BY DEB AND TIM SMITH
As the sun slowly set at the Rush end of Rush Mendon Road, the fleeting rays of autumn sunshine began to creep below the protection offered by the fire-red umbrellas dutifully guarding the tables at The Cottage Hotel of Mendon. The two kindred and free-spirited women engaged in conversation on that fateful fall day were the current owner of the Cottage, Hilary Stott, and a former employee of the Cottage, Karen Mireau.
Among the many hats worn by Karen, it is in her current capacity of poet and author that the Spirit of Mendon’s past has called her home from California to deliver on a destiny lying dormant for decades. This is a story both sparkling and spiritual, a tale we felt compelled to tell.
So to rewind, how ‘bout we begin by tackling those decades of dormancy we alluded to above. During the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Karen tended bar at the Cottage and lived in the hamlet (on Mendon-Ionia Rd. next to the bridge) while majoring in English at the University of Rochester. The owner of the Cottage at the time was one John Urquhart Ross. But he was universally known and addressed as “Burdock” – it was a different era.
Burdock specifically, and the Cottage in general, had a profound effect on Karen during those formative years. We, with Karen’s literary assistance, will expand upon that premise moving forward over the next few weeks. But having established the depth of the relationship, it will go without saying that when Burdock took his life on October 19, 1981, a devastating toll was taken upon Karen. As she reflects, “It was 20 years before I could bring myself to drive down Route 64, no doubt because there were so many memories lying in wait. It took another 20 years to be able to set those experiences down in writing.” She was finally able to accomplish this in her book Tell Me Again That the Dead Do Dream – The Mendon Poems.
Here’s our poetic take…
From life’s grand carousel
And those times raising hell
There are stories to tell
Like that tragic death knell
And one final farewell
From The Cottage Hotel
It was that book of poems, inspired by Burdock and the Cottage that brought Karen back to Mendon last year, during the fall of 2022. Those were the circumstances behind the Hilary-Karen connection that kicked off this Sentinel saga. And as we in the writing world well know, it’s not surprising to find that sometimes one thing leads to another, in this case Karen’s follow-up The Cottage Hotel: The History & Untold Tales of Mendon Hamlet’s Legendary Stagecoach Inn & Tavern.
For the first time, please allow us to invoke Karen’s own words to pontificate upon what happened at that meeting… “I never expected to be writing this [newest] book until I had lunch with Hilary while I was researching a book of poetry about the Cottage and Burdock last October. In that meeting, she looked at me, tilted her head in typical Hilary fashion and said, ‘You should be writing a @*$%* history of The Cottage Hotel.”
“In that moment of epiphany, it was as if a light had suddenly come on. That very day on October 19th (the anniversary of Burdock’s death), I started doing the research, and voila, some nine months later, here we are! Rather like birthing a baby… without the epidural.”
Now that we’ve set the table for where we are headed in this Sentinel salute, please allow us to hit the rewind button and pick up the Karen Mireau story at its inception. She graduated from Pittsford-Mendon High School and after that, she drifted south down Pittsford Mendon Road to spend those aforementioned formative years in Mendon.
All of which just blows us away with the acknowledgement of how in the world does a Mendon gal end up in the office of the CEO of NBC watching the debut episode of Cheers before most of the rest of America?! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here… more on that story later.
Karen moved away from Mendon as part of a back-to-nature initiative, and began “homesteading” a 50-acre farm in Canadice, with her husband, where she was growing all their food, hunting deer, quail, and pheasant, grinding grain, baking bread, chopping wood and heating the house with a wood furnace. She describes it as “your basic ‘70s hippy-dippy-back-to-the-land trip. Loved it! Farming had always been in my blood, as my grandparents had farmed along the St. Lawrence River.”
Karen was feverishly devoting herself to writing poetry at this time, composing much of the material that would eventually comprise her book… Some of her material was published, but it was a for-love rather-than-profit endeavor. And then October 19, 1981 rolled around and things would never be the same again.
“After Burdock’s death, my life seemed to fall apart rapidly,” Karen said. “I was going through a divorce, battling serious depression, and finally went to visit my best friend who was then living in Lexington, Kentucky. I worked for a time in a French bistro there where I became friends with some people working on a feature film. When the film was done shooting, they invited me to travel with them to Los Angeles, and I did.”
The L.A. gig almost immediately turned into a sojourn of sweet serendipity. The first job she landed was as a personal assistant to NBC CEO, Grant Tinker, and President of Entertainment, Brandon Tartikoff. Tinker was obviously drawn to Karen from the get-go because her interview consisted of just one question and her one-word response would not go down in the annals of oratory history.
Tinker asked, “What interest or experience do you have in television?” to which Karen’s honest response was, “None.” It was an innocently truthful answer prompting Tinker to smile from ear to ear and say, “You’re hired!”
“I imagine it was because clearly I was not star-struck,” Karen said, “and I was fairly articulate for a farm girl, but people were amazed. I was often asked, ‘How in the hell did you get a plum job like that?’ I suppose that if that had been my ambition, it probably never would have happened in a million years.”
An almost unbelievable event occurred on Karen’s first day on the job at NBC. She and Grant Tinker sat in his office and watched the “rough cut” of the pilot episode of the sitcom Cheers, the Boston bar “where everybody knows your name.” Karen was immediately reminded of The Cottage Hotel. “Maybe in my heart of hearts I felt that Diane was my TV doppelganger,” Karen said, “but all of the characters on the show reminded me of regulars at the Cottage.”
“My job with Grant and Brandon began as a temporary position, and after a year, they asked me to stay as a permanent employee. I turned them down. I was working 80 hours a week tending to these amazing, creative, wonderful execs – they were truly brilliant people, but by that time I wanted to have more hands-on experience in television and that was never going to happen in that position.”
From there, Karen moved into the Children’s Programming Department working on some of the most famous animated series of all time, such as Alvin & the Chipmunks and The Smurfs. She was also involved in some topical cartoons based upon live action icons of the era such as Mr. T and Punky Brewster. She used that experience to go on and form her own animation production company which created programming for NBC.
Following these halcyon Hollywood highlights, Karen’s life has been one of cross country adventures “although admittedly,” she says, “my life path has not been a particularly linear one.” Those aforementioned adventures took her from L.A. to Lexington, KY; to Berkeley, CA; to Southern Pines, NC, and finally back to Berkeley, CA.
It was here she met her husband Ray, a retired American Airlines captain and now an active street photographer. They are currently living in Sonoma, CA where Karen still maintains much of that vintage hippie chick vibe, continuing to write, garden, paint, publish, and shower her friends, family, and grandchildren with unending affection and love.
In 2008, Karen officially became a “Literary Midwife,” helping people write their life stories, and founded Azalea Art Press, a boutique publishing company specializing in putting beautiful, meaningful, and imaginative books into print. It’s been her bliss ever since.
And, allowing Karen to put it in her own words, “So my unpredictable wanderings (at least for the time being) have come to an end point, and although I continue to publish other authors on a regular basis, I am now spending more time working on personal projects such as the book on the Cottage Hotel.
How lucky I am and have been to have followed my bliss and never worried about what might happen next! Even though I have had many reversals of fortune, and some very, very dark nights of the soul, I always had faith that the right people and the right resources would come into my life, and that has proven time and time again to be true.
I must say, however, that this book has been one of the most soulful endeavors I have ever embarked upon . . . and it all began with Hilary Stott’s suggestion. The book has allowed me to connect with old friends, and to make many new ones along the way. But more so, it has allowed me to heal my own history from what was a terribly difficult time period and to acknowledge that without Burdock’s encouragement (and his death), I would never have been compelled to leave where I grew up and become the writer I am today. The Cottage was in many ways both a crucible and a portal to my future.”
