GRANBY — Every Halloween for half a century, Carol Pineo, a recently retired Hadley Elementary School art teacher, has made candied apples to hand out to trick-or-treaters and gift to family and friends.
In Granby, her home for the last 43 years, Pineo is known as the “candy apple lady.” Former students with their own trick-or-treaters now in tow come knocking on her door for the coveted treats. Hampshire College students and middle school sports teams have been known to stop by too.
“This is a nice community, it feels pretty rural but it’s only a couple hours to get to the ocean, or the mountains,” Pineo said. “It’s only a few hours to New York City. You can get anywhere from here, it’s great.”
Four boxes of candied apple mix make about 40 apples, each one served skewered on a Popsicle stick. Pineo uses a thermometer to boil water and sugar to exactly 302 degrees F to achieve the perfect “hard-crack” candy coating.
As for the apples, only Macintosh from Atkins Farm will do.
Pineo retired last June after 28 years of teaching, 20 of which were spent in the exact same room. During that time she facilitated her art classes painting murals around the school. Castle doors her sixth-graders painted above the pre-school, kindergarten, and first grade hallway keep the youngest students from getting lost, she says.
Apple dipping, too, is a messy art. When making candied apples en masse, Pineo uses a large pot to prevent the syrup from boiling over. The syrup cools fast, so the process starts smooth and ends when the last apple lands on the wax paper a lumpy, ghoulish, treat.
“It’s what my mother made us when I was a little kid because we were really poor,” Pineo said. “After all, buying apples and a bag of sugar is cheaper than candy.”
She grew with three siblings in Fall River. She left to study at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, married, and moved to Belchertown in 1967 when she started the candied apple tradition.
Her husband’s career moved them around Massachusetts, to Illinois, then Alabama, before settling in Granby to start a family.
“Being a Yankee in Alabama in 1970 was a challenge,” she said. “It was difficult. We wanted to start a family and I said no way, I wasn’t going to raise children in Alabama.”
In Alabama, Pineo began a 20-year stint as a Girl Scout troop leader. She says she was able to lead one of the first racially integrated troops in the state.
“That was one of my proudest moments. Getting these girls to know each other and like each other,” Pineo said.
As an educator, building cultural bridges may be what Pineo does best.
“She’s very talented in just about everything, not just art,” said Nancy Hampshire, Carol’s sister and new neighbor. “Her art classes are sociology classes, they’re history classes, they are math and science classes. She knows all about it.”
As an art teacher, Pineo tried to incorporate the rich cultural traditions of the Valley into every lesson. Around Thanksgiving, while other teachers gave lessons on the Pilgrims, Pineo taught her students to weave patterns on a bead loom as the Native Americans did. To recognize the dense Polish-American community in the Valley, Pineo taught her students “wycinanki,” the Polish art of paper-cutting. Having students break apart rocks from the Nash Dinosaur Track Quarry in search of fossils harkened back to the Valley’s prehistoric days.
“I’m not afraid to take chances and flop, then do it again,” she said.
The glazed apples cool for 15 minutes then Carol wraps each one in wax paper. In recent years she has seen fewer trick-or-treaters as her street competes with more expensive, newer neighborhoods close by.
“This street is changing,” Pineo said. “There used to be more houses that are occupied. We have some vacant houses, we have some snowbirds on this street.”
Pineo, now divorced with three grown children, keeps busy crafting, knitting, installing kitchen cabinets and living by her seasonal rituals. She is especially proud of the intricate chocolate and frosting eggs she makes in the weeks leading up to Easter. She likes to hold personal workshops with family and friends to teach them “That’s an important thing about teaching too. If you follow the steps, you can really do something great. I guess that’s just the teacher in me.”
Sarah Robertson can be reached at srobertson@gazettenet.com