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Francine Curto: Talking Turkey

Could it be? People are still wearing Bermuda shorts and flip flops and this story features Thanksgiving. Still, the beginning of the Liberty Bank Rotary Thanksgiving Dinner Drive is just weeks away. This year the Thanksgiving Dinner drive runs from Tuesday, Oct. 10 to Saturday, Nov. 18.

That’s why Fran Curto of Chester already has her mind firmly fixed on Thanksgiving. She’s heading the Chester Rotary’s fundraising efforts. The Rotary clubs on Essex and Deep River also hold Thanksgiving dinner drives. Liberty Bank adds 25 cents for every dollar contributed to the fund.

Fran will start collecting early for the Chester drive. She will be at the Rotary table at Chester Sunday Market on both Oct. 1 and 8. Checks collected at the Sunday Market will be saved to deposit at the Liberty Bank in Deep River when the fund drive officially begins on Oct. 10.

Chester Rotary opens a special account for the Thanksgiving Drive at the bank and those who wish to donate can make deposits there. People can also send checks to the club’s post box: Chester Rotary, P.O. Box 111 Chester, CT 06412. Checks should be made out to Chester Rotary with a note on the memo line that “the donation is for the Thanksgiving Dinner Drive.”

Deep River Rotary also collects for the Thanksgiving Dinner Drive at the Liberty Bank in Deep River, but using a different method. Jars are put out at the bank and people can drop in contributions. Arlene Pressman, who heads the Deep River drive, also puts collection jars at various locations around town. In addition, she sets up a table for just one day in front of Adam’s Market in Deep River for contributions. Pressman recalls an occasion when a shopper, who had just bought a lottery ticket and won a small amount, donated the winnings to the Thanksgiving Dinner Drive as he left the store.

According to Essex Rotary president Jordan Welles, the Essex club uses the Liberty Bank branch in Essex for its Thanksgiving Drive collections.

At the end of the Thanksgiving Dinner Drive, the Chester and Deep River Rotary clubs turn over the money they have raised to Rosie Bininger, the social service director for both towns, and she sees that gift cards and fixings for a festive dinner go to deserving families. Last year, according to Essex Rotary’s Welles, that club decided to donate the money it had raised to Shoreline Soup Kitchens.

“The important thing is that the money stays local,” says Toral Maher of the Liberty Bank Foundation, which has sponsored the drive every year since its inception in 2004.

That first year, the drive netted $32,000. Last Thanksgiving, according to Maher, the Liberty Bank Rotary Club Thanksgiving Dinner Drive raised more than $281,000 with the help of 41 Connecticut Rotary clubs. Since its first year, according to Maher, the program has raised a total of $1.7 million.

This is the fourth year Fran has headed the Chester collection drive, but she will have more time to devote to the project this year because she finds herself, as she puts it, “temporarily and involuntarily retired.”

She is a visual merchandise manager who created in-store and window displays for department stores, but the corporation that employed her closed the store in Hamden where she worked.

Display art, she says, demands a variety of skills.

“My years in visual had me using ladders, drills, various hand tools, and lighting; back in the old days we sometimes sewed our own tablecloths,” she recalls.

At one point she was in charge of the visual displays for 23 Steinbach stores throughout New York and New England.

Fran got into the visual merchandise display as a career because since early childhood she had wanted to be a painter, but feared she would not be able to support herself. She never gave up art, and these days works mostly with watercolors and pastels. Often her landscapes feature the view from her own backyard in Chester, including the Pattaconk Brook that runs along the property.

Fran moved to Chester a little over 10 years ago and joined Rotary after she saw publicity for the annual Lobster Fest and asked if volunteers were needed.

“I had such a great time as a volunteer that I joined,” she says.

Now, as a Rotary member, her official job at the annual event is to melt all the butter for dipping, about 30 or 40 pounds she estimates.

“I am absolutely covered in butter at the end,” she says.

At the yearly Chester Road Race on the 4th of July, Fran works parking cars in the lot at St. Joseph’s Parish Center. Most often people follow directions, she says, but there can still be occasional confusion. Once, Fran recalls it was necessary to break into a car blocking a lane.

“I don’t know what happened when the owner came back and found it in a completely different spot,” she says.

Now that she is retired, Fran, already a committed volunteer, would like to do more community work.

“Volunteering is more fun than a high pressure job,” she says.

She would also like to visit France again. Her mother, now 93, is French and came to the United States as a bride after World War II. Fran’s father had met her in France and returned to the country to marry her at war’s end. As a child Fran spoke French, but her mother was more intent at that point on learning English than teaching her children her own native language.

Fran grew up on the Jersey Shore, in Neptune, and she has heard all the classic New Jersey jokes and jibes. With no prompting, she asks the timeless New Jersey question to a reporter who once lived in the state: What exit? That’s the classic way two New Jerseyans geographically locate each other, not by identifying what towns they come from, but by what exit off the New Jersey Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway is nearest to their homes.

Fran will be down in New Jersey eating turkey with her family on Thanksgiving, but she hopes that Liberty Bank Rotary Thanksgiving Dinner Drive will make a more bountiful holiday for families in this area.