The Boston Memoir Project

A partnership between the City of Boston Elderly Commission & Grub St. Writers to turn memory into narrative for Boston seniors since 2006.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Dolores Seay: Life is Good

Bernard was the fourth child and the second boy in my family. He was the toughest of my three brothers. You could tell that John Wayne was his favorite movie star just by the way he carried himself. He had a John Wayne–type walk and a no-nonsense demeanor. As a young man, he liked the ladies and thought he was a great dancer. Bernard never married and never had children, although he loved kids and they loved Uncle Bernie. He was a painter and loved his job, but he drank alcohol—a lot of alcohol—and he developed liver cancer. He had successful liver resection in 2009, but the cancer came back in 2012.

I found out that he was sick and took him to the hospital where he was admitted for tests and a biopsy. The results showed that the cancer was beyond treatment. Rather than move into a nursing home, he asked if he could come to my house. I said yes and made arrangements with hospice to have a bed and everything he needed to be delivered to my house the next day. My sister Diane and I were told that he would live for weeks or months. He was brought to my house by ambulance the next day, a Friday. He was able to get off the gurney and walk up the nine steps to my house. He didn’t want to get in bed. He wanted to sit in the living room and watch TV, so I let him. He ate very little, almost nothing, but the hospice nurse said not to worry about it.

The people from the hospice agency were wonderful to us. They didn’t mind my calls and answered all my questions. The nurse came whenever I needed her, outside of her daily visit. The family and all the kids came to my house Friday night and, as sick as he was, he seemed glad to see everyone. Friday night he was okay. Saturday afternoon he was okay. That evening he complained of pain and I called hospice. They advised me over the phone to break out the emergency kit they had sent and what and how to administer the medication, which I did, and by the time the nurse arrived, he was feeling better.

Sunday morning he woke up really agitated and I could hear a kind of wheezing when he breathed. I tried to calm him down by talking and rubbing his back. He seemed like he didn’t know what to do with himself. He would lie down and then jump up to a sitting position. Then he’d jump to his feet but couldn’t move his feet to take a step. I called hospice and they said someone would be on their way. Then he acted like he couldn’t catch his breath, but I thought it was more like being overwhelmed. My daughter and granddaughter arrived before the nurse and we tried to get him comfortable in bed. The nurse came and administered meds and he calmed right down. The nurse called us outside the room and told us that he was actually dying. She said it might be tonight, maybe tomorrow. There was no way of knowing. We went back into the room. My granddaughter prayed. I held his hand and said a prayer and told him, “If you have to go, Bernard, it’s okay. I’ll see you in the Resurrection.” He stopped breathing. I called to the nurse who pronounced him dead. It happened so quickly.

In the weeks after Bernard’s death, I thought a lot about our childhood. We were born in lower Roxbury in the 1940s. We lived on Washington Street and our second floor apartment was level with the el. We could look in the window of trains passing by and we kids would guess where people were going and pretend that they saw us.

We lived in what I guess was a cold-water flat, because I remember every morning my mother had big pots of water boiling on the stove to wash with. We had a bathroom with a tub, but it was in the hall and my mother never let us bathe in it. We took a bath in the kitchen in a galvanized tub. My mother would say, “Now hurry up before the water gets cold.” The next one had to use the same water. If my father was home when we bathed, he would check our ears and noses and clean them with a hair pin if necessary.

The toilet in the bathroom had a pull chain and made a loud sound when pulled. It always reminded me of a train and the driver pulling the train horn. It was freezing in that bathroom and there were no windows. We had only one bedroom. My parents slept in there and we kids had a pullout couch and cots.

Every year just before Christmas, my mother took us to Mechanics Hall where a big Christmas party was held every year for kids. It was probably sponsored by the city or the mayor’s office. I don’t even remember where that was located, but I looked forward to going there. I was around five or six years old. I don’t remember if there was a show or something, but I remember a stage. Every family left with a shopping bag or bags. I think I remember us getting winter coats and boots. But I most certainly remember the fruit basket with the Christmas apples. They were delicious and I loved them. I only remember seeing them in that bag from Mechanics Hall at Christmastime and I couldn’t wait to eat one.

My parents stayed together fifty-five years and had seven children. My mother was the disciplinarian of the two and she was only four foot eleven. There were four girls (Dolores, Diane, Denise, and Darlene) and three boys (Bobbie, Bernard, and Bruce). I am the oldest. My mother never had many friends and she was always at home. A few times she sat outside with a few of the neighbor ladies, but one day as they were sitting and talking, one of them left and the remaining ladies immediately began talking about the lady that left in a negative way and my mother got up and left. That was the last time she sat outside with the neighbors. She didn’t like gossip, or being “two-faced,” as she called it. 

I was eight years old when my dad tried to move us into a larger apartment. He wanted to get us into the almost-completed Cathedral Housing Project. I later found out that it was really hard to get into the projects. Basically you had to know someone. Well, he went to see someone in City Hall and whatever they promised to do they didn’t do. Finally, he went to see someone from the neighborhood, someone who had become well known in local politics, and within a few months we were moving on up Washington Street to the Cathedral Project. We were all so excited. The apartment was on the first floor and it had three bedrooms and a bathroom inside the apartment. It had a flushing toilet. I don’t remember ever having seen anything like this before. Boy, we kids would stand around and flush and watch. My mother would say, “Stop before it gets stopped up.” The kitchen had a gas stove. You turned the black button and fire came out. No need for coal or wood. No more sign in the window for the coal or woodman.

My mother was scared to death for us to be near that stove. Every five minutes she’d shout, “Get away from that stove” or “Come out of the kitchen.” The street still had dirt roads and one of my brothers fell and cracked all his front teeth running around and playing on all the stacked up granite blocks that were going to be curbs. The priests and nuns from the church across the street came to visit and get to know the new parishioners and everyone knew Frank, the neighborhood policeman.

Slocum’s five-and-dime was across the street, Kennedy’s Butter & Eggs and “My Market” was a small local grocery store. There was the bakery on the corner of Dedham Street where we took our nickels to buy a lemon tart, or if you could muster up fifteen cents, a Bismarck, or cherry Cokes at the luncheonette.

The projects had areas safe for kids to play and ride bikes, and Blackstone Park was right across the street. My dad bought himself a beautiful Schwinn bicycle. It was maroon with chrome fenders and he decorated it with all the bells and whistles, fur streamers like raccoon tails that hung down from the handlebars, and I don’t even remember what else, but this was his thing of beauty and he shined it up with chrome polish after every use. He went down to Police Station Four and got a license for it. Then he proceeded to get each of us a bike, for birthdays or for Christmas. We didn’t all get them at the same time, but as each one got his or her bike, we all went to Police Station Four and got a license. We thought that was a really big thing. “Oh, someone’s getting their license next week,” we’d say. Then on some Sundays in good weather my dad led the bike brigade, and we would ride to the Esplanade or the Commons or to Fenway and whoever didn’t yet have a bike would ride on Daddy’s cross bar until the day they got their license.

Sunday was always family day. We got up and went to church. You couldn’t even think about going out to play if you couldn’t go to church. You always saw families walking in the street on Sunday, walking to and from church or to visit a family member or friends, all dressed up in their Sunday best and walking. Times were a lot safer back then.

The South End is so different now. My youngest sister moved out of state shortly after high school, about thirty years ago. She hasn’t been home since 1998. She came for my mother’s funeral, but she didn’t get a chance to visit the old neighborhood or to see what Washington Street looks like without the el—how sunny and bright it can look on a good day—almost too much space. At first I wondered what in the world they were going to put there to use up some of the space. It looked so odd. I was afraid to cross the street. The projects still stand. Blackstone Park is still there and looks better than I remember it. All the stores are gone and some streets as well. Washington Street across from the church now has a restaurant with valet parking. St. Vincent de Paul is gone, and Dover Street is now Berkeley Street. Laconia Street is gone, John J. Williams Elementary School where I went in third grade is gone, but the Red Fez Restaurant is still there on Washington Street.

My parents are both gone now. Denise is gone and all the boys are gone; Bernard just passed away a few weeks ago at my home. All in all, I had a good life. I feel blessed.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Marion Fennell Connolly: Life In A Tenement

My grandchildren sometimes ask me what it was like to grow up poor in Boston. I don’t know where to begin to describe what it was like living in a tenement in the 1940s to teenagers who can’t imagine such a life.

Life in a cold-water flat was an experience in itself. Rent was seventeen dollars a month for five rooms, and my parents paid $4.25 weekly because they never seemed to be able to put the whole month’s rent together. The landlord came to collect the rent. When my parents were late with the payment, I (being the oldest) delivered it, even though I was just eight or ten years old. I would walk to Dudley Station, take the streetcar up Dudley Street, get off at St.Patrick’s Church, and walk across the street to the landlord’s house.

The most delicious meal we had was mashed potatoes piled in the middle of the plate like an island with string beans stuck on it and a piece of meatloaf on top. My mother would pour gravy made from Campbell’s tomato soup over it. Occasionally we would have spaghetti with tomato soup for a sauce. The soup was mixed with water instead of milk, because milk was too expensive. I still love tomato soup.

The only method to heat water was to boil it on the black iron stove that we would polish periodically. This stove produced the only heat for the five rooms. A gallon glass oil container stood near the stove on some sort of a stand and was connected to the stove with a small, narrow pipe. We could buy a five-gallon can of oil from the oilman, but only when my parents had extra money. When we couldn’t afford that, I would be sent to the local variety store with a gallon glass jug to buy some oil in the middle of winter. I remember how heavy that jug was when it was full, and I would have to set it down several times in the snow to rest.

My mother put a card in the front window if she wanted oil or ice that day. As I remember, the oil and ice were delivered by the same truck. Usually we bought a twenty-five-cent piece of ice that the iceman would chop off with an ice pick. We had a rectangular, black soapstone sink that was about three and a half feet long and seven inches deep. It had only one faucet. We would fill a basin with the boiled water to wash dishes, and we used the same method to wash ourselves. Dirty clothes would be sent to the wet wash, which would be picked up by a truck and returned wet. The clothes would be hung on a line from the kitchen window to the electrical pole to dry.

The horse and wagon would come around on certain days with vegetables and fruit, and also the ragman came around with his horse and wagon shouting, “Any ol’ rags?” Nate’s Meat Market was on one corner of our block, the First National store was on another corner, and Al’s and Sammy’s variety stores were on the other corners.

At Christmastime in 1940, money was especially scarce. My mother wrote a letter to Post Santa, which was a charity program run by the Boston Post, which was then one of the largest newspapers in the country. Her request had to be verified by a nun at our school, who confirmed that my parents had no money for toys for us. On Christmas Eve, there was a knock on the door and when we opened it, a man delivered a box that contained a toy for each child. How excited I was! Although I don’t remember my toy, I do remember the little train given to my brother. It was a small tin circular plate that a single train ran around on. I don’t remember how it operated but it must have been a windup toy.

When I was between the ages of eight and twelve, we played jump rope every summer morning. There were a lot of little girls in the tenements and we always had plenty of playmates. We would play in the middle of St. Francis de Sales Street, a side street next to our grammar school. We also played games called jack stones, jack knife, and aggies. I loved aggies and at one of our games my friend Patsy and her friend Issy scrambled the pot and ran. During our grammar school years, we would sometimes smoke cigarettes. During the war years and in the section of Roxbury known as “Leaky Roof” you could buy looseys (single cigarettes) for a penny apiece.

I would go to Al’s corner store with a note one of my friends would have written backhand to “give Marion 5 looseys” and sign my mother’s name, and for five pennies I had five cigarettes. Then five of us would go to someone’s cellar to smoke and leave our coats outside so they would not smell of smoke. I was never caught but one of my friends was. Ironically, I stopped smoking at age twenty.

The three-decker tenements would get hot in summer, and people would sit out on their front stairs. One night, my friends and I decided to walk to Simmons Street where there were a few factories. It was just a block from my house. We went there to smoke one of our looseys on the loading dock of the mattress factory. We started home at about nine o’clock. About an hour later, after I had gone to bed, a huge explosion occurred. Everyone in the entire neighborhood came running out of their houses. The street was jammed with people; children were out in the street in their nightclothes. The sky was all lit up. I was very frightened. This was during World War II, and I thought we were being bombed. I always thought the Simmons mattress factory had blown up, but recently I asked librarians at the Boston Public Library to do some research, and they told me that the explosion had occurred at the varnish plant of the National Chair Company at 80 Hampshire Street; it was June 12, 1944.

We didn’t have a bathtub, but we did bathe. We lived a block from the Cabot Street Bathhouse. It was open six days a week with Mondays and Thursdays reserved for women and girls. It had a swimming pool and for a nickel we got a grey cotton bathing suit, a small bar of soap, and two dishtowel-sized towels. It was hard to come by the nickel. I remember having a penny and guarding it, hoping to get some other pennies together to go to the bathhouse. On the second floor was a gymnasium, lockers, and showers. This part was all free. The shower stalls were all private with marble partitions, a small, attached bench, and a wooden door that had a latch-type lock. When we were teenagers and old enough to go to the showers in the evening by ourselves, even my friends who had bathtubs at home preferred to go to the bathhouse. It became a social time for us as we set our hair in pin curls and then walked home. There was also basketball to play in the gym where the girls could only run on one half of the court. The forwards for one team would be on one half of the court and their guards on the other half to block the forwards of the opposing team from making a basket. It was great fun.

In the cold winter months, my parents would pull their mattress to the kitchen floor and shut off three of the five rooms. I would sleep with my younger brothers, and my youngest sister would sleep between my parents. In the morning the mattress would be put back in their room only to be dragged out the next very cold night. As I got older, I would sleep in the small front bedroom with my sister, Mary, who was nine years younger. The room had a kerosene heater that used the same oil as the kitchen stove. The bedroom was so cold that I could see my own breath. I would leave my clothes on a chair beside my bed. I would take each piece of clothing under the blanket to get dressed before I got out of bed. Many a morning my face would have black soot near my nose from the circulating heater. I can’t imagine how much soot I breathed in during those nights. Many, many years later this type of heater was prohibited because they were so dangerous.

As a young teenager, about fourteen or fifteen years of age, I had my first paid babysitting job, at which I earned fifty cents for the entire night. There were not many jobs because most parents couldn’t afford a sitter. I sat for a young couple that had two very young children. They lived in the Eustis Street Housing Project in Roxbury. My family didn’t have a telephone, so they contacted me when they visited neighbors who lived across from me. When they came home around one in the morning I would have about a fifteen-minute walk home alone at that hour through Dudley Station and along Roxbury Street. I remember feeling a little frightened. They had a telephone, so when I sat I would call a few of my girlfriends to come over, and we would call up boys on the phone and giggle and laugh but never leave our names. There was a smoked shoulder left in the refrigerator one night, and my friends and I ate the whole ham. My friends left before they came home. I was never asked to sit again.

My old neighborhood no longer exists. Back then it was known as St. Francis de Sales parish, and if anyone in Boston wanted to know where in Roxbury you lived, they wouldn’t say, “What street?” They would say, “What parish?” But for those of us who lived in the parish, we called our neighborhood “Leaky Roof.” Downing Street was located behind the Cabot Street Bathhouse, and the houses on that street had leaky roofs so the area became known as such.

These days Madison Park Technical Vocational High School has replaced all the variety stores, taverns, churches, schools, the bathhouse, factories, and tenements in St. Francis de Sales parish. I still have my many friends from childhood in Leaky Roof, and I could pick up the phone and talk to them as though it were yesterday—about the dances at Hibernian Hall on Saturday night, Sunday night dances at St. Alphonsus Hall, and the young men we met from Cherry Valley, Roxbury, whom four of us married.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Mary O’Keefe: Lally and Her Dad

Some people have the time to enjoy their grandfathers. Others, like me, can only enjoy their grandfathers’ lives by the tales told to us, which we in turn give to our families. Daniel Saunders was my grandfather, and my mother told me so many stories about him. She told me that Dan was a Boston Globe reporter. When he was new on the job and covering a murder trial, he somehow found out the verdict before the jury foreman had handed it to the judge. As the judge announced the verdict of “guilty,” the newsboy outside was already selling the papers with the guilty headline on top. The judge was upset, but Dan wouldn’t give up his source, and so he went to jail along with the editor. This was before 1900, and my mother said he was the first reporter to go to jail for not revealing his source. Dan’s next job was as a boxing reporter and editor. In his office, he welcomed anyone connected with the sport. He loved the champs, including Jack Dempsey. His favorite boxer was Sam Langford, the lightweight champ who was sometimes called “The Boston Bonecrusher” and “The Boston Terror” because he fought men far above his weight class and beat them. He and Dan were great friends. In fact, Dan accompanied Langford to New Orleans for a match, and rode in the back of the train with Langford in a car that was then known as the Jim Crow car, and Dan was arrested for riding in the back.

Although my grandfather was a successful writer, he had his struggles. His wife died of cancer when she was young. Her death left Dan with six children, between the ages of six and eighteen, including my mother who was twelve years old at the time. According to my mother, the first thing Dan did was go to St. Andrew’s Church and take a pledge that he would never drink a drop of liquor again. It was a pledge he kept for the rest of his life, not that he was much of a drinker.

My mother was Dan’s pet, in part because the doctors had told him that she was too frail and sickly to survive into adulthood. She was a tiny, sweet thing, who weighed just ninety pounds when I knew her. She had auburn hair that hung down below her waist. She was named Helen at birth, but then her name changed when her siblings nicknamed her Nellie. Then later on when one of my cousins couldn’t pronounce Nellie, her nickname changed again to Lally, and that’s all anybody called her after that.

Dan hired housekeepers to help with the housework, and then my mother took over for them when the last housekeeper retired. Sometimes she went to the bank to withdraw the money she needed for the shopping and bills. She told me that one time she was at the bank and she asked the bank manager to call Dan at the newspaper. At the time Dan happened to be sitting in his office talking to Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion and a national celebrity. According to my mother, Dan got off the phone with the bank and complained to Johnson that the manager thought Nellie shouldn’t walk home alone with all that money. Without hesitation, Johnson said to Dan, “I’ll keep an eye on her.” And he did. She found out later that Johnson planned to walk a half block or so behind her so that she wouldn’t know he was there. At her doorstep, my mother turned around and waved to him, and Johnson later told Dan that he thought he’d been so sneaky in following her. It was a story my mother told for the rest of her life.

Dan eventually became sick with throat cancer after all the years of covering boxing with the resins and smoke in the air. When Dan was very sick and in a great deal of pain, a friend of my mother’s suggested that he would be more comfortable if he had a sip of brandy. The doctor agreed that brandy might help him feel better, but the doctor still warned her against it. “Nellie,” he said, “He would never forgive you if you gave it to him. He swore he’d never take a drop.” And so she never brought it up again.

Dan Saunders died on May 5, 1923. According to one obituary, he had been a Boston Globe reporter and editor for forty-three years, and had become one of the foremost boxing and sports writers in the country. Many famous boxers, athletes, and prominent businessmen attended his funeral. According to my mother, they locked his office door on the day he died and it was never used again.

After Dan died, the family house reverted to another owner. When my mother and father got married, they got an apartment, and three years later I was born there. My little brother, Albert Stewart, named after my father, was born six years later.

Ours was a great family for nicknames. My mother and father called each other “Hoak.” One day my mother had extra money after doing the shopping, and she decided to buy a bicycle for each of her two nephews. When Dad came home he said, “Hoak! Where’s the meat for dinner?” And she said, “Oh! No wonder I had that extra money.” It didn’t bother her at all that she’d spent the food money on something else. Money was nothing to my mother. I never heard her ask the price of anything and she never bought anything on sale. If she had a dollar, she had to spend it. Funny thing is that she never worked, never had a social security number, and never had any of her own money.

In our house, the food was always good. Both my father and mother were excellent cooks. One night Dad was making his great chicken pot pie in the big roasting pan. The smell told us that we were in for a treat. We heard him taking it out of the oven, and then we heard a bang. My aunt Celia and I ran to the kitchen, and there on the floor we saw the roasting pan and Dad bending over it. Both my aunt and I said, “It’s okay,” as we lifted the food off the floor. That night my Dad, my aunt, my brother, and I sat at the dinner table and watched Mom put food on everyone’s plate. It was a very quiet meal. My aunt sat beside me, and I don’t know how we kept from laughing. It had to be the look on Dad’s face; I had never seen that look. But the next day even Dad had to laugh. I asked what the things floating around were and he said, “That was celery salt.” My aunt looked at me and winked.

My mother had stayed close to her siblings because their mother had died when they were young. In my childhood, we were a very united family. There were three carloads of us going to the beach in the summer. Every five years we would go to Plymouth Beach, which was a special trip for us. We’d have an ice cream cake and every time one of my uncles would say that he had won the cake in a contest. It was years before we realized that they had bought the cake. We ate hard-boiled eggs at the beach, and I remember running past my uncle to break the eggs on his head. We laughed a lot and I still tell stories about the parties and trips to the beach, and our little jokes, and everything my mother told me about Dan, the grandfather I wish I’d known.

When Lally was little, the doctors said she would never survive, but she lived to be eighty-four years old. She came to live with my family for the last few years of her life. We all miss her. It would be great for everyone to have a Lally in their lives.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Elieen Bradley: Keep Calm And Carry On

Who remembers July of 1955?” Dorothy Dorsey asked as we began our memoir class. My mind immediately returned to that tumultuous summer when Boston was inundated with victims of the polio epidemic. Many children were affected. The symptoms were a cold with headache and chills, with a chance of paralysis setting in. It caused inflammation of the spinal cord, and the disease was called “poliomyelitis” or “infantile paralysis.”

In 1955, my husband Peter, our six-year-old nephew Kevin, our three-year-old son Michael, and our five-month-old daughter Elizabeth, and I had just moved from an attic apartment in Dorchester to a second-floor apartment in the two-family house we had just purchased in West Roxbury. The neighborhood was similar to the one I had grown up in (Roxbury) with the church, school, library, and supermarket all within walking distance. Ours was a short street teeming with children, and Kevin soon joined them playing outside. He contracted polio with no ill effects, but Elizabeth sustained a debilitating paralysis mainly in her legs (she continues to use crutches to this day). Her following years consisted of hospitalizations, surgeries, and physical therapy, and then learning to walk with braces and crutches. Many family decisions were based on what was best for Elizabeth because of polio, including where the girls went to school. They had all been accepted at Girls’ Latin School, but I didn’t want Elizabeth traveling to Dorchester, so they all attended Ursuline Academy in Dedham.

In July 1958, a moving van appeared in our neighborhood. As I watched the wicker chairs being unloaded, I thought someone interesting was moving in next door. Later, I met that young mother of three boys, Joan McManus. At that time, we each had newborns—she had Brian and I had Diana—and our husbands worked the night shift. That created the nucleus of our friendship. Over the next forty years, I would discover every day how much we had in common.

Joan was slender and stylish with blue eyes and always had the latest hairdo. She was fastidious in her appearance. An excellent housekeeper, she also sewed beautifully. We were the “Thelma and Louise” of our era. She had the driver’s license, and we made time to spend together outside of our homes. We laughed and cried our way through fun and tragedy almost on a daily basis.

The closest connection between us was our concern for our children. Her three boys had hemophilia and my Elizabeth had polio. We exchanged babysitting services for the children’s various hospital visits and supported each other during the ups and downs of those visits. We were constant companions on shopping expeditions, sewing projects, and daily cups of tea. We spent many vacations together when her family joined us on Cape Cod. Our children grew up together, partied together, and attended each other’s proms. Even our husbands enjoyed each other’s company and played golf together.

Joan went to work at Catholic Memorial High School and suggested that I apply for a job teaching there. I did and we spent seventeen years working together. Joan and I chaperoned the Catholic Memorial prom with our husbands. It was a memorable event since I had graduated from high school during World War II, and my small school didn’t have a prom. Joan and I had some differences:she was an only child and I was one of seven. Yet, our families joined forces and our friendship was a unique forty-year companionship without rancor. It lasted until she died in 1996. Not a day goes by when I don’t think, “What would Joan say?”

Because of her polio, I enrolled Elizabeth in a ballet class at Boston Ballet for exercise and took my younger daughter Diana along. Diana loved it and that chance arrangement became her passion. She attended the Boston Conservatory and spent her college years singing and dancing in the musical theater program. Her college summers were spent at the Orleans Inn on Cape Cod as part of the entertainment and because we had a summer home on the Cape, our evenings were spent at the inn. Several of her classmates, whom we dubbed “the Show Mates,” lived with us during the summer. As so aptly described in their repertoire, “the joint was jumping.” We had cousins by the dozens and my Uncle Jim, a dapper Irish gentleman with a shock of white hair and thick brogue, had been a Gilbert & Sullivan performer and he provided the best entertainment in years, singing, dancing, and advising Diana’s classmates.

How we acquired our vacation home is an interesting story. In 1960, I attended an auction of the McCloud Bakery on Centre Street and while there, I struck up a conversation about vacation opportunities with a distinguished elderly gentleman called Captain Michael. Having told him that we had just returned from a rainy week in Yarmouth in a small rented cottage on a crowded street, he suggested Nauset Beach on the lower Cape as an alternative to the busy Yarmouth area. I followed his advice and planned a trip to a part of the Cape that was new to us. Captain Michael had several lots of land for sale and the next thing I knew I was the proud owner of a half-acre of buildable land in Eastham where we have vacationed every summer since that chance meeting on Centre Street. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made and it led an unbelievable experience that has enhanced our family life beyond expectations, but we never built on the land. We looked for a builder in 1963 and then a local realtor, Louis Gregory, suggested we look at a cottage that he had for sale that had just been reduced in price. Lo and behold, this summer home in Eastham had been rented by my cousin the previous year. It was a year-round home on a half-acre lot, walking distance to the bay beach, with six bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a dining room, and a living room with a large fireplace. It was perfect for us. We bought it immediately and have enjoyed it for the past forty-nine years. Originally we called it “Castle Rag” but now it is “The Enchanted Cottage” with a sign over the front door that says Cead Mile Failte, which is Gaelic for “a hundred thousand welcomes.” The Irish have a zest for life as demonstrated in their daily attitude and their questions are, “What’s for dinner?” and “Where’s the dance?”

My husband and I still live in the home we bought fifty-seven years ago in West Roxbury. Our children are adults now and I am accused of not telling them I love them. My excuse is that I’m Irish and not demonstrative. They are all college graduates with various degrees and careers in education. Elizabeth grew up right along with them. She married, has two adult children, a full-time job, and she drives through Boston like a cabbie. Elizabeth works with the elderly in the state government; Michael teaches in Dedham; Diana teaches musical theatre, social etiquette, and ballroom dancing; Christopher is employed at Framingham State; and Jennifer teaches in Norwood. I love them and I am proud of their accomplishments, especially in the field of education. Who knew the outcome would be so positive?

[bostonmemoirproject]

George McCormack: I’ll See You At Ma’s

My clearest recollection of early childhood goes back to the middle 1930s. I remember Mom feeding us all at the kitchen table and wondering where Dad was. Even at the age of five, I knew where he was—at one of the many shops in Allston that served alcoholic beverages. When he finally showed up, supper was over and all he had in his pockets was change. My older brothers would threaten mayhem and Mom would calm them down, and then Dad would disappear for a week or two. This went on for a few years, and when we moved in 1942, Dad was on his own. Mom was a real faithful Catholic and she wouldn’t hear of a divorce. I’m sure she conferred with Father McShea.

My dad was an alcoholic and he was dysfunctional. These are two words I probably never heard until I was in my twenties, and yet there is no way I could tell this story without them. It is a mystery to me how I was ever born. How did my mother give birth to seven children? I am the youngest and my oldest brother was fourteen years old when I was born.

My mom instilled a strong work ethic in all of her children, and I watched my older brothers take jobs and leave home. My four oldest brothers all spent time in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the thirties and John, the oldest, joined the army in 1940. Bud, the next oldest, served out in the western part of the state and married a girl in Greenfield in 1937. Mother got her third son, Bob, a job with the local plumbing company in Allston where he worked the rest of his life—with time out for the army, of course. Her fourth son, Joe, enlisted in the navy soon after we settled on Coolidge Road in Allston. Her fifth son, Frank, took a job at Wheeler’s, the dry cleaners, on Franklin Street in Allston. The lady who owned the place had asked Mom if she had a grown-up son who could come to work for her. Mom said, “I’m not sure he’s fully grown, but he’ll be a good worker.” She was correct, of course. Frank practically ran the place for the next twenty years—after taking time out to join the navy.

That left Mom with just two children at home to care for. I should mention that she also worked. She left the house every morning to tend to the family of a doctor. She also took care of a few of the doctor’s neighbors on Aldie Street and made lunch for some elderly ladies, too. She looked in on a wheelchair-bound lady to make sure she was okay.

As we were growing up, my brothers and I knew we could reap a few coins from these ladies by putting out the barrels or removing storm windows, putting the screens in, and doing a little painting or whatever chores they needed done. Our sister Anne did her share of minding children. They weren’t calling it babysitting back then.

Mom oversaw all of this and worried all the time about us, and about money, even though she always told us not to worry over things that we couldn’t do anything about. She also had high blood pressure and on many occasions her doctor would open a vein and bleed her. Mom always told us that smoking was no good for us—way ahead of the rest of the world. But when her doctor was trying to get her blood pressure down, he suggested that she should go into the parlor and have a highball and smoke a cigarette. Mom had never drank or smoked in her life, but tried it anyway. We all laughed the first time she let the smoke out her nostrils. She was so proud. A teaspoonful of whiskey in a glass of water was one of the most distasteful things she had ever tried. That was the end of doctor’s orders.

One night coming out of church with the group of ladies who were her closest friends, she had what was probably a small stroke and fell, striking her temple on the light pole on the corner. She was incapacitated for a few weeks and the doctor she worked for took her to Florida with the family for a month. She was in good spirits for a long spell.

Mom was a great correspondent. All during World War II she kept in touch with not only all her sons in the services but also with every one of their buddies. The large dining room table always had two or three letters started by Mom on it, and anyone who came up the stairs would be invited and encouraged to write a few lines.

We also had a portable typewriter that always had four or five sheets of carbon paper in it. Mom didn’t type, but my sister and I did. Anytime one of the guys—my brothers or any of their friends—came home on leave there was a party at our house. They called it “standard procedure.” The soldiers would arrive home, hug and kiss their mothers and call their girlfriends, and say, “I’ll see you at Ma’s.” Of course, the Ma they were talking about was Mom. I was at most or all of these homecoming parties. Maybe the greatest one was when Don Stevens brought home twelve of his Marine buddies to be his honor guard when he got married. The young Marines, most of them from down south, stayed at our house overnight and the next morning, Mom marched all of them to church. A couple of the reluctant ones were told by Mom, “Everyone in this house goes to church on Sunday.” They were quite a sight in their dress blues.

A few of my brothers’ friends had trouble at home, so they came and lived with us until things got better for them. When my brother Frank was in the navy, he was assigned to a new heavy cruiser that was built right here in Massachusetts; while it was getting the finishing touches done, he was able to come home nights. One of his buddies on the ship came from Brooklyn and he could go home only on the weekends. When Mom found out he had a new baby boy, she suggested that he would save a lot of traveling time if his wife and child lived in Boston. That wife and child lived with us for the next six months until they all shipped out of Boston heading for the Pacific.

Mom worried about her five boys in the various services, and it nearly killed her to learn that her first born was killed in action in North Africa on January 28, 1943. My brother John was more of a father to me than our own dad. He was also a true hero and was posthumously awarded a Silver Star for gallantry in action. Poor Mom was never really healthy after that, I guess. Five years later when I wanted to enlist in the air force, Mom didn’t want me to go. I tried to reassure her that the war was over and I would surely be drafted, and I could choose the schools that suited me best. Mom relented and sent me off with her blessing. I’m sure it didn’t help her health about two years later when the Korean “police action” started. My commanding officer at the time was a WWII fighter pilot named Francis M. Groves who liked the way I conducted myself. Major Groves promoted me twice, so we were pretty good buddies. Once he inquired about my family, and I gave him a short description of things back home. He promptly wrote my mom a letter promising her that I would be home at the end of my hitch and that I wouldn’t even be transferred.

I’ll never forget that morning I got home. Mom was in bed most of the time as a result of a couple of strokes. When I walked into her bedroom and sat on the bed, we hugged and she held me and wouldn’t let me go for a long time, I guess maybe until we both stopped crying.

I had sent her money from every one of my paychecks while I was in the service with the hope that the extra money would help her in some way. I had always given her the money I had earned in my various jobs in childhood. But when I came home, I found that she had put all that money I’d sent into the bank for me. She never spent a dime of it.

Two weeks after I arrived home, I was in the backyard helping Mom hang the wash. The neighbor came out, and Mom introduced us by saying, “My son is looking for work.” The next morning I was on the way to Watertown to start my new job, a job that lasted eighteen years.

Even in the last months of her life, Mom was my English teacher, advisor, confidant, music teacher, and best friend. Whenever I was on my way out in the evening, Mom always told me to have a good time, and to behave, and not wait to be entertained, and not to be hesitant if asked to sing along—not that I ever was. Her strokes had left her hands a little trembly, but she sat at the piano and played until I had the songs “Louisville Lou,” “Dapper Dan,” and “Some Sunny Day” firmly implanted in my brain. Mom passed away in March 1953, less than six months after my discharge from the air force. Not a day goes by that some encounter or something said brings my mom to mind.

My wonderful bride, Mary Lou Carey, whom I married in May 1957, never met her mother-in-law. In my mind, you don’t really have memories until you’re four years old. That, and the fact that I was away from home for four years in the service, left me with about fifteen years with my mom. Mary Lou’s mother also died before we met. She and I had so much in common; maybe that was why we were so perfectly compatible. How incredibly lucky and blessed I was to have two totally wonderful women in my life.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Delores Hall: Dolls And My Childhood Memoires

My foster grandmother was the only parent I knew. I called her Mama instead of Grandma. She read the Bible a lot and would often quote the verses to me: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” She would say, “Give from your heart. Never give someone something that you don’t want yourself. You may have a lot or a little to give. When you give, do it quietly.” She would frequently ask me, “Do you know you’re loved?” and the way she said it, the way she looked at me, always made my eyes tear. When I was six years old, I went with Mama to a small, dimly lit fabric shop. In those days most ladies usually made their own clothes, even coats and hats. While she and a few ladies were looking over the fabric, my eyes wandered around the store. In one corner, I saw a big cardboard box with two doll legs hanging out over the side, and I didn’t know if it was a whole or just a half of a doll. I went over and picked up the legs, and I saw it was a whole doll. I was so excited. I had never had a doll before and right away I wanted this one. I ran over to Mama to show her the doll, but she was still busy. When she finally found what she wanted, I asked, “Mama, can I have this doll?” She said yes, and I was so happy. Later, I thought that the doll must have been free so Mama said that I could have it.

The doll did not have any clothes. The head, arms, and legs were made of hard plastic, and her body was stuffed. She was bare just like that. I said to Mama, “My doll needs clothes.” She took a small piece of remnant, white with orange stripes, from a box and said, “You can use this piece for a blanket for her.” The piece was so small it barely fit around the doll. The next day, Mama began to cut the pattern out for her dress from the fabric she bought. As she cut, pieces of fabric fell to the floor. I picked them up to see if I could put them together to make a pretty dress for my doll, but the pieces were too small.

I was a shy and quiet girl. Mama and my little doll were my only friends. I was happy even if my doll didn’t have any clothes. We lived in the same house with another family that had a girl my age; she was my cousin. One afternoon, she and her mother were laughing and playing with her dolls, saying how cute one of them was and how it could stand on its feet. I went out and stood by their door to see the dolls and to hear the fun they were having. They saw me but didn’t invite me in. Mama saw me standing there and she whispered, “De, come away from their door. Come back and play with your own doll. You should never worry about what others have. Be thankful for what you have.” After seeing my cousin’s pretty doll, I didn’t want anybody to see my little doll, and I couldn’t tell Mama of my feelings.

A few years later, the Sparkle Plenty doll came out. She was a baby doll with long, golden hair that sparkled. She was a character from the comic strip Dick Tracy. I asked everybody in the family to buy one for me, but they didn’t have enough money. Money was tight at that time. I often saw a pretty doll sitting on my friend’s mother’s bed whenever I visited, so I dreamed about having a nice doll that I could put on my bed, too. Since every little girl wanted to have a Sparkle Plenty doll, the church had a contest. The girl who sold the most raffle tickets would get a Sparkle Plenty doll as a prize. I walked door-to-door, selling the tickets, but I didn’t win the contest, so there was no doll for me, and I was very disappointed.

On my eighth birthday, I woke up to hear Mama say, “De, happy birthday.” She gave me a birthday card with the number eight on it. There was a present with the card. It was a pair of brown socks. I was so excited and I ran around to show my card to all the people in the house. I had never gotten a birthday card before. Well, that was the first and last birthday card I had in my childhood.

When I was nine, I remember coming home from school on my birthday. There was a little cake on the table. On the cake, there was a piece of paper cut into the shape of a doll on it. I was so happy, and I laughed and laughed when I hugged Mama.

For my tenth birthday, I expected to see another cake on the table for me, so I told all my classmates that I would have a birthday cake when I got home after school. I ran all the way home. There was no cake on the table. I asked, “Mama, am I going to have a birthday cake?” Mama said, “Honey, you’re too old for a birthday cake now.” I was ten years old. After that, I never got a birthday cake until I was an adult.

When I was a teenager, I helped make packages of Christmas gifts from the donated stuff for the little kids in Sunday school. I put an apple, an orange, some nuts, and Christmas candy in a brown paper bag. I covered the bag in Christmas wrapping paper and tied it with a piece of ribbon. When I went to the Christmas party at the church, I also got a gift-wrapped present. One year I got a checkerboard game, and my biological grandmother gave me a book called Black Beauty and a new snowsuit. I remember that Christmas very well. I didn’t see my grandmother regularly. She lived quite far away and she didn’t often visit.

On Christmas Eve when I was twelve, Mama needed a new nightgown. She had patched her old one until it was worn out. She gave me two dollars to buy her a flannel nightgown. I went downtown. There were about seven or eight stores on one block and an expensive store, Blumstein’s, in the middle of the block. I went into the least-expensive stores, and they were all out of flannel nightgowns. I checked every store, and then went back into each of the stores again even though I knew that all the flannel nightgowns were sold out. I kept passing Blumstein’s and I asked myself, “Do I dare go in?” I was so determined that finally I went in. By then there were no other shoppers that late on Christmas Eve. A sales lady came to me and asked, “Young lady, what do you want to buy?” I said, “A flannel nightgown for my grandmother.” She took me to the rack. There were a lot of frilly nightgowns and one beautiful flannel one.

“How much does this flannel nightgown cost?” I asked.

“Ten dollars.”

I knew I could not afford it. She looked at me and asked kindly,

“How much money do you have?”

“Two dollars.”

“Can you go home and get more money?” she asked.

I shook my head and walked out of the store because I knew that those two dollars were all the money Mama had.

I left Blumstein’s and continued going in and out of the other stores searching for a flannel nightgown. It was getting dark. Finally, I returned to Blumstein’s and went to the sales rack and looked at the flannel nightgown again. It was marked two dollars! I bought it. That sales lady offered to wrap it up for me. Years later I realized that the sales lady must have changed the price for me. It was a miracle, a gift, and she sure had the Christmas spirit on that cold night.

Mama’s face lit up when I gave her the nightgown. She put it on. At that moment, I thought that she almost looked like a big doll with a new dress on. Mama was so happy she gave me a great big hug, and hugs were few and far in between when I was a child. On that Christmas Eve, Mama had her new nightgown on and she told me, “Kewpie doll,” as she sometimes called me, “you are better to me than my own children.” I would never forget that Christmas Eve. 

When I was fourteen, I got a job after school. I was paid twelve dollars a week. I brought my paycheck home and gave it to Mama. When summer vacation came, I got a summer job. My pay was thirty-five dollars a week, and I brought my pay home and gave Mama all of it. The pay was in a little brown envelope. When I was fifteen, I wanted to buy a skirt and a blouse like my friends had, but Mama refused to give me any of the money from my pay and said she was saving the money for my education. So I worked overtime that Saturday to have the money, and I bought the skirt and the blouse. That’s when I told myself, “It’s time to start sharing my paycheck with me.” The next month, I bought myself a doll.

Time went by and it was another Christmastime in the city. I was so happy that I could buy Mama a present with my own money. I bought her another new nightgown. She kept thanking me. I also bought my grandfather a bottle of Canoe cologne that he liked. He put some on and made his funny little sound he would usually make whenever he laughed happily. I was so happy that I could buy gifts for them with my own money.

I never forgot about the dolls. As an adult, I had three daughters. I would make sure that my daughters received beautiful dolls every Christmas. When they got older, they lost interest in playing with dolls. Here was my big chance to make my long-lost dream come true. I collected their old dolls, scattered all over their beds, and turned them into beautiful dolls again with new dresses. I sat them on my own bed. It became a hobby for me to make new dresses for old dolls. I made big rag dolls and I began to buy dolls. My friends and family would bring a doll back for my collection whenever they went on a trip. My son brought me a doll in traditional South American attire from Belize. Now I have dolls from far and near. Today, I have more than fifty dolls.

I love talking to other seniors. Some of them tell me they are lonely and Iask them if they like dolls. If they say “Yes,” I give them dolls from my collection. One senior, Miss Freeman, would sit at the window waiting for me to come home from work every day. She loved to laugh. Sometimes she would say, “I was very lonely today.” I did not want her to be lonely and the next day, I went to visit her with two little dolls in my bag.

“Miss Freeman, do you like dolls?” She told me how she used to have dolls when she was a little girl. I took the dolls out of the bag and she was beside herself with laughter. “Look at their faces!” She looked so happy and she sat them on her piano and that was the dolls’ new home. She would still be at the window sometimes when I came home from work with a smile on her face. She told me that she talked to the dolls every morning and that she felt less lonely now.

Giving and sharing things always brings me real joy. When I share with others they seem to beam with joy. These are the happiest moments of my life.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Ann Labbe: The Aunt Who Spoiled Me

My mother, Beatrice Downey, came to America in 1927 on what she always said was “the last boat from Ireland.” She had gone to school until fifth or sixth grade, and after that had been working on the farm. Her mother told her to join her brother Willie and her sister Margaret in America because there was nothing for her to do in Ireland. She said, “Go and better yourself.”

Willie had come to Boston first, then he sponsored Margaret, who in turn sponsored Beatrice. My mother was very eager to see Willie and Margaret, who had left Ireland more than a year before. She wrote them a letter with the date and time of her arrival in East Boston.

Mom used to tell me that she arrived in the U.S. with just the clothes on her back. I imagine her lonely and lost on that boat, a seasick and terrified eighteen-year-­old. I picture her in a long black skirt, a simple blouse, and a coat, with a small bag carrying only her pass­port and entry papers. She was on the boat for a week and sick for the whole trip.

When she arrived in East Boston, no one was there to meet her. She searched the crowd of faces and waited, but no one came to greet her. She always told me this story and I can hear her now saying, “When I landed in East Boston, I didn’t have a penny to my name.” Even years later her voice sounded like a lost soul, desperate, scared, and nervous. I imagine that she wondered why she came. She said that was very scared and anxious to see her sister and brother. Eventually an official was able to get in touch with Margaret and Willie, and they came to get her. They had never received her letter; it was on the same boat she had been on from Ireland.

My maiden name is Brien, not O’Brien. When my dad came to this country, he dropped the “O” in the ocean. That was always a big joke with my dad; he just thought that was so funny. My parents met in Boston and married in 1937 at St. Mary’s Chapel in the North End. They moved to Hillside Street in Mission Hill and when the projects opened up, they got an apartment there. That was the best thing to ever happen because there was lots of heat! The rent was a flat rate. My brother Jim Gurry, best man, my aunt Margaret Downey, my mother Beatrice, and my father William Brien was born in 1939, followed by Peggy in 1941, Tommy in 1943, and me in 1946. There were three bedrooms — one for my parents, one for the boys, and one for Peggy and me. There were so many nice people in the Mission Hill Project; we were all struggling, living paycheck to paycheck. We were poor, but we kids didn’t know it.

Aunt Margaret was a very special person in my life right from the day I was born. My mother took sick after my birth and Aunt Marga­ret took care of me until my mother recovered. Growing up, Thurs­day was my favorite day of the week because it was Aunt Margaret’s day off. She was a domestic for Mrs. Steinert, of M. Steinert & Sons piano company. Aunt Margaret lived and worked at Mrs. Steinert’s home at 401 Commonwealth Avenue, but she came to visit us often on her days off (Thursdays and every other Sunday). Aunt Marga­ret was very generous and always spent her money on us. We had delicious steak, rolls, and chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and walnuts. When it was time to have the cake, someone or maybe all of us scraped the frosting from the cake, but no one would own up to it. Every other Sunday, Aunt Margaret would come over and maybe take us downtown to a restaurant.

On the Sundays when Aunt Margaret worked, we kids visited her. We ran like crazy down Marlborough Street to see who could get to the back entrance first. Aunt Margaret would be waiting for us, and sometimes gave us each a Ritz cracker for a treat. The old el­evator had black gates over the door and it was as slow as could be. We inched our way up from the first floor to the third floor, and Aunt Margaret would be very nervous, saying, “Be quiet, be quiet.” The kitchen had a dumbwaiter that went up to the third floor. It was used mostly for big parties held in the upstairs dining area.

We made do. Dad worked for Harvard as a janitor and caretaker, on Huntington and Longwood avenues. Mother did domestic work in the Back Bay with Aunt Margaret. Thursday was grocery day. My mother and I would meet my father at the First National grocery store with his paycheck. By the following Wednesday, Dad and I would be eating gravy sandwiches, leftover from roast beef made on Sunday.

One day I came home from school to find my mother reading a let­ter by the kitchen window. She had tears streaming down her face. I started crying, asking, “Ma, Ma, what’s wrong?” She said, “This is a letter from home that says my mother has passed away.” I was nine years old and I felt so bad for her; I couldn’t imagine being without my mother. When I think about that now, her mother had probably passed at least a week or two before that letter arrived.

In 1957, my Aunt Margaret took me on a vacation to Ireland for five weeks. She wanted to take one of us kids and I don’t remember any­one else volunteering to go. I was eleven years old, and so excited. All my aunts and uncles in Boston gave me spending money for the trip. The Roxbury Citizen newspaper even printed a little story with a picture. It read, “Roxbury girl Ann Brien boards a Pan­American clipper to Ireland with her aunt Margaret Downey for five weeks.”

It was my first time on a plane. We took a taxi out to the farm, near Athlone in County Roscommon, central Ireland. The landscape was wide open with beautiful green valleys. Walls of stacked stones fenced in the sheep and cattle. Coming from Roxbury, all of this open country was a big change.

Mother and Aunt Margaret’s second oldest brother, Uncle Dennis, lived on the farm, ran the farm, and never left the farm — it was his whole life. The farmhouse had two levels, a fireplace, and a thatched roof, but no indoor plumbing. You had to go out to the barn to do your business. At home my mother always said, “In this country you go out to eat and come in to go to the bathroom, but in Ireland you go out to go to the bathroom and come in to eat.” I suddenly understood what that meant. The kitchen had a cast­-iron stove and no refrigerator; Uncle Dennis used a cold box with ice. Milk came from the cows and eggs from the hens. People came around selling bread and bakery goods. We went into town, where Uncle Dennis and other farmers sold their livestock.

Everything on the farm was new to me. I had never ridden a horse or milked a cow. All the farm work was an education in itself. I was very happy and excited to be there, but after a few days I was sad and lonesome for my mother, father, and family. I just cried day af­ter day. I pulled out the money my aunts and uncles in Boston had given me for the trip and said, “I can buy my ticket back home,” but Aunt Margaret explained that it wasn’t possible for us to go back early. After a week, I started adjusting to the farm.

There was a huge painted portrait of my mother in the stairwell; she was a beautiful young lady, with dark black hair and big brown eyes. Seeing it made me miss her, but it also made me happy in that she was with me.

We visited the one-room schoolhouse my mother had attended. It was a small, plain room. There weren’t enough desks for everyone, so chairs were clustered together around each desk.

Uncle Dennis let me ride up front with him on the wagon on our trips to the bog. The horse was old and slow. When we got to the bog, Uncle Dennis dug out pieces of peat the size of bricks and I helped load it into the wagon. Stepping on the bog was like walking on a sponge, like cork.

I loved the horses, cows, and chickens. I helped milk the cows, and I rode the horses. The baby chicks were so cute, so fluffy. One day I was out playing and thought I would give the baby chicks a treat. I filled a big basin of water and put them in so they could go for a swim, then I left them and went on to play somewhere else. Later, Uncle Dennis told Aunt Margaret, “The little one there put the baby chicks in the basin, and I found them all dead.” Aunt Marga­ret then explained to me that chickens can’t swim and that the baby chicks didn’t survive. I felt so bad. After that, I still played around the barn, but didn’t give any “treats” to the animals.

After a few weeks on the farm, Aunt Margaret and I left for the big city of Dublin. I imagine that after what happened to the chickens, Uncle Dennis was happy to see me go. Dublin felt a lot like Boston, busy and exciting, like being home again. I met many cousins there and had a lot of fun. I had never seen a double-­decker bus, and I couldn’t get over it. I always rode on the second level; Aunt Marga­ret would shout up to tell me when it was time to get off the bus. She was very patient. When it was time to leave Ireland I could feel the tears coming; yes, I was crying again. It was so hard to leave all my relatives, but I was very happy to be home with my family.

I was not fortunate enough to know or meet any of my grandparents like other kids my age. I had Aunt Margaret and she did a good job spoiling me. Thank you, Aunt Margaret, for everything you did for my family and me.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Gladys Facey: Miss Facey

My grandchildren are my life to me. It’s my duty to raise them to be the best that they can be in whatever they try their hand at. This was how I was raised.

I was born on March 24, 1922. I never knew my mother, Elizabeth, because she died in childbirth. I do have her high school graduation picture. My father, James, was a good, fun-loving man. My paternal grandmother in Somerville, who I called Ma, raised me. I was her baby and felt that I had all of her love and care. When I die and go to heaven, the first thing that I’m going to do is look for her.

Country life in Somerville was good for the Chute family. If there were any problems, I never knew about them. Of course, there were money issues — this was during the Depression — but we all pitched in. My first paying job was helping an elderly woman in Arlington bake perfect cakes, as her hands were full of pain. Each day after school, under her watchful eye, I mixed the ingredients for these perfect cakes in a big mixing bowl. There was no such thing as an electric mixer. It was fun and I was paid five dollars per week.

I was thirteen years old and felt rich. My earned money went toward the house expenses, just like everyone else’s, and that felt so good.

When I turned sixteen, I started spending days at a time with my maternal grandparents in Boston. The Bowles were members of the Black Bostonian high society. My grandfather — I called him Sugar — was the bandleader for the well-known Bowles Black and White Orchestra. My uncle, George Francis Bowles, had graduated from MIT and his college friends were always around. My grandmother, Edith, was a social butterfly known for her piano playing. She gave very popular social gatherings at their home near the corner of Massachusetts and Columbus avenues. She never called me by my first name, Gladys. She thought that it was too common and represented my father’s side of the family. She called me by my middle name, Elizabeth, instead. Thus began my two years of living in two very different worlds — the homespun country life of Somerville and the high-society, hoity-toity life of the Bowles of Boston.

As the only child, I was spoiled, especially by my grandfather Sugar and Uncle Francis. I went to them for whatever I wanted. I never went to my grandmothers because they were very strict. Neither of them gave in to my requests, one out of love and the other out of a little jealousy. I had very fancy clothes for Grandma Edith’s high-society gatherings of Black intellectuals, musicians, and business owners in Boston. I had to speak differently; everything was very proper. Afterward, I took a taxi up Massachusetts Avenue to Somerville and the country living and kitchen of Ma, where she made scrumptious meals and never allowed anyone to cook on her potbellied stove. I learned so much about life in those two worlds, but I wish that I had paid a little more attention.

On April 10, 1940, William Facey and I were married by a justice of the peace. I was eighteen and we eloped. We tried to hide it for a while but failed miserably because his mother came to Ma’s house and demanded to know why they had not been introduced. When the dust finally settled down, so did we, in Somerville. We had our first child, James, two years later and our daughter, Sandra, a year and a half after that.

Our life was normal. That is to say, there were good times and there were bad times. We had Ma Chute and Daddy to help us. I had been married for fifteen years when I heard about the new housing expansion called Bromley Heath in Jamaica Plain. I was determined to move my family into one of those new apartments. I filled out the application and when I didn’t get a response, I took the children with me to the housing offices every day for two weeks until I received an apartment. It was 1956 and Bromley Heath had been open for less than two years. Everything was new and that’s where I started a life as Bromley Heath’s most popular babysitter.

It started with one little girl who I kept overnight because her mother worked nights. When her mother started working two jobs, it was easier to keep her five days a week. Some people saw me with a child who wasn’t mine, and they asked, “Are you babysitting?” I said, “Yes,” and they asked, “Would you babysit my child from this time or that time?” I started charging two dollars a day. For two dollars a day, I worked five days a week, which meant ten dollars a week. Half the time, I didn’t get paid the two dollars a day or the ten dollars a week, but it didn’t matter. I babysat. By the time I stopped babysitting thirty years later, I had taken care of two generations of the same family, up to twenty or twenty-five children at a time. I adopted one of them. We marched down the street to get the bus and went on field trips. Everybody knew us. They called me Miss Facey.

During that time my husband died, and my son helped me through that despair. I have my husband’s ashes in a drawer and when I go, he will be buried with me. That was his wish.

There is nothing more difficult than burying your children. I have had to bury my daughter and my son. Sandra died from breast cancer. My son died in Kingston, Jamaica, and we have never been able to find out how or why, which makes it hurt even more.

Before Sandra died, she said, “Mom, please take good care of my children for me and do your very best for them.” I think that’s what I’ve done. I kept the oldest, Dawn, in private school. Couldn’t afford to, but I did it anyway. From Boston Latin, she went to Wellesley College. She did this on her own. From there, she went to Harvard, where she graduated with a Doctorate of Law. Tremana is in her last year of college and the youngest, Armani, is a senior in high school. They’re all doing so well. I figure that I have paid my dues to my daughter and to anybody else. I raised them in a project that everybody said was so bad. I have given them my life, love, and time. I thank God for giving them to me.

Now, I’m in the calm, quiet phase of my life. Not that I am ready to die; I just do what I want. I’m still very busy with elder activities and outings. I go shopping for friends and family. If there’s something I want to do, I take my time and do it. At eighty-seven, that’s good. No cane, nothing. I have learned to say what is on my mind, and never let anything fester. My grandkids will tell you, “[If ] Grandma don’t like something, she’s going to tell you.” After that, it all depends on how you take it. On the flip side, I am always looking for new ways and things. You’re never too old to learn something new. I’m planning to be a hundred years old, then I’ll slow down. My motto is “Be happy, don’t look back. Everything good is ahead.” Love.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Raisa Karmiy: Learn, Learn, Learn

When I was in the eighth grade in the Soviet Union, I had a good friend named Emma. She  was  a  very  good  student,  especially in mathematics. Her mother was Russian but her father was Polish, a former colonel in the Polish army. He had been a prisoner in Siberia until 1945. Emma’s family was afraid of everything because  her father  had opposed the communist regime  in  the  past,  and  they always felt in danger. When Sta­lin passed away in 1953, school officials called a meeting. We stood in lines like soldiers  and the principal told us that Stalin was dead. All of the teachers and many of the students cried. 

Emma didn’t cry. She knew from her father and mother who Sta­lin was. The next day our principal called Emma to her office. She asked Emma, “Why didn’t you cry? The greatest leader of the proletariat is dead.” Emma didn’t answer. If it had been just one year before, this act would have put her family in jeopardy. They all could have gone to jail.

This is the reason I didn’t like school at that time. The teachers never told students the truth about life. In my family, words about politics outdoors had always been forbidden. After I saw what happened to Emma, I realized why we had this rule. My  eyes  were  opened.  In  the  Soviet  Union,  you  couldn’t say what  you  really thought if you wanted to have  an  education,  a job,  and your own life. What was important to my parents was to educate their two daughters, to give us a chance at a job and a good life.

To  do  that, my father  often  pushed me.  He  pushed  his family  to  adhere to  his rules. Sometimes I didn’t like the sounds that came from him. I was afraid of his loud voice, but he knew what was best for us. He had his own chair at the table, his own spoon. He had blue eyes, good skin. He was bald, smart, and practical. He had a terrible temper. He liked music, played the guitar, and could sing. He never asked me if I wanted to learn to play the piano. He brought the piano home and said, “You will play.” I played for six years.

My father saved my life three times. When World War II began, my mother and I could not evacuate from the capital city of Kiev, and he saved us. He was a soldier, and my mother wasn’t an active woman. Evacuation meant going to a train station that was packed with people in a panic. It was too dangerous. We waited in our apartment, waiting to be killed by German soldiers. One day, my father came and said  to  us,  “What  are  you  doing?” My mother said,  “I can’t  evacuate.”  He said, “You will.” And we did. 

The second time, he saved my mother and me from the German fascists about a month later in Poltava. We needed to evacuate again, and again there was a panic. I was outside when I saw soldiers with big cars. I was six years old. I saw him and yelled, “Papa! Papa!” He saw me and helped us, putting us on a train to Asia. He stayed with the army and we went to Uzbekistan.

The third time, he saved us from starvation near the end of the war. We were living in Uzbekistan. My mother  and I had no food. My father was wounded in the leg and walked with crutches. In 1944 he came home to us. As a soldier he was able to find a job quickly and gave us his ration of food. He worked very, very hard, eating only a few dried apricots per day. He worked until he had money to buy food. He never ate any of the food he brought home. He gave it all to us. He was a strong man, a good father, and a good husband. I learned what family means from him. I was eleven years old. 

When I was  in  ninth  grade, I  decided I wanted  to  be  a  doctor  because I loved children and because I had a younger sister who was often ill. The Medical Institute of Lvov would be an open door for me when I finished tenth grade, but first I had to prove to myself that I could do the work. I went to an anatomical museum in the institute  to  see  the  cadavers.  Many  of  my fellow  students  did  the  same.  The cadavers didn’t bother me. 

This is when my father announced his rules. I was a beautiful girl. It was a difficult school. My father said, “No dancing. You have to come home at ten o’clock. Learn, learn, learn.” Once I came home at midnight and he had locked the doors. No one let me in. I had to sleep at a neighbor’s house. I learned what the rules were, what I couldn’t do. My parents pushed me to do what I didn’t want to do as a young girl. Now  I  can  understand  that  they  were right.  Children  don’t  grow  up  like mushrooms, with no one taking care of them.

I can’t recall the moment when I began to think of myself as an adult, because the  changes in life forced me to do what I had to for the family. When I was twenty years old, my father fell very ill. I was studying medicine. I had a small grant of money from the medical institute and took three courses, a full course  load. My mother couldn’t take a job, so I found a job as a nurse in the hospital ward  for  people  with  dangerous  diseases.  I  worked  three  nights  a  week on twelve-­hour shifts. At nine in the morning, right after work, I went back to the medical institute to study,  and I didn’t give up. On  a student stipend  and with money from my job, I  had to support my mother, father,  and sister, who was only eleven years old.

I graduated and became a doctor, a pediatrician. I helped my family in this hard time. Children should pay parents back for all things that they did for us. I had a job that I loved, helping children to get well. I was a family doctor. I had 1,100 children in my area, ranging in age from seven days to fifteen years old. I had no car. I walked every day and in the winter I made twenty-­five to thirty visits to children’s homes to help them, in addition to my hours in the hospital. I found out  later  that  doctors  in  the  Soviet  Union  had  the smallest salary  of doctors anywhere in the world, but I never thought about those things. I was so happy to help poor and ill children.

I  want  to  describe  one  day  from  my  life  when  I  felt  under  pressure in the children’s  hospital  where  I  worked.  At  six  o’clock  at  night,  the ambulance delivered a small four-­month-­old girl. Her name was Nataly. She was in a very bad  condition  and  had  pneumonia.  Her  mother  belonged  to  a  religious  sect whose members were forbidden  to  treat  their  children with medication  or to meet with doctors. The  girl  had  been ill for  about two weeks. The family  doctor  had told them that Nataly had a virus that would transform to pneumonia. Natalie needed medication— antibiotics — but they couldn’t listen to the doctor because of their religion.

Nataly looked at me with big black eyes, full of suffering, as though she was asking me for help. I was fighting all night for Nataly’s life, while her mother was crying all night. At eleven o’clock the next morning, Nataly passed away. I told her mother, “You lost Nataly because you believed the people from the sect. Unfortunately,  you  didn’t  believe  the  doctors.  If  you  had  treated Nataly  with medicine in time, she could be alive.” She said, “You are right, but God gave me the baby child and God took my baby.” The terrible story ended.

My life changed absolutely when I came to America. I was a pediatrician in the Ukrainian city of Lvov, a beautiful city with wonderful architecture, like a small Vienna. When I first came to America, I understood that I was a nothing, a big zero. I did not know the language. I did not have an American license. I couldn’t speak to or  communicate  with  American  people.  It  was  a  terrible time  for  an  educated person.

My father’s lesson was still with me —  “Learn, learn, learn.” I went to Roxbury Community College  and studied  how  to  write  and  how  to speak for  three years. Now I can read and I speak with an accent. Sometimes I forget the correct word and substitute another word. This is not an easy time for me, but I was never looking for an easy life. That would not be interesting for me. My motto is “prove that if you are resolute you can survive an extreme situation.” We should pay back our country and the American people. I like the words of John Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” That’s why, after I came to this country, I volunteered in the Children’s Hospital in  Brighton  for  several  years,  and  the  Franciscan  Children’s  Hospital  in Brighton, where I worked with handicapped children. At the Farahat School in Boston, I worked as a tutor for four years teaching children writing, math, and music. I volunteered in the food pantry of the Boston Red Cross and the Home for  Little  Wanderers. I  am  happy  to  work  in  public service for  the  American people.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Earl Faulk: We Called Him Papa

My greatest hero was my great-grandfather, Papa Forrest. His given name was Guy Forrest, and he was born a slave. He was a tall, proud man, six feet three in height, always wore a suit and hat, and smoked a corn pipe. He had broad shoulders and a powerful voice. Papa could not read or write, and he always signed his name with an X. Yet, he built his own house, ran a farm, managed the fields, and raised all the boys in the family. He owned a Ford Model T that was his pride, even though he never learned to drive. Instead, he got one of the neighbors to drive him, and when his sons were old enough, they drove him around. You could not cheat Papa out of money. He had a pouch or purse in his right pocket. From that pouch he would sometimes give me a nickel to put in the bank. He started out as a farmhand but ended up running the farm of the man he worked for. Papa took the farm wares to market every week. These consisted of chickens, mules, hogs, cow’s milk, and a host of other things.

Papa had a short temper. Although his boys feared him, they loved him more. Some of my uncles have had beatings from him or chastisement that will last forever, but they say it made them who they are today. The only person who could control him and get him to stop beating his hardheaded boys was his wife Readie, who was five feet tall and no more than one hundred fifty pounds wringing wet. She was very soft-spoken, always wore a long, black dress that dragged on the floor, and covered her hair with a net. When she left the house, she wore white gloves. She could cook anything. She cooked from scraps and never measured anything, as she had no measuring cups. Everything was either a pinch of this or a handful of that.

Grandma Readie made biscuits and syrup that we ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Breakfast was sometimes chicken gizzards with gravy, or liver and onions. Sometimes she made full dinners, with everything from chicken to oxtails to cow tongue, and she could make gravy from anything. Papa had a smokehouse, but we never ate ham. He told us to leave the hogs alone because they were the moneymakers.

Grandma would take a piece of snuff, put it in the corner of her mouth, and chew it and move it around from one side to the other. She could hit her spittoon from any point in the room. Grandma Readie read her Bible, and she wrote birthdates and other important events in it. She also kept track of the farm business. She wrote down names, dates, payments, and other important information to run the house in Virginia. She did this until World War II started and all the boys, her and Papa’s grandsons, left to join the army. By then Papa was too old to run the farm by himself. I was born shortly after the war and, like all the boys had, spent my first few years on the farm in Virginia. When Papa decided to take his family north, I became part of the family migration.

Papa and Readie had lived in Virginia for as long as they could, but in the fifties, they went north where all the other relatives lived. They went to Boston and moved to West Newton Village and then onto Haskin Street. A lot of workers from the South settled in Boston’s South End. Some of my great aunts, Readie’s sisters and daughters, were already in Boston doing work cleaning, cooking, and working as nannies for white people in Wellesley, Newton, Brookline, and high Dorchester where no black people lived. We lived with them in Boston until 1960, and that’s when I got to know Papa and Readie myself and heard all of their stories.

They described lynchings they’d seen in the South and talked in detail about their travels, all done on a wagon pulled by mules. It took them days to get from town to town, and they had to make frequent stops to rest and water the mules. On one trip, an old white lady gave them some biscuits to eat. It seemed like such a nice gift until the biscuits were dropped on the ground for the hogs to eat. When Papa and Readie went back by that farm a few days later, they found the hogs dead. The biscuits had been poisoned. Papa said that was what Virginia was like at that time. He told me not all whites were bad people.

Papa and Readie told me they had never wanted to move to Boston. Papa said, “When I die, don’t plant me on foreign soil. Take our bodies back to Virginia.” It was a very hard adjustment from country life to big city life, but they had no choice. Papa was my Superman. I promised that I would be just like him when I grew up, strong and hardworking.

I was the first of fifteen brothers and sisters, all by the same parents, and none were twins. Except me, all of them were born at City Hospital in Boston. We lived in a section of West Newton Village that is gone now because of the Mass Pike. We later moved to lower Roxbury. We lived on so many different streets while the whites were fleeing and the blacks were moving in. Urban renewal was on high.

I attended Dwight Elementary School, Madison Middle School, and William Bacon Elementary. The teacher didn’t like black kids and was very strict, using a bamboo or rattan stick as a form of discipline. Hitting children was discipline back then, and discipline was expected and enforced. It was even worse at Catholic and private schools.

For social enjoyment, we went to the Boys and Girls Club on Dudley Street that had a large membership and to the Cabot pool where I learned to swim. If we had no money, we went to the Whittier wading pool. We brought butter-and-sugar sandwiches for lunch. Candy was two for a penny, and a chocolate bar was a nickel. That same nickel could buy a small candy mint julep, a Mary Jane, a squirrel nut, a licorice stick, candy stick, or watermelon slice, so everyone was looking for returnable bottles to turn into big money.

As time moved on and my parents had more children, we moved into cold-water flats in the Cathedral projects. We thought we had moved up. We lived on the second floor right next to an incinerator chute that banged all night. Every week we had to mop and wax the floor, and up and down the stairs. That was part of the lease, even though rent was only forty dollars. With so many children, my mother stayed home, and my father was an Independent Taxi Operators Association (ITOA) taxi driver with a uniform, hat, and changer. He wore a black tie and kept the cab spotless. Sometimes he worked twenty-four-hour shifts, or “iron shifts.”

My mother saved money wherever she could. She loved Morgan Memorial thrift shop and St. Vincent de Paul. Every two weeks we got twenty-five-cent haircuts called “baldies.” We went to the bakery to buy fig ends, which are the overcooked ends of fig bars. We could get a whole bag of them for five cents.

The rest of the family worked just as hard to make ends meet. One of my uncles went to Uncle Ned’s Pawn Shop every Monday to get money, and on Fridays he bought his watch back with his paycheck.

That doesn’t mean the adults never had fun. Dad enjoyed wrestling at the Boston Arena, and my aunts went to the clubs: Big M. High Hat, Shanty, Rosco, and Highland Tap. Everyone rode the el, the elevated train, high in the air. We got on at Northhampton, Eggleston, and Dudley, which were all black people’s stops. Anything else was out of bounds.

As a young teenager, I shined shoes and sold newspapers. I sold the Afro-American and the Banner. I pulled a wagon to and from the grocery store, taking people’s bags home on the weekend. That was my first job. My second job was at a tire shop where five quarts of oil cost a dollar. I had to fix tires by hand. It was backbreaking work.

We all worked hard because that’s what Papa taught us to do. He emphasized this to the men who married his daughters and granddaughters, too; that they had to work hard and take care of their families just as he had. My father still talks about Papa’s stern manner and about the lectures he received when he began courting my mother.

I have gone to my children’s school to tell the story of black history, to speak about what Papa was able to accomplish without an education and with few opportunities. My son graduated in 2003 from Wentworth Institute with a degree in engineering. With Papa’s legacy in my son’s heart, he told me that he dedicated his degree to Papa Guy Forrest, who never had a chance. I promise to tell his son what Papa did for him. My grandson, Jesiah Jevani, also known as J. J., is three months old now and is the eighth generation of our family. All of us who have come after Papa have been influenced by his strength. He is gone but not forgotten. His story can never be finished.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Marion Isom Wood: The Happiest Home

One of my many homes in Charlestown was at 113 High Street. It was a light blue clapboard-shingled house with a dark gray tile roof and many windows. The rent was twenty-seven dollars a month.

I lived there from the sixth grade until four years after graduating from high school when I left to be married. That was eleven years. My mother always called it a happy house. We had four weddings, two births, and six graduations there. I remember only happy memories: Christmas trees and Christmas mornings, birthday parties, and Thanksgiving dinners around the large dining room table. My father, two brothers, and a brother-in-law served in World War II. All four returned home safe and sound to 113 High Street after the war. I began a relationship in that house that lasted the rest of my life.

The house had a small three-room apartment on the first floor. My family lived in the other rented apartment on the second and third floor, which consisted of six rooms. The kitchen was on the bottom floor, and the walls were painted yellow and green, common colors in the forties, separated by a chair rail. We had no wall cabinets, so a china cabinet was added to hold the dishes. We had an ice chest for a few years until my mother bought a gas refrigerator. The floor was linoleum.

Across a small hall was the dining room. A small space heater near the doorway warmed the room. It was an oil heater — very dangerous — and was knocked around often by us kids. It’s a wonder we never burned the house down. We held birthday parties in the dining room; there were so many of us that we never needed to invite guests. We set the cake on the dark mahogany table in the center of the room. Against one wall was a couch with wooden arms. Across the room were two windows with lace curtains.

The small front hall led to the parlor, which was furnished with a pretty flowered parlor set, some tables, and a floor ashtray. The parlor was bright, and it had four windows with lace curtains and pictures on the wallpapered walls. Mother closed the parlor off during winter to save on heating.

Our bedrooms were on the top floor: a bedroom for the boys, a bedroom for the girls, and a bedroom for my parents. Two more children were added to the family while we lived there, one for the boys’ room and one for the girls’ room. The girls’ bedroom was over the dining room. Three of us shared a double bed. Each of us had a bureau. The walls were covered with pictures of movie stars from magazines. The magazines were half-price — two cents — after the store’s owner had ripped the front cover off to get his refund. What started as one or two pictures ended up covering the walls like wallpaper.

Winter mornings always found my mother in the kitchen removing the coals that had died out during the night from the old black heating stove and replacing them with new ones. She had the stove going by the time we got up for breakfast and dressed for school. Our breakfast, a large pot of oatmeal, was waiting for us on the hot stove. We all sat around an enamel-top kitchen table with eight chairs. For our cereal, each of us got a half glass of milk measured from an empty four-ounce glass Kraft’s cheese spread jar. We ate it with great grumbling, knowing that it would be our lunch if we didn’t eat it for breakfast.

My mother was a small-built woman with a pretty face and short, curly, jet-black hair. In our family if you had a few extra pounds on you, you were described as “pleasingly plump,” so I must say that Mom was pleasingly plump. I remember when hugging her she would always feel soft and warm. Mother was always home doing some kind of housework when we got back from school. I can still see her mopping the kitchen floor barefoot in her housedress, singing as she swished the mop back and forth. “She’s only a bird in a gilded cage, a beautiful sight to see.” I guess it was a popular song in its day. “Her beauty was sold to a fool and his gold. She’s only a bird in a gilded cage.”

Mother usually ran the household by herself, since my father was away so much in the service. He was a chief warrant officer in the navy. He was so handsome in his naval uniform. I remember waiting for my father to come home on leave. He always brought a small gift for each of us, something from his pocketful of change, sometimes a delicious golden apple. That was quite a treat. Sometimes he had a little extra something for my oldest sister. He favored her. We said, “She looks like Ma, that’s why he likes her best.”

Winky first asked me for a date at my sister’s wedding reception. We had two staircases. One was the main stairs and the other led back to the kitchen. Winky cornered me between the staircases to ask me for a date, and of course I said yes. You know boys. He was a handsome young man that I had had my eye on for a long time. We knew each other growing up and attended the same church, St. John’s Episcopal in Charlestown. We belonged to the same youth group. He was a little punkier than the other boys and had a lot to say about nothing. He made you laugh and was very pleasant. You could see that in him even as a kid. I guess maybe he had his eye on me, too.

Winky gave me my engagement ring on the steps leading up to the front door. It was cold outside, so he just handed the ring to me without a lot of rigmarole. There’s a picture of me posing in front. Winky and I spent a lot of time kissing on those steps. He was drafted and sent to San Bernardino, California. I cried all night when he told me. We ended up getting married on his air force base by the chaplain.

And so it was that I left my parents’ home to another happy home of my own. I would never go back to that house, as my parents moved from 113 High Street with the three remaining children while Winky was still in the air force.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Peter Looney: Thank You, Ma and Pa

I chose to write about a picture from my wedding. It is a group picture of my whole family: my brother Larry and his wife Rosella; my brother Bob and his wife Dee; my wife Mae and me; my sister Patricia; my brother Bill and his wife Betty; and, sitting in front, my father Bill, Alice “Ma” Murphy, and Patrick “Pa” Murphy.

Thinking back to that day, it was like I had two families: my three brothers and sister had been raised by my father, and I had been brought up by Alice “Ma” Murphy, my mother’s sister, who had also raised my mother. My mother was born and baptized in Saint Francis de Sales parish and was married from Ma and Pa’s house on Mystic Street in 1920, in Saint Francis de Sales Church. When I was born, my mom had medical problems and never came home from the hospital, so I went straight to Ma and Pa’s house from the hospital. My father had four other children to care for and could not handle an infant at the time. The arrangement was supposed to have been temporary, but I stayed with the Murphys until my own marriage.

Early in my childhood, I was a little confused as to who I was. Ma and Pa were mother and father to me, so I thought I had to be a Murphy. In the early grades at Saint Mary’s School, I would sign all my papers Peter Patrick Looney Murphy. Although the nuns told me, “Peter, your name is Peter Looney, not Murphy,” I continued to sign Murphy to all my papers, because I was a Murphy and a Looney. In the end they won and I did as I was told.

I felt comfortable with my brothers and sister when my father would bring them over to visit or when I visited them. Even though we were apart, I felt that I belonged with them, but it was different with my father. I did not know what to call him, Bill or Dad. In my mind, Pa Murphy was my father and I don’t think that changed even when I became an adult. I was told that I was to stay with the Murphys until my father was able to care for me, and then I would go back with him. I think what happened is that I became too attached to Ma and Pa and they, along with my father, decided it would be best if I stayed with them. I don’t know what kind of life I would have had with my father — most likely it would have been great — but I consider myself very lucky to have been brought up by Ma and Pa.

Let me see if I can describe life with the Murphys. Alice Margaret Burns, “Ma,” was born November 11, 1885. Patrick Henry Murphy, “Pa,” was born May 13, 1883. They were married in Charlestown in 1904 and had eight children of their own: five girls (Helen, Alice, Mary, Virginia, and Patricia) and three boys (Daniel, who died at three from scarlet fever; Patrick, who died of shock at six when he was hit by a truck; and Lawrence, who joined the navy at eighteen and fought in World War II). At the same time, Ma Murphy was bringing up her younger sister Agnes, my mother. In 1941, when I was brought from the hospital to live with them, Ma and Pa had only two daughters still at home, Virginia and Patsy, who are like sisters to me and felt that I was their baby brother. The other children had already grown up, left the house, and produced seven grandchildren. Ma and Pa were in their fifties.

Ma was a short woman, about five feet two, with white hair and glasses. She usually wore a housedress, an apron, and black Mary Jane pumps. I can see her now in the kitchen on a Friday night kneading dough for her bread and pies, and soaking beans for Saturday night, always with a smile. She would also be getting supper ready. Everyone would be at supper: Ma, Pa, Virginia, Patsy, and me; that was Ma’s rule. Ma never forced me to eat. I was a poor eater and when at home, my sisters and aunts would always load my plate and tell me to finish everything. The plate full of food looked like a mountain to me and I could not eat it, but if Ma were around she would tell them not to force me. I ended up with a good appetite. I tell my own children not to force their kids to eat because I know how it feels, and they won’t starve to death.

Another unwritten rule was never to beat Ma at cards. On Friday or Saturday nights, we played Pokeno for pennies and Ma didn’t like to lose. Every night that we played, she somehow won. One of my favorite card-night treats was Drakes and popcorn squares. I crushed the Drake, a chocolate with cream inside, onto the popcorn — yum!

I’ll never forget Ma’s wisdom. When life got tough, I’d say, “If I can get through this week, I’ll be okay.” Ma would say, “Don’t wish your life away. It will go quick enough.” How true.

Pa was also short, about five feet five, and somewhat bald with white hair around the sides. He wore glasses and smoked a pipe. I can picture him in the summer wearing a white T-shirt, long pants, and a sailor hat, smoking his pipe and playing ball with me. I guess he was about sixty-five years old when I was eleven. He was in the fire department from 1918 to 1947, and then he went to work at Converse Rubber Shoe Company in Malden from 1948 to 1955. After that, he worked at Beachmont Station in Revere at the MTA parking lot. Pa told me stories about his days riding shotgun on a Wells Fargo carriage or about his years at the Boston Fire Department. In 1958, the Boston newspaper featured stories on acts of heroism, and Pa Murphy was included. He was placed on the Roll of Merit in 1942 for rescuing a fellow firefighter. I remember Pa telling me that during the fire, he entered a cellar, pulled the firefighter up from the floor, and passed him out the cellar window. As he was saving the other fellow, he passed out himself, but even as he fell unconscious, he kept an iron grip on the other guy. This allowed the men outside to get a hold of Pa’s arm and pull him out, too. He was so proud when he told me that story.

Growing up with Ma and Pa Murphy during what I call the “carefree years” between grammar school and high school was much better than these so-called golden years. We had a cottage in Beachmont very close to the beach for the summer. I think Pa paid between one hundred fifty and two hundred dollars for the whole season, from May to October. The cottage had no hot water and only a wood stove, so on cold, damp days I moved my cot near the stack to keep warm during the night. Believe me, I could dress quickly for school on late September and early October mornings when it got cold.

I have many fond memories of our days at the beach, but I always looked forward to going home to Charlestown at the end of the season. I could sleep later because I didn’t have to take a train to school, and it was a lot warmer getting dressed in the morning. When I first got back to Charlestown, the noise of the old el trains kept me awake. Thinking back now, in the spring when we went to Beachmont, it was too quiet at night for me to sleep!

To this day, passing the house on High Street brings back many childhood memories, guaranteed to put my grandkids to sleep. I can picture my friends playing step-ball with me. I can see myself going around the corner to one of my friends’ houses and yelling, “Hi-o, Joey! Are you coming out?” Sometimes when Joey’s mom came to the window, you just knew Joey wasn’t coming out. I can remember one time we were climbing the fence at the Bunker Hill Monument, and I fell and broke my left arm. I didn’t want to say anything, but at dinner I was eating with my right hand (I am left-handed) and they asked me why. My arm was in a cast the next day that was removed six weeks later. Each night after Pa got home from work, we sat in the kitchen and he massaged my arm with warm oil and made me exercise to rebuild the muscles. Ma took good care of me, too. God forbid I got sick. She would be at my side day and night with hot tea, medicine, and TLC. The president himself never got the care and love I did.

I have many fond memories of my days at Saint Mary’s School, serving as an altar boy at Saint Mary’s Church, and all the friendships I made during my carefree years. Over fifty years later, some of us still hang out together, talk on the phone, and email each other. What a wonderful town Charlestown is: an Irish Catholic community that taught all of us from my era the meaning of church, family, community values, and to give back to the town we love so well. Thank you, Ma and Pa, for building such a solid foundation for my life.

Even though they have both been gone for a while now, I am reminded of them each time I go into my home, look up the stairs, and see Pa’s old pipe stand. It has been around since I was a young boy. I don’t know how old it is but I do know it came from a firehouse that was either being remodeled or torn down. One of Pa’s coworkers made the stand. Its post is made from a spoke of a staircase railing, it’s thirty-two inches high, the base is an octagon shape, and the top is a section for the glass ashtray.

Although it has always been there, this is the most attention I have ever given it. It has traveled to 43 High Street, 53 High Street, and 50 O’Brien Court with Pa. Then it traveled with me to 85 High Street, 61 Pearl Street, and to my current address on Dunstable Street. It has been in closets, cellars, and bedroom corners, but it always has been there. I walked by this ashtray stand for my Communion, confession, grammar and high school graduations, prom, when I left for the army, the day I got married, when Ma died and when Pa died, when my children and grandchildren were born, and when I got cancer. It’s been there with me. Where is it now? It sits at the head of our stairs on the second floor holding a small plant with flowers instead of a pipe.

The stand is part of my past, although it has been taken for granted for a long time. However, because of this writing program I have recently paid it more attention, and it has brought back so many memories, like coming into the house on a winter night. Ma would be in the kitchen getting supper ready, and Pa would be in the parlor in his chair with his ashtray beside him. His pipe would be in the ashtray and the sweet smell of pipe tobacco would fill the room as we watched Hopalong Cassidy together.

I’ve never met my mother and have so many questions. Hopefully, if I get to heaven, Ma and Pa and my mother Agnes will be sitting at a kitchen table and will say, “Come in, Pete, you’re just in time for tea.”

[bostonmemoirproject]

Ann Giovanni: Sticking Together

I grew up in Somerville and graduated from Somerville High. My mother was Catholic and on the strict side. She raised my sisters Norma, Rose, Tena, and I not to wear makeup and to watch how we dressed. We had to go to church and Sunday school. We also had a brother, whose name was never mentioned around my parents after the war. His name was Danny Buonomo.

When he was sixteen, Danny wanted to join the navy and he enlisted. My mother and father were not happy, but he did very well. He wrote to us from his ship, the USS Honolulu. I was about ten when we received the news about him. I asked my sister what was wrong, and she said it was about Danny. She wanted to spare my mother. They told my dad and he was very sad about it. When Mom found out, it was too much for her to handle, and she became sick and had to stay in bed. My sisters and I took care of her. Danny’s ship had been torpedoed and his body had not been recovered, so at the funeral, there was a closed casket with an American flag and his photograph on top. He is buried in the national cemetery, and his name appears on the Somerville Honor Roll.

Our parents were very good to us, and we grew up and started working. Norma was a secretary at Somerville Hospital, and Tena worked at Stride Rite, where she also got me a job. She got married and lived downstairs from us. Dad worked in a meat factory and kept a garden at home. He loved rabbits and had four, each one a different color. One day he was working in his garden after supper and his heart bothered him. We took him to the hospital where he hung on for three weeks, but then we lost him. My mother was so broken up — first with the loss of her son and now with the loss of her husband — that she went into shock and never really got over it. My sisters and I took turns grocery shopping, cooking, washing dishes, cleaning, and doing laundry in the wringer until she got back on her feet.

In time, I met someone at my job at Stride Rite. He flirted with me by pulling on my apron strings. I went with Tony on and off for three years until my mother gave me permission to marry him. We had a happy marriage at first. We had three boys, Matthew, John, and Tony, and finally a girl, my Maria. They were nice kids and were good to each other. As they got older, I was in the doghouse with my husband a lot. He wanted the boys to go into business or into the military, but they were interested in other things, and I encouraged the kids to do what they wanted. Matt liked working with wood, so he went to carpentry school and now works as a contractor. John enjoyed working on transmissions, went to a school for mechanics, and did well in the automotive industry. Maria went into apartment management and now works for Gillette. Only Tony Jr. wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, and his father pushed him to go into the service.

My husband did not want me to work, but I did anyway. I worked undercover making school lunches at the YMCA in Hyde Park and baking cookies, and I was still home before anyone else. I put money in the bank without his knowledge. He worked at Atlas Liquors, and came home late most nights after I’d gone to bed. Later, I found out why.

He kept on Tony’s back about going into the military. Tony wasn’t too keen on it, but his father insisted, saying, “Do me a favor and go into the service.” And so, like Danny, he joined the navy. Unlike Danny, he did not do well. When Tony wrote to tell me about the ship, he did not sound happy. He sent letters less often, and I worried when I didn’t hear from him. A friend of mine was going to Hawaii for vacation and brought Tony a gift from me. She said he looked healthy but seemed sad. I still had not gotten any letters from him. Between that and his father not being around, things were difficult.

I discovered that my husband had been lying to me. One night, he said he was staying late at work to do inventory. My friend and neighbor Ruth drove me to the store, and there was no one there. He was seeing someone else. After I found out, I refused to sleep in the same bed with him.

My son Tony was in the navy for three and a half years. One Saturday, I was browsing the stores downtown with Matt and John, and I saw a fellow looking in the window of one of the shops. I looked at my two sons, and then he saw us. Tony hugged his brothers and me, and told us he was living with another fellow on Dartmouth Street. Tony had gone AWOL without telling us. He would not receive any checks or benefits from the navy. The fellow he was living with was nice but after a while Tony moved back home.

The children were not happy with their father. I got a lawyer, a restraining order, and eventually a divorce, with small child-support payments from my ex-husband (forty dollars a week per child). The kids were in their teens and worried that they wouldn’t be able to finish school. The lawyer said that their father would pay for that, too, which he didn’t. After their father moved out, the kids and I pulled together and took care of each other. I went to counseling to help deal with all the changes. I worked and they pitched in what they could. Eventually, Matthew got married, and it was time for John to move into his own apartment. As for my Tony, he had a breakdown and suffered from mental health problems. He could not cope and had to be hospitalized. They kept him there for a while until he was ready to be on his own again. Now he is out of the hospital and lives in his own place.

Family members agree that if his father had not pushed him into the military, Tony would not be in the predicament he is now. But just like my sisters and I took care of my mother after losing Danny and my father, my kids and I take care of Tony and each other. We visit Tony every week, and if he forgets to take his medication, his brothers take him to the hospital. Matthew is now his guardian and checks on him to make sure he has everything he needs. Tony visits his brothers, helps with the yard work, and plays with the kids, all of which helps keep him motivated. We all make sure that he has a good quality of life.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Nancy Barbero: Siblings

I was born and raised in East Boston, the youngest of seven children. My oldest two siblings, Paul and Michaelina (Mary) were born in Italy and came over when they were two and three years old. The rest of us — Conchetta (Annie), Carmen, Antonio (Tony), Augustine (Austin), and I — were born here. Being the youngest, I was the favorite and spoiled, so they say. My mother kept me close by. As a child, I couldn’t go to camp because she was afraid I’d get lost, and I couldn’t go to the beach because she was afraid I’d drown.

My two sisters and four brothers were already working. I looked forward to going to work when I was of age, and I got a job permit when I turned sixteen. For a few years, I worked at the hardware counter at Woolworth’s, the five-and-dime on Meridian in East Boston. I sold dish sets — Blue Willow china was popular then — and watered the plants. Because we lived ten minutes away, I always went home to have lunch with my mother rather than eat at the lunch counter, but I did get ice cream at work. After that job, I was a gift-wrapper in R. H. White’s department store for four years. There were no machine-made bows at that time; we made bows of all sizes and colors by hand.

Then I went to work at a millinery shop with my brothers Tony and Austin and older sister Mary. The New Style Hat Company, owned by Abe Fixler, was on Kingston Street near the Jordan Marsh department store. First, the hats were formed on the hat block and then my brothers “banged out” the trimmings. Heavy iron forms in the shape of flowers and leaves were placed on pieces of felt and hammered out into the pieces that I then tacked on to the hats. After I positioned and stapled them in place, the sewers reinforced the trimmings and added veils. These hats were sold at Jordan’s, Filene’s, Gilchrist’s, Raymond’s, and R. H. White’s under the stores’ own labels. At the end of winter we made straw hats for the upcoming spring and summer seasons, and at the end of summer we made felt hats for fall and winter.

Annie and Carmen worked in the Central Theater and the Seville. Ann was a candy girl at the Seville for four years and became a war bond girl during World War II. On her way to work, she passed by Kennedy’s Butter and Egg store. I remember the smell of the butter and the peanut butter there. Ray McNulty worked at Kennedy’s and saw her walk by every day. He asked her for a date and finally she said yes. In time, Ann became Ann McNulty.

When the U.S. entered World War II, three of my four brothers joined the service, two of them in the navy and one in the army. Ann’s husband joined the air force. I would write letters each week to tell them what was happening at home. We were so happy to receive their letters and to know they were all well.

Tony and Carmen saw a lot of action on destroyers since they were both in the Pacific. Austin was a medic in Texas. At that time if any family member was serving in the armed forces we hung a flag with stars to indicate how many in the family were fighting in the war. We had four stars, three for my brothers and one for my brother-in-law. Luckily they all came home.

Being the youngest may have been fun while I was growing up, but now it’s difficult. I am sad to see my siblings go. In March 2007, Mary passed away at ninety-three and now it’s just Ann and me. That spring, my doctor noticed that I had lost a significant amount of weight and asked me about it. It’s just sad to lose your family. I take care of Ann. If anything happens to her, I’ll be the only one left.

So many things bring back memories of my siblings. I’ll go by the street where Tony lived in Medford and think about how we all sat in his yard every other Saturday. We alternated between his house and mine, eating dinner and sitting outside when the weather was fine, the kids playing and the adults gabbing. The food was good, especially the pastiere (Easter pie) and sopressata (smoked sausage). I see Tony’s daughter at family gatherings and ask, “Remember how your father made those stuffed clams?” Tony was a cook in the navy and at Giro’s in the North End for many years. My nieces, nephews, grandnieces, and grandnephews remind me of my siblings. One of my niece’s sons got married and at the wedding I asked her, “Wouldn’t it be nice if your parents could be here to see this?”

Holidays remind me of the good times with my family. At Christmas we had a great time at Tony and Gertie’s house in East Boston, enjoying many tasty dishes and Italian cookies. The house smelled so good. The children loved to see the decorated Christmas tree and the candles lit in the windows. Tony loved shopping for his children, and the presents wrapped under the tree resembled Jordan Marsh’s toy department. We remembered our parents, talked about the good times, and had lots of laughs together.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Barbara Powers: Rituals

At first I thought we had no family rituals. Rituals were big things. We had no big things I could remember. And then, the little sillies began to pop into my mind — the little sillies that made love and family so very special, and that put security into a child’s life.

The first ritual was bath night. My father bathed us one at a time. While he scrubbed backs and cleaned necks, he told us stories of two bears, Pick and Pat. One of the regrets of my life is that I do not remember the content of those stories. I remember giggling and begging for another one and loving my father. I wonder if he felt a little sad as each of us grew into preadolescent shyness and wouldn’t let him in the bathroom any more.

On Sunday afternoons at precisely 3:55, the Hill family sat down to the dinner table, said grace, and listened to the deep, mysterious tones declare that The Shadow knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men. Never a Sunday passed by without Lamont Cranston aiding and abetting the side of justice. My family believed in justice. Of course, Sunday evenings always ended with the cheery, “J-E-L-L-O” of Jack Benny. Things seemed so safe back then.

There was also the Saturday movie ritual. One never admitted that a friend’s mother was refusing to let her offspring go. Everyone went. We from Munroe Street picked Peggy and Andy up at Harrishof Street, and Barbara, Milly, Owen, Walter, Delores, and Mary Ann joined the group at various stages. All you needed was fifteen cents to buy a ticket and a box of popcorn. It was a ritual you didn’t mind sharing with little brothers and sisters — at least until you began to notice boys as boys.

From April through October, we had a tennis ritual in which my father and his cronies all arrived home from the tennis courts to devour my mother’s delicious baking powder biscuits, sausages, and gravy. My mouth still waters when I think of that.

Rituals — teeny, tiny rituals — echo throughout growing up, giving the good old days a flavor never to be repeated, and never to be forgotten.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Eileen Locke: Noni

My grandmother Honora Dillane Silk, known affectionately as Noni, was my mother’s mother. Her birth certificate reads Honora Dillane, which was Americanized to Dillon somewhere along the line. She arrived in Boston aboard the SS Ivernia on October 9, 1910. She came from Listowel, county Kerry in Ireland. According to the ship’s manifest, she was five feet six with brown hair and had twenty-five dollars in her possession. She was traveling to her brother James Dillon’s home in Somerville because someone had to sponsor her to come into the country.

My aunts and uncles said that she had a theatrical side to her. When a former actor named Patrick Lund moved into the apartment below her, she talked to him for hours about the theater scene in New York City while everyone else was bored. In fact, the family was happiest when he moved away. I think she liked to be the center of attention. She was a character in the best sense of the word.

My mother was small for her age and said that when money was tight, Noni, whom she called Momma, would tell her to put on her first Holy Communion dress. It was usually on a Sunday. They would take the trolley to visit a well-to-do and somewhat forgetful uncle, and, for making her first Communion, he would tuck a few dollars into my mother’s hand — again and again.

My memories come from stories that have been passed down by other relatives. Noni passed away in April 1940, and I wasn’t born until June 1943. My relatives talked about her as though she were still alive. She had been widowed twice by 1928 and had seven children to raise on her own. Prior to this, life was good for her. She was able to return to Ireland in 1923 for a brief visit. It must have been sad to leave her family in Ireland again. She arrived at Ellis Island aboard the SS Andania. She was thirty-four years old and had no idea how much her life would change in the next few years. I admire Noni’s courage for crossing the ocean in 1910 and again in 1923. I don’t know if I could have done it.

I have an old photograph of Noni in which she is looking down lovingly at her baby boy, Little Jimmy, who had just passed away. The wallpaper and time period tell us he is being waked at home. Her dress is made of simple cotton, more than likely a homemade day dress. The rickrack trim on the dress is intended to fancy it up a bit, and the ribbon adorning her neck was her attempt to wear her finest. She just didn’t have the means, yet her hair looked lovely and she wore earrings.

Noni didn’t have much education. Her children, including my mother, would sit around the kitchen table doing their homework. One of them asked, “Momma, how do you spell ‘elephant’?” She replied, “You might as well ask me how to spell ‘America.’ ” To her, these were both long words. I have told that story to my grandchildren many times and will soon tell it to my great-granddaughter. As I tell people, we’re regular cemetery-goers. We have pictures of my sister and me as little girls standing by Noni’s grave. We didn’t think anything of it. We were just visiting her.

Noni’s legacy to the family is to make do with what you have. You must rise above any situation and be proud. My mother said that if Noni caught them walking with their heads down, she would say, “Pick your head up. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

For the first time I have realized how very strong my grandmother was. She endured so much yet kept going for the sake of her children and other loved ones. There was always music in the air, with Noni singing, dancing, or playing the concertina. Her children all grew up loving music. At family gatherings long after she passed away, they carried on the tradition of sing-alongs. To this day, we sing at family functions. We have sheets printed up and we pass them out so that everyone knows the words. We use the songbook 100 Irish Ballads. Once, I tried to lend it to my girlfriend Phyllis who lives in Maine. I said to her, “Guard it with your life.” Phyllis wouldn’t take it. She didn’t want the responsibility. Those songs are our memories.

[bostonmemoirproject]

Nina Preston: My Modern Father

My father came to America when he was just fifteen and settled in San Francisco with his uncle. In 1909, there was a quota on the number of immigrants who could come here from Italy. He was the oldest of seven kids. Later he was drafted into the army and fought in World War I for America, the country he loved. He got the measles during the fighting and was sent to a hospital. While there, he found out that his entire troop had been killed in action. Later in life, he still cried about this loss. When the war was over, he went to Italy to visit his parents. He spotted my mother and immediately wanted to meet her. By then he was twenty-seven years old, and he was really ready to be married. They had a forty-day engagement. It was not an arranged marriage, but it was suggested. My mother thought my father was a show-off from America with his dapper clothes, but that marriage was made in heaven, believe me. I was so lucky to be born into my family.

Although my parents were both born in Italy, I never considered them old-fashioned. My father especially was very modern. He changed with the times. Some of my friends had fathers who were very strict, so my friends liked to come to my house to relax and even joke with my dad. My father was a shoulder to lean on if anything bothered us. He always listened to us and somehow said the right thing to make us feel better.

Because my mother worked as a stitcher at Hoffman’s factory, Dad cooked for us during the week. He loved to cook. He always had a wonderful dinner ready with platters full of food. The presentation was so perfect that we didn’t want to eat it, but we did because it was so good. He loved meat: steak, pork chops, cutlets, and roasts. He loved spinach and carrots, and we ate a salad every night without fail and had fruit for dessert. He would get three cantaloupes, cut them in half, scoop out the seeds, and put a scoop of vanilla ice cream in each half, which was very Italian. Sometimes he took me out to a restaurant to try new food. He liked Chinese food. He loved to try anything new. We were poor, but not when it came to food.

On the weekends my mother made homemade ravioli. She had a rolling board my father had made for her. It had a lip that went down under the table to hold it in place, and she was so fast with the rolling pin. My father used the rolling machine when he made pasta, but my mother rolled it by hand.

My mother never liked America as much as Italy. I believe in time she got to like East Boston, but it was hard for her in the beginning. I remember she couldn’t get used to the coffee. One day she sent me to the store to buy black coffee. She wanted to make espresso since she didn’t care for Maxwell House or any other type of American coffee. I went to the store and asked for black coffee, but the lady laughed and said, “All coffee is black before you put milk in it!” Needless to say, it was not an Italian store. Eventually, my mother got used to the food and the coffee. She found that she could buy the dark roast coffee in Kennedy’s Butter and Egg store. That store had the best aromas. They had all different kinds of beans that they roasted right in the store and would mix for you. The line to get into the store was always long, with people waiting to give their orders for dairy, coffee, and peanut butter.

My mother picked up English, probably because she worked and had to speak well and understand everyone. My parents sometimes spoke Italian to each other, but they spoke English to us. She was a quiet and gentle woman who lived for her family. She never complained about working hard. She worked long hours in the factory and took embroidery home to work evenings. She took the ferry to work to save four cents. If I wanted something washed, ironed, or hemmed, she always did it for me. She always made our school lunches in the morning, never the night before, because she thought they would be fresher.

When she was a child, my mother had rheumatic fever, which left her with a very damaged heart. She joked about her tick-tock not being too good, but she never felt sorry for herself. I’ll never forget the day my father took her to see Dr. Grande. She was forty-four years old and the doctor told my father that with a lot of care she would live just two more years. He was wrong. She made it to fifty-eight, thank God. We were lucky to have her.

I felt very safe in my home. I was the youngest of three girls, and I think my sisters paved the way for me to be somewhat spoiled. They did the chores and I was sent out to play. My sisters gave me an allowance of twenty-five cents a week. Sometimes they bribed me to run errands for them, so I always had spending money. When we were old enough, my best friend Loretta and I went to Central Square in East Boston to browse in the stores. We always managed to buy something with our allowances. Central Square had furniture, appliance, shoe, and clothing stores. Our favorite store was Woolworth’s — they had everything. I loved the smell of the roasting nuts, and their windmill cookies were absolutely delicious. We could pick our own variety of cookies from the lift-up containers. As we got older, we met girls from other schools and we all went shopping there together.

Eventually we were allowed to go into Boston. Almost every weekend we went to a movie and then out to eat. The theaters on Washington and Tremont streets were absolutely beautiful with so much detail, nothing like today’s theaters. Afterward, we usually went to the Number Nine restaurant in Chinatown, Luigi’s Pizza, Walton’s Cafeteria, or the Waldorf, where we could get real American food with brown gravy or hamburgers with french fries. I came home and said to my father, “You’ve got to make brown gravy,” and he started laughing. He knew how to make it, you see, and he finally did, but his heart wasn’t in it.