A look back on Terni’s, and its place in the village of Millerton

MILLERTON — Turn the calendar of Millerton back some six or seven decades and take a long look at Terni’s store, where Main Street curves downhill to Route 22. 

There, to hear owner Phil Terni tell it, in the evening hours, after super had been served and dishes cleared away by the women of the house, after lamps had been lit and curtains drawn, veterans of “The Big One — WWII” would gather.  

Television would not yet be a fixture, flashing news to every home, but the men — always only men, he said — would make their way to the store eager to learn what the day had brought, waiting each night for the arrival of the New York City papers that would slake that thirst.  

In their midst would be young Phil, whose job it was to meet the train and bring those papers to the shop. As they gathered, the men, many of them Air Corps pilots — not so old, but not so young after years of war — would exchange memories. They never spoke of the conflict, never relived the battles. Instead, they would speak about the planes that had become the mainstay of many far-flung operations — B17’s, B24’s and Spitfires. Listening with the intensity any young boy would show to these heroes, he learned all there was to know about the chariots of the skies. 

As a result, the building, far more than a simple village store with coins embedded in its steps and a wooden Indian guarding the entrance, became something of a personal museum, with Terni as its all-knowing guide. Just a bit above eye level, above the hunting gear, the hats, the vests, the papers and the candy, the walls of his store are covered with framed photos — mainly in black and white — of those planes. 

While waiting at the station for those eagerly-awaited papers to be thrown from the train, Terni had also learned about the mighty Iron Horse — the reason the village of Millerton had come into being a century earlier. So, in pride of place above the candy counter, there hangs a huge builder’s photo of a train, taken whenever a new model was created, in this case, a Union Pacific Big Boy from the American Locomotive Company in Schenectady. The strength of steam engines gone-by is evident in its stance, as anxious as a race horse at the gate. 

Above a cooler, resting on an old Dutch Masters Cigar box, sits a telegraph “key,” a treasure rescued from the train station when it closed up shop. Not dwelling on decades of information that would have passed through the operator’s fingertips and to the world beyond, Terni explained instead how that the much-worn object is distinguished from a similar device called a “bug.”  

Growing up in the store’s three-story building his family shared with his grandparents, the chores in the shop framed his life and now tell a tale of a Millerton gone by. As a young boy on his way to school on Elm Avenue, he would be stopped most days by farmers wanting to pay for the tobacco and cigarettes they would pick up after they delivered their milk to the plant for processing. It’s easy to imagine them leaning against the shop’s still immaculate ice cream counter, flummoxed by a sign that forbids e-cigarettes.

And just as there are echoes of veterans and farmers of old, there are of customers as well — regulars in the days when people “looked one another in the eye,” before a hurried pace and the internet changed the way people shop and find their news. One had honored Terni’s request to create a huge reproduction of a painting by Howard Pyle, an artist who had illustrated adventures such as Robin Hood and King Arthur, books that took Terni far from Millerton, just as had the stories of planes and trains.  

A font of historical knowledge, Terni explained the Revolutionary War battle the painting depicted as easily as he did events closer to home — General Henry Knox’s men, braving the 1776 snows of nearby Claverack, transporting captured cannons 300 miles from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston, where they helped secure the country’s liberty. 

Terni’s, an institution for the ages, is a reminder that one man can be shaped by and then make his own mark on a town. All are well worth attention. A shopkeeper first, but a fine teller of tales, Terni is as much a treasure of Millerton as is his family’s 1919 store. He knows well what has shaped this village and can easily share his pride in it, should anyone care to ask, as well someone should.

Hidden Treasures is a series by Carol Kneeland that takes a look back at the Harlem Valley in the days of yore. If you have a special remembrance, or know of someone with tales to share, email editor@millertonnews.com.