General Store

When I was at sea on convoy duty during WWII, I picked up a book in the ship library that made a deep and lasting impression on me. It was Behind the Ballots, the autobiography of Jim Farley, the colorful Irish Democrat from Grassy Point, N.Y., just up the Hudson from the Big Apple. James Aloysius Farley filled the book with unforgettable anecdotes - about the political rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the role Jim Farley played in the rise) and his days as postmaster general during FDR's first two terms in the White House, among others.

The volumes of evidence in John Nagy's upstairs study sometimes seem like pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle that refuse to fit. Someday, he hopes to arrange them to create a history of Willistown Township, where Nagy has made his home for more than 20 years. The problem is integrating the pieces - nuggets of information about the township's history - that the Sugartown resident has gathered for nearly a quarter century. For example, Nagy has two pages of a journal kept by Abigail Worrall, the wife of Sharpless Worrall, proprietor of the general store across from Nagy's home on Sugartown Road.