The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Two are Friendly’s hikers
After walking trails, women eat and blog
MIDDLETOWN — Everyone has a Friendly’s story.
Longtime friends and nature enthusiasts Beth Lapin and Cherry Czuba discovered that fact and many others as they made their way around the state, working up a hearty appetite over the course of 20plus day trips along Connecticut’s blue-blaze trail system.
Their mission, which began as a way to visit every Friendly’s restaurant in the state after they learned the corporate office was closing many sites, took three years — from June 2015 to March.
The women, who have known one another since 1989, began at the Airline Trail in Portland after learning of the area through the Connecticut Forest and Park Association’s CT Trails Day.
They met through a group of area women who took monthly hikes in the late 1980s, dubbing themselves Sisters of the Earth. Eventually, the club dissolved. But their friendship blossomed.
One day, Czuba called Lapin.
“Would you take me hiking?” Lapin recalled her friend asking, as they both erupted into laughter, recalling that simple request that led to where they are today.
“I have no sense of direction. None,” Czuba said.
“I got punished for playing in the woods when I was a kid,” Lapin said. “I still did it. There were some places at the end of my street where I grew up in New London and I’d always go down there.”
Her parents discouraged her wandering, Lapin said, because they were worried about her being out in the forest alone.
“I remember sitting on our porch when I was young and loving it,” she said. “I could hear the air. It was really neat.”
Lapin, a Middletown author and ecotherapist, leads free nature walks on the city’s open space through the Recreation and Community Services office.
In college, she took an ecology class.
“That was when I discovered that you could actually make a living out of doing this thing I was punished for,” she said. “The professor was an extraordinary woman. We’d take these field trips and she’d be driving around and say, ‘Marsh hawk!’
“How does she do that? And I wanted to learn how,” Lapin said.
The women’s rapport is an easy one — so much so that they finish each other’s sentences, and laugh heartily even before they fully recount a shared adventure.
The two have fond memories of Friendly’s from growing up. So, when they learned in 2015 that the corporation was closing some of its locations due to bankruptcy, they were dismayed.
The Blake Brothers opened their first ice cream shop in Springfield, Mass., in 1935 and named it “Friendly,” according to the company’s history. “The name was a promise that the shoppe would be a friendly place for families to create lasting memories while enjoying handcrafted ice cream that was made fresh daily.”
Some may remember Illiano’s Ristorante and Pizzeria on South Main Street used to be a Friendly’s.
“We would go after softball games or after choral concerts,” Lapin said. “It was just filled with kids celebrating and having sundaes, calling out to each other — just a good community feel — connections with people.”
Czuba, of Haddam, grew up in Holyoke, Mass. One of Friendly’s first locations was just down the street from her house.
There are nearly 400 Friendly’s along the Eastern Seaboard, from Maine to Florida, according to the company, which marked its 80th year in 2015, the year the women began their adventures.
As she’s grown older, Czuba said she’s fostered a deep connection to nature.
“Nature nurtures me spiritually,” she said. “It’s one of the places I find the presence of God strongly. I’m just grateful for being able to be in this part of the country and being able to appreciate the beauty around us. It’s pretty inspiring for me.”
Lapin feels the same. “I get a certain sense of peace and connectedness to everything. A certain sense of interbeing: how we are part of nature and nature is part of us and there really isn’t a lot of separation.”
At one of the last Friendly’s they visited, their waitress was having a bad day, said Lapin. The women got to talking — and got a whopper of a story.
Twenty-eight years before, Lapin said, the waitress took part in something called the scooping olympics, during which staff would show off their confectionery skills.
“It’s a real thing! They still have it,” Lapin said, delighted. “It had to be a perfect ball. It had to be the right weight; all these different things that we don’t even think about.”
As the waitress told the story, “her whole personality changed,” Czuba said.
Lapin left with another chapter for her blog.
For their mission-accomplished celebration, the duo chose Cromwell, “where it all began,” Lapin said. The manager was more than happy to oblige their request for a special party and even gave their 15 or so guests free sundaes for the occasion.
“We had such a good time,” Lapin said. “Cherry’s really good about celebrating things when they’re done. I just move on to the next thing.”
To read about the women’s travels, visit Lapin’s blog at bethlapin.com.