. Amand – who practices on his own pool table back home in Hampstead, but doesn’t enjoy it nearly as much as playing with friends – and the other members of his group will challenge the town employees in a tournament.

In the meantime, their greatest challenge is remembering whose turn it is to take a shot.

“We’ll argue for hours on who is partners, who’s got high or low, whose shot is it,” St. Amand said. “We talk for 15 minutes and nobody knows whose shot it is.”

They began playing together about six years ago when the senior center first opened in Salem and have kept the weekly tradition alive since then. For fewer than five hours three times a week, they talk pool, drink coffee and eat pastries.

“I really enjoying being with my friends here every week,” said Lou Alterisio. While he has been playing pool with the group for most of the six years they have spent on the second floor of the senior center, Alterisio just retired as a truck driver and mechanic in July.

“I’ve been playing here since the place opened up,” he said. “I never played pool before. When I was a kid, maybe. Some of these guys are pretty good.”

“I started at 12 years old and I’m still lousy,” Sambataro said with a smile and a pool cue resting across his knee.

Some of them have known each other since their childhood days. Sambataro is joined regularly at the pool table by his cousin, Sam Laudana. Together they’re known as “the Italian stallions” by the others.

Childhood friends Joe Swift and his partner, Joe Perrotta, remembered playing high school basketball together.

“(Joe Swift) was the only one who could make a basket,” Perrotta said, laughing. “As soon as you got the ball you passed it along to Joe.”

“We were friends as teenagers, but we don’t talk about that,” Swift said with a smile. “All of us were born during the Depression. We were juvenile delinquents. We learned to steal hubcaps at a young age.”

As senior center officials begin to move forward with plans to expand the second story before the end of the year, Swift, St. Amand and the others are hoping they might end up with a new pool table or two. The current table – worn and dented from so many years of use – has been at the senior center since it opened. But for the time being, they are happy just to shoot the breeze, and pool, with one another.

“We take on all comers,” Swift said with a grin from his seat next to the table.

Depot work begins

Salem Editor — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:49:00 GMT

BY DARRELL HALEN

Plans for renovating the old train depot station in Salem are moving along, thanks to $60,000 that will be used to remove asbestos from the structure and raze a portion of the building.

Selectmen recently authorized the use of the money, which will come from the Depot Trust Fund.

Built in 1867, the now-vacant building stands near the intersection of Main Street and Route 28. It’s considered an eyesore by some, but a group of volunteers want to return it to its past glory.

“I like old buildings,” said Dianne Paquette, a lifelong Salem resident who heads up the committee to renovate the Depot. “I enjoy the prospect of bringing the building back.”

The building needs a lot of work – among the problems is a leaky roof and the need for a new furnace and plumbing, but it is structurally sound, Paquette said.

The group has plans to renovate it to look as it did in 1912, and to install air conditioning and make it handicap accessible. Once fixed, it could bring in rental income to the town, Paquette said.

“It has value. It has a unique location,” said Paquette. “This is the building that makes the Salem Depot.”

Demolition of an office added to the building will be done in December, after asbestos is cleared out a month earlier.

Renovating the building would cost thousands of dollars, but Paquette hopes the project can be financed with private money with work being done by volunteers. Already, a host of skilled workers who can do carpentry, plumping, electrical, and roofing work have been lined up.

“We want everyone to feel they had a little part in the restoration,” she said.

Paquette previously worked with others to replace playgrounds at Fisk and Palmer schools, and has a background in finance.

“People who know me know I try to get donations and grants and money where I can get it,” she said.

There is no timetable to finish the project. But when it’s done, she said, she believes that people who thought the building should be torn down will say that restoring it was worth the effort.

Group touts school fixes

Salem Editor — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 17:59:00 GMT

BY CHRISTINE HEISER

Though the price tag attached to proposed renovations to Salem High School has astonished some residents, others are working together to get the word out that the fixes are necessary.

The newly formed Salem High School Renovation Committee is applying for nonprofit status, and Salem residents taking part want others to join them to help inform the public.

“We want people to see not just screaming headlines saying ‘$40 million’ but what would be done to improve the school,” said Tim Bosch, who has just signed up for the new committee.

“Our main goal is to make sure that everyone in Salem understands the needs of the high school, the deficiencies of it, and that the recommendations that the Facilities Committee made are the most cost-effective way to handle it,” he said.

The school district’s Facilities Committee has proposed a $40 million fix for the high school, including a 75,000-square-foot free-standing athletics facility, along with moving the main entrance of the school and making improvements to the library, science rooms and other classrooms.

The advocacy group will meet for the first time in August, said Bosch, and will plan a strategy to convince voters to pay for the needed renovations.

The committee may produce a Web site and a video presentation on Salem Community Televsion, and, as the election approaches, make presentations to small groups of residents, as well as to PTA and civic groups in town.

Addressing the athletic center Bosch said one of the most important things the group wants to get across to voters is that the proposed athletic facility, which some detractors have said is the district’s focus, is really a by-product of other school needs.

School Superintendent Michael Delahanty said the first aspect the district and the Facilities Needs Committee worked on was making the building safe, both to protect students and provide a sense of security for parents sending their children there.

A new entrance at the front of the school on Geremonty Drive is planned.

That, in turn, made changes to the rest of the building necessary, he said. The renovations would create more and better spaces for the science, music, art and special education programs, some of which operate in substandard areas.

“The evolution of our thinking resulted in a free-standing athletic center,” he said.

The center, along with the other improvements, would add to security and save wear and tear on the building, he said.

Currently, the track team is using the halls to run in, and youth sports groups using the building have to travel through the current entrance all the way through the building to the gyms.

Bosch, whose children have all graduated from Salem High, said he signed up for the new group because he’s a concerned citizen who believes the renovations are important to the town.

“Anyone who’s had kids in the school can see that the school has served us well, but it needs work.”

Contact information for the group will be forthcoming in the next several weeks.