by Angela Starita

Beauty supply shops are a mostly extinct category of small business. My father owned one in Jersey City, NJ, and I’d think of him every time I went to one on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s the right kind of street for a beauty supply store: a busy, rundown shopping area, with enough oId-timers who aren’t going to order their shampoo and wigs and curlers online. That store was owned by a handsome Korean man in his forties who, like my father, had no real relationship to the business—unsmiling and quiet, dressed in dark sweaters, and waiting behind the register. You could buy something or not. As far as he was concerned, his job was to stock the place, keep it open during the hours posted on the front door, and find a way to withstand overwhelming boredom.
In my father’s case, that lack of engagement led to spells of jumpy, all-in energy alternating with sour disdain. When he could no longer tolerate dedicating years of his life to the vicissitudes of hair trends, his solution—to chuck the store and start a farm—was part of a long, robust tradition, one that increasingly pervades current discourse: when life proves empty, turn to the land. It’s a notion filled with the promise of self-determination and meaning, and while I have my doubts, I fully understand, even applaud, the impulse. To leave his business, my father also needed a highly supportive spouse and serious confidence in his midlife physical stamina. In fact, he had both. What he didn’t have was a community for the farming he wanted to do, no pesticides and coupled crops. He started in 1975, a period when there was no shortage of books and magazines and communal farms advocating the same methods. But my dad was not a hippie nor much of a reader. Having immigrated to the United States in his mid-30’s after spending 10 years in the Italian navy, his psychic orientation faced World War II and Europe, not cooperative supermarkets and Vermont. Though he obsessively followed current national and international politics, he had only the vaguest awareness of anything countercultural.
He came at farming from a perspective wholly ordinary in the world of my childhood, probably many people’s childhoods. Everyone we knew—almost all of them immigrants or children of immigrants—kept extensive vegetable gardens. My aunt, a college professor, tended dozens of tomato and lettuce plants along the side of her suburban house, though her crops paled in comparison to her Yugoslavian in-laws, who ran a house painting business, and in their spare time made veritable farms out of their front yards. My grandfather, I’m told, kept a garden in a tiny allotment given to renters in his small apartment building in northern New Jersey. He’d throw pasta water on a tree trunk there to grow his own mushrooms. For greater variety, he and a few other men would drive to a rural area of the state where they’d forage for mushrooms on land they didn’t own. In our backyard in a dreary corner of Jersey City, my father’s only real joy came from his vegetable garden, which was unusually productive. At school, I’d suspended a sweet potato in water and when its roots grew long, he planted it in the backyard for me. It produced a dozen potatoes, and despite my efforts since, I’ve never had so good and robust a crop.
Unlike his peers, many of whom saw work as a necessity to be faced with dispassionate acceptance, my father had adopted an idea far more familiar to my generation than his: your work had to give some sense of pleasure, some satisfaction. With that in mind, he and my mother bought a 10-acre plot of land in central New Jersey, had a house built on it, and farmed the rest. My mother learned to drive and commuted an hour to her job as a high school teacher in Staten Island, making the farm venture possible. Most years, my father opted to work on his own, tending to nine acres of tomatoes, corn, lettuce, and beans, with fruit trees, mostly peaches, on the acreage fronting the road. In the world of farming, this is a minuscule plot. But for a person working alone, testing methods by trial and error, the undertaking is extraordinary. I listen to podcasts about weaving and recently came across one about a fiber artist, LaChaun Moore, who decided to start farming. As a manager at the Union Square Farmers’ Market, she’d found out about a class called Farm Beginnings. “It was a holistic farm planning course. They taught us about farm management, and all of the sort of administrative aspects of starting a farm and planning for a farm and a successful crop, and planning for profit.” Now she leases land from her mentor in South Carolina. When she tells people that she works one acre all by herself, they are stunned. It’s a reasonable and informed response, and while I’m happy that she has at least a small group of peers who can appreciate the seriousness of her work, my first thought is of my father, who worked largely in solitude.
One exception to the isolation was Jimmy Blanton, a sweet Georgian man who lived down the street and was perhaps my dad’s first American-born friend. As I recall, he had no land himself, but he worked for other people and gave my father some advice on tractors and tillers and layout. He died from a massive heart attack while driving, and so my father’s memories of him were always bathed in anguish.
The other farmer in our lives was a man named Marshall Bienstock. Occasionally my father would lease a few acres to Marshall, who would grow soybeans. He was a small build man, quiet, and professional. Years later I found a book about Jewish farmers in Central New Jersey called The Land Was Theirs. The Bienstocks, I learned, were central to that community and had been farming in the area for three generations. It made some sense since our town, Howell, wasn’t a typical suburb, though it did have its fair share of developments and commuters. Unlike nearby Manalapan and Marlboro, favorites of transplanted New Yorkers, Howell still had people who lived in tiny houses on a few acres of land with a few chickens; others ran horse farms. Our land abutted a Christmas tree farm whose owner shot our dog, Nemo. My father found his body months afterwards. Around the corner, an elderly family of chicken farmers called the Inzelbuchs sold eggs on the honor system. I’d ride my bike there on Friday afternoons to buy eggs and peer inside their dining room window where their table was already set for Sabbath dinner. I’d leave money in a coffee can and never see a soul.
Although we didn’t advertise our produce as “organic,” both my parents were determined not to use pesticides. They would plant marigolds between tomatoes, alternate crops, apply soap sprays, and, incredibly, the two of them would rise early to pick bugs off of plants. It wasn’t efficient—when it came to pest control, they essentially scaled up what my father had been doing in his vegetable garden in Jersey City. But it worked. I can’t recall a time he had a failed season.
His only sales outlet, though, was the vegetable stand he ran on the edge of our property near the road where we sold mostly corn, beans, and tomatoes, but a fair amount of lettuce, eggplant, and squash. He predated farm-to-table restaurants, and we knew nothing of the Union Square Farmers Market, which began the year after we moved to Howell. He attached a large American flag to a tree to make it easier for drivers coming around a bend to spot us. Once, as he was closing down for the evening, a woman pulled up for some tomatoes. He’d been taking down the flag and placed it on the ground to help her. She picked it up, and charitably said, “You dropped your flag.” No, he told her, he’d put it there. He saw she was bothered but couldn’t figure out why until he reported the exchange to my mother, who explained the American flag protocol.
While my mother sacrificed much to make the farm possible, she had no real interest in it. Neither did I. My father’s friends saw it as eccentric, a little sad. A college friend of mine came to the farm and referred to our chicken coop as “another failure.” I don’t know what she had expected of a chicken coop or how she could see those fat rows of corn stalks, a gradient of greens from mint to emerald, as somehow deficient. But I did understand–and this is probably what she meant—that there was no money to be had on Angelo’s Farm; that was undeniable.
In the end, that aspect of it stung my father the most. I’m sure he had no illusion of making money from the produce, but he had expected the property to grow in value. What he hadn’t anticipated was that our municipal council had designated some areas of town as farm zones, which required a minimum of 6 acres of land to build a house. They’d set out to preserve open spaces and control development, an admirable goal, but for us it meant our land’s value suddenly depreciated, barely worth more than a house on a ¼-acre lot.
A few years before he died, my father, taking deep draws on a Marlboro, told me how much he’d sold the land for. He said it as if in a confessional, afraid someone else could hear. He should’ve had no shame: he had traded in beauty supply for the kind of meaning that underpins back-to-the-land dreams. But without a world that could understand the scale of what he’d taken on, appreciate it, or learn from it, he could only assess himself in dollars.