–
On a sunny day last summer, board members Carli Gazoorian and Alexandra Prince sat down for a delightful Armenian lunch with longtime Mountain Top resident and Hunter-Tannersville school teacher Sonia “Siranoush” Hairabedian at her home (aka Fort Shish Kabob) overlooking Hunter Mountain. Below is a snippet of the conversation.
Sonia: I’ll tell you about one of the hotels over in Lexington that’s Armenian—O’Hara house. And my parents came there with my grandparents. …And they liked it up here very much. The mountains reminded them of parts of Armenia. Then after that, my father and my grandmother went looking for property, and they found the boarding house here [in Hunter] for $2,800.
Carli: And what year was that?
Sonia 1940.
Carli 1940. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Sonia …So I came up for one year. My grandfather had put heat in one of the single apartments that was still winterized …So, I said, I’ll come up for a year. Well, fifty years later, I’m still here.
Carli It’s hard to get out.
Sonia So after one year I came up with stockings on, high heels, and makeup, and false eyelashes. And I’m working in the ski shop. Irving Schwimmer— he sees me in town. “What are you doing up here?” [he asked.] I said, I’m going to stay here for the year. “Oh, come and work for me.” I said nah, I had enough money saved then. He knew we were grocers. “You said you worked in your parent’s grocery store. Selling skis is the same thing.” So, I did that for winter.
Carli Where was that? Where did you work?
Sonia Heller’s Ski Shop in um, it’s the building is still, you know, where the rotten buildings are, [the] broken down buildings? Right next door was the ski shop.
Carli Okay, cool.
Sonia Heller’s Ski Shop. And it was Irving Schwimmer’s. So I worked there that winter. And in the springtime, I said, I can’t live up here. You don’t make any money. Everybody’s on unemployment. I mean, the creek, I couldn’t go swimming in the winter. Cuz the creek was an attraction to me. The creek, definitely.
Alexandra Of course, yea it’s beautiful.
Sonia I moved up here. And then after that, that’s when I bought a chainsaw and I started burning wood. And I didn’t have stockings anymore. You know, I had hammers and screwdrivers.
Carli Nice.
Sonia And I have no regrets.
Additional conversations about Armenian history on the Mountain Top, including photos, recipes and more will appear in the Summer issue of The Hemlock and future blog posts.