Dad's Memories: My Afterthoughts

Related to Part I:

First Class postage was very stable for a long time. During Dad's childhood it was two cents. During my childhood it was three cents. Also during my childhood, the postman delivered twice a day, entirely on foot - no house to house truck driving.

Regarding the knickers boys wore to school: Dad once told me that some boys, during the first few school days of their lives, deposited something into their trousers, which would slide down until stopped by the bunching of the tucked in pants at the boots. Before long you could tell by the smell. Also, one girl created quite a puddle under her chair.

Strafford went on to become the black sheep of the family. At 12 or 13 he hustled little bottles of booze in the stands at sports events, and eventually became a bookie.

Saved!

When I got out of the Army Strafford offered me a job as a runner. but that was the wrong side of the law for me

Related to Part II:

Tacetta Chevrolet is still in business in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

I do not remember either of the Portsmouth restaurants he mentions, but I do remember the neighboring Olympia Theater. And the Civic Theater, the Colonial Theater, and the Arcadia. That last was the one most frequented by children. On a Saturday afternoon we would see:

• A newsreel
• A cartoon (occasionally two)
• Previews of coming attractions
• A serial (featuring Batman, Nyoka the Jungle Girl, Hopalong Cassidy, and others, always left in some kind of terrible trouble so you would have to come back next week).
• *Two* full length movies

Dad mentions that he began his Civil Service in Portland, Maine, and that is the source of my very first memories. I was ten months old when we moved there.

The "Yard in Portsmouth" is a reference to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which is actually in Kittery, Maine. Portsmouth is across the water in New Hampshire.

Regarding Dad's Army service "(boy did I hate that shit):" Dad was very short, about five foot one (and had flat feet, so don't believe the myths about flat feet being rejected). He was drafted and did his time at Fort Benning, Georgia. He particularly disliked the heat. Also, the clothing he was issued was too big for him. The worst consequence of this, I think, was during his basic training. When he had to enter a tent filled with gas (probably chlorine and sulphur), he had to take his mask off briefly before exiting. Unbeknownst to him, his too-large shirt filled up with the gas, and several minutes later, when the heat caused him to pull his shirt away from his body, he got a pretty good lungful of the gas. (You know, "lungful" is not a real word according to dictionary.com, but I've used it all my life and it's too late to stop now. Perhaps the dictionaries will catch up.) It was several days before he could smoke again.

During the Pop and Rena years, the family owned a dairy farm which had been in the family a very long time. I have, passed down to me by my father, an 1875 medal for an Ayrshire cow. There was, at some point, a stud bull named Linwood, and for a few years a standard greeting between male members of the family was "How's your Linwood?"

Related to Part III: I caught bloody Hell for my little mention of having heard the Barbee story "at least two hundred times." He denied ever telling it before, but really, I'd been hearing it since my childhood and I was in my late forties at the time of my comment. But the wheel is coming full circle, and I am sometimes caught repeating myself by my friends.

The 110 House Dad mentioned was in Amesbury, Massachusetts. "Was" is the key word here, as the last time I went by the site, perhaps 30 years ago, it had been replaced by a car wash. George Lay, mentioned by Dad, married the owner and was the regular host. We despised each other, but mostly got along for the sake of my dad.

Dad's Memories, Part I

(Intro in preceding post.)

 Jr,

You asked me for my memory of the depression. It is pretty dim, as I didn't know it was going on, and if it affected me I didn't know it at the time.

October, 1929 seems to be the date it hit this country. I only knew about it through the movies; the first thing would always be "Pathe News." We saw men splattered on the sidewalks of New York after losing their shirts on the stock market and taking off from their office windows etc. in a high dive

 It was big for the newspapers and since I always read the papers, I was aware, but not concerned to any degree. Our local paper, "The Brockton Enterprise," cost two cents, twelve cents for the six days it printed, and the paper boy was always given fifteen cents. First class postage was also two cents, and haircuts were twenty five cents.

In 1929 my folks bought me my first bike. It was a "Miami," made by Columbia, and I was never more thrilled. I think it cost $29.00, a lot of money at the time. No depression yet.

My bike and my hormones kicked in at the same time. My first "kissy face" was just down the street and her name was Eleanor Gorman. My bike was often parked by her back steps. Her father was never home and her mother didn't pay much attention to what was going on on the back steps.

Most shirts were white at the time, and were long sleeved. When the cuffs got a bit frayed, the sleeves were cut off at about the elbow. Then you had a shirt for summer.

(Jr here: Dad has also told me that when boys got suits in
those days they got two pair of pants, one of them knickers.
They didn't get to wear the long pants until the knickers were
worn out. During the winter they wore long underwear, tucked
into their stockings. Going to school in the knickers, the
bulges in the stockings showed, and were very embarrassing.)

One night when I got home about dark, my mother was in the kitchen and noticed lipstick on the collar of my white shirt. Trauma in a second. The problem was that the girl was an Irish Catholic, and to a diehard Methodist family that was of great concern. I imagine there was relief when my bike showed up from a different direction.

We lived at 29 Nye Avenue from the time I was born until I was about sixteen. It was a "three decker" with large rooms. My grandmother and Bertha shared one bedroom; Irving, Ruth, and later Strafford had another bedroom; and my mother and father had another. When they went to bed, I was on a couch on a living room for the rest of the night

(Jr again: Dad said that when he was very young, they would
put him to bed in a bedroom, and he would wake up in the
morning on the couch.)

When we moved to 23 Newton Street, Strafford and I had our own rooms on the third floor, and the others had the whole second floor. It was a nice rent, and was owned by a Brockton school teacher.

I can imagine that so many living together was the result of the depression, but I didn't know it. Bertha, Irving, and my father were still working, although I know nothing of their wages.

Do you remember the watch that Gramp wanted Bobby to have (probably because he sat on his lap, listened to his stories, and stole cigarettes and matches)? In the watch case was a pawn ticket from a Brockton pawn shop. At some point (1931 or 1932) he had pawned it for $15.00, possibly for reasons depression related, but I just don't know. Why he saved the pawn ticket for so many years I can't imagine. It was redeemed less than a year later.

CONTINUED IN THE NEXT POST