The year is 1974, early December, and a young George Nash is trucking a flatbed of balsam firs down I-89 toward Boston.

At the same time, Kevin Hammer, a 19 year old Brooklynite with a cargo van and a bright idea, is headed in the opposite direction. Spotting Nash on the highway, Hammer spins his van around and follows Nash to a gas station outside White River Junction.

“This crazy guy pulls up behind me in a van,” Nash recalls, “this little guy with a thick Brooklyn accent and asks me where I got those Christmas trees from.”

“Next thing I know, I am jammed into a phone booth. It’s freezing cold. There’s ice forming on the phone booth, [Hammer] is feeding me quarters, and I’m making phone calls back up north to the grower I got the trees from.”

Little did Nash know then, but this crazy guy with a bright idea was not only about to revolutionize a New York City industry, but that he would also bring to Nash and his family a passion to last a lifetime.

Hammer’s idea was simple. Hewanted to sell Christmas trees in New York City. Due to a loophole in New York City law, it is legal for a vendor to sell Christmas trees on the sidewalks without a permit during the month of December. Capitalizing on this loophole, Hammer would see his sapling idea flourish into a mighty Ponderosa, bringing to the city what is now a much cherished fixture of the holiday season.

“[Hammer] had this brilliant inspiration,” Nash recounts. “Up until then, all the trees in the city were sold at little florist shops or in front of delis. They were all bought at the terminal markets out in Brooklyn or the Bronx, and were shipped in by railroad cars. They were really poor quality and very expensive.”

Nash and Hammer shook hands that cold day in December of ’74, and Nash drove off thinking he’d never hear from him again. But a couple days later, Nash says, Hammer called in his first order of 250 trees to be delivered the following evening.

Nash, now 59, is a small, thick shouldered man with a dark, simmering gaze and palms as coarse as lumber. Sitting in the kitchen of his hand-hewn, Garfield, Vt. home, Nash smiles wryly as he talks about his years as a Christmas tree salesman in the city. His tales are an equal mix of woe and wonderment, but within them all there is that evident spark of passion that has kept Nash at it for 33 years.

It gets into your blood, Nash says, and once it does, it’s terminal.

For 10 years, Nash worked for Hammer, first trucking trees, until in just two seasons the pair had outgrown Nash’s tiny flatbed and they had to hire on drivers with increasingly bigger trucks. Within four years, Nash says, tractor trailers loaded high with Christmas trees were rolling into New York and within seven years Hammer had nearly 40 stands spread out across Manhattan.

In the old days, Nash says, there could be a stand every 10 blocks along Broadway without ever competing with the one farther down.

Being the carpenter he was, Nash designed, built and maintained Hammer’s stands and the tiny 4x6 shacks the vendors would hover in as a respite from the cold. Every season, Nash orchestrated the set-up and break-down of the stands, managed upwards of 20 stands, as well as worked his own on the corner of 110th and Broadway.

It was this stand, along with three others, that Nash, at the encouragement of his wife and now business partner, Dr. Jane Waterman, bought from Hammer after a dispute over employee relations caused the two to split.

The years that followed, Nash says, were some of the best and the worst his fledgling company, aptly named Gopher Broke, would experience. Procuring from the city a spot within the massive parking lot of the Bay Plaza shopping center in the Bronx, Gopher Broke exploded into the wholesale tree business, selling nearly 29,000 trees in a single season.

What Nash hadn’t realized at the time, however, was the nefarious New York element he’d become involved with by moving from retail into wholesale. In the few years that followed, Nash experienced some of the worst New York City had to offer: muggings; extortion; a massive armed robbery that would cost him an entire year’s profit; and at its worse, the “Sopranos” style murder of a fellow marketer.

“Needless to say,” Waterman says, “we got out of the [wholesale] business,” deciding then to shrink Gopher Broke back down to their four original stands, something, Nash adds, he could manage easily on his own.

Waterman hastens to add, however, that all this is ancient history and that neither the city nor the business is like that anymore.

Benjamin Hatfield, Nash and Waterman’s youngest son, is one of the sellers in New York.

“I have to say, there is this high level of friendship in New York,” Hatfield says, “I actually come back up here and miss it. The majority of the people down there are so nice and friendly.” He adds that unlike his experience of Vermont, complete strangers will simply stop and talk to you, standing at the counter of a deli.

“I think the best part of it is the way we’re received by the people of the city,” Waterman says. “When you first get there and you’re setting up the stands before the trees come