Nine years of life, love, and laughter
Virginia L. Woodwell
Lee, Geno Jacks reminisce about how they met,
This Wednesday marks an important date for Lee Regan Jacks and her husband, Geno.
Lee runs Dusted Things and Daisies, the little antiques shop on Old Post Road, open from May through October, and then only on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. She is so warm and personable that a visit to her shop often has more to do with socializing than it does with purchasing. Though one certainly helps the other. So we were glad when May rolled around once more and we seized our first chance in the new season to stop in and chat.
That was last Friday, and what we ended up learning then was that the magic date coming up this week is Lee's and Geno's ninth wedding anniversary.
Discovering that, we pressed for details, and here's what we got.
Lee and Geno were married on May 19, 1995, in the old gazebo at York Beach, with York notary public Sue Antal officiating - and they met, about six years earlier at a big flea market in Norton, Mass., where Geno first spotted Lee "jumping out of a truck."
At that time, Lee had been widowed for some time, and, with her two children grown and through college, she moved from Walpole, Mass., to York, to what had been a family summer place on Mountain Road. In York, she supported herself through a number of jobs - waitressing regularly at Mimmo's and for special functions at the Cliff House, working as an aide at York Hospital, cleaning houses, tending the elderly and infirm in their homes - but also, always, at selling antiques, if only one morning a month.
So she was at the Norton flea market on a routine antiques foraging expedition - she went every Sunday, leaving York at 2:30 a.m. to get first pick at the contents of the dealers? trucks -when Geno, who was a collector, never a dealer, spied her.
For Geno, Lee said, it was love at first sight, and Geno agreed, but not for Lee. She thought she'd never remarry.
He pressed her to go out for coffee. She finally agreed. They dated. She said she wouldn't marry. Geno's heart, according to Lee, was broken. But Geno persisted.
"And finally," said Lee, "when he least expected it, I said, "OK, I?ll marry you."
Geno said, "No kidding! When?"
"May," said Lee promptly. It was then March. So May it was.
Geno worked for Kodak for 30 years, first in Detroit, then in Framingham, Mass., where he was a lab manager doing microfilm processing. After he retired from Kodak, he and two partners bought the lab and he continued working there for another 12 years, retiring for good in 1998.
At the time he was courting Lee, he just built a house on Great Island in Harpswell, right on the water and with a 44-foot dock. It was on a visit there that Lee decided to surprise him with her acceptance, and it was there that they began their marriage. But Geno was still working in Massachusetts, weekdays, and, while Lee was happy enough with visitors in the summer, she was unbearably lonely in the winter.
They came back to York.
"Just make sure you say that I met this wonderful man," said a beaming Lee with evident sincerity.
So we do, herewith.
On the day we were visiting, a steady stream of customers came and went, several of them other dealers, and, among them, Marsha and John Doggett, from North Hampton, N.H.
"Have you ever heard of a snow bird?" John asked, and answered his own question.
"You?re talking to two." he said.
The Doggetts rent a condo in Stuart, Fla., from December to May, then return to North Hampton, from which Marsha ventures out to sell antiques from rented booths at Columbary Antiques, and at Coach Road Antiques, both here in York, in the summertime.
In the 1980s, she reported, she ran a three-story barn in Rye, N.H., full of antiques, collectibles, and decorative items, called The Hitching Post, and there was also a time when she sold antiques from sites in Scarborough, Kennebunk, and Ogunquit. Now, however, she says that she's "getting too old for that," so she's cut back, particularly since John's retirement.
John was a carpenter, the first, he told us, hired to work on the building of the Seabrook nuclear plant, where he was employed, full time, for 10 years, before the plant opened. There, he volunteered, one of his fellow-carpenters was Al Moulton, of York.
Marsha said that, in her antiques business, she didn't specialize in any item or period, but she did "lean toward furniture," all of which John is able to refinish for her.
York antiques dealer Gwen Dennis was also there, as she had been, she said, the day before.
"I buy a lot from Lee," she added, as she held up a small, classic, tin coffee pot, minus its top. "Can't you see lilacs in this?" she asked.
Gwen reported that she sells at four sites: Family Tree and Columbary Antiques, both in York (in Cape Neddick, actually), at the Blacksmith Mall in Ogunquit, and at Bo-Mar in Wells.
We learned that Gwen got a jump-start in the antiques business when she came east from Chicago as a girl, for a couple of summers, to work for a grandmother who sold antiques in Marion, on Cape Cod.
Her highest praise, though, was reserved for Lee, and it was high praise indeed.
"Lee has a wonderful eye," she said. "Her prices are so fair, and I learn so much from her."
She added: "She's one of the kindest and most caring people I know."
And she went on, echoing our own thoughts: "We miss coming here in the winter because this shop is as much about Lee as it is about the things she sells. Other shops you go into can be impersonal. Not so with Lee's, from the day she opened this shop. She cares about anybody who comes in here. People who come here from out of town come back because of that. It's not your typical store."
Lee herself, hearing all this, just laughed characteristically and said, "And I have a bathroom. Other stores put up signs saying ?No Rest Rooms.? I think they probably tell people about the one here."
Of course we knew the draw was more than that.
Next week, before moving on: a little more about the other talk, that day, at Dusted Things and Daisies.
Meantime, a most happy anniversary to Lee and Geno.