This morning I was hopping through broadcast channels and there was an episode of Family Affair about little Buffy having her tonsils out (and of course Uncle Bill and Mr. French were more strung out about it than either Buffy or her brother Jody). Buffy has no problem with going to the hospital and rides there in a taxi in one of her fetching designer outfits (later you could buy them in department stores), her doll Mrs. Beasley, and a cute little suitcase. Post surgery she writes cute messages on a little chalkboard because her throat was too sore for talking.
I'm not sure if the designer outfit and the taxi ride would have put any glamour on my tonsil experience.
Liberating kids from their tonsils seemed to be a cottage industry in the 1960s. I think doctors today hold off unless the situation is dire, but back then it seemed every kid on earth underwent a tonsillectomy, as well as having their adenoids extracted. I had frequent colds, and until my pediatrician realized I probably had an allergy, extracting the tonsils/adenoids combo seemed the way to cure the problem.
So, if it had to be done, it had to be done before I started school.
The gotcha back then for kids was the ice cream. You're five years old, and being sick wasn't fun—but in a way it was. You got to snuggle in blankets and watch TV on the sofa and eat chicken soup, and since Mom didn't work, you had her for company all day, and Liquiprim and alcohol rubdowns were the price you paid for all this luxury. Why would you want to go to a hospital—and unless you were one of those poor sick kids you saw in the St. Jude commercials or during the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon on Labor Day, you never saw the inside of one, because kids weren't allowed inside back then, not even if your mother or dad was there, but instead you had to stay with relatives—to "feel better" when you could eat chicken soup with rice and watch The Secret Storm with Mom?
So to get you to feel better about going to a hospital and staying overnight and having your tonsils out, they promised you all the ice cream you could eat. Ice cream for breakfast, and lunch, and supper if you wanted, because that was the best thing to soothe your throat after the surgery. C'mon, what kid's going to turn that down?
There's a sweet little commercial on here for Children's Hospital of Atlanta that shows a winsome little blonde girl calmly going into some type of hospital or outpatient clinic for surgery. The nurse is smiling and young and curtseys to the child like she is a princess, and the little girl is wheeled solemnly but trustingly down a hall as the parents look on. This must be a modern thing. I definitely was no little princess, just a short little girl with bobbed brown hair who still remembers being placed, not on a gurney by a smiling young medical assistant, but in a hospital room or some sort of supply room (I recall cupboards) that had been done over as a playroom with the addition of some toys and blocks. There were several other children there, and one by one, one of them would leave with a nurse and never come back. Apparently they thought kids our age (about five) wouldn't notice this troubling reduction, but trust me, we did. Little Mary left, and then little Tom, and they never came back. Could you imagine anything more fairy-tale nightmarish? Finally there were only two children left, a little boy and myself, and we knew what would happen the next time the nurse arrived. We quickly consulted. Now, off to one side of the room was a gurney with a sheet covering it, all the way to the floor. We crawled under it, convinced that we'd never be seen behind that sheet.
The expected nurse came, of course, and this time it was my turn, but I had to be fished out from under the gurney. I don't know if I was crying, but I sure wanted to if I wasn't. She pretty much had to drag me out.
After that it got hazy, but the one thing that starkly stands out is being laid down and secured on the operating table, with masked faces bobbing above me, and the big, dark, looming ether mask coming down on my face while a disembodied voice told me not to be afraid. It blotted out the light, and I remember struggling and crying and then blackness. I think most of my problems with anesthesia today come from having that horror-film image hovering in the back of my mind.
But it was finally over. I was lying in a big white hospital bed with the sorest throat ever. Everything in hospitals was white back then. Today the nurses and aides and techs wear colorful scrubs, even florals, or they are color-coded to the department the person is in. Nurses back then wore starched white dresses, white caps (possibly with a pop of color of a logo), white or light stockings with the seams very firmly straight upon their calves, and white shoes with soft crepe soles. (Doctors wore white in the operating room, but when they came to visit you in your room they were usually in a suit and tie.) The nurse did everything: she responded to the call button and tidied your bed and brought your pills, speaking in the standard soft voice. Back then hospitals were quiet unless you were in the emergency room. Visiting hours were only from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9, and only adults, as I mentioned, could visit. If you missed your mom you just had to cry until visiting hours arrived. And not much company because you had to pay for a television or radio or a telephone in your room.
My mother and father arrived that afternoon to find me crying. After the frightening waiting room and the sinister nurse and the terrifying ether cone, I wanted my ice cream, the promised ice cream, to sooth my painful throat. And all they were serving me was vanilla. Icky-tasting, nasty, gross vanilla! Not even Newport Creamery-quality vanilla, but the cheap bricks they served to you for dessert at weddings when they didn't have any Neapolitan. I ate nothing but chocolate (and an occasional coffee) and despised vanilla with all my heart. In vain they tried to explain this was all the hospital had. I refused to eat it and instead struggled to drink cold water.
What brought this all back? When Jody came down with tonsillitis at the end of the episode, they gave him chocolate. New York hospitals must have been swanker then, or Uncle Bill bankrolled it. Lucky Jody. Even all these years later, the five-year-old in me twinged in envy.
(And yeah, I still hate vanilla. 😐 )
The memories began in the attic, but they continue to accumulate. I've taken them out to air.
Showing posts with label parents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parents. Show all posts
"Tell the Story About..."
One can't grow up in Rhode Island, or at least couldn't grow up when I did, without hearing stories about the hurricane of 1938. We we were raised with the older folks comparing that storm with each new hurricane or nor'easter which came along. There were several close contenders, including Carol, the one in 1954 which I "remembered" simply because of the softcover "Hurricane Book" we kept in the attic, comparing the devastation in that year against photos from 1938. The strong hurricane I actually did remember was Donna in 1963; we lost power for three days plus shingles from the roof, and the chimney cracked because the television antenna was fastened to it and it being blown about and torn apart by the winds shifted the bricks out of position. The power eventually came back on with the blat of the television and the rattling of the refrigerator motor, and my first comment was typical of a 60s seven-year-old: "Oh, goody, now I can watch TV!" We had a close call in the late 1970s when I was working at Trifari, but the worst it did was strew tree branches all over the Parkway that took me from I-195 to the building on Pawtucket Avenue.
The 1938 hurricane stayed in everyone's memory because it was a heartbreaker. It might as well have been Galveston 38 years earlier. No warnings were given because the Weather Bureau considered it unlikely that the hurricane would make landfall where it did. "Hurricanes don't hit New England," the head of the Bureau said, despite history to the contrary. When a junior meteorologist plotted the path of the storm and asked if people shouldn't be warned, this same bullheaded superior said no, that New Englanders wouldn't listen to it anyway. The stories are frightening and fascinating: a family who rode out the storm riding a portion of their attic which was swept inland by the storm surge, ten Baptist ladies having their annual picnic who could not escape the waves and were all drowned, the couple who married despite Providence flooding below them. Providence was jackhammered by the storm; at one point the water downtown was 14 feet deep, a level memorialized by a brass plaque on the old Providence Journal building. Providence was built on a marsh and the city stunk of rotting plants and sewage as the waters receded—then the looters showed up as the sun set. One woman drowned in her car in a parking lot only yards from safety. Rowboats floated through the streets. One memory that stayed with many people were the mournful tooting of automobile horns from cars with electrical systems that had short-circuited when swallowed by water.
My parents and their families lived through this terrible storm, but many were not so fortunate. Six hundred and eighty people from Long Island to eastern Massachusetts died and $4.7 billion dollars (in today's money) damage was done. The hurricane crushed homes, lighthouses, and fishing fleets. The train from New York to Boston was nearly overwhelmed by the storm surge. The wind and rain even did damage inland: it destroyed 25 percent of Vermont's maple trees and ruined lumbering in New Hampshire. Traditional New England towns with tree-lined streets and church steeples were changed forever.
From the time I was very small, I remember being a history addict. Mother and Dad watched a lot of older movies, including old war movies, and I knew my father (not to mention numerous uncles and cousins) had fought during World War II. I was brought up in a scrapbook full of old photographs, memories of radio series, and the life stories of D'Ambras and Lanzis who came before me. To me, World War II and the Depression weren't just words in history books; they were as alive as the Beatles and Vietnam were to my generation. Dad showed me his war photographs and told me about working from the time he was fourteen and playing hooky from English class and how he learned to swim in Dyer's Pond (someone basically threw him in the water and let him make his way to shore). Mom told me about her best friend Dora and poor Pat who got "poomonia" and growing up on Federal Hill, but two of her stories were my favorites.
"Tell me the story about the hurricane, Mommy."
My mother was 21 that year and working at Coro, the noted costume jewelry factory, as a "gluer-in" (she put all those tiny little colored stones in place with tweezers and patience). She'd been working since she was 17, having missed most of eleventh grade to care for my grandmother, who had contracted "coal dust lungs" when my grandfather was working in the mines in Lafferty, Ohio. They had moved specifically in 1924 to get my grandmother away from the dust, but she had never recovered completely. Mom brought most of her salary home to her parents, but dressed smartly if economically in the fashions of the time. Because so many people walked home for lunch, it was truly a "lunch hour" and Mom and her co-workers would wash up and eat their sandwiches as they hurried to a nearby bowling alley where they could bowl a game or two during their break.Wednesday, September 21, was a typical workday to begin with, but as the afternoon wore on the wind picked up and clouds came boiling in. As she worked at her bench, occasionally she would glance sideways to the vast plate glass windows that made up one wall of the big room, and saw debris blowing past. Curious, when her break was called, instead of talking with the other "girls," she went to the window and leaned forward to figure out what was going on. "There were bricks flying by," she told me in chilling tones just as she told her co-workers a few minutes later, bricks from the factory chimney, bits of wood from window frames, stones, tree branches stripped of leaves, and the leaves themselves in wild, swirling gusts of wind. She was assured it was just a bad storm as the rain began and lashed the plate glass, for surely there would have been something on the radio if it were something worse! Despite the lights, the room grew darker and darker, and they could hear the wind howling outside. Finally at four, the height of the storm, the power failed and they were told to go home. Coro's building sat directly on the edge of downtown Providence and normally all Mom did was walk across what was later the land covered by I-95 and up Broadway through the Italian neighborhood of Federal Hill until she reached the house on Belknap Street. Luckily the husband of one of her co-workers, who also regularly walked home, had arrived to pick her up, and with the wind turning umbrellas inside out and the rain slashing down, agreed to give her a ride home.
By the time she arrived home, the winds had done their work everywhere on wires once strung tightly on telephone poles, and both power and phones were out. Mom raced upstairs to find her own mother nearly hysterical with worry. Not only had she been afraid for my mother walking home, but my grandfather was not home. Back in those days the family had "lots" (allotments) on which they grew tomatoes, zucchini, snap peas, cucumbers, and carrots on Smith Street near what is now Rhode Island College, and grandpa had taken the bus up there that morning to go tend the garden. Mom assured her mother that Grandpa would get no more that wet and he was used to that as a former farm boy, although in her heart she was less than sure. "You know Papa can take care of himself," she told Grandma.
The wind had already died down and the storm done its worst when Grandpa arrived home, soaking wet and puzzled why everything was so dark. He had not been able to get a bus back from Smith Street and had walked over three miles home using only the clearing sky for lights. He didn't speak any English, so he hadn't been able to ask anyone he saw on the way home why the streetlights were out and the homes like blacker shadows against the black sky. It was only as word spread between the triple-deckers and the duplexes of Belknap Street that they understood what had happened.
Newsreel About the Damage
Everett Allen's A Wind to Shake the World
History Channel's The Great Hurricane of 1938
A Camera Copy of the American Experience episode
Expanded Reprint: (H)Motel 128
Talk about traveling in time. When I saw this postcard I was "Little Rosie" again, as in the "Rose is Rose" comic strip, about eight years old and watching the world from the right-side backseat of our black 1958 Chevrolet Impala (oh-so-imaginatively dubbed "Blackie").
My dad's youngest sister had married a man who was in the home construction field. Later in the 70s when the housing boom died in New England they moved down to Maryland, then to Florida. But at this particular time, the early Sixties, they lived in Peabody, Massachusetts along with their adopted daughter. My dad's youngest brother worked with him at the time, and he, his wife, and his son, a couple of years older than myself, lived nearby in Beverly. Before my mom got a part-time job to supplement our income and we could go to more "touristy" places, our yearly vacation consisted of spending a week with each family.
Each household had its own charms. Dad's brother lived in a place that was right on the street, like photos you see of English homes: a sidewalk, a step, a door, and you are in the house. The land sloped precipitously down at the back of the property, so you had to descend a long wooden staircase to the back yard to play with the English springer spaniel, Jeff, who ate Cocoa Puffs for breakfast and was that great miracle to an allergic kid, a pet dog! My aunt didn't buy groceries at any old neighborhood store like we did: she shopped at an "exotic" supermarket called an "IGA." Dad's sister had a modern, all-electric ranch house with a refrigerator built directly into the cabinets (it seemed so odd to find the milk right next to the cabinet the cereal was kept in). But the big hit here was the big inground pool, which my uncle seemed to clean more than he swam in. My cousin and I would have been in the pool all day if our mothers had permitted it, slathered in layers upon layers of Coppertone. Both aunts took us to that most exciting of all places, a real shopping mall, Northshore--oh, not enclosed in those days, but a mall just the same, with all those "foreign" Boston stores: Jordan Marsh, Filenes, Marshalls. After one vacation week my tricycle came home with us from Jordan Marsh.
Aside from vacations, though, every month or two from early spring to late fall we'd wake up early on a Sunday morning and "go to Massachusetts." Originally this was a longer drive before Interstate 95 was finished. Dad would swear all the way to Dedham because U.S. 1 was clotted with small towns, traffic lights, and "Sunday drivers." And there was the big glittering attraction of Jolly Cholly's amusement park in North Attleboro, with its huge clown logo, enough to leave a youngster with eyes big as those proverbial saucers pleading "Can we come here some time?" You could smell the hot popcorn and peanuts, and the sharp sugar tang of the cotton candy all the way to the street.
Dedham was a relief because that's when you reached Route 128 (otherwise known as "the New England Circumferential Highway"—don't worry, no one actually called it that; it was just so designated on the map). It was one of the first freeways in the area and once you got on you didn't have to worry about a traffic light (except for one stretch of road almost to Peabody). Being on 128 was almost like being home. We'd get on at Exit 63 and I would spend the time counting up to Exit 32, which was where we got off. We locked our doors as we drove past Walpole where the state prison was. We'd crane our necks to try to see the tall tops of the television towers in Needham, where Channels 38 and 56 sent their signals out to the greater Boston area. We'd marvel at the huge Polaroid plant. We passed all the towns with their wonderful English-sounding names: Burlington, Dedham, Lexington, Concord, Needham, Wakefield, Wrentham. Dad's longstanding joke along this route was "You Needham? Just Dedham or Wrentham!" which probably makes your eyes roll now but was high humor to a six-year-old. We passed tempting places like big drive-in theatres and Pleasure Island, the big, big amusement park that had live stage shows with favorite celebrities—Lassie, the Lone Ranger, Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody had appeared there, not to mention Boston kids' show icon Rex Trailer.
The H(M)otel 128 was the sign that you had really "arrived" at 128; it was set right on the intersection of U.S. 1 and Route 128, and the sign for it could be seen from all angles on the road. Although the post card above shows the name as being "Motel 128," the tall sign always indicated they thought more of themselves than your typical cinderblock motel with the flashing vacancy sign. The first letter was definitely shaped like an "H," but so written and colored so that an "M" appeared as well. At that point I had never stayed in a motel that I remembered; we'd gone to Florida when I was three, but all I remember was being hot on the train and playing in the sand, not the motel. And I'd never stayed at an honest-to-God hotel which of course had fantastic things like bellboys and a fancy restaurant and elevators and big, long hallways with moulding and wallpaper and carpeting, like the places rich bachelors lived on TV. What now looks hideously dated, with cookie-cutter pseudo futuristic furniture and bad color combinations, was back then a glimpse of opulent paradise and modernity, of that other world out there that only existed in the square boxed screen of the television, and the gateway to adventure west and north of Boston as well.
That Darn Spot (a.k.a. The Neverending Story)
Mom was a neat freak. There was no doubt about it. Once she went to work little things had to fall by the wayside, like dusting the house each morning, but before that time everything had a feather duster run over it daily. I dreaded weekends because one of my chores was having to take everything off the bureaus and the parlor tables and use a cloth (and sometimes the Pledge); between the bureau scarves, the small gold-framed photos, the knicknacks, clocks, flowers, and of course the saint statues it was a long and tedious job.
(Dad always liked to tell the story about their bedroom. Just as at our house, so it was at my maternal grandparents' house where Mom and Dad lived for four years, saving up to "go housekeeping." As in many Catholic homes, the top of the chest of drawers was lined with religious statues: the Infant of Prague, the Sacret Heart of Jesus, the Blessed Mother. Plus there was a statue of St. Anthony on the bureau and of course a Crucifix over the bed. He used to say he felt downright guilty "doing what comes naturally" in front of Jesus!)
The house also had to be dustmopped daily (thank goodness for hardwood floors!), the parlor vacuumed, the dishes washed and wiped. If doing the dishes or making the beds on a morning we were going downtown might make us miss the bus, we missed the bus! Mother never left a dish unwashed or a bed unmade. I learned to make a bed in two minutes and forty seconds, and that was with the top sheet and blanket tucked in, the bedspread correctly positioned and flat, and the pillows puffed up into long bolsters at the top of the bed with the spread covering it like frosting on a Swiss roll. Plus there was the laundry to be done, and the ironing after that. Mother ironed everything. About the time I got old enough to iron, she had given up ironing panties, men's shorts, and the sheets, but the pillowcases had to be ironed! And not only did I have to iron my pants, but they had to have a crease in them, like Dad's trousers (even the ones he wore to work in the factory every day). No one was ever going to gossip about my Mom's house- and family-keeping!
Back in those days I would spend any time not watching television in the living room in my bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the bed. I had "Lassie," my little 12-inch television set in the window, for some time, then shifted into the corner about the time I went to work and bought my nice wooden art desk, which, of course, became a horizontal magnet, and I seldom used it. Instead I would sit "tailor-fashion" with the beanbag lap desk someone had bought me on my lap, with my pens in their containers and my crayon box on either side of me, and a composition book in front of me, writing stories.
I couldn't write stories in just any old way, on a tablet like John-Boy or Laura Ingalls Wilder. Instead, I bought spiral bound small college-ruled notebooks, first at my favorite drugstore of all time, Thall's Pharmacy on Reservoir Avenue, and then later at Douglas Drugs on Atwood Avenue. (Both of these places fall under Places I Still Miss: Thall's which had TV Guide earlier than anyone else, a big plus when the Fall Preview came out, and Douglas Drugs, where I bought my first copy of "Starlog.") These were written using the beautiful Sheaffer ballpoint cartridge pen Mom bought me when I went to Hugh B. Bain (pens were supplied in elementary school only), with embellishments provided by several sources, including every single color of Flair pen ever made and my "fountain" pen with the black ink (it wasn't a real fountain pen, which you fill from an inkwell, but a cartridge pen). Every so many pages I would illustrate a scene from the story, and then when I finished, two pages of the composition book were left blank. When I did finish, I bent one end of the wire spiral so that I could "unscrew" it, remove the two sheets, and then replace them on top of each of the cardboard covers. I could then make a cover for my book and a teaser for the story on the back, just like a proper novel, and tape the cover papers to the cardboard.
It was the fountain pen which caused all the trouble, because if a fountain pen has one weakness, it's that anything absorbent, like paper—and like cloth—will wick the ink from the nib of the pen if it is laid on that type of surface. So I was very careful, especially after an accident with an old blouse (and thank God it was old), never to leave the fountain pen lying with its point against paper or cloth. Besides, a big blot of ink on paper or cloth meant less ink in the cartridge, and those were expensive. It was in my best interest to be careful.
Nevertheless, one day Mom found a big black spot on one of my sheets. Yes, you can guess what she accused me of doing. In vain I protested that I never left the pen lying on the sheet, that if nothing else it wasted the ink. No, she insisted, it must have rolled away and you didn't see it...there's nothing else that could have made a big black spot like that...on and on. And on and on. And it didn't go away after a week, or a couple of weeks. Every time we changed the beds and the blotted sheet came up, she shook her head at my wastefulness, and I protested that it wasn't my pen..."well, then it was another one of your pens!" was the retort. If something else went wrong and I would protest that it wasn't my fault, she would bring up the ink spot on the sheet. I would never, ever, hear the end of that sheet.
Over the course of another couple of years, tiny black spots appeared on some clothing. Once it was Dad's pants, so Mom figured it was something he had gotten into at work. Polishing jewelry was never a clean job and Dad had to scrub his fingertips with a nail brush when he finished for the day. Once it was on the pocket of my chestnut-colored pants and again came the accusation about the fountain pen. The fact that I usually sat on the bed to write after I'd changed clothes for the night and was in my pajamas didn't appear to dawn on Mom. It was all the fault of that fountain pen! I sewed a cute little bee patch on the pocket and hoped that was the end of it.
So victory was very sweet the day a big black spot showed up on Mom's sheets, and not only one of hers, but on the bottom sheet, which spent 16 hours a day covered up with a flat sheet, a couple of blankets, and a spread, none of which had an ink spot on it. And she knew very well I almost never went into their bedroom, and no one could sit on that bed without making a racket; it had bed springs instead of a box spring and they squeaked like the devil.
Mom was positively gobsmacked. Me, I gloated. "I guess you think I deliberately set my fountain pen down on your bed, right?"
So she called my cousin Timmy, who was a washer repairman. He reported that the clutch was bad on the washer and that would make it, occasionally, leak oil into the tub—which meant that big "ink stain" on my sheets was an oil stain instead.
Needless to say I was pretty happy, having finally vanquished the specter of the leaking fountain pen.
Don't you know that as Mom got older she started telling that old story again? Apparently, some family legends never die...
(Dad always liked to tell the story about their bedroom. Just as at our house, so it was at my maternal grandparents' house where Mom and Dad lived for four years, saving up to "go housekeeping." As in many Catholic homes, the top of the chest of drawers was lined with religious statues: the Infant of Prague, the Sacret Heart of Jesus, the Blessed Mother. Plus there was a statue of St. Anthony on the bureau and of course a Crucifix over the bed. He used to say he felt downright guilty "doing what comes naturally" in front of Jesus!)
The house also had to be dustmopped daily (thank goodness for hardwood floors!), the parlor vacuumed, the dishes washed and wiped. If doing the dishes or making the beds on a morning we were going downtown might make us miss the bus, we missed the bus! Mother never left a dish unwashed or a bed unmade. I learned to make a bed in two minutes and forty seconds, and that was with the top sheet and blanket tucked in, the bedspread correctly positioned and flat, and the pillows puffed up into long bolsters at the top of the bed with the spread covering it like frosting on a Swiss roll. Plus there was the laundry to be done, and the ironing after that. Mother ironed everything. About the time I got old enough to iron, she had given up ironing panties, men's shorts, and the sheets, but the pillowcases had to be ironed! And not only did I have to iron my pants, but they had to have a crease in them, like Dad's trousers (even the ones he wore to work in the factory every day). No one was ever going to gossip about my Mom's house- and family-keeping!
Back in those days I would spend any time not watching television in the living room in my bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the bed. I had "Lassie," my little 12-inch television set in the window, for some time, then shifted into the corner about the time I went to work and bought my nice wooden art desk, which, of course, became a horizontal magnet, and I seldom used it. Instead I would sit "tailor-fashion" with the beanbag lap desk someone had bought me on my lap, with my pens in their containers and my crayon box on either side of me, and a composition book in front of me, writing stories.
I couldn't write stories in just any old way, on a tablet like John-Boy or Laura Ingalls Wilder. Instead, I bought spiral bound small college-ruled notebooks, first at my favorite drugstore of all time, Thall's Pharmacy on Reservoir Avenue, and then later at Douglas Drugs on Atwood Avenue. (Both of these places fall under Places I Still Miss: Thall's which had TV Guide earlier than anyone else, a big plus when the Fall Preview came out, and Douglas Drugs, where I bought my first copy of "Starlog.") These were written using the beautiful Sheaffer ballpoint cartridge pen Mom bought me when I went to Hugh B. Bain (pens were supplied in elementary school only), with embellishments provided by several sources, including every single color of Flair pen ever made and my "fountain" pen with the black ink (it wasn't a real fountain pen, which you fill from an inkwell, but a cartridge pen). Every so many pages I would illustrate a scene from the story, and then when I finished, two pages of the composition book were left blank. When I did finish, I bent one end of the wire spiral so that I could "unscrew" it, remove the two sheets, and then replace them on top of each of the cardboard covers. I could then make a cover for my book and a teaser for the story on the back, just like a proper novel, and tape the cover papers to the cardboard.
It was the fountain pen which caused all the trouble, because if a fountain pen has one weakness, it's that anything absorbent, like paper—and like cloth—will wick the ink from the nib of the pen if it is laid on that type of surface. So I was very careful, especially after an accident with an old blouse (and thank God it was old), never to leave the fountain pen lying with its point against paper or cloth. Besides, a big blot of ink on paper or cloth meant less ink in the cartridge, and those were expensive. It was in my best interest to be careful.
Nevertheless, one day Mom found a big black spot on one of my sheets. Yes, you can guess what she accused me of doing. In vain I protested that I never left the pen lying on the sheet, that if nothing else it wasted the ink. No, she insisted, it must have rolled away and you didn't see it...there's nothing else that could have made a big black spot like that...on and on. And on and on. And it didn't go away after a week, or a couple of weeks. Every time we changed the beds and the blotted sheet came up, she shook her head at my wastefulness, and I protested that it wasn't my pen..."well, then it was another one of your pens!" was the retort. If something else went wrong and I would protest that it wasn't my fault, she would bring up the ink spot on the sheet. I would never, ever, hear the end of that sheet.Over the course of another couple of years, tiny black spots appeared on some clothing. Once it was Dad's pants, so Mom figured it was something he had gotten into at work. Polishing jewelry was never a clean job and Dad had to scrub his fingertips with a nail brush when he finished for the day. Once it was on the pocket of my chestnut-colored pants and again came the accusation about the fountain pen. The fact that I usually sat on the bed to write after I'd changed clothes for the night and was in my pajamas didn't appear to dawn on Mom. It was all the fault of that fountain pen! I sewed a cute little bee patch on the pocket and hoped that was the end of it.
So victory was very sweet the day a big black spot showed up on Mom's sheets, and not only one of hers, but on the bottom sheet, which spent 16 hours a day covered up with a flat sheet, a couple of blankets, and a spread, none of which had an ink spot on it. And she knew very well I almost never went into their bedroom, and no one could sit on that bed without making a racket; it had bed springs instead of a box spring and they squeaked like the devil.
Mom was positively gobsmacked. Me, I gloated. "I guess you think I deliberately set my fountain pen down on your bed, right?"
So she called my cousin Timmy, who was a washer repairman. He reported that the clutch was bad on the washer and that would make it, occasionally, leak oil into the tub—which meant that big "ink stain" on my sheets was an oil stain instead.
Needless to say I was pretty happy, having finally vanquished the specter of the leaking fountain pen.
Don't you know that as Mom got older she started telling that old story again? Apparently, some family legends never die...
"I Say It's Spinach..."
Otherwise known as "the Mom story" and always worth repeating at this time of year.
I don't think I fall into the "picky eater" category, but I do have a list of foods I don't like. Cooked green vegetables are at the top. I'll eat salad veggies any day, but boil those suckers and turn 'em limp and you insult my digestion.
In any case, I tell people I was the only kid in school who hated weekends. Religiously obeying my pediatrician, Mom fed me the three foods I hated most in the world on Friday and Saturday (always those days because my dad loved routine and we ate the same kind of food on the same day of the week all the time).
Friday night was fish. Now, I'm not totally adverse to fish. Shellfish make me swoon. Crab I'll eat until I'm stuffed. I love steamers, clam chowder, scallops broiled in butter, shrimp scampi, the rare bit of lobster (I was 54 before I ate my first lobster roll—that stuff is just too expensive!), and tuna fish. I've even been known to eat a few bites of salmon steak if it's been cooked nicely and has a fruity sauce upon it to kill the fish taste. But I hate your run-of-the-mill freshwater and especially saltwater fish. Mom bought what she could afford at the little cinderblock fish market once on Park Avenue, and this usually ended up being haddock or halibut. Worse, the only way my parents would eat fish was breaded and fried. I hate foods with coatings, whether it's battered or bread crumbed: fried chicken, chicken fried steak, fried appetizers, etc. When I eat a food, I want to taste the food, not this noxious grainy coating that too often has that even more noxious condiment, pepper, in it. (The one exception to this rule is onion rings.)
I'd sit there on Friday nights and try to pick the middle out of the breaded fish, but Mom had always breaded 'em too well. The bread crumbs were well mixed into the flaky fish flesh and I'd end up disgustedly digesting fishy flesh and flaky fried bits.
Saturday afternoon was scrambled eggs. Remember, this was the 1960s, back in the days when no one worried about cholesterol and eggs were "good for you." You were supposed to eat one or two every day.
As far as I'm concerned, eggs belong in cake batters. Mom got around this dislike by having me drink an eggnog every morning. This was also back in the days when no one made a fuss about salmonella in chicken eggs—we got our eggs fresh from Stamps Farm out on Scituate Avenue, where you could hear the chickens from where you stood buying the eggs—and she could make me a real eggnog, not those gloppy, thick, oversweetened concoctions that show up in cans and bottles before Christmas. She beat one egg, one cup of whole milk, and a teaspoon of sugar, and I drank the delicious beverage without a quibble. On frigid winter mornings when the thermometer barely rose to double digits, totally supported by the same pediatrician mentioned earlier, she would put a tablespoonful of brandy into it—can you imagine a doctor recommending this today for an elementary school kid? My pediatrician did; in fact when Mom told him about the brandy and the amount, he teased her: "Cheapskate!"
Now, granted, if you have to eat an egg, scrambled is the way to go. But even that she got down me only forkful by desperate forkful for Saturday lunch.
Saturday supper was the worst. If the spinach I had to eat wasn't bad enough, she cooked it Italian style. This mean you sauteed the wretched stuff in olive oil until it was limp and saturated with this greasy warm coating. Even with the oil poured off it was slimy and nasty. But this was the way she had been brought up to cook spinach and the way my dad enjoyed it.
(Many years later I figured it might have been the oil that I hated, not the spinach, so one day when a salad bar was offering spinach salad, I gave it a try. No dice. As far as I'm concerned, the taste of spinach is as bad as sucking on the monkey bars in the schoolyard.)
Anyway, I ate this wretched concoction for years, through three schools, several best friends, three presidencies, hippies, Vietnam, changing mores on TV, bellbottom pants, the maxi skirt, the decline of Downtown Providence—you get the idea. (Cue nostalgic film montage...)
One Saturday evening when I had just turned seventeen I was sitting at the table. Mom had just started to get the utensils out for dinner and I was considering setting the table; it was a little early but I might as well get it over with. And we were talking.
She took out the smallest, tiniest saucepan she used for the spinach (and boiling water for tea) and I said, "You know what? I can't wait until I turn eighteen."
She laughed. "Are you going to go out on your own and leave us?"
My parents and I got along very well 99 percent of the time and I shook my head. "Of course not. But at eighteen I'll be an adult and be able to make some of my own decisions." Now, mind you, I tried not to swear in front of my mother. Like Ralphie from A Christmas Story I still lived in everlasting dread of getting my mouth washed out with soap. But I had to make my point. "And then I won't ever have to eat that goddamned spinach ever again."
She put the saucepan down and blinked at me, not even scolding me for "that word." "You really don't like it that much?"
Heavens, parents can be so dense sometimes. "I hate it, Mom. It tastes awful and greasy and nasty and it makes me sick to the stomach."
At that time I took vitamin supplements. So she sighed and said, "Well, you're healthy enough. Okay, you don't have to eat it anymore."
If I wasn't flabbergasted enough by that, she added, "Good, then I won't have to eat it any more either. I hate spinach."
Blink. "You what?"
"I hate spinach. I've always hated it, but the doctor said it was good for you, so I ate it, too, to show you a good example."
My mother ate something she hated for sixteen years every Saturday night just to show me a good example.
If that ain't Mother Love, I don't know what is.
Seen: Red Geraniums
With our factory income there weren't many spare dollars for flowers for the cemetery. I would have preferred the waving tulips or fragrant hyacinths in springtime, or the lilies that predominated the rest of the year, but the bright little geraniums were the least expensive of the potted flowers that were sold near the cemetery gate or at the garden stands at the "mill outlets." Dad or Mom made the careful selection of three geraniums after counting out creased and folded dollar bills to the proprietor. On Mother's Day, still all dressed in patent leather pumps and spring-colored dress from Easter, fresh out of church and joining the line headed through the gates, I sat in the back seat with the three terra-cotta pots covered with brightly colored shiny paper, a little row of scarlet or pink, as we made our way down the curved road.
Almost as soon as you entered, to your right were a sad little collection of tiny headstones with lambs or cherubs upon them. These were for the babies, and they almost always had soft flowers of white or pink bobbing next to them. Passing several more plots, brave on a sunny Sunday with blooms of all sorts—gladioli, lilies, tulips, hyacinths, roses, and more—and fluttering satin ribbons, we would stop at the right side of the road, choose a geranium, and walk the few steps to Grandma Lanzi's grave. Dad's face always got soft and sober when we approached and he would kiss her picture gently before we stopped to pray. I have no memory of her; she died when I was three; the only thing I do recall is that we had a small Christmas tree that year, set on the big parlor table, rather than a large one, and only turned the lights on Christmas Eve. There were faucets on each corner of each plot, and if the geranium was too dry we would water it before setting it down under the headstone.
Even though it was Mother's Day, we had a potted geranium for Mother's brother, my Uncle Ernest, whose real name was Agnello. We always brought flowers for him, no matter what the holiday. He had not a tall headstone but a small rectangular stone set in the ground, like the rest of the graves in the plot across the street, and Mom kept track of where it was by row number and its distance from a certain tree at the edge of the plot. I have no memories of him, only that he was the adopted father of my cousin Raymond who lived in California. Still, you could see the empty space in the family right there in Mom's face. She would tell me rollicking stories of her girlhood when Uncle Ernie apparently had an old jalopy of a car in which Mom and her brothers would pile in to go places. Several times they drove straight to New York to see the Yankees play; I marvel even now—straight to New York, before the interstates, before the Connecticut Turnpike! It must have taken hours, all for a ballgame, and they would come back tired but happy.
And finally there was the slow left turn that brought us abreast of Grandma and Grandpa D'Ambra's headstone, where Mom lingered. Like me, she was very close to her mother; in her last few days she even called for her when in pain. With a little brush from the car she would sweep any bits of grass or dirt which had gotten on the rim of the stone from lawn cutting, and with spit she would clean the glass over the picture of her parents. I remember their little house on Killingly Street; Mom had no car so we would take the bus to Hartford Avenue and then walk the rest of the way, past the Warwick Shoppers World and the other businesses. By the time I was old enough to remember them, Grandpa had gone blind. He had been a vibrant working man, having grown up on a farm and then become, among other things, a coal miner and an ironworker. Now he was blind from cataracts and I recall only a silent man on the sofa, listening to the television. Grandma was sickly by that time, but I remember her offering me cookies and milk. They were childhood sweethearts and died within a month of each other.
Around us spread marching lines of marble and stone, almost all with a colorful surround of flowers. Cars stopped, families poured out, women in spring hats or lace mantillas, little girls in poufy skirts like mine, men and boys in suits and ties, gathering in little knots to pay their respects. Ribbons from the hats might flutter, the children would fidget, mothers would send a child with a container to get some water. If you saw someone you knew, you waved hello in a gentle manner; like the library this was a place of silence.
But around you the trees rustled, the birds sang, the bees darted from flower to flower, and the red geraniums were like flags.
Reprint: "Will You Be My Valentine?"
I guess we were pretty typical as mid-60s elementary school kids go.
The boys wore their hair short and parted to one side or the other. The occasional cowlick or bowl cut appeared. They wore button-down shirts—often "cowboy shirts" with piping—and pressed troussers (often courderoy in this winter season, or wool). They wore sturdy lace-up shoes in winter and sneakers in summer. The girls were in dresses, skirts and blouses, or jumpers. Short hair was popular (especially with moms who had to wash that hair), held back with a headband or a gold or plastic barrette. They wore sturdy Oxfords or Hush Puppies, or strap shoes. A few extroverts whose moms allowed it wore patent leather dress shoes and might have had their hair permed. Ringlets were still popular, too, and hair bows. To stay warm during a long walk to school or at recess, the girls often wore snow pants under their dresses; these came off in the morning along with the thick winter coats and hats and scarves and rubber boots that fit over your shoes and were stowed in the chaos known as the cloakroom behind pivoting bulletin-board doors that had corkboard on them. When the doors were closed, the best papers from that week were displayed pinned to the corkboards.
Valentine’s Day didn’t start immediately after Christmas as it does now. Yuletide was allowed to wind down past the new year before the candy started to appear, but it was only at the tail end of January and into February that schoolchildren started to gear up by surveying what classroom valentines were for sale in the eternal delight of the 60s child, "the five and ten"—Woolworths, Newberrys, McCrory, Ben Franklin, McCrory, and whatever other local store plied the trade.
The least expensive Valentines, most endorsed by Mom because of their cost, were just plain little hearts and cupids with cartoony boys and girls or animals wishing each other a happy day or professing love or affection. Girls' Valentines featured dolls, flowers, cute animals, and lots of hearts. Boys' Valentines would more likely have their youthful protagonist in a train engineer's uniform or spacesuit, or would feature trains, cars, airplanes, sports equipment, or construction equipment. Specialty cards, like those with Disney characters or the cartoon heroes of the day like Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, or theme cards involving real-life race cars or spaceships or television programs were pricier. There was always one, larger Valentine in the box reserved for the teacher; the most common design was some sort of a blackboard with the message written in white "chalk." These were purchased and (sometimes) laboriously signed over and over for twenty to thirty classmates until the day you could dump them in the big box on the teacher’s desk. (Mom always insisted you make out one for everyone in the class, even the kids you didn’t like, so it would be "fair.") In the lower grades, the teacher decorated the box herself, usually with white or pink construction paper. White was favored since then the hearts could be made in both pink and red, and on it in red crayon would be neatly printed the grade and the teacher’s name.
As you grew older the teacher would allow the best artist in the class to decorate the big box. It was an honor to encrust the box with layered hearts or tissue paper flowers, although some students always wanted input on the design.
One February art class closest to the fourteenth was always reserved for making Valentine cards for your mom and dad and grandparents. Stacks of white, pink, and red construction paper (sometimes black was added for a cool shadow effect) were put into service. Sometimes the teacher purchased foil-like cupids or hearts to embellish each card, and lace paper doilies were always a favorite for backgrounds for mothers' cards. Some kids brought in magazine clippings of flowers to further add to the decorative effect. Twenty-five children wielded twenty-five snub-nosed scissors, folding a red sheet in half and carefully reproducing the lopsided teardrop shape with the flat side that would open up into a really-truly heart. The more ambitious children cut odd shapes from the edge and the interior of the folded heart and what unfolded was a confection in "lace" design. These hearts, plain or cut-out, were layered with smaller or larger hearts and then stacked together permanently with the inevitable paste (the flicking paste brush sending bits of white everywhere, including on the clothing and hair of unsuspecting classmates) and cheerfully crayoned with greetings.
We also cut out hearts, again both the plain and lacy variety, to decorate the bulletin board at the back of the room or on the pivoting cloakroom doors, white or red scalloped edges surrounding our best designs.
Later, at home, you would happily hand the now-stiff hand-fashioned card to Mom and/or Dad with a proud "Happy Valentines Day!" and Mom and Dad would admire it and then set it on top of the television console or on the kitchen table, leaned up against the vase of flowers Dad had brought for Mom, so everyone could see it. If you were lucky, Dad would take Mom out to dinner and you could come, too, although in most households this was postponed to the Sunday closest to the holiday. Still fresh in your Sunday dress or suit, you'd all troop out to a nice restaurant where the waiters wore suits and there were cloth napkins instead of the paper ones you had everyday, separate salad forks, and white tablecloths.
In that Valentine afternoon at school, however, you had received your own haul. The Valentine box was opened and the cards distributed. A few girls shyly smiled at a few boys, and a few boys tucked special Valentines away, their ears pink with embarrassment. There was the constant squeal of a few girls who had received sarcastic comic cards from the few whose moms had not supervised their card purchases and were sticking their tongues out at the guilty, laughing boys. Afterwards, there might be cupcakes and punch or some chocolates Hershey kisses and then it was time to run home and show Mom your cards (after carefully anointing a chosen favorite classmate with that ultimate winter Valentine, a snowball!).
The boys wore their hair short and parted to one side or the other. The occasional cowlick or bowl cut appeared. They wore button-down shirts—often "cowboy shirts" with piping—and pressed troussers (often courderoy in this winter season, or wool). They wore sturdy lace-up shoes in winter and sneakers in summer. The girls were in dresses, skirts and blouses, or jumpers. Short hair was popular (especially with moms who had to wash that hair), held back with a headband or a gold or plastic barrette. They wore sturdy Oxfords or Hush Puppies, or strap shoes. A few extroverts whose moms allowed it wore patent leather dress shoes and might have had their hair permed. Ringlets were still popular, too, and hair bows. To stay warm during a long walk to school or at recess, the girls often wore snow pants under their dresses; these came off in the morning along with the thick winter coats and hats and scarves and rubber boots that fit over your shoes and were stowed in the chaos known as the cloakroom behind pivoting bulletin-board doors that had corkboard on them. When the doors were closed, the best papers from that week were displayed pinned to the corkboards.
Valentine’s Day didn’t start immediately after Christmas as it does now. Yuletide was allowed to wind down past the new year before the candy started to appear, but it was only at the tail end of January and into February that schoolchildren started to gear up by surveying what classroom valentines were for sale in the eternal delight of the 60s child, "the five and ten"—Woolworths, Newberrys, McCrory, Ben Franklin, McCrory, and whatever other local store plied the trade.
The least expensive Valentines, most endorsed by Mom because of their cost, were just plain little hearts and cupids with cartoony boys and girls or animals wishing each other a happy day or professing love or affection. Girls' Valentines featured dolls, flowers, cute animals, and lots of hearts. Boys' Valentines would more likely have their youthful protagonist in a train engineer's uniform or spacesuit, or would feature trains, cars, airplanes, sports equipment, or construction equipment. Specialty cards, like those with Disney characters or the cartoon heroes of the day like Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, or theme cards involving real-life race cars or spaceships or television programs were pricier. There was always one, larger Valentine in the box reserved for the teacher; the most common design was some sort of a blackboard with the message written in white "chalk." These were purchased and (sometimes) laboriously signed over and over for twenty to thirty classmates until the day you could dump them in the big box on the teacher’s desk. (Mom always insisted you make out one for everyone in the class, even the kids you didn’t like, so it would be "fair.") In the lower grades, the teacher decorated the box herself, usually with white or pink construction paper. White was favored since then the hearts could be made in both pink and red, and on it in red crayon would be neatly printed the grade and the teacher’s name.
As you grew older the teacher would allow the best artist in the class to decorate the big box. It was an honor to encrust the box with layered hearts or tissue paper flowers, although some students always wanted input on the design.
One February art class closest to the fourteenth was always reserved for making Valentine cards for your mom and dad and grandparents. Stacks of white, pink, and red construction paper (sometimes black was added for a cool shadow effect) were put into service. Sometimes the teacher purchased foil-like cupids or hearts to embellish each card, and lace paper doilies were always a favorite for backgrounds for mothers' cards. Some kids brought in magazine clippings of flowers to further add to the decorative effect. Twenty-five children wielded twenty-five snub-nosed scissors, folding a red sheet in half and carefully reproducing the lopsided teardrop shape with the flat side that would open up into a really-truly heart. The more ambitious children cut odd shapes from the edge and the interior of the folded heart and what unfolded was a confection in "lace" design. These hearts, plain or cut-out, were layered with smaller or larger hearts and then stacked together permanently with the inevitable paste (the flicking paste brush sending bits of white everywhere, including on the clothing and hair of unsuspecting classmates) and cheerfully crayoned with greetings.
We also cut out hearts, again both the plain and lacy variety, to decorate the bulletin board at the back of the room or on the pivoting cloakroom doors, white or red scalloped edges surrounding our best designs.
Later, at home, you would happily hand the now-stiff hand-fashioned card to Mom and/or Dad with a proud "Happy Valentines Day!" and Mom and Dad would admire it and then set it on top of the television console or on the kitchen table, leaned up against the vase of flowers Dad had brought for Mom, so everyone could see it. If you were lucky, Dad would take Mom out to dinner and you could come, too, although in most households this was postponed to the Sunday closest to the holiday. Still fresh in your Sunday dress or suit, you'd all troop out to a nice restaurant where the waiters wore suits and there were cloth napkins instead of the paper ones you had everyday, separate salad forks, and white tablecloths.
In that Valentine afternoon at school, however, you had received your own haul. The Valentine box was opened and the cards distributed. A few girls shyly smiled at a few boys, and a few boys tucked special Valentines away, their ears pink with embarrassment. There was the constant squeal of a few girls who had received sarcastic comic cards from the few whose moms had not supervised their card purchases and were sticking their tongues out at the guilty, laughing boys. Afterwards, there might be cupcakes and punch or some chocolates Hershey kisses and then it was time to run home and show Mom your cards (after carefully anointing a chosen favorite classmate with that ultimate winter Valentine, a snowball!).
Tea
For Mom's birthday:
I confess: I hate tea. At least of the tea bag variety, and especially iced tea. How does one drink something that smells that bad? Coffee was my favorite. Mom bought the local brand, Autocrat, with the little bird on the tin and the legend "A swallow will tell you..." and at breakfast the rich, full scent was as good as reveille. Even today I sniff the coffee aisles of the supermarket with delight.
On cold winter nights when the wind would have whistled through the north-facing front door if we did not have it blocked up for the season, though, Mom loved tea. And I loved the ritual.
I was usually in bed, at the center of a wooly cocoon that consisted of a sheet, two blankets, and a light summerweight blanket doubled up on top of me, pillowed on two feather pillows and clad in flannel "feetie" pajamas with socks on underneath. In radiator versus cold winter wind, the latter won most of the time. My bedroom was right off the kitchen and by lying on my left side I could look directly at the gas stove. Back in those days I walked in my sleep, had nightmares, and woke up screaming. If I was in the dark I would awaken not knowing where I was, so in my bedroom on the dresser there was a little plaster nightlight base, putty-color and oval shaped and strewn with tiny seashells. At one end a large seashell half stood on end, and inside in the grotto the shell made was a small statue of the Virgin Mary. The nightlight flooded her with light and was a warm beacon in the dark. There was also a less prosaic, grocery-story type of nightlight in the kitchen. Between them I slept comforted.
On chilly nights Mom would pad out from the living room, taking care not to wake me although I usually was still awake anyway. She'd be bundled in a quilted bathrobe and slippers over her pajamas, with a pink hairnet on, and she would go to the cupboard where the pots and pans were kept and extract the littlest saucepan, wider than it was tall and bright aluminum silver, so small only a couple cups of water would fill it. Mom saw no need to keep a teakettle; it was easier just to boil water in the saucepan and then just pour it over the teabag slumped inside the jade green coffee mug.
From the bed with drowsy eyes, I would see Mom's silhouette bowed over the stove, the bit of steam lit by the nightlight bulb, and the flickering blue gas flame, which was like a small hearth burning just for me, and quiet and safe, I fell asleep.
The Neighborhood: From Trotters to Trolleys
Like everything before it, the old neighborhood at one time was open space, dotted with maples and oaks and sycamores, the brush a tangle of sumac, bittersweet, and aggressive poison ivy, populated by squirrels and rabbits, moles and voles, deer and bear. In spring the buds swelled on the trees and became tender shoots that morphed into green leaves and violets grew in the clearings. In summer, rabbits nibbled under the trees and foxes and mice raised their families in dens among the trees. In fall the sumac turned to waving scarlet fronds and the trees blazed gold and orange as squirrels stored their nuts in hidden caches and the birds headed south. In winter the bones of the trees cast blue shadows against the snow where mice noses emerged, testing for the scent of predators. Then civilization encroached; a factory was built only a few miles away, to utilize nearby water as its power, and beside it the trim white home of the factory owner. The factory prospered, the size of the white house doubled, and it became the home of a governor.
Governor William Sprague found that open space once filled with trees and wildlife a perfect place to exercise his champion trotting horses. In 19th century America where vehicles were horse-drawn, the trotter and his counterpart the pacer were king, and the harness-racing event the biggest part of the annual county fair. That now flat stretch of land next became Narragansett Trotting Park. This sprawling acreage had a grandstand so large that it contained a hotel, and financiers like Morgan and Vanderbilt formed its audience on opening day.
Fortunes come and go, and in the later 19th century the Spragues' 67-acre property became the state fairgrounds, and in 1896 a novelty attraction appeared at the fair: racing cars! These sputtering vehicles—so unreliable that if a car even finished a race it was considered a success—made occasional appearances, and the park was also used for other big outdoor shows: circuses, exhibition trotting races (including an appearance by the great Dan Patch, who held harness-racing records for years), and even Wild West shows, one attended by a small boy who would later grow up and buy a house and raise a family at the edge of the park. He remembered for years afterwards his wide-eyed amazement at the trick riding and shooting, the colorful Native people on prancing horses, and a "stagecoach robbery" sequence, the dust and the smell of horses and popcorn. Trolley cars wended their way down Cranston Street and its extension, Narragansett Avenue, to bring people to the park, men in ties and top hats, women in long skirts and parasols, and as always excited children in frocks or roundabout and knickers to ooh-and-ahh at whatever attraction played at the moment.
Soon the age of the horse and carriage made way for the horseless carriage, and not months before the United States joined the Great War, the park closed and re-opened with what was the first paved and banked oval track, in what was apparently the first super-speedway in the United States. Eddie Rickenbacker, a few years before his flying exploits in France, pushed the limits of automotive speed in the first race, driving a Maxwell motor car. Soon speed became the watchword as other then racing-greats like Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet circled the track. Glenn Curtis, the aircraft designer, raced motorcycles there, and air races were even held around pylons added to the park for that purpose.
As the classic newsreel announced "Time marches on." The trolley cars that squealed and ground their way down the avenue now just called "Gansett" to carry fairgoers were bringing people who wished to live in the suburbs. By the time the 1920s were ending, the fairgrounds had moved out to East Greenwich and the cars to other venues. The racetrack left its mark on the street names—Chandler, Jordan, Overland, Cadillac, Packard and Fiat (Fiat Avenue was the backstretch)—and in the neighborhood's nickname, the Speedway, long into the 1960s, when you could have your hair cut at the Speedway barber and bowl a game at the Speedway Lanes, and when a leftover chain link fence from the Speedway, now separating two back yards, linked the little boy who'd gone to the Wild West Show and the little girl who grew up in the little Cape Cod house turned sideways to fit on the corner lot.
Governor William Sprague found that open space once filled with trees and wildlife a perfect place to exercise his champion trotting horses. In 19th century America where vehicles were horse-drawn, the trotter and his counterpart the pacer were king, and the harness-racing event the biggest part of the annual county fair. That now flat stretch of land next became Narragansett Trotting Park. This sprawling acreage had a grandstand so large that it contained a hotel, and financiers like Morgan and Vanderbilt formed its audience on opening day.
Fortunes come and go, and in the later 19th century the Spragues' 67-acre property became the state fairgrounds, and in 1896 a novelty attraction appeared at the fair: racing cars! These sputtering vehicles—so unreliable that if a car even finished a race it was considered a success—made occasional appearances, and the park was also used for other big outdoor shows: circuses, exhibition trotting races (including an appearance by the great Dan Patch, who held harness-racing records for years), and even Wild West shows, one attended by a small boy who would later grow up and buy a house and raise a family at the edge of the park. He remembered for years afterwards his wide-eyed amazement at the trick riding and shooting, the colorful Native people on prancing horses, and a "stagecoach robbery" sequence, the dust and the smell of horses and popcorn. Trolley cars wended their way down Cranston Street and its extension, Narragansett Avenue, to bring people to the park, men in ties and top hats, women in long skirts and parasols, and as always excited children in frocks or roundabout and knickers to ooh-and-ahh at whatever attraction played at the moment.
Soon the age of the horse and carriage made way for the horseless carriage, and not months before the United States joined the Great War, the park closed and re-opened with what was the first paved and banked oval track, in what was apparently the first super-speedway in the United States. Eddie Rickenbacker, a few years before his flying exploits in France, pushed the limits of automotive speed in the first race, driving a Maxwell motor car. Soon speed became the watchword as other then racing-greats like Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet circled the track. Glenn Curtis, the aircraft designer, raced motorcycles there, and air races were even held around pylons added to the park for that purpose.As the classic newsreel announced "Time marches on." The trolley cars that squealed and ground their way down the avenue now just called "Gansett" to carry fairgoers were bringing people who wished to live in the suburbs. By the time the 1920s were ending, the fairgrounds had moved out to East Greenwich and the cars to other venues. The racetrack left its mark on the street names—Chandler, Jordan, Overland, Cadillac, Packard and Fiat (Fiat Avenue was the backstretch)—and in the neighborhood's nickname, the Speedway, long into the 1960s, when you could have your hair cut at the Speedway barber and bowl a game at the Speedway Lanes, and when a leftover chain link fence from the Speedway, now separating two back yards, linked the little boy who'd gone to the Wild West Show and the little girl who grew up in the little Cape Cod house turned sideways to fit on the corner lot.
The Little House
I knew I’d grown up in a small house, but I didn’t realize how small until after my mom passed on when we were going through the layered contents of the old steamer trunk that sat in our basement for years. Mom’s wedding dress was carefully folded at the very bottom, yards and yards of heavy ivory white satin with a long train, bureau scarves, the metal cashbox that held emergency money, and various odd things like some rough sacklike pillowcases that I suspected had belonged to my grandparents. The trunk itself was a remnant of my grandparents’ past; it had been used when they packed up the family in 1924 and moved from tiny Lafferty, Ohio (today a few miles off I-70, and still a tiny town when we detoured there in 1978 on the way back from California) to Providence, Rhode Island, where Grandpa had been offered a job in a foundry, and still has the brownish, faded 1924 baggage tag stuck haphazardly to its side. One of the more interesting things found in the trunk were the original 1951 house plans, complete with a notation that a coal bin could be fitted into the cellar, if necessary, as the boiler was equipped to burn both oil and coal. The first floor footage was only 782 square feet.
There were days we each had our cozy corners, Mom under the three-way lamp in the armchair, knitting or crocheting, Dad in one corner of the sofa usually asleep, and me, either at the other end of the sofa, surrounded by my lap desk and pens and paper or a book (you had to do something during the commercials), all watching the square, sturdy GE television that one day morphed into a Magnavox "portable" that eventually, happily at Christmas of 1972, finally turned into a color TV. There were other days of housecleaning or rushing around that it seemed there was never room enough.
Granted, we did some living in other parts of the house. The attic, as previously mentioned, acted as a kind of storeroom. The basement, anchored in the center by a big cast iron boiler compartment, was unfinished at first except for a small northwest corner which Dad partitioned off in Masonite in hopes of making wine like his father did. I vaguely remember a big oak barrel in the little room, but the experiment didn’t last long. Still, it remained “the wine cellar” in nomenclature for years afterward, keeping the Christmas tree intact (Dad didn’t like putting lights on the tree anymore than I do now), with handmade wooden shelves in one corner as an overflow pantry where multiple sale items were kept for storage until needed: canned goods, paper towels, toiletries. The oil tank was neatly against the wall in the opposite corner where it was periodically filled by my godfather (our oil man), with the clothes washer (and later gas dryer) next to it along the wall that paralleled the driveway. Dad later fixed three quarters of the basement with a drop ceiling of acoustical tile, wooden floor covered in inexpensive linoleum squares, and the 1970s de rigueur dark-brown paneled walls. It was downstairs I had my first ever-birthday party—I was twelve—in which the guests were all kids my age rather than a few friends mixed up with relatives. Later Dad also installed our old enamel sink and the old Glenwood gas stove down there so in the still humid throes of September we could can tomato sauce in relative coolness. Our old kitchen table, Mom’s sewing machine, the aforementioned steamer trunk, and the old sofa completed the turnout. Near the wine cellar I had a little space where I kept two bookshelves of hardback books (some were my mom’s) and shelves on the wall which held my rows of paperbacks, plus the old red-maple child-sized old roll-top desk and swivel chair I’d gotten from my cousin Johnny. Flanking one of the book cases on either side were closets that held seldom used clothes like Mom’s and my dressy dresses, bathrobes in summer and sunsuits in winter.
The house itself was that most ubiquitous of New England structures, the Cape Cod, with a small apron of lawn out front; however, since the lot was short and narrow (the width of a one-car driveway, the house, and a green stretch of lawn and flower bed to the side that wasn’t more than three feet wide), the home had been turned 90 degrees—instead of the front door being on the long end of the house, it was on the short end, opening directly into the living room (we called it the parlor). To the back of the parlor were the stairs to go upstairs, and you exited the room at left through the arch to a short hallway, tiled, like the kitchen, with pale yellow with black accents. Mom and Dad’s room was to the left of the parlor, followed down the length of the house by the equally ubiquitous pink-tiled and -painted bathroom, and then the yellow kitchen. My bedroom was opposite the kitchen, and between my room and the parlor were the stairs down to the basement. In the house's original incarnation, the rest of the rooms were wallpapered. No gayly-flowered 50s fashion for us; the parlor wallpaper was a pattern of curves and pediments that would not have looked out of place in a Victorian home. My room was striped pink, green, and silver, and my parents' room was similarly attired but in different colors. Once the wallpaper came down, we emerged into Mom's "beige era." Oh, all the rooms were a different shade of beige, but there it was—Dad and I dubbed it "everlasting beige" and fought it tooth and nail. Eventually Mom gave in: my room turned a pretty sky blue, their room a golden, dark yellow, and the parlor another ubiquitous 1970s color, terra cotta (which matched the fabric on the sofa and chair). It didn't last long: after fifteen years and Dad's death, Mom went back to "everlasting beige" once again.
Tacked on to the back of the house was an small enclosed porch just big enough for three in woven tape lawn chairs which had begun life as a simple square platform. In winter the winds came skidding from Cooney Field across the street and anyone standing on the porch attempting to open the back door rattled their teeth in the cold as they groped for their keys, so a roof was soon added and then walls and windows. In the wee hours of dark mornings, even in the cold winter over the low grumble of the boiler, I could hear the porch door open and then clunk close as the Hood's milkman made his delivery; in spring with the windows open the clink of the milk bottles would add music to the percussion.
Behind the house lay a small lawn, small enough to be manageable when mowing, large enough to fit a small shed, a full-size clothesline (which for at least one year flapped nearly daily with diapers), and even a small vegetable garden up against the old fence which went back decades to when the area behind our house was a racetrack. Mom's rosebush grew against the fence each summer, winding the chain link with tangled thorny vines that ended in riots of small red roses. In winter I dug paths along the snow with my feet through the yard and then rode my stick horse through the paths, pretending to be Trixie Belden on her favorite of the Wheeler mares, Susie, or Annie Oakley rescuing her little brother Tagg yet again. And in the spring, oh, in the spring, for a few delicious weeks in May, Charlie's unkempt lilac bush draped its fragrant branches over the chain link fence, dripping with heavenly scented armfuls of pale purple lilacs. I never failed to bury my nose in them, even if later I was punished with the mother of all allergy attacks.
The house I remember best at Christmas, sparkling with tinsel and candoliers at the window, and in summer when the relentless heat brought every orifice open and the sounds of the street inside; the basement was for hot summer days; the attic for memories—but the yard I always remember for those brief weeks of spring and the draping lilacs. Surely heaven smells of lilacs...
There were days we each had our cozy corners, Mom under the three-way lamp in the armchair, knitting or crocheting, Dad in one corner of the sofa usually asleep, and me, either at the other end of the sofa, surrounded by my lap desk and pens and paper or a book (you had to do something during the commercials), all watching the square, sturdy GE television that one day morphed into a Magnavox "portable" that eventually, happily at Christmas of 1972, finally turned into a color TV. There were other days of housecleaning or rushing around that it seemed there was never room enough.
Granted, we did some living in other parts of the house. The attic, as previously mentioned, acted as a kind of storeroom. The basement, anchored in the center by a big cast iron boiler compartment, was unfinished at first except for a small northwest corner which Dad partitioned off in Masonite in hopes of making wine like his father did. I vaguely remember a big oak barrel in the little room, but the experiment didn’t last long. Still, it remained “the wine cellar” in nomenclature for years afterward, keeping the Christmas tree intact (Dad didn’t like putting lights on the tree anymore than I do now), with handmade wooden shelves in one corner as an overflow pantry where multiple sale items were kept for storage until needed: canned goods, paper towels, toiletries. The oil tank was neatly against the wall in the opposite corner where it was periodically filled by my godfather (our oil man), with the clothes washer (and later gas dryer) next to it along the wall that paralleled the driveway. Dad later fixed three quarters of the basement with a drop ceiling of acoustical tile, wooden floor covered in inexpensive linoleum squares, and the 1970s de rigueur dark-brown paneled walls. It was downstairs I had my first ever-birthday party—I was twelve—in which the guests were all kids my age rather than a few friends mixed up with relatives. Later Dad also installed our old enamel sink and the old Glenwood gas stove down there so in the still humid throes of September we could can tomato sauce in relative coolness. Our old kitchen table, Mom’s sewing machine, the aforementioned steamer trunk, and the old sofa completed the turnout. Near the wine cellar I had a little space where I kept two bookshelves of hardback books (some were my mom’s) and shelves on the wall which held my rows of paperbacks, plus the old red-maple child-sized old roll-top desk and swivel chair I’d gotten from my cousin Johnny. Flanking one of the book cases on either side were closets that held seldom used clothes like Mom’s and my dressy dresses, bathrobes in summer and sunsuits in winter.
The house itself was that most ubiquitous of New England structures, the Cape Cod, with a small apron of lawn out front; however, since the lot was short and narrow (the width of a one-car driveway, the house, and a green stretch of lawn and flower bed to the side that wasn’t more than three feet wide), the home had been turned 90 degrees—instead of the front door being on the long end of the house, it was on the short end, opening directly into the living room (we called it the parlor). To the back of the parlor were the stairs to go upstairs, and you exited the room at left through the arch to a short hallway, tiled, like the kitchen, with pale yellow with black accents. Mom and Dad’s room was to the left of the parlor, followed down the length of the house by the equally ubiquitous pink-tiled and -painted bathroom, and then the yellow kitchen. My bedroom was opposite the kitchen, and between my room and the parlor were the stairs down to the basement. In the house's original incarnation, the rest of the rooms were wallpapered. No gayly-flowered 50s fashion for us; the parlor wallpaper was a pattern of curves and pediments that would not have looked out of place in a Victorian home. My room was striped pink, green, and silver, and my parents' room was similarly attired but in different colors. Once the wallpaper came down, we emerged into Mom's "beige era." Oh, all the rooms were a different shade of beige, but there it was—Dad and I dubbed it "everlasting beige" and fought it tooth and nail. Eventually Mom gave in: my room turned a pretty sky blue, their room a golden, dark yellow, and the parlor another ubiquitous 1970s color, terra cotta (which matched the fabric on the sofa and chair). It didn't last long: after fifteen years and Dad's death, Mom went back to "everlasting beige" once again.
Tacked on to the back of the house was an small enclosed porch just big enough for three in woven tape lawn chairs which had begun life as a simple square platform. In winter the winds came skidding from Cooney Field across the street and anyone standing on the porch attempting to open the back door rattled their teeth in the cold as they groped for their keys, so a roof was soon added and then walls and windows. In the wee hours of dark mornings, even in the cold winter over the low grumble of the boiler, I could hear the porch door open and then clunk close as the Hood's milkman made his delivery; in spring with the windows open the clink of the milk bottles would add music to the percussion.
Behind the house lay a small lawn, small enough to be manageable when mowing, large enough to fit a small shed, a full-size clothesline (which for at least one year flapped nearly daily with diapers), and even a small vegetable garden up against the old fence which went back decades to when the area behind our house was a racetrack. Mom's rosebush grew against the fence each summer, winding the chain link with tangled thorny vines that ended in riots of small red roses. In winter I dug paths along the snow with my feet through the yard and then rode my stick horse through the paths, pretending to be Trixie Belden on her favorite of the Wheeler mares, Susie, or Annie Oakley rescuing her little brother Tagg yet again. And in the spring, oh, in the spring, for a few delicious weeks in May, Charlie's unkempt lilac bush draped its fragrant branches over the chain link fence, dripping with heavenly scented armfuls of pale purple lilacs. I never failed to bury my nose in them, even if later I was punished with the mother of all allergy attacks.
The house I remember best at Christmas, sparkling with tinsel and candoliers at the window, and in summer when the relentless heat brought every orifice open and the sounds of the street inside; the basement was for hot summer days; the attic for memories—but the yard I always remember for those brief weeks of spring and the draping lilacs. Surely heaven smells of lilacs...
It All Started Upstairs... (An Introduction)
It doesn't look like much, especially in this bleak photo where half the items had been stripped away. This was the last time I would see the old attic, that summer that my mom passed away.
As a kid, this was a Magic Place, like my grandfather's house. That empty corner you see at right was once filled with cardboard boxes covered in old sheets, ones that held old photograph albums; a big box of "Reader's Digest" issues (mine) going back to the 1950s (I would pick up old ones at yard sales); vintage books, including what was left of mom's old library; my dad's World War II souvenirs (one a pistol he confiscated from a German officer); Mom's old tatting magazines; and my 1970s "American Girl" issues (not the present magazine; this was a publication of the Girl Scouts). Very dimly at back you can see my child-sized Boston rocker (which I regret leaving behind). There was nothing better on a rainy day or a snowy day (if I could stand the cold like Jo March; as in her garret, the attic wasn't heated) than to creep up the stairs and tug the cord on the lightbulb set in the ceiling, to sit scrunched up on the rocker, looking through the old wartime newspapers my mom had saved, with their maps of the battle lines of Europe, and one stark front page announcing that FDR had died; the newer newspapers covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the old hurricane book the Providence Journal put out in 1954 after Hurricane Carol, comparing the damage in 1954 versus "the big one" in 1938; or the wonderful book sections of those old "Reader's Digests." In other corners were the summer clothes/curtains/bedspreads if it were winter and vice versa; the wicker picnic baskets; the hurricane lamp; the bowling trophies; my kindergarten graduation gown; my school box with old "Bain Bugle" issues and classmate photos; and my old stuffed animals. Everything had a coating of grime and dust, hence the old sheet covers, and I'd have to scrub my hands when I got through, but it was always worth it and I could hardly wait to go again.
For Mom and Dad, I suppose, it represented a disappointment, as it was never intended as an attic. It was actually an unfinished second story, and should have looked like my Confirmation godmother's house upstairs, with the slanting eaves over the beds of my best friend and of her older brother. My parents were hoping for three or four children, and would have put those eaves to excellent use. Instead the place became a time machine I dipped into at will.
Now the time machine resides inside my head, and sometimes a photo online, or a scent, or a book, or a scene will prompt a memory to the fore. I think I'll air them out here once in a while. Just to keep the dust down, you understand...
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