SHARON — Ray Donovan passed away earlier this month, on May 2, but his influence on the town of Sharon will continue to be felt probably for as long as the town remains — because for many people, the shopping plaza that Donovan built is the actual center of town. It is home to many of the town’s essential services (post office, pharmacy, diner, grocery store, bank and package store) and as such is also a social center of the town. But five decades ago, nothing was in that spot but a single-family house (where the post office is now) and a 3-acre field.Donovan purchased the property in 1956 and moved his family into the house but already he had a vision of the retail plaza he wanted to build there. Donovan was not originally from Sharon. He was born in 1925 in Addison, Maine, and lived in the part of the state known as “Downeast” until, at the age of 17, he enlisted in the Navy. “He had a tough childhood,” recalled Debbie Donovan, the oldest of the three Donovan sisters, in an interview last week. “It was the Depression and his dad was out of work. His parents had split up when he was quite young; his mother worked at different private schools, so Dad and his sister, Carol, were sent to live with other relatives. Carol lived in Amenia for a very long time. She married Leland Hulst and they had five children, Leland III, Peter, Janice, Cheryl and Curtis. “My grandmother had moved here to Sharon and married Dwight Bierce,” Donovan continued. The family moved to Sharon when Ray Donovan was 13. His future wife, Roberta May Tischofer, became friends with sister Carol. “When my mother met him, she thought, ‘Oh, he’s cute!’” recalled their daughter, with a grin and a twinkle in her eye. Whirlwind romance When he was discharged from the Navy at age 20, Donovan returned to Sharon “and they had a whirlwind romance, about three months, and decided they wanted to get married. Donovan had enrolled (courtesy of the GI Bill) in the Coyne Electrical School in Chicago, and left New England for the first semester of school.“Then he came back and said, ‘Let’s get married.’ The wedding was on Dec. 26 and they left that same day for Chicago. They drove there in a ratty old car with holes in the floorboards.”Clearly his future wife saw potential in her groom, and he seems to have rewarded her faith by not only being, according to everyone interviewed for this article, a hard worker and a visionary entrepreneur but also a kind and devoted family man and excellent father. After their return from Chicago, the Donovans moved into a house on Gay Street and opened an appliance store in the barn out back. The business grew and as Donovan made plans to expand he also began planning out the future shopping plaza. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, according to First Selectman (and Sharon native) Bob Loucks, there used to be multiple small retail businesses all around the town.“There were two grocery stores and two package stores on West Main Street,” he said. “There was another grocery owned by Al Jenkins on the Green. And there was one in the Sharon Valley owned by the Middlebrooks, across from the Sharon Valley Tavern.” Several stores in town “Ray was from Maine and in his travels he must have seen that small shopping centers were a thing that was coming,” said Rick Hotaling, also a Sharon native and the owner of Rick’s Wine and Spirits in the plaza. “At that time, there were a number of stores here, Sharon was like other little towns. You didn’t have one big market, you had little markets, where you could get Bond Bread or buy your Red Ball Keds.”Back then, he recalled, what is now the plaza was just a field, with one big house on the corner. “They used to have carnivals there,” Hotaling said. “Someone used to come and sell fireworks out of a bus. I remember playing baseball there. What’s now the Salisbury Bank and Trust branch office was my great aunt’s house. We used to hang out there after school and play baseball. What’s now the entrance to the shopping center across from the bank was home plate.”It got harder to play as buildings began to grow, one at a time in the plaza. At a certain point, Hotaling recalled, “we’d have to stop playing and go get our ball off the roof of the pharmacy.”In winter, he said, “there was ice skating out in front of the laundromat and what’s now the Bodhi Tree gift shop. Once the first grocery store went in, mom could shop at the market and we could skate.”Donovan had laid out the rink with plastic, filled it with a hose and even added lights and music for night skating.The first building to go up was in the space now occupied by the Black Goose Grill. Donovan’s plan was for it to be a restaurant or coffee shop; he made sure to install a take-out window on one wall. But he was his own first tenant, moving his appliance store in until a restaurant took over the space. Then he moved to the back of the building (what is now the salon) and began adding on new retail spaces, usually deciding what kind of business he wanted and then setting about finding a tenant. Carwash One of his innovations was the addition of a carwash in the spot where his house had been (that house was picked up and moved to the very end of Still Meadow Road in September 1964). The carwash was later closed down and a new building was erected for the post office, which up until that time had been housed at Town Hall.“My dad really wanted the post office in the plaza,” his daughter said. “The Postal Service said you can have the post office there if you can have it ready in 90 days. So he tore down the carwash and he and my mom worked every day painting the new building and getting it ready and it was finished in 90 days.” Much of the masonry work there and throughout the plaza, according to everyone in town interviewed for this article, was done by the Amerighi family. “He was fearless,” Debbie Donovan said of her father. “He knew what he wanted.”But he was the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove, according to most accounts. His daughter said he was wonderful to live with, and had a terrific sense of humor. Both Hotaling and Loucks said he was a quiet man, soft spoken, but, said Hotaling, “When he said something, you really wanted to be listening.”And as is often believed to be the case with a man who gets a lot done, much of the credit for Donovan’s success goes to his wife. Donovans were a team“He and Roberta worked as a team,” Loucks said. “And they were a tremendous team.”They ran the plaza together until about five years ago. Now the operations are handled by the three daughters, Debbie Donovan, DeeDee Mandino and Rindy Higgins. The sisters have upgraded the plaza and succesfully enticed the Choe family and their Sharon Farm Market as the anchor grocery store.Now they are trying to find a replacement business for what used to be the laundromat (“It’s too expensive to run a laundromat at the plaza,” Debbie Donovan said, “because water in Sharon is so expensive.”). The family is hoping that perhaps someone will open a housewares/hardware/kitchen supplies business. Because the family members have expertise in retail, they are willing to guide and coach a new owner. Town residents do seem to be aware of it when storefronts are empty in the plaza. It’s not necessarily the tax impact. According to Tax Collector Donna Christensen, the plaza itself barely makes the list of the top 100 taxpayers for the entire town, ranking at number 97 (with a combined tax bill of $17,324.68). The individual businesses each pay a few hundred dollars in property taxes (although Webster Bank pays $2,983.24). Harbinger of economy There seems, rather, to be a spiritual sense that when the plaza is thriving, so is the town.“The plaza is the heart of our town,” Loucks said. “We felt that when we were missing a market for a year and a half, the impact it had on the town.”Ray Donovan’s legacy lives on in the plaza. But for those who remember him and for his wife, family and friends, his death is still a loss. “I had a lot of respect for the guy,” Loucks said. “We were friends. I miss him.”
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Greg Fricke and James Boehmer, co-owners of Peggy Mercury in Kent, recently launched their first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts.”
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Fricke and Boehmer are not there to stock their shelves with the same products customers find at standard makeup retailers. They’re there to help customers find what works for them. That usually means asking customers about themselves and learning about their beauty habits, skin, style and the way they like to present themselves. Fricke and Boehmer believe it’s their job to help customers bring out the qualities that suit them and determine what works best for their look.
So much of the Peggy Mercury world is about emboldening people to become more creative, and possibly bolder, versions of themselves. Some of this comes through the store’s creative collaborations with artists, designers and stylists.
It’s part of an ethos that encourages them and their friends to use the shop as a kind of laboratory, trying out new creative experiments without knowing how they might turn out. Whether in fashion, painting, fiber arts or photography, the projects almost always turn out marvelously.
A line of sterling silver charms they sell started as a small project by their friend Nolan Percival. In the beginning, the pieces were for close friends and loved ones. But Boehmer and Fricke encouraged Percival to get a little more serious about the project and create a whole line for the store. Today, it’s one of their top-selling collections.
Classic styles, bold colors, and creative concerts make up the “Imaginary Concerts” line at Peggy Mercury.Provided
“Imaginary Concerts” has the duo taking their own advice.
The project started as a way for Boehmer to connect with his mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Taking old concert shirts from his own collection, Boehmer and his mother began cutting out the graphics with the idea that they would make a quilt together. Unfortunately, she died before they could complete the project in 2025. The pieces, which were ready for production, were put on the back burner as Boehmer and Fricke dealt with their loss and the whirlwind of projects that never seemed to cease at Peggy Mercury.
But the harsh winter of 2026 presented an opportunity to take some time and focus on themselves. Part of that meant revisiting and redefining the concert T-shirt project. This time, instead of looking to the warmth and comfort of a quilt, they turned to another passion — fashion.
Taking a page from their own book, they wanted to create something that felt comfortable to them. They took two disparate loves — one rooted in simple preppy style, with clean lines and classic silhouettes, and the other in the nitty gritty worlds of punk rock and pop — and blended them together to create something entirely new. Pulling from the staples of vintage Brooks Brothers and Charvet collections, they applied the graphic elements with bold stitching reminiscent of punk jackets of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but with a much more sophisticated air.
But the remixing isn’t just the pairing of prep and punk. The pieces are not canon. They take liberties with the realities of concert tours, combining one band’s dates with another band’s logos, mixing them all up until the reality is lost and imagination is the only truth.
Shirts from Peggy Mercury’s first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts,” hang on display.Provided
Adding to the mix is an element of perpetual creativity. Art can be messy, both figuratively and literally, and many of Fricke and Boehmer’s artist friends carry evidence of their work on them at all times. As a nod to these tireless creatives, the duo added haphazard splashes of bright color, giving the line an even more distinctive feel.
For them, “Imaginary Concerts” passes the “Peggy Test.” The mythical Peggy Mercury is a fictional figurehead for the company, a character who thrives on creativity and change. The name, much like the clothing line, is a mixture of interests: Mercury is a planet, a deity and an elusive, transformative element, while Peggy is the wonderfully stylish and boundary-pushing Peggy Guggenheim.
Everything Fricke and Boehmer put in their store has to pass this test: Would Peggy Mercury approve? For their first collection, the answer is a resounding yes.
Peggy Mercury is at 9 Maple St., Unit 2, Kent.
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