Category: Introduction

My parents were both from Pittsfield, New Hampshire, a town small enough so that most people knew each other. They were married in 1907, lived for a few years in Lynn, Massachusetts, where father served as Secretary of the Shoe Manufacturer’s Association, and then moved to Haverhill, living at first in the Riverside section, before moving to Bradford. My father owned a small shoe factory, which he ran with his brother, Frank, but that was before I was on the scene. Much later in life, Lucile pointed out to me the two floors in a manufacturing building, which had been their “factory”. By the time I was old enough to know, father owned the City Insurance Agency, located on the main business street of Haverhill, where he employed a couple of other people, Miss Elden, Cliff, and my sister Lucile.

I have often wished that I had asked more about why the switch from shoe manufacturing to insurance, but I am left only with surmise, and a few snippets of information shared by my sisters. My father was not well during most of the time when I was growing toward manhood. My guess today is that his condition had something to do with loss of the shoe factory. The shoe industry had moved south from large parts of the Merrimack Valley, and of course the stock market crash came about the same time. Today I am confident that whatever happened to the business was largely contributory to the limitations placed on him by poor health.

My father was not able to be to me what fathers often are to boys; I was not taught some of the things which young boys usually learn from fathers. His condition was called by a variety of names, including the term “nervous breakdown”. He was treated with numerous and sometimes peculiar “cures”. I can remember a period of time when a doctor had father get up early in the mornings on cold days, go out into the yard to open the garage, clad only in his BVD’s! That was a spectacle I watched with wonder, and mother with a hope that the neighbors did not see! She told me that she told Mrs. Bowdoin about so that she would understand if she saw him; a good way to make sure she looked!

Neighbors included the Bowdoins, across the street from us. Others on the street were the Smiths, the Stearns, the Mulloys, Batchelders, Ross’s, Mrs. Carleton, others whom it is hard to remember. At some point my father’s brother, Frank, lived “around the corner”, on Williams Street, sometimes too close, always easily distanced. Mr. Bowdoin worked as a tanner, and came home wet and dirty, and seemed mostly to retreat into the house. The Smiths worked in a grain store, had two sons, both older than I, and they were quiet, “good neighbors”. Mr. Stearns went each day to a bank where he worked, always pleasant when he paid me for shoveling the snow. Closest to us were the Ross family, whose older son was in the Navy, and whose daughter, Dot, became one of my best early friends. Mrs. Ross and mother were active together in various clubs.

Mrs. Carleton, a retired piano teacher, was regarded as a community enigma, some would say “witch”. I befriended her enough to discover her “peculiar” propensities. One day she explained to me that she had lots of old magazines stored in her attic, and that she periodically rotated them bringing one batch, then another downstairs, fearful that “they might be lonely” in the attic. Most people on the street were happy to avoid Mrs. Carleton. I think she appreciated what attention I accorded.

Among our neighbors, the Mulloys, next door to us, on the corner, presented for me a mystery I have never fully understood. At an early age I learned that my parents and members of the considerable Mulloy family were never to speak! A low hedge separated our house lots; driveways were juxtaposed, and it was necessary to walk past their house to go almost anywhere. For years I moved in that direction in frozen silence, sometimes frightened, always uncomfortable. At some point I made initial contacts, and by the time I was in high school was actually invited into the house, had conversation with Mrs. Mulloy, and began what was a modest attempt at reconciliation. She was gracious, and seemed almost proud when I was recognized in the local news upon graduation with honors from high school. Gradually I was pleased to see the days when mother and she at least exchanged casual, though still cool pleasantries. I must have asked my parents about the reason for the estrangement, but do not remember any satisfactory answer; I was content to forget it, and move on. The reasons for that severe rift in the neighborhood were never explained to me, but my suspicion always rooted it to some degree in the fact that the Mulloys were Catholic, on a street occupied by at least nominal Protestants.

From my school years, there is one dominant and sad memory of my father. The “picture” is of evenings at home. A small den, dining room, living room, hall, and kitchen were circled around a central chimney. Evening after evening, hour upon hour, father paced around between the living room, dining room, kitchen, occasionally stopping at the door of the little den where mother sat sewing, or perhaps, if my homework was done, I would have joined her in a game of cards. He would stop briefly, and in the few moments of exchange often share a worry; then continue with his pacing, by the hour. It is a difficult memory to share, because it reminds me that I did not know him until much later in life, long after he had retired and I was married, and saw him playing with my children.

Due to my father’s illness, there is a sense in which, as I grew into teen years, I turned to mother for friendship. My father was never mean or never treated me poorly. I am conscious today of times when he tried to break through that inevitable “teen-age wall”, to be a friend. Add to the common difficulties of understanding between father and son, his illness placed limits on the relationship beyond those most young boys experience. Mother became the confidant, and she also turned to me for companionship. She taught me to play two-handed bridge and other card games, and we spent many an evening talking as we played. When she wrote papers for presentation to her reading club, she asked me to read, discuss, and critique them. Mother was for me the adult friend my father could not be.

My parents were eminently good people. Members of the little white church on Bradford common; mother more regular in attendance than father, neither very active in the church beyond Sunday. Mother read her Bible daily, but said little about what she had read. The only time I remember any expression of religious feeling from father was on the day I returned home, discharged from the Army after World War II. When I entered the house that afternoon, he fell to his knees by the couch in the living room. I was so astounded that I did not even hear the words by which he gave thanks!

The house I knew as home until marriage, was a comfortable six-rooms at 6 Shawmut Avenue, in the Bradford section of Haverhill, Mass. An ice-box in the cellar was regularly serviced by men who delivered the cakes of ice which I helped chip so that they could fit more fully into the box. In the cellar there was also a washing machine, and two large set-tubs which, as a youngster I learned to use for rinsing clothes before hanging them to dry on a line in the back yard, or, on rainy days, on lines strung in the basement. That is where I was introduced to the mysteries of women’s undergarments, the corsets! A quaint old second toilet also was there, with the flushing water closet suspended overhead, controlled by a metal chain. A coal furnace stood in the center of the cellar; it became a regular duty for me to keep the fire stoked with coal, and to empty the ashes. In another corner of the cellar was a “vegetable closet” where apples from our trees were stored for the winter, and where I was sent daily to choose from rows of jars of mother’s preserved fruits and vegetables. That same basement was the place where I was banished to wait for “Papa”, whom I knew would spank me when he came home and mother told him what forbidden thing I had done. The waiting was always worse than the actual spanking!

Groceries were delivered after mother phoned an order, or sometimes were picked up by father on his way home from work. Because we were dependent for services on delivery people, letter carriers, and because people needed to use the sidewalks, I learned very early in life that shoveling after a snowstorm was an important part of being thoughtful, to make it easier for others. I remember that mother insisted that I must shovel as soon as a storm was over so people in the neighborhood could walk safely on the sidewalk. It was one of my first lessons in community responsibility.

School memories do not often occupy my thoughts today. One thing I was learning as I approached High School was not to trust negative attributes which others gave to teachers. I was learning to judge them from my own experience. In seventh grade I sat in home room with Miss Haseltine, who in appearance was grim, and everyone said the experience with her would be grim also. My strongest memory of her today is the time when she took me and one other student to visit the home of John Greenleaf Whittier, on the outskirts of Haverhill. I thought of her recently as I encountered the words of Whittier while studying his role in the Abolition Movement, with Garrison, one of my “heroes” of history. That visit may have been the first seed of my present focus on the history of that nineteenth century movement! Miss Haseltine was never a favorite teacher, but I discovered one who cared for her students. I was learning not to quickly accept the negative predictions of others.

A similar learning occurred as I moved into eighth grade. I heard stories of “dynamite” Russell, the tall, “piano-legged” woman whose dictatorial style dominated her room. “Everyone hates her” was the common judgment. My actual experience with her gave a “lie” to all I had heard. An able teacher, she taught me the value of discipline in attention to assignments. I came to admire the once-dreaded!

My older brother, Richard, I still remember as one with whom I tumbled on the grass in the back yard, as he allowed me to pretend wrestling him to earth. Together we picked from our two apple trees, and one pear tree. We shoveled snow together in winter and rode our tricycles together in summer. Richard died when he was nine, and I, only five; the “hole” left was my first experience with the wonder of death. Richard suffered from spinal meningitis. Days before his death there were nurses around the clock, tending to him in our home. Fond memories of my brother are accompanied still by a strong view of Richard in a casket in our front “living room”, as my father lifted me to say goodbye. I know now the power of that moment for my father, who then had seen two boys die, and whose hopes for a son now rested solely in me. In the fourth grade of school, I was often ill; my parents were openly frightened about my health, and in some ways they became protective of me in those early years. A lasting legacy of that protection is my continuing hesitance to feel comfortable as a swimmer in open water. As I write I can hear the cautioning voice of my parents as I dog-paddled too far from shore!

Through those early school years I was frequently ill, contracting the usual childhood maladies, but also limited by conditions which today could easily be diagnosed in psychological terms. Fourth grade was especially difficult for me, since the teacher was one with whom I was in constant conflict, and she frequently yelled at me in class. I was terribly frightened by her, hated school, and managed to stay home “sick” often. My parents tried any number of “remedies”, including putting me on a regimen of drinking “Ovaltine” more often than I cared to. It was advertised as some sort of magic elixir for kids like me! On the physical side, I knew I worried the family; I remember well, one occasion when I was confined to bed. My visiting grandmother entered the room, stood by the door looking at me, shaking her head sadly, saying nothing. Her expression is still clear to me; I knew she was worried about my condition.

Part of the difficulty was rooted in Lucile’s much more complex family relationship. She had worked for my father in his insurance office, fell in love with a man in the office, Clifford R. Cusson, dated him while his ill wife was dying, and then secretly married him. My parents could not forgive her behavior, and the family was broken. She and Cliff left my father’s agency, established their own competing insurance business, and my father claimed that they had “stolen” clients from him. Cliff was a local politician, was elected to the State House of Representatives and then to the Senate, a popular figure among many. I came to appreciate, and like Cliff; I now understand that in the process of coming to know his friends I was experiencing an early fracturing of the stereotype of the “many”, whom my parents greatly disliked. Memory tells me that Cliff was a registered Republican, but acted more like a Democrat, and that was probably enough to satisfy my Father’s dislike. Cliff also came from a “background” which was not appreciated at home. It was many years later that I would name that as a dawning consciousness about prejudice based on “class”.

There were years when I was growing up during which neither Beatrice or my parents had contact with Cliff and Lucile. There must have been some attempt, because I remember Cliff and Lucile being in our home for dinner sometime after their marriage. During the meal, at one point I was in the kitchen with mother, and for the only time ever, I heard her speak words of intense hatred. With a raging face, mother whispered to me that she hoped Cliff would strangle on every mouthful! I knew then that the break was complete! That incident may also have been an early encounter with the ways in which harbored anger can explode and distort a peaceful and beautiful person. If that could happen to my Mother, something deeply sinister could happen to anyone!

While the family was separated, my parents allowed me to continue in relationship to Lucile. They must have discussed that option, but I do not remember them speaking about it with me. I don’t remember even thinking about why they allowed that, or what that might have meant to them as parents. Uncertain, still today, reflection leads to a belief that I was living at some level an unstated hope and forgiveness never articulated by my parents. It may be that even they did not know the significance of letting me stay in relationship to Lucile; it was something they did because of who they were, and what they knew to be right about “family”.

I often visited in Cliff and Lucile’s office, on Merrimack Street, directly across the street from my father’s office. I had meals occasionally in their home, went to Boston with Cliff to observe the Senate in session, even one time sat in on the Senate Highways and Motor Vehicles Committee, which Cliff chaired. On at least one occasion, I traveled with Lucile and Cliff to visit New York City. Cliff was known for his swearing, which was a way he and his legislative chums conversed. I can remember hearing him cautioning his friends not to use that language in my presence.

I liked Cliff, even came to accept the swearing and “roughness” of his exterior behavior, patterns abhorrent to my parents. His manner of speaking conveyed strong emotion, unknown in my family. I came to accept the swearing as simply a way of expressing strong feeling, nothing more. It is probable that somewhere in my remote self my personality was being prepared for a much later time, when I too would express my emotion in strong voice and word! Those who know me in these later years will differ in opinion about the appropriateness of my sometimes flaming tongue. Opinions aside, the emotions of today may be an echo of Cliff’s depth of feeling.
Then came the time, I believe it was when I was in College, that Lucile quietly shared with me the news that Cliff was dying from cancer, and that life would be short for him. I wondered if I should tell my parents. I did tell them, and am grateful for that decision. My parents went to visit Lucile and Cliff before his death, and I am sure that it made a lot easier the reconciliation with Lucile which did come after Cliff’s death. Those years of family separation remained, lost opportunities.