Trump-voting veteran Ed Timperlake and self-described “raging liberal” Elizabeth Fox are among the politically diverse friends Tom Pellegatta collected through a regular coffee klatch in Sperryville, Virginia. Photo / Carolyn Van Houten, Washington Post
Ted Pellegatta brought people together at a daily coffee shop gathering, helping to bridge political divides and combat loneliness.
Ted Pellegatta, the village eccentric here in rural Sperryville, Virginia, drove an ancient Honda Accord with a cracked bumper and a dinged-up vanity license plate that proclaimed: “RICH MAN”.
This was his joke, for Pellegatta had never been successful in any conventional sense. He did odd jobs his whole life and lived in a studio apartment attached to a vacant barn. He often stood outside a local restaurant hawking copies of his self-published books of poetry and photos to supplement his US$1000 ($1700)-per-month Social Security check. If you met him for dinner, you knew you were going to have to pay.
But Pellegatta died a happy man when he succumbed to metastatic cancer last month at the age of 85. When I visited him a few days before the end, he regaled me with favourite stories about favourite people, and he spoke the words we all hope to be able to utter on our deathbed: “I’ve had a great life.”
He could say this because Pellegatta prospered in what matters most for human happiness: he was rich in friendship. He was a Maga guy who was beloved by liberals. He was an old Marine, waiter and farmhand who made friends with all classes, ages and colours. “Oh, man,” he said of the parade of friends who came to his bedside in the final weeks. “It’s a wonderful feeling.”
His signature achievement was the coffee klatch he convened at the local coffee shop, Before & After, just about every morning for the past 10 years, and in other locations before that. Day after day, he’d sit in the front of the shop, wearing his cowboy hat (never mind that he was from Pennsylvania) over his wild silver hair, and serve as the unofficial chairman.
Anybody who walked in was welcome in the discussion. The ground rules were simple: show interest in one another (“If you’re up for what they’re doing, they’re up for what you’re doing,” Pellegatta explained to me) and refuse to fight (“We’re Quakers,” he joked). If an argument got too hot, he’d shut it down with a “meow”. If somebody was pontificating, he’d drop his head and snore. If the conversation annoyed him, he’d get up and leave – then start again the next day.
At a time when the country has been enduring an epidemic of loneliness, Pellegatta’s coffee klatch has offered connection for residents of Rappahannock County. At a time when half the country can’t talk to the other half, he found a way to get people to discuss and sometimes to argue politics while still respecting – and even loving – one another. At a time when social media is tearing us apart and driving some to heinous acts, this group is feeling the healing power of human contact.
Last week’s gruesome slaying of conservative leader Charlie Kirk was followed predictably by finger-pointing and cries for vengeance in many corners of the United States. But not at Before & After. One member of the coffee klatch, Sheida Jafari, an Iranian-born liberal, says she reached out to another member, Ed Timperlake, a political appointee in two Republican administrations who voted for President Donald Trump, to say, “Hey, I’m thinking of you, and I think it’s terrible that this happened”.
Timperlake was deeply touched. “That really showed the crossing of a barrier,” he tells me. It makes him feel that, if others can do the same, “there’s hope for America”.
Whether on the left or right, the coffee klatch regulars say their gatherings provide a bulwark against their common foes of loneliness and isolation. “The quality of life that it brings to a single man like me is amazing, the communication with like- and un-like-minded people,” says Ted Goshorn, 77, a former sharpshooter who now does HVAC work to make ends meet. “My kids and my grandkids are far, far away,” he tells me. With a finger on the table at Before & After, he says: “This is the most cherished spot in my life.”
Jafari, a 44-year-old real estate consultant who works remotely, carves out time for the daily gathering because she has craved human contact since moving to the rural community a few years ago. “I feel a little out of touch, even if I’m seeing things online.”
She says she can be annoyed when Goshorn, a MAGA man, invokes his “dark lord,” Trump aide Stephen Miller, and anti-trans talk about men in women’s bathrooms. “I literally want to eat my shoe,” she says. “That’s your concern? You blow my mind, man,” she’ll tell him. And then? “We move on. And I hug him before I leave.”
They range in age from their 40s to their 80s, working and retired, men and women, wealthy and just getting by, longtime residents and transplants. They talk about county happenings and gossip, as well as music, books and travel. In my short time with them, I heard unguarded comments about family members’ medical problems and marriage troubles and candid talk about sex and dating. Some days, only a couple of people show up; other times, as many as 30 might join the conversation, coming and going over the course of the morning and into the lunch hour.
Camden Littleton, a 56-year-old photographer and “hard Democrat,” says her coffee shop pals keep her grounded. “It’s insane what’s going on in America,” she says above the hiss of the steam wand. “So you come in here. It brings you back to centre.”
Elizabeth Fox, a self-described “raging liberal,” certainly wouldn’t have expected to be hanging out with a bunch of Trump supporters. But when she lost her husband, she found in them “that elemental sense of belonging. It sounds so corny, but there is just so much love here.” It taught her “that people are a lot more than their political inclination”.
Science confirms what Pellegatta knew intuitively in building his coffee klatch. As Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, leaders of Harvard University’s study of human happiness, wrote in their 2023 book: “If we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living … it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.”
Yet most of us are getting further from this ideal. The World Health Organisation reports that loneliness affects nearly 1 in 6 people around the world, causing serious harm to mental and physical health and reducing lifespan. For generations, industrialisation, urbanisation, high-speed travel and mass communication have taken us away from the communities that held us together for much of human existence. More recently, the pandemic and the explosion of personal technology, social media and artificial intelligence have compounded the barriers to human connection.
We are also living in a moment of extreme partisan segregation in the United States. Democrats and Republicans live, work, worship and learn in places where they are unlikely to come across those of the other party. Because we don’t interact, it’s easy to “other” political opponents as lesser people.
Partisan segregation isn’t as much of a factor in Sperryville, for practical reasons. In a town of 364 people, within a county that split 58% Republican to 40% Democratic in the 2024 election, partisans don’t have the luxury of frequenting their own bars and restaurants. Everybody shops at the Corner Store. Everybody dines at Black Twig. Rappahannock County is also unrepresentative of much of the country because it is largely white.
But the sense of personal connection people find here is a worthy aspiration for places large and small, Black, Brown or White. Marco Cáceres says that when he lived in suburban Fairfax County, Virginia, before moving here, he couldn’t find coffee shop camaraderie because “everybody’s on their phone”. But here, “we kind of invite them into the group,” says Cáceres, originally from Honduras. “You’re going to come back and people are going to know you when you walk in.”
It echoes the Cheers bar culture of the 1980s – and it has long been part of the culture here. For decades, Eugene McCarthy held forth at the F.T. General Store weekend mornings after he retired from the Senate.
That tradition is what Capitol Hill staffer Kerry Sutten had in mind when he opened Before & After with his niece in 2015 – and that’s what Ted Pellegatta delivered. “Anybody could walk into that cafe and he’d be their friend,” Sutten says.
The group became a minor tourist attraction, drawing hikers who wanted to chat up the locals on their way to Shenandoah National Park. Sutten hung a sign in the shop: “Ed and Ted’s Office.”
The “Ed” is 77-year-old Timperlake. He and the other coffee klatch originals (including a church deacon who goes on dates in his Mustang convertible) agree that “whenever it gets a little bit hot, everybody backs off,” Timperlake says. This mutual self-restraint produces results: a former Marine fighter pilot, Timperlake says the discussions have led him to rethink some hawkish views. “When you start putting the facts on the table without animosity, without judgment, you start to find mutual ground.”
And the insight flows both ways. Before the 2024 election, Cáceres recalls, “I kept telling my liberal friends, ‘Guys, I think we’re living in a bubble. I don’t think you understand how angry people are.’ And a lot of that knowledge came from listening to these conversations.”
Of course, it would be naive to think our problems would go away if we’d just talk with each other in coffee shops. But neither will those problems be solved by beating the other side in an election or two. Ultimately, we need to figure out how to see one another as people again.
Pellegatta’s itinerant life prepared him well for that. High school dropout and steelworker. Enlisted Marine. Bartender and waiter in New York and Washington. Sailing bum in the Caribbean. He gave up drinking decades ago after a car crash. He was married only briefly and discovered recently that he had a child long ago who was put up for adoption.
In Rappahannock he found appreciation for his eccentricities. His buddies persuaded the local paper to refer to him as the county’s “poet laureate”. He drew cartoons and took photos and rode with the hunt club. He used weed and psychedelic mushrooms. He recited his poetry at a winery while a friend accompanied him on the snare drum. He ran a short-lived bakery. After he was first diagnosed with cancer, he dosed himself with ivermectin livestock dewormer from the farm store.
Along the way, Pellegatta assembled an extraordinary collection of friends. When he announced his illness 18 months ago, a couple hundred people attended a “Teddy Fest” to celebrate his life with him. When, a year later, he was improbably still going strong, they feted him again with a pig roast, live band and T-shirts announcing: “Teddy Fest 2.0: Celebrating his life again.”
Only at his memorial did I see the true breadth of his friendships. In the overflowing parking lot, pickups with “Don’t Tread On Me” licence plates alternated with the Subarus of the Patagonia set. Inside New Iberia Kitchen, which provided Pellegatta’s favourite fried chicken for all, there were farmers and weekenders, bikers and artists, a massage therapist, a cidery owner and an heiress. People filled a mini coffin with items to be buried with Pellegatta, including his false teeth and a fundraising appeal from the Democratic National Committee.
Mo Seck, a Black former college football player, said Pellegatta introduced him to “something I felt was lost in the country: People of all walks of life came together, literally a cross section of society”.
Kenny Sullivan, a White biker with a long beard, had the same description. “He was like a magnet. My wife called him the ‘stone soup’ man” – from the European folk tale in which a visitor arrives with nothing and persuades the whole village to contribute to a bountiful feast.
It’s not that Pellegatta was a sweetheart, his pals say. He was unfiltered and irascible and made plenty of enemies over the years. But, no matter who you were or where you came from, once you were at that table with him at Before & After, you were no longer lonely.