Sweet Memories

I heard the news today, oh boy.

Could it be true? Was the Gaston Avenue Bakery, the finest in Somerville, NJ, the place that bonded our family together with rich chocolate filling and yummy layer cakes, really be closing? Granted, it had gone way downhill in recent years, but still. Could it be closed?

I drove by today, and the sign said, “Sorry, we are closed.” Sorry, yes, I am truly sorry.

This partially my fault, since I stopped buying cakes there years ago (after my friend Chris told me they sold her a cake with mold in it and didn’t even apologize when she returned it). And now that I am on Weight Watchers, cakes and cookies are verboten. But it can’t be all my fault. I am only one person, and my family contributed more than our share to the profits of this once-thriving bakery.

The original owner was a tough-as-nails guy who ran that place with authority and aplomb, turning out chocolate seven-layer cakes (seven luscious layers) that were always my favorite. My sister preferred the hazelnut cakes with the chocolate shavings on top. We all loved the cookies (especially the ones we called “dumbbells” with the big globs of chocolate on each end of a cylindrical wafer), which we often bought to take as a sweet treat when going to visit friends or relatives. How I remember those ubiquitous square cardboard boxes and the thin string that closed them!

At one time, many years ago, there were two bakeries in Somerville. Hochstein’s probably had the better bread, but Gaston Avenue, well, that was the Mecca of cakes in town. Birthday coming? A trip to GAB was a prerequisite. Special occasion? Plan your stop at the bakery. Once my mother sent me to GAB the day before Thanksgiving to pick up a variety of goodies and I was on line there for over an hour. When I got home I accused her of not loving me anymore because if she did, I reasoned, she wouldn’t have made me torture myself for that long in line at a bakery.

My mother would stop there nearly every Saturday, bringing home the tasty treats that we relished – a little too much, perhaps, which probably explains why I have had a weight problem for years. For a while we lived dangerously close to GAB, almost in walking distance – though we never did – and we always passed it on our way home from the Jewish Community Center Swim Club. You’d run into everyone in town there eventually. Once, while working on my high school reunion, I literally bumped into the mother of a classmate and got the contact information for him that we were missing. So it was a place of gathering as well as a place of delectable delights.

The Cort Theater, where I spent countless hours honing my love for movies, is long gone, as are the Candy Kitchen and Pop’s, the corner hangout opposite the school where we’d stop for nickel candy. Gaston’s, the local department store, closed decades ago, and Somerset Trust Company has changed its name dozens of times since I had my first account there. Johnny’s Diner and Howard Johnson’s are distant memories. Wald Drugs remains open on Main Street, though I doubt you can buy 5 candies for 25 cents (and they’d throw in a 6th for free) on the way to the movies, where tickets cost first 25 cents, and later 35 or 50 cents.

Even my elementary school, a holdover built in the late 1800s, was razed a few years ago, and my high school, the original Somerville High, is now the Middle School, with the “new” high school replacing it way back in the 1970s.

As we get older, our memories are increasingly filled with the sights, sounds and smells of days gone by. I used to think that just entering the door of the Gaston Avenue Bakery made me gain five pounds, so sumptuous were the smells. Though I understand that time passes and things change, I will always retain the sweetest memories of my favorite place in town and my years of growing up in Somerville. Somehow, ordering a cake at ShopRite will just never be the same as a delightful delicacy from GAB.

I always said that if I was told I had six months to live, I would immediately head over to the Gaston Avenue Bakery and depart this world with icing on my lips. I guess I’ll have to rethink that plan now.

RIP, Gaston Avenue Bakery. You will be missed.