Town Living

9-6-6-Story: The Many Changes of New Canaan’s Exchanges

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New Canaanites today see residents on cellphones everywhere, driving up Ponus Ridge or walking along the sidewalks of Elm and Main. For people such as Cookie King, née Van Beck—who lived in New Canaan from the 1930’s to the 1960’s and whose family lived in New Canaan until 1995—that’s about as impersonal as the way individual cell numbers are assigned: Between IP technology and mobile provider pool applications, there’s no rhyme or reason to a New Canaan “extension.” “We still have a landline and won’t give it up,” King told NewCanaanite.com “Have phone on the wall with a dial on it too.”

Many New Canaanites remember the days even before “966” was the town’s main designated exchange, and a look at our local telephone history tells the story of those three digits, long associated with the Next Station to Heaven. The first telephones in New Canaan were installed in 1881, as four businesses in the then-small town—Henry B. Rogers & Co., Hoyt’s Nurseries, Monroe’s drug store and Johnson’s carriage works—were part of the Norwalk exchange. After the turn of the century, New Canaan’s population began growing rapidly—as did the number of phones in town.

News

‘They’ve Carried on Our Culture’: New Canaan Girls Lacrosse Beats Darien for CIAC Class LL Title

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It was a lot of déjà vu all over again at Sacred Heart University’s Campus Field on Saturday afternoon. For the third consecutive year it was New Canaan-Darien in the CIAC Girls Lacrosse Championship. The same matchup as it has been for the previous four FCIAC Championship Games. And just like the conference final played 16 days ago, it was the Rams who came away with a five-goal win as New Canaan downed the top-seeded Blue Wave 10-5 to take the Class LL crown. “I am just so happy for this team,” New Canaan head coach Kristin Woods said.

Business

‘We’re Excited To Be Here’: Best Pizza Shop Opens on Main Street

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John Parlatore and his young family were among the first wave of New Yorkers to make the move out of the city when COVID hit in March of 2020. 

“My sister lived up here for about four years and we’d come up and visit her all the time,” Parlatore said on a recent evening at Best Pizza Shop at 62 Main St. “We liked the area but never thought we’d move from the city. Our daughter was going to school and we had restaurants there. When the city said on Saturday by Monday we were closing, we just saw it as a preview of things to come of mismanagement and we were right.”
Parlatore—who owned several eateries in Queens—slowly shut down each establishment, including his Italian restaurant that had been operating since 2013 and a pizzeria that had opened in early 2020 with the intention of reopening in Fairfield County. 

Serendipity intervened for Parlatore when Vicolo’s closed after nearly three decades on Main Street, leaving New Canaan without a go-to destination for family birthday parties and postgame youth and high school sports celebrations. 
“We heard about what Vicolo’s was,” Parlatore told NewCanaanite.com. “I hadn’t been there but I heard that through the years that it was a gathering place for people and that families ate here.

News

New Canaan Old Timers Association To Induct Six Athletes, Honor Wilky Gilmore

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After missing a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the spotlight will once again shine on local sports figures from the past as the New Canaan Old Timers Association hosts its annual honoree ceremony on Sunday, September 19th at Waveny. 2021 inductees will be Bobby Festo, Paul Gallo, Tom McInerney, Lew Socci and Katey Twombly. Also being recognized at this year’s affair as the Loren J. Keyes Memorial Honoree is all-time New Canaan basketball great, the late Wilky Gilmore. 

Bobby Festo is listed in the Who’s Who of American High School Athletes as an All-American in track and field, an honorable mention on the Fairfield County Interscholastic Athletics Conference county soccer team as a goalkeeper his senior year in New Canaan. He holds many track and field records as a sprinter for New Canaan, and won many medals at state and invitational track and field competitions as a sprinter in both individual events and as a member of a relay team. He went to college at Southern Connecticut State College where he joined the men’s track team for a year and a half while also participating on the men’s soccer team.