MEXICO — After volunteering with his teenage friends to fight in Vietnam in the early 1960s, Rollie Bousquet was shocked to learn that he couldn’t go.
Papers the 17-year-old seaman in the Naval Reserve received weren’t his expected documents to go to war. Instead, in 1964, the Bridgeport, Conn., native was honorably discharged for a medical reason. Years went by before he learned the reason — a blocked artery in his right leg.
Fifty-two years later, Bousquet, 69, of Mexico, has rekindled that sense of duty and guilt into providing free home-cooked meals once a month to veterans, their spouses and children at his function room, The Paper Plate, at 55 Main St.
“I never did active duty and it bothered me, so I guess this is my way of doing my duty,” Bousquet said. “It’s my way of saying, ‘Thank you,’ to those who served.”
He accepts cash donations to help pay for the food, but is dismayed to see veterans who come in for the meals dropping $5 bills into the glass donation jar. “They can come here and eat for free, they don’t need to pay anything,” Bousquet said.
Veterans — whether or not they served in wartime— have a place to sit and relax from 3 to 8 p.m. on the third Tuesday of each month while he serves them a meal. He doesn’t serve alcohol or allow smoking, and stresses that what he’s doing isn’t a soup kitchen or offering handouts to nonveterans.
Bousquet started the effort Jan. 20, posting fliers ahead of time and handing them out to veterans organizations in the River Valley area. He also put a Veterans Appreciation Day sign on the building fronting Main Street. He cooked 10 gallons of soup. No one came.
Rather than let it go to waste, he froze a few gallons and took the rest to Regional School Unit 10’s Dirigo Elementary School in Peru and gave it to the teachers, one of whom is his wife of nearly 38 years, Suzanne Bousquet.
Rollie Bousquet is a retired school bus driver and custodian of several years for Rumford schools in the former School Administrative District 43.
For his next feed on Feb. 17, he again advertised the free meal and cooked several gallons of chicken stew. It attracted one couple.
Still undeterred, he sought help from friends on Facebook to spread the word for the March 17 feed. Only this time, figuring people weren’t coming because they were working, Bousquet served the meal later in the day — 3 to 8 p.m. And, because it was St. Patrick’s Day, he made three “nice rounds” of corned beef and three or four gallons of cabbage soup.
“It was a big improvement,” he said of changing the time and using Facebook to spread the word.
The feed attracted 11 people, one of whom was a female veteran from New York who saw his homemade sign on the sidewalk outside the function room. Topped with two American flags, it read, “Welcome Veterans. Come on in, the food is on us, 3-8 p.m., or ’til we run out.”
But, Bousquet said, the New Yorker stopped in because she was lost, saw the sign and figured he’d know how to get to the Veterans Administration building in Rumford. He did, told her about the free meal, and she returned for it.
Bousquet’s next free veterans meal will be from 3 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 21. He’s making chicken stew. “I hope like hell I get more people,” he said.
Bousquet’s mother bought the two-story building in 1962 and raised her family there. She didn’t want him to go to Vietnam after he served 2½ to three years in the Naval Reserves. Rollie bought the building from his parents in 1978 and opened a variety store, Puff-N-Stuff, on the first floor.
In 1987, while transitioning from a variety store to a sporting goods store, he and his wife lost $40,000 to $45,000 in merchandise and personal belongings to the flood of 1987.
Since then, he’s renovated and rented the first floor out to several people for hair and beauty salons, sold it and bought it back and renovated it again. It has a lounge, kitchen area with a kitchenette, a large cloak and coat room, a handicap-accessible restroom, and a dining area with enough tables and chairs to feed more than 25 people.
He opened for business in November 2014 and rents space for baby or bridal showers, birthday parties, small group parties and business meetings.
“It’s as convenient as I could make it. I hope, in time, it will get better,” he said.
For more information about The Paper Plate Function Room at 55 Main St. in Mexico, visit www.facebook.com/thePaperPlateFunctionRoom or call Rollie Bousquet at 357-6834.
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