It’s important to read a daily newspaper, and it seems to become more important, at least for me, the older I get. When I picked up the daily habit as a kid, it was the sports page, particularly the box scores for my beloved Red Sox, which attracted me. Now middle-aged, I admit with mild embarrassment that it’s the obituaries that keep me coming back to the morning paper day after day. As a child, I thought my grandmother and her contemporaries were weirdly morbid as they turned to the obits first thing, usually hours before I’d roll out of bed to check the progress of my favorite sports teams. But now I see that people of a certain age begin to turn with increasing frequency to the obituaries because they begin to know more and more of the names recorded there.
Unfortunately, for some reason, I didn’t read the paper—in this case, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, one of three local dailies that I peruse daily—or at least the obituaries, on April 24, 2009. As a consequence, I missed the obituary of Frank Moro, Jr., who died at his home in South Deerfield on April 22, 2009 at age 66. I’d have been shocked to read of his passing, just as I was several months later when someone told me the sad news in response to a casual remark I made about not having seen Frank the last several times I’d had my truck in for service at Fisher’s Garage, which he owned and operated with his son, Frank Moro III, in South Deerfield.
The fact is, I didn’t know Frank Moro very well. When I recently pulled up an online version of his obituary, it told me things I had never known about him—that he loved classical music, for example. Still, what I knew about Frank—what, undoubtedly, most if not all of his regular customers knew—isn’t the sort of thing that comes across easily in a formal obituary. What I knew about Frank Moro was the kindness of his smile and the sincerity of his concern for me and my family as customers, as the drivers or passengers in vehicles that he and his crew serviced. From my first visit to Fisher’s Garage, a place I discovered almost by accident after a visit with Max Hartshorne, owner of the travel website GoNOMAD and a caf? of the same name in South Deerfield, I knew I’d found something special: a family business run by a man with old-school values that seemed unbending in the face of never-ending pressure to accommodate a changing marketplace. Frank was small in stature and gentle in temperament, but his commitment to running a business that always put personal integrity first was fierce. Within his community, as a business owner, a leader in his church, a devoted family man and good neighbor, Frank Moro was a giant.
Beyond missing his obituary, one reason I remained unaware of Frank’s passing last year was that Fisher’s Garage continued to operate just as it always had, only with Frank’s daughter Karen and son Frank running the show. When I didn’t see Frank the elder, I figured he was taking some time off, leaving things in the capable hands of his children. When I finally heard the news around Christmas, I stopped into Fisher’s to get my oil changed and to offer my belated condolences to Karen. Bearing a remarkable resemblance to her dad, Karen acknowledged her profound sense of loss and then, with a sad smile, turned her attention back to scheduling my truck for service. I was not surprised by her stoicism, she being Frank Moro’s daughter, but I choked up a bit when she told me how much she and her family appreciated my business. Her thanks reminded me of something that Hartshorne wrote about her father shortly after he died: “Frank was never, ever, anything less than delighted to have me as a customer.” I suspect all of his customers felt the same.
If politicians want a model of the kind of businesses they should have in mind when they talk about how pro-business they are, they should look no further than Fisher’s Garage. Driving through South Deerfield on Sugarloaf Street, one might see the small Mobil gas station in the pretty, old brick building and not realize how rare such a place is in this day and age. But those of us who did business with Frank Moro know how lucky we are, and we’ll remain loyal customers of Fisher’s Garage for as long as the Moro family will have us.
