Zabarsky Family Burial Records at Sharon Memorial Park, Sharon, Massachusetts

Here's a brief "bookmark" for future writing about the Zabarsky family of St.Johnsbury (Vermont) Trucking fame.

High Holy Days in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, 1921

Records show that the Knights of Columbus acquired rooms in the Citizens Bank (now Union Bank) building, shown here, after the building's catastrophic fire in 1909 led to a new structure. The organization allowed use of its space by the Jewish community in 1921, as described in this local news article:

Caledonian-Record October 8, 1921

Jewish Services In K. of C. Hall

            Several families of the Jewish faith in St. Johnsbury are banded together in solemn observance of the Jewish new year. The service of prayer and fasting which began last week in Knights of Columbus hall will conclude next Wednesday evening. From 4 o’clock Tuesday afternoon until darkness spreads over the land Wednesday evening earnest Jews will be engaged in prayer and fasting. Business will be entirely at a standstill.

            The services of prayer in Knights of Columbus hall will be in charge of D. Zabarsky of Barton and I. Lavontil of Montpelier, and the families included in the solemn observances are those of H. Dolgin, A. Nurenberg, J. Arron and B. Goldstine of St. Johnsbury and Maurice Nurenburg of Hardwick. Mrs. Zabarsky and son, Harry, of Barton are here for the celebration of the holy days.

Growing Up in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, in the 1920s through World War II: Irene Dolgin Goldstein - Third Interview: Getting Married

[Mrs. Irene Dolgin Goldstein, interview 3, March 17, 2015, by phone - Beth Kanell]

Railyard would be on far side of river, left part of photo.

Mrs. Irene Dolgin Goldstein – “Irene” – made a correction to one date in interview 2, mentioned that her father had a siding and scrap yard near the railroad tracks, and said that her father’s arrival date in St. Johnsbury should instead be “after 1910 and before 1916.” [No archived materials address this; we only have the 1920 Census showing Irene’s parents, Harry and Frances Dolgin, living in St. Johnsbury with their son “Aron” (that is the Census record, although Irene says her brother’s name was always Arnold) at age 1 year, 11 months. I will keep searching.]

 Irene’s family home was at 113 Portland Street, St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Across the road was 80 Portland Street, which included a filling station. There, her father built an office, and a platform scale that could weigh up to one hundred thousand pounds, so it could weigh a big tractor or trailer, says Irene. She added that her father installed in later years steam heat for the scale, so it would work in the winter. “The police used to come by with some driver with his truck loaded and it would be [shown on the scale to be] overloaded, and they were so happy with that!” Also pleased with the scale was the Cary Sugar Company (now Maple Grove) further east on Portland Street. “Trucks bringing maple syrup [to the maple sugar company] would weigh before and after unloading. It was convenient, just down the road.”

Cary Maple Sugar Co., photo from about 1960; would become Maple Grove.

Irene learned to drive on a 1920 Oakland. “Everything had standard shift.” It belonged to “the girl who worked in the office” (her father’s office), and Irene’s mother arranged for this office worker to teach Irene in that car. The first car that she owned was a 1939 Ford convertible, “the last year they made the rumble seat.” Then a cousin of hers had an accident in a convertible, and Irene’s father took her convertible away, replacing it with a 1941 Pontiac.

1920 Oakland automobile

The driving test was in St. Johnsbury, although no particular office location came to mind. Helen, the office worker, took Irene in that 1920 Oakland. There was a written test first, and then they “drove around, not too long.”  As a new driver, she especially noticed how challenging it was to handle a standard-shift car going uphill: “Going up Eastern Avenue in the winter could really be something.” One time, she noticed a line of cars at the bottom of that hill, so without thinking much about it, she detoured to the shorter (and steeper, but less traveled) Sand Hill, made it all the way up just fine, then realized afterward that it could have been a bad choice!

As a girl, Irene wanted to be a nurse. “However, in those days, nurses did the dirty work,” and her dad said, “No daughter of mine is going to lug bedpans, period.” So instead she “did secretarial training.” She didn’t go to college because of the war (World War II). As she reflects on her career today, she says she had a lot of fun in all her jobs. For example, she worked for her father, and when he bought a restaurant, she’d sometimes help in there. “I learned how to carry a tray when they were shorthanded.” She also learned from her father’s business about scrap iron and metal: what they were, how they were treated. “And everything to me was learning. You can learn so much from different jobs.”

As another example from her career, later, when she lived in Montreal, she got an “entirely different job for a small firm importing textiles from around the world. I worked with letters of credit, and foreign exchange, and it was so great!” She worked four hours per day at that time, so she could be home for her kids after school. She took her work seriously, even though she enjoyed it, and one time the bank said her business had overdrawn one of its letters of credit. Her boss said to go home and not worry about it, but she went through all the numbers and worried all weekend – and on Monday showed that the bank had made the error, not her! [Later, she would work in Malden, Mass., for a building supply company, including bricks, and enjoyed learning that, too.]

Filene's on Boston, where Irene's mother bought the wedding dress.

Irene married at age 20, in Boston on February 22, 1943, a few weeks before her birthday. Her fiancé was in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and he suddenly got word of his leave being approved. It was okay’d on February 1, and Irene went to her mother and said “I’m getting married on February 22.” That put everyone into a rush to prepare – especially her mother. Three weeks! Her mother said, “Pick up the phone and call your aunt” [in Boston], who was a whirlwind at getting things done. Irene’s aunt said, “Tell your mother to get down her tomorrow and we’ll get started figuring things out.” Together, Irene’s mom and aunt rented a Boston-area hall for the wedding and printed up invitations. “Then they went to Filene’s Basement [famous dress shop in Boston, with a “basement” of wedding gowns] and my mother found a girl about my size and had the girl try on a gown” that seemed right. It fit, and Irene’s mother bought it. Then her mother came home, and the next task was to address all the invitations to Irene’s family members. Next, they went to Montreal to give invitations to Irene’s fiancé’s family to send out. Irene’s recollection is that her family had to provide checks for the Canadians to travel to the wartime wedding, so the Canadians could prove they were “not taking money out of the country.”

The dress was ready and right, but Irene had to go to Boston herself and, with her aunt, go purchase her headpiece and veil. About 250 people would be coming to her wedding. And now she had another challenge: Her older brother was in the service and stationed at Camp Gruber in Oklahoma, close to being shipped overseas to the war. All leaves had been canceled. But Irene was determined to have him be her best man. She sent a letter to Lieutenant Colonel Carver, who was head of his group, Rainbow Division. She said it was important to her to have her brother take part in the wedding, especially since he was being shipped out and she “might never see him again.” Her brother was given two weeks of leave, even though nobody else was getting any!

It was a big favor she’d been given, so she went to Cary Maple Sugar Company and got a case of maple syrup and sent it to the Lieutenant Colonel – her brother had told her that they didn’t have maple syrup in Oklahoma. Soon Irene “got a lovely letter back, the Lieutenant Colonel’s children had fun, they had only ever had molasses before.”

At the wedding, “the fellows were all in uniform.” Irene and her new husband stayed in Boston for a couple of days of sightseeing, then took the train to Montreal to see her new father-in-law, who had been sick and couldn’t come to the wedding. [Irene notes that this marriage, which took her to Montreal to live, lasted about 16 years; her other marriage was to Sam, also an airman, and lasted 34 years: “Every day was special.”]

At this point in the interview Irene took time to talk about the family years in St. Johnsbury again. She recalled other Jewish families in the area with the names Prolman and Brody, who were in-laws of each other. She also mentioned the Zabarskys, who “used to live in Barton. Daniel, the older one, was a junk dealer and would go with the two boys with horse and wagon to peddle” and would stay at the Dolgin home in St. Johnsbury. But Irene’s mother decided there really was not enough room for three extras, so she told Harry, Irene’s dad, to give the Zabarskys money for a hotel room, although they continued to come share meals.

Irene has in her papers a receipt written by her mother, accepting a cow as payment for a car at the family business – the cow was worth more!

Hilda Handy's family members, at their St Johnsbury ice house.

The family home at 113 Portland Street had a garage and office on the first level. The home, upstairs, had its own separate entrance, on the right of the building. The kitchen was 18 by 18 feet, and it was a lovely home. Irene’s dad would try to be home for supper each day, so they all ate together. Lunch was a family meal as well. When Irene was a teen, attending St. Johnsbury Academy on the other side of town, she would run home a mile and a quarter in fifteen minutes. Going back was an uphill trip, so sometimes she’d go over to her friend Hilda Handy and get a ride with Hilda on the Handy family ice truck back to school.

-- BK

The Zabarskys and St. Johnsbury Trucking: A 20th-Century Force of Economic Development

In the early 1900s, probably between 1906 and 1911 (the stamp on the form is too faint to read), Daniel Zabarsky become a US citizen. Born in "Tsartorea," Russia, in 1871, he'd married Ida Shusterman from Russia and arrived in Chelsea, Massachusetts, for his new life. And in a few years, the couple would have a large family in northern Vermont. Two of their sons, when grown, would make St. Johnsbury, Vermont, a name familiar to people all over the Northeast through their long-haul trucking firm: St. Johnsbury Trucking.

How Daniel reached America in 1906 is worth noticing. Ancestry.com explains: "In the port cities on the east coast of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, many charitable organizations aided immigrants arriving from Europe. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was one of these organizations. There were 'ethnic' or 'immigrant' banks in many port cities ... where newly-arrived immigrants tended to settle. ... a place where recent immigrants could save money and arrange to bring their families to the United States." Daniel Zabarsky arrived in early 1906 on a steamship ticket from one of these: the Blitzstein Bank.

Harry's World War I registration card

Daniel's birthday is recorded as November 1, 1871, and his wife Ida's as December 25, 1877 ; "December 25," like "July 4," was a date often assigned when an immigrant didn't know her or his actual date of birth, and that seems likely for Ida. Records show a son, Harry Daniel Zabarsky, born in 1899 or 1901; another, Milton R., who would be nicknamed Mickey, born in 1907; a sister Betty in 1909; and Maurice, arriving in 1918, would be noted at the hospital in Newport, VT, as the sixth child of these parents. Daniel was a "driver" at the time of naturalization; his sons Harry and Mickey became truck drivers, too.

Younger brother Maurice's birth record

Harry's story is the better known one. According to the Bangor (Maine) Daily News of June 4-5, 1988, in spring 1920 Harry's work involved driving a Ford truck along the back roads of Barton, VT, collecting milk from dairy farms, delivering it to the creamery (milk processing plant) in town. He also took on some other hauling. When he hauled a truckload of furniture up from Boston for a summer resident, the rest of that resident's belongings came by train -- and didn't arrive until three weeks later. Said the Maine paper, "Zabarsky realized the possibility of long-haul trucking" at that moment.

He chose to start his long-haul business in St. Johnsbury. "For a short time in 1921, he hauled milk to the creameries and delivered ice cream to local hotels, but the road to success started with the decision to deliver meat door to door to the resort hotels in the area."

Harry's brother Mickey joined him, and the two began hauling butter to Boston from creameries in Vermont. By 1927 they had six trucks and delivered milk to Arlington and Somerville, Massachusetts. In 1929 the company established headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., but the terminal in St. Johnsbury continued active (and much later would become a computer hub for the firm). The Great Depression nearly wiped them out, but they recovered and in 1938 expanded into Maine. The trucking business eventually became an icon of New England, with depots in many states and boldly marked truck trailers. In 1975 the Zabarskys sold their business to Sun Carriers, Inc.; in 1988, when the Maine paper reported on the company, it had more than four thousand employees and provided freight service to fifteen northeastern states and two Canadian provinces.

But as the Interstate Commerce Commission changed its rules, and the trucking business became dominated by fewer, larger firms, St. J Trucking met its end on June 15, 1993, with the announcement that it would close. It was a "victim of the deregulated road," said news accounts.

Few thought of St. Johnsbury Trucking as founded (and long owned) by Jewish brothers. Nor did the Zabarskys take on any large roles within the Jewish congregation, although their accomplishments were recognized within the synagogue community. Yet Harry's wife Molly was an active member of the early Beth El Sisterhood, and at least one Beth El gathering was held at Harry and Molly's spacious "cabin."  The Jewish roots of the Zabaarskys were undeniable: Harry, for instance, married Molly Fruchtman (born in Australia, 1903) at the "Jewish Share Hashomayium" in Quebec, Canada, about two hours from Newport, VT, and a very large Jewish center then, as now.

Harry Zabarsky died in 1982 in Boston; Mickey died in 1995 in Needham, Mass. A road in St. Johnsbury bears their name, and St. Johnsbury Academy owns the property where Harry and his wife used to welcome guests.
**
A note to St J Trucking fans: I was unable to find a photo of a St Johnsbury Trucking vehicle that was available for use here. If you have one you'd like to share, please do!