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07/25/2018 08:30 AMMaybe you’ve met her at Our Lady of Pompeii’s Christmas Fair or at the food tent of their Summer Carnival. Maybe you remember her from Picone’s Fruit Stand. If you’ve lived in East Haven for long, you’ve probably met Antoinette Picone.
Nettie, who celebrated 90 years on June 28, married the late Angelo Picone in 1952 and came to East Haven the following year.
“We’ve been out here ever since,” Nettie says.
Nettie had been working in an office in New Haven, where her husband was a dental technician. Together with their three children, Gina, Peter, and Karen, they soon took over the family fruit stand to become fixtures of East Haven.
For the 25 years they ran the fruit store, Nettie says, “that’s where we stayed for months…until after Halloween.” They shut down until Christmas tree season and opened again for Easter flowers in April.
Carrying on the legacy of the family fruit cart, started by Angelo’s father in New Haven, Picone’s sold peaches, plums, strawberries and, especially, cherries.
“There wasn’t a time you’d go in a store that you didn’t run into a customer,” Gina says. “They never forget those cherries.”
“We enjoyed talking to the people and being there with the kids and the neighborhood,” Nettie says. “I enjoyed every bit of it. Yes, I did.”
Picone’s fruit was always fresh, Nettie says. Much of it was local produce from the Ceccarelli or Troiano farms.
“It was so nice meeting the people that came,” Nettie says. “My husband would give them recipes.”
In addition to the food brought in from around town and through New York, Nettie and Angelo grew their own strawberries. At one time, they had 5,000 strawberry plants to be picked by local kids.
Nettie says she enjoyed bringing fruit to those kids, who often returned to the field behind the fruit stand to play ballgames in the summertime.
“My mother and father were like everybody’s mother and father,” Gina says.
When Nettie became a grandmother, the fruit stand closed down so she could help to raise her grandsons, but the Picones were never far from the activities of their town.
She and her husband dedicated themselves to their grandchildren, all four still residents of East Haven. During their retirement, they babysat and, according to Gina, helped in the gardens of their children’s new homes.
“They were like garden fairies,” Gina says. “I’d come home and everything would be done.”
Her grandsons played football, baseball, basketball, and hockey in East Haven. This meant sometimes two or three games a day for the enthusiastic grandparents.
Nettie has been involved with Our Lady of Pompeii since it was built following the burning of the old parish church on Foxon Park. In fact, she watched the construction of the church, now a Route 80 landmark, from nearby Picone’s Fruit Stand.
Nettie recalls how Angelo used to open up the old church for first Mass and how the raising of the new building occurred slowly over time.
The Picones were deeply invested in the goings on at Our Lady of Pompeii. Angelo was a member of the Knights of Columbus and Nettie remains active with Our Lady of Pompeii’s Ladies’ Guild for which she once served as president. Over the years, she has helped the Ladies’ Guild through many church fundraisers.
She has chaired their annual Christmas Fair for 40 years now, helping to support the popular fair for all those years.
“Now I’m her co-chairperson, but she’s still the boss,” Gina says.
For some 25 years, Nettie was a common sight at the food tent’s register during Our Lady of Pompeii’s summer carnival, a posting she retired from only recently.
Wherever Nettie or her children go in East Haven, they are still remembered for the legacy of their family’s fruit stand by those who visited it.
Nettie also worked in Luigi’s Deli for a time, serving chicken parmesan, meatballs, and chicken cutlets to many of the same customers who used to visit her at Picone’s Farm Stand.
“It was a lot of years,” Nettie says, “and I enjoyed every bit of it.”