Cheap Travel Guide

Just back from a one week vacation, what do I decide to do? Write an entry publicizing another inn of course.

Actually there is some sense in this, in a roundabout, six degrees of separation kind of way. First, Tom Poston died a couple of days ago. He played played George Utley, the slow, inept handyman on the Bob Newhart Show. That show placed Newhart as the owner of a Vermont inn called the Stratford Inn, and surrounded the laconic actor with a wild assortment on deranged people, most notably the brothers Larry, Darryl, and Darryl who looked like three extras from a droll, Vermont-style Deliverance movie. It was Newhart’s longest running show, starting in 1982 and wrapping up its run in 1990.

We are asked from time to time if that inn actually exists. In fact, it does although different from the TV icon. It is called the Waybury Inn and it’s located not too far from us on Route 125 in East Middlebury Vermont. The Waybury’s web site has a page devoted to its famous TV connection. The Waybury exterior was shown during the TV show’s opening although it is now painted green instead of the white color it was back in the 1980’s.

Coming back full circle to Tom Poston, and just to prove once again that you cannot judge a book by its cover, it turns out that in real life Poston could not have been the fumbling goofball he played on stage. He was a highly decorated WWII airman who entered the US Army Air Corps as a private and attained the rank of captain in just five years, serving in North Africa, Italy, France, and England.

(c) 2007 Jeff Connor Grunberg Haus

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