Lebanon
“We interviewed chefs by having them prepare a meal,” Fried explains. Candidates were allowed to bring their own “helper.” Bergeron brought his young teenaged son Jason.
Fried invited a panel of “friends and neighbors” to the restaurant to sample Bergeron’s cooking skills and render judgment. Then the hot plates began flying out of the kitchen: meatloaf, spaghetti and meatballs, Swedish meatballs, burgers, London broil, fried potatoes, boiled potatoes, mashed potatoes, a feast of hearty comfort food.
“Within 10 minutes there was no doubt in our mind,” Fried recalled. “Moe was a Godsend.”
He was hired on the spot.
Maurice “Moe” Bergeron, who retired as the head chef at Lou’s in 2008, died from lung cancer on New Year’s Day at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, surrounded by his wife, Jan Bergeron, all nine children and six of his 26 grandchildren. He was 73.
As a young man, with his tousled hair, handle-bar mustache, wide grin, turtlenecks and banterweight physique on a 5’10” frame, Moe Bergeron could pass for the pop star Sonny Bono. Later in life, his black hair turned white, thinned on top, and he grew a close-cropped beard in winter. Never weighing more than 130 pounds, Bergeron in family photographs invariably is smiling, holding a son or daughter, relaxing in camping chairs with his brothers and sisters at the lake on vacation, or twisting on the dance floor at weddings.
“Outside of work, his life was family,” Bergeron’s youngest son, Jason Bergeron, 36, said. “That’s what he loved. He was a homebody.”
The Bergerons remain a close-knit family. All nine of Bergeron’s children — five from his first marriage, three who came with Jan from a previous marriage, and one born to Moe and Jan — live in the Upper Valley, where they have raised their own children.
“I loved him,” said Wes Shipley, 48, who works for Hartford’s road department and was 3 years old when his mother, Jan Shipley, married Bergeron. “He was just a giving, loving person,” Wes said, his voice cracking. “He came to all my football games. He was my dad, you know?”
Born in Abercorn, Quebec, Moe Bergeron’s parents moved a few miles south of the border to Richford, Vt., when he was a young boy and where the family settled on a farm. It was a hard, sparse, life, recalled Marie Myott, Moe’s sister, but one filled with love, too, especially “every Sunday when there was a big dinner and all the family came over.”
And the Bergerons were a large family — although just how large is a matter of debate.
“My dad was the youngest of 15,” Jason Bergeron said.
“I thought it was 14?” Jan Bergeron challenged.
“It’s 12 or 13,” offered Mark Bergeron, Moe Bergeron’s eldest son.
Myott, who lives in Vernon, Conn., settles the question: It was 13, nine boys and four girls of which Mo — ” ‘Moe?’ His name was Maurice. I still call him that. His wife don’t like it but I don’t give a damn,” Myott, 78, insists — was the youngest and to whom she bestowed the nickname, “Bugger,” because, Myott explained, “he was a brat. He was always sticking his nose in when we were trying to do something.”
But, Myott assures, “he was a good kid, a very caring kid.”
Farm life was hard, Myott said, and everyone had chores, yet the bonds were tight. Maintaining family connection was important for Moe Bergeron, an example he passed on to his own children.
Long after the Bergerons sold the Richford farm and the siblings went their separate ways, Bergeron would continue to bring his own growing family every summer to vacation at a lakeside home in Franklin County owned by one of his sisters for what his son Mark Bergeron describes as lazy days of “playing horseshoes and drinking beer and telling stories.”
It was family, too, that brought Moe Bergeron to the Upper Valley in the early 1960s, following his brother Fernand who had already moved to the area. Moe got a job in the Enfield Woolen Mill. It didn’t last long. “He said it was the worst job he ever had,” Jason Bergeron said.
Moe next was able to find work as a dishwasher at the former Montshire Restaurant on Route 10 in West Lebanon. Soon enough, he expressed an interest to Jerry Hayes, the Montshire’s head chef, in learning how to cook. Hayes said he was impressed by Bergeron’s work ethic and willingness to do the grunt work that comes with the job.
“He was good. He wanted to work. He wanted to learn,” Hayes said. “You told Moe something and he would do it.”
At the time, Bergeron was still carrying the nickname his sister gave him. “Most everyone called him ‘Bugger,’ ” Hayes noted. “I don’t know what it meant. I can imagine.”
In the early 1960s Moe Bergeron met Linda Stockwell, of Lebanon, with whom he shared a background of being the caboose in a large family growing up on a farm: Linda’s family owned Stockwell Farm, and she and her twin sister were the youngest of 12 siblings.
Moe and Linda married and had five children: Mark, 52, who owns Bergeron’s Lawn Service and Landscaping in Hartford; Bruce, 49, manager of stores at Jake’s Market & Deli in Lebanon; Michelle Pringle, 48, of Enfield; Shane, 47, a stone mason; and Missy Kiernan, 46, a senior clinical secretary at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
Although the marriage was not to last, Moe and Linda remained friendly after the divorce, with Linda frequently sharing holiday meals with her former husband and his second wife, Jan. Later, Moe and Jan lived a few doors away from Linda on Romano Circle in West Lebanon, which afforded the opportunity for the kids to play together and shuttle back and forth between the two homes.
Moe and Jan had met when Moe, single again, went to visit his sister and Jan was there looking after his sister’s children. Jan, who grew up in Bridgewater and had thick raven-black hair, remembers the first time she eyed Moe as he came through the door, “with Mark on his shoulders wrapped around him like a monkey.” She was smitten.
Moe and Jan married in 1976 and she and her three children — Tina, 5, Wes, 3, and Shelley, 1 — crowded into a two-bedroom apartment with bunk beds on Ela Street in Lebanon (Moe’s five children with Linda were living with their mom).
Moe “never differentiated, he never thought of us in any other way than his own children,” said Tina Clarkson. Everyone looked forward to the weekend, when Moe’s five children with Linda would come over and spend the night at their father’s apartment. “We did a rotation each night with girls in the bedroom and boys in the living room,” Clarkson said. “It was a slumber party.”
They didn’t have a lot of money, but that didn’t stop anyone from having fun. Moe’s skill with motors enabled the kids to whip around on minibikes, and there were always enough players for wiffle ball, Clarkson remembers. There were the simple activities, too — a run to McDonald’s for hamburgers and then stopping off at the Lebanon airport to watch the planes take off and arrive.
Even though he was a professional cook, Jason, who was born to Moe and Jan in 1979, said his father never had a bad word to say about the golden arches. “He’d say, ‘It’s fast and it’s clean,’ ” Jason explained.
Moe loved cars, especially muscle cars, and during the late 60s and early 70s, he owned a succession of classics: a 1966 Chevelle SS 396; a 1970 GS Buick; a 1970 Trans Am 400; and an AMC Green Hornet.
And Moe drove them as they were intended. “They were more ‘go’ than ‘show,” Bruce Bergeron said. “He liked to drive them hard.”
Daughter Missy Kiernan tells of how her dad loved the roar of motors.
“The louder they were, they happier he seemed,” she said. Moe would amuse everyone by purposefully getting the engines to backfire, Missy described, the boom in the tailpipe sending everyone into squeals of delight. One of their favorite things, she said, was to sit on their dad’s lap while he let his kids steer the car around the sands pits in West Lebanon.
Besides cars and minibikes, Moe always had a boat and occasionally skimobiles. On one of the boats he kept at Lake Mascoma, Moe stenciled a shark’s mouth on the bow. “That’s how we all learned to water ski, all of us boys,” Wesley Shipley says.
Moe’s swimwear was a Speedo, and it was a favorite object of razzing in the family. “It was a thong, and with those skinny white legs,” laughs daughter Missy.
“Thank God he gave that up,” Jason Bergeron said.
Along with the hard play, Moe instilled early the values of hard work, his children said.
“One of the rites of passage, when we became 10 to 12 years old, dad would truck us off to work in the kitchen for a day, scrubbing floors, peeling shrimp,” Bruce Bergeron said. “I can’t tell you how many shrimp I peeled.”
Wes Shipley said he would “play hooky from school to go work with him” when his father was cooking at a restaurant in the ski town of Waterville Valley, N.H. “He had us peel potatoes, do prep work,” and in addition to getting paid there was the bonus of “free food, whatever we wanted,” Shipley said.
Sometimes working alongside their dad was the only way they could get more time with him, Jason Bergeron said. When Jason was in middle school, Moe got a job at the Greenhouse Café in Amherst, N.H. Moe spent four days a week working at the restaurant, sleeping in a camper in the restaurant’s parking lot. He would come home to Lebanon for three days and go back to work.
Jason said he loved visiting his dad, getting put to work in the kitchen doing “prep work,” and then savoring time alone with him — and enjoying the pan-fried, bacon-wrapped filet mignon that his dad cooked on a camping stove in the parking lot (with a side of ramen noodles). “That was our dinner,” Jason remembers.
Moe’s years of retirement were full with doing what he most loved: spending time around his family. Moe and Jan had always lived in rental housing, so one of the first things Jason did on land he had acquired in Canaan was build a modular house. Jason cleared the land with a dozer, Moe built the chicken coop, planted a garden, and painted the interior (base and finish).
“They always rented and never had their own house,” Jason said. “It was always my thing to give them their own home.”
Of course, the longstanding battle between Moe and Jan over room temperature — he liked it warm, she liked it mild — raged on in the new home, in which a wood-burning stove was fitted out in the corner.
“Moe always said, ‘I grew up cold, and I’ll never be cold again,’ ” Jan quotes her husband declaring.
And in true Bergeron style, a new family was born out of two: Jason got married and moved in with his wife, Meredith, and her two young children. Moe loved playing with his grandkids, even watching kids TV shows with them. He would point up to the sky at night and tell his grandchildren the “the brightest star is someone looking over you.”
Moe’s life slowed down in the winter of 2015 when, just after watching his beloved New England Patriots win the Super Bowl, he suffered a severe stroke. From then on Moe had difficulty holding a knife and swallowing — he could only eat soft food.
Moe knew the end was coming, family members say, and he didn’t hide it.
“Mama, you’re good woman,” Moe liked to remind Jan.
“I’m halfway to heaven,” he’d tell her at other times.
“I’m really going to miss you,” Moe would let Jan know.
“It was hard on Jason,” Jan said about her and Moe’s youngest, who in addition to expecting a third child — the baby boy’s middle name is already selected: Moe — was now his father’s principal caretaker.
Then, in the fall of 2015, Bergeron was diagnosed with pneumonia. Yet he never really recovered and a subsequent examination revealed “massive lung cancer,” Jason said. His dad had quit smoking in 2004.
Jason remembers when his father received the grim news from his medical team at DHMC he reacted calmly, saying politely “I really appreciate you guys being honest.”
Moe, who by this time was frail and barely able to stand, then rose and shook each and every hand of his medical team.
Moe was admitted into the hospital directly afterward. As his condition grew worse, the family members were called bedside and alternated with an around-the-clock vigil. “We took the whole corner of that floor,” Jason Bergeron said.
Moe Bergeron died on New Year’s Day.
One month later, on Feb. 1, Moe’s birthday, Jason and Meredith stood on the porch of their home in Canaan with their daughter, Charlotte, 7, and son, Andrew, 4. The sky was clear and a canopy of stars hung above them. They looked up and sang “Happy Birthday” to Moe, who would have been 74 years old.
After they finished singing, the family saw the brightest star twinkle, Charlotte said. The family knew instantly what that meant.
“It was Moe watching over us,” she said.
John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com.
