John Coletti was a quiet little man.
Did not want to be bothered much by society.
He was happiest just growing his flowers. They were a bright oasis in his otherwise
weed-strewn habitat.
They called John Coletti a hermit. When his story hit the newspaper, it was as the
Hermit of Bensalem Township.
I wrote the stories. It was my job to get to know the hermit.
There is no exact figuring how long John had been out there. He lived in a tiny
dilapidated shack, surrounded on all four sides by homes that easily stretched into the
two hundred thousand plus range.
The shack was set at the tail end of an expansive plot of land. The area in which he
resided was a natural fortress of trees and overgrowth. You could hardly see in, but
John could certainly see out. The only clearing on the property was a flower garden
off to the side of the scrap board, tin and tarpaper shack.
Coletti called it home. The flowers, his passion of many a year. He would
share them with the neighborhood kids. They all knew that John was back there.
They had followed the winding path in the thickets and found this kind, gentle
little man. He would send bouquets of flowers out with them, with the direction to
give them to their mothers.
It seems John did not receive notice that his property taxes were over due. I doubt
the mailman knew he was there. It took a child's eye to find this child's fantasy
existence. So he was never notified of his back taxes, and his plot of land had been
sold from out under him.
John waited to make his appearance until when a bulldozer started clearing the land.
He emerged real fast then, blocking the bulldozer's path and igniting the legend of
the Bensalem Hermit.
This is where I got involved in this tale. My job was to go out and interview the
hermit.
I do not know what I expected to find. Hermit, the very word brought a less
than joyful image to my mind. I kept thinking about people with long scraggly
beards, and bad attitudes, using half a tree trunk as their walking stick.
It was with some trepidation I followed that winding path in the wooded area that children
lightly skipped along with no thoughts or fears.
When I reached the little clearing where the shack stood, there on a tree stump sat the
Hermit. John Coletti looked anything but like what my perception of a hermit would
be. He was somewhere in his late 60s, clean shaven, bald headed, and moved with a
gentle nature. There was nothing at all threatening about this hermit.
The shack was dilapidated but neat in its own way. He had a small Sterno stove.
An ice chest for refrigeration. Lanterns for illumination. Nothing
fancy but nothing out of the ordinary or extremely eccentric either.
If there was a noticeable habit, it was his smoking. He chain-smoked cigarette after
cigarette. His cigarette of choice, those without filters. The smoke even
smelled strong from a distance.
It took a little while for the hermit to figure me out and for me to figure the hermit
out. He was not so eccentric not to realize his existence was in a precarious
existence. The silent bulldozer was only 25 yards or so from his house. And
although he had been out of the loop for a lot of years, he knew the power of the
press. He agreed to do an interview.
John said he was first generation in this country. His family which came from Italy,
settled in the Pittsburgh area. He was a tailor by trade. He had left
the family to come to the Philadelphia area. He had married and widowed along the
way. There were no children of the union.
And some how, some way, he slowly slipped into the isolation, solitude, deprivation of
this little shack in the woods. It was a lonely setting for a lonely old man.
He said he would occasionally read a newspaper. And even listen to the radio when he
had working batteries. There was a well-worn Bible near his bed. It was his
most used reading material. He was not totally out of touch. But his existence was
basically people-free with the exception of the children, who brightened his life
almost as much as the flowers that stood in the one cleared patch near his house. They
also were his legs, fetching food, and yes cigarettes, back to him from the local
grocery stores.
I took my story back to the office. It ran on the front page of the paper the next day.
It also got picked up by both AP and UPI, international wire services, and my story
of John Coletti, the Hermit of Bensalem Township was sent around the world.
The next day my phone rang. It was a call from Pittsburgh. The caller had read
the Hermit story and had traced it through the wire services back to me. It was
John's brother. They had not seen each other in over thirty years but reading the
story in the paper, he just knew it was his brother.
He asked me for more details. How his brother looked. If he had remembered him
when he was talking. John's memory was sharp, his recollection clear. He
had named off his relatives during the course of our stump-sitting interview.
The voice at the other end of the phone was one he had named.
I was due to check back in on John when I received a call from the local hospital.
John had been admitted with what they thought was pneumonia. He had asked hospital
officials if they could find the reporter fellow for him. By now, John was a minor
celebrity. The newspaper story had lead to television stories. This little
man's fight against the bulldozer even had made national news.
I was not sure if what I did had helped him or hurt him. John Coletti no longer was
able to hide away. The winding path to his little shack had been widened by all the
feet that had lately trampled back to interview him. His peace and serenity had been
shattered.
I felt a little sheepish going into the hospital room. I knew I had
helped turn John's life upside down. He was not mad though. He smiled and took my
hand. Then he began to thank me. Instead of being mad, he was thankful.
His brother had gotten in touch with him and was coming to visit him. They had
talked about him going back to Pittsburgh to live with the family.
He looked small and frail in that hospital setting. The battle against the bulldozer
and all the subsequent publicity seemed to have taken its toll on my hermit. And it
was a futile battle. While John was in the hospital, a court order allowed the new owner
to level what was John's home. It even smashed his pretty flower garden. I am
glad John never got to see that.
Turns out the bulldozer battle was not the only reason for John's drawn state. The
doctor pulled me aside as I was leaving. I knew him from past stories I had done
there. He told me that John had lung cancer. It was in a terminal state.
A few days later I had a chance to meet John's brother , Tom Coletti, when he came to
visit. John, now seeming even weaker, perked up a bit when he had his reunion with
his brother. His eyes brightened. They even spoke haltingly in Italian to one
another, remembering some of the things they had done in their youth..
Tom did not get a chance to take John home with him. John passed away a couple days
after he had been reunited with his brother.
I thought for me, the story now was over. I had chronicled the story of John
Coletti, the Hermit of Bensalem Township, from his discovery to his death. I did not
feel there was much left for me to say.
But there still was a post script to the story. The phone rang at the office and Tom
Coletti was on the other side. He asked if I would serve as a pallbearer for his
brother. He said most of his brother's friends were children, but that his brother
had spoke highly of me and how I had worked to reunite him with his family.
"Could you do this one last thing for my brother," Tom Coletti asked.
In the months this story took to cover, I had gone from fearing hermits to liking and
looking forward to sharing time with one. That little old tailor with the tattered,
well-read Bible, had become a friend. I loved to sit on the stump with him,
hearing his tales of old times and smelling the flowers he so carefully planted and
cultivated.
It was a Catholic service and I have to admit, I was not very familiar with anything that
happened but I knew the coffin that sat covered in the aisle contained a person I
considered a friend. And lying beside him was a tattered Bible that followed him
even into death.
At the conclusion of the service, we rolled the coffin to the waiting hearse. And
then it only was a short drive to the cemetery, which only was around the corner from
where John Coletti lived his life as a hermit.
The rest of the day seemed to go in slow motion. We marched the coffin to the open
grave. And there, after the committal service, John was lowered back down into the
earth. He would have loved the flowers that topped his grave. They looked like
his garden by that tiny shack. I bid farewell to the Coletti family and thought, now
the story is really over.
But as I watched the 11 o'clock news that night, preparing to call an end to the day. I
suddenly saw a familiar scene flickering across the screen. The station had sent
a crew to cover the burial of the Bensalem hermit. I had been so deep
in my thoughts and duties I did not even realize they were there.
It felt a little surreal to watch on television as the coffin was carried to the grave.
It was borne by two brothers, two nephews, a cousin and there at the very front, a
tall reporter who was bringing to a close, both a story and a friendship, with a little
man whose birth certificate said John Coletti, but who came to national attention as the
Hermit of Bensalem Township.
I think of John Coletti whenever I pass the cemetery, and from where I live, it is
necessary to pass it several times a day. But I really never went back to analyze
his story. People called John a hermit, but John probably would tell them he was
never alone.
Took me all these years to really write the end to this story. The clue to John's
existence was that tattered Bible. It provided the answer as to how he made it by
himself in that tiny shack, how he was able to remain hopeful without neighborly help.
John's home did not have electricity but he had tapped into an even higher
power. John had just depended on the Lord, and God's grace was sufficient for
his meager existence. John neither was alone or lonely. He was enjoying his
wilderness experience.
