Rita 1

As a young woman Rita might as well have been Rochester royalty. Her father was deputy Sheriff of the police department, and he was one of those gruff old time non-nonsense cops who swung a Billy club around the chip on his shoulder like an Irish stereotype. Rita was a flirt, but she was smart, educated and blessed with the good looks and figure of a small-town starlet. Eventually, she met my Grandfather Bill and gave birth to my uncle and father. Together they raised the kids on military bases all around the world before returning to the States to ease comfortably into retirement with a regular schedule of gardening, competition card games and the quest for the perfect Manhattan cocktail.

Rita was a unique and interesting storyteller too. Her tales were mostly about her spoiled childhood or her travels around Asia and Europe with my grandfather, but after he died she began to rack up quite the collection of solo adventure tales. From her cruises around the arctic to tracing the passions of Christ through Jerusalem she always seemed to be doing something epic. She was vicious but sincere of her criticisms of others. Her opinions often seemed outdated but were conveyed with such enthusiasm as to make you sometimes question your own convictions. These subjects included race, the church, and politics. Basically, all the no-no’s of polite conversation.

When I was about 20 years old my college friends and I piled into an old 1978 AMC Concord with no power steering or brakes but a giant rebuilt V8 engine and drove down to Camp Hill, PA from Brooklyn, NY to give her a proper weekend visit. That would have been about 1992 or 93 and she still lived in the same house I’d always known as a child. The one with the enormous tree in the backyard and the green bean stalks growing up the north side near the wild strawberry patches. There she sat on the porch waiting for us, chain smoking Winston lights and petting her tiny poodle companion Tiffany.

Conversation would inevitably turn to her family roots Rochester and her early memories of growing up in that place with her now estranged brother George.  How the Connell family ended up in Rochester, how they all left and what happened to George are all fascinating stories for another time.