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10/05/2016 08:30 AMLongtime Madison residents will tell you of the days when the town’s main downtown block was filled with mom-and-pop businesses providing basic goods and services. The Madison Coffee Shop, located on the north side of the street, is one of the last surviving links to those days.
It’s easy to miss one mom-and-pop touch at the Coffee Shop: Every month for the past 21 years, Holly Magee, who owned the shop with her husband David until 2007, has redecorated the front window with a seasonal theme.
At press time, the window was filled with prize ribbons, trophies, and toy cows, chickens, and pigs, in honor of the Guilford and Durham fairs. Holly was planning to install the Halloween display early in October.
“I’ve been doing them for 21 years,” Holly says, “and each year I’m buying more and more stuff, so I do all 12 seasons.”
Some of the themes—Christmas, the Fourth of July—are obvious, others less so.
After Halloween, Holly says, “Everyone else in town goes right into Christmas, but I like Thanksgiving.”
For August, the theme, involving a lot of sand and dolls, was “Barbie’s beach party.”
Holly keeps the decorations at her home, a cottage in the Neck Road neighborhood that, at press time, was already decked out inside for Halloween.
“Each window takes me about four hours by the time I take the stuff out and put the new stuff in,” Holly says. “But it’s the preparation before, getting it all together, so when I do get down to the Coffee Shop, it’s bing-bang-boom.”
Holly has been involved with restaurants nearly all of her adult life. She was born and raised in East Haven, graduating from East Haven High School in 1965. Her first job was waitressing at the Branford Howard Johnson’s. When she turned 21, she started bartending at the Howard Johnson’s on the Long Wharf in New Haven.
Her daughter, Michelle (“Michelle with two l’s,” Holly says), was the product of a brief first marriage. Holly moved with her second husband to Madison in 1977. She’s lived in the same home since 1978.
She met her third husband, David Magee, while tending bar at the now defunct Woodlawn restaurant, on the Post Road in Madison. He had a daughter, Michele (“Michele with one l,” Holly says), from a previous marriage.
Holly soon began working as a waitress at the Madison Coffee Shop. The daytime shifts made child rearing easier.
Holly had worked there for nine years before she and David bought the restaurant in 1989.
“He was the cook,” Holly says, “and I worked the front.”
Nearly 20 years into their co-ownership, David became ill.
“He ended up having to go on dialysis,” Holly says. “He had to go four times a week for four hours. Then I had to be caregiver at that time.”
Holly and David sold the Coffee Shop to Michele with one l and her husband, Wayne Martin. Holly says that the couple are “the same as Dave and I were—mom and pop.”
David died in early 2015, but Holly hasn’t returned to work at the Coffee Shop.
“It’s tough when someone else takes over,” she says of her son-in-law. “He’s a sweetheart, but it’s his business now.”
Still, Holly keeps busy.
“I love to cook,” she says, “so I cook my own sausage and peppers, corned beef and cabbage, stuffed peppers, ham and scalloped potatoes. I make big pots. I make a great fruit salad, all from scratch.”
She likes to share her food and her surplus tomatoes—she has two plants—with her Neck Road neighbors and with Michelle with two l’s, who lives in Guilford with her two sons, Dominick, 21, and Christopher, 15, and works for SARAH Inc.
She also helps takes care of Michele with one l’s daughter, Lily, 7, who has her own playroom in Holly’s house.
Holly says her neighborhood remains a good place for kids.
“They can ride their bikes and go down to the beach,” she says, “and there’s plenty of people to watch them if you let yours go. It’s a wonderful neighborhood. Everybody watches out for everybody.”
With the passing years, the average house size in Neck Road has grown while the average family size has shrunk. Holly’s Halloween purchases reflect that.
“The first year I was here,” she says, “I had 320 candies. I’m down to 200.”
In her nearly 40 years in Madison, Holly has seen the town change, but she isn’t one of those longtime residents who insist that everything was better in the old days. She says that people are as friendly as they ever were, and she praises the ongoing downtown renovations.
As for her own monthly contribution to downtown aesthetics, she says she decorates the Coffee Shop window simply because she enjoys it and it occupies her time. Sometimes, however, it can involve sacrifices.
Take, for example, Barbie’s beach party.
“Lily loses half of her toys,” Holly says, “because we take all of her Barbies—well, my Barbies.”
To nominate a Person of the Week, contact Tom Conroy at t.conroy@Zip06.com.