Column: Four years after closing shop, Fran is still here

Fran Squillo Vessichio was quick to tell me, as she sat contentedly in her family’s closed cigar store on State Street: “There are certain people who can stay home. I’m not one of them. I’d go out of my mind if I had to sit at home, looking at the walls.”

And so there she is, the fixture people call “the mayor of State Street,” taking care of business when there is no actual business — receiving visitors, counseling a network of callers and enjoying being around her old friends.

When I heard that Vessichio was sitting in the old shop she closed four years ago, playing Solitaire and Spades on her laptop computer, I thought it was a sad story. Well, it’s not sad at all.

“This is like my little social club,” she said last Wednesday afternoon when I stopped in. She introduced me to two of her pals who were sitting with her at the dining room table where she spends her days: Robert Hoffman and Ralph Cannata.

Hoffman was smoking a thin cigar. Vessichio was enjoying a cigarette.

The shop is a little eerie, a place where time seems to have stood still. On the counter sits an ancient cash register, not used for the past four years. On its surface sits a photo of Vessichio and her husband, “Big John” Vessichio, on their wedding day.

“There are a lot of old things around here,” she acknowledged. “When