Grammy’s Life Adventures
Nina Clancy Stone Newton Kilgore, B. March 25, 1923 D. 2015
Recorded by her Granddaughter Erin Newton
On Nov 28, 2008
(Cousin Don Cook, Kenmoore, NY has geneology)
Health: 15 or 16 surgeries. 2 Ectopic pregnancies, 2 herniated lumbar disk operations, gall bladder removed, ruptured ovarian cysts, appendix removed, only had half ovary when I had Mark.
Mother: Grace Emily Meadway Stone, B. Dec 29, 1891 in Buffalo, NY, D. Age 58 Nov 1948 Cause: Esaphogeo cancer (lived one month from symptoms), had breast cancer 20 years earlier and survived radical mastectomy where chest muscles are taken resulting in severe disfigurement. Mother’s mother born in Wales and her father born in England
Mother’s Mother: Sara Richards Meadway born in Wales, B. D.
Mother’s Father: Harry Meadway born in England, B. D.
Father: Erling Farwell Stone, B. March 26, 1891 in Rochester, NY, D. Age 65 Nov 1957, (had a heart attack) Cause: Asian Flu Family here from England and Ireland since 1700s
Father’s Father: Fredrick William Stone, B. Dec. 9 1865 in Troy, NY. D.
Father’s Mother: Jessie Adelia Clancy Stone, B. Sept 25, 1869, Gloversville, NY D.
Family and Youth
My parents were made for each other, born 9 months apart. Andrew’s British mum told me the area my grandfather grew up was low class, but I thought he was pretty classy. He sold insurance.
Though both my parents families were from England and they loved a cup of tea after dinner each night, I never developed a taste for it. I think that was because I was required to clean out the tea grounds from the tea pot while my parents lounged around. The tea grounds were such a mess, I would sometimes sneak upstairs and dump them in the toilet to save cleaning the sink.
Grandma Stone was a saint because she put up with Grandpa. He was deaf and everybody but me was scared of him. I adored him and could do no wrong as I was his favorite. He was the secretary and treasurer of the Railroad workers of America and in his office he would type and my grandmother had to sit patiently next to him and he would say the word “Samaritan” and she’d spell it, and then he’d ask for ‘congress.’ When he missed a word and yelled “shit!” she calmly spelled it, S-H-I-T, though she never would have said the word aloud.
One day Grandma Stone, sat on the outside sill to wash the windows, and fell and broke her leg so her leg was always stiff and she walked and sat with a straight leg. I learned to sew with my leg out straight because my mother never sewed and I thought you had to have a straight leg to sew properly after watching Grandma Stone closely.
Grandpa Stone would read till 3 or 4 in the morning because he couldn’t sleep. He’d come downstairs at 11 in the morning and Grandma would bring him his breakfast. He would say to Grandma, “Jessie, I feel pretty good this morning. I think I’ll peel my own egg.” He would speak, and she would jump.
Brother: Robert Meadway Stone B. March 4, 1918 in Buffalo, NY. D. Age 82 July 22, 2000 of cancer. Profession: Chemist
Wife: Helen Dwyer Stone, Profession: Taught school, raised 5 children
Children: Jennifer, Jimmy, Jonathan (retarded) and Jerry (twins), Jane
Sometimes we got on beautifully and sometimes we could have killed each other. We were 5 years apart.
Mother’s Side:
Siblings: Mabel, Pearl, Bessie, (Grace), and Viola, Boy died at 5 yrs.
Bessie was 2 years older than my mother but always claimed she was 2 years younger. Pearl was an old maid school teacher. Mabel was married to a dentist who died and was married to Fred Bolson who also died and she moved in with my parents. She worked in an office in a department store in downtown Buffalo and I loved to visit her when I was downtown.
My mother had a brother who died when he was 5 years old and my mother was panic stricken until her son Bob got past the ill fated age.
Father’s Side:
Siblings: (Erling), Everett, Virginia, Ruth
Everett was a pharmacist and had a drug store in Akron, NY where we loved to go to get candy. He had 2 kids Dawson and Garry and was married to Francis Dawson Stone. Aunt “Gin” lived in Akron too and married Bill Robinson and lost her first child and my mother always claimed the cause was the doctor being a quack. She had Barbara Gale and Bob and then divorced Bill because he got the maid pregnant. He remarried and has a son Bill who is Barb’s half brother and lives in Sacramento, California. Dawson was married to Lydia and lived in Akron. They had 3 or 4 children and one died around 40 yrs old. Francis was glamorous because she dressed well, was tall, and nice looking. Uncle Everett was a clown. On Christmas we’d open the presents one at a time. Uncle Everett would make a comment about the cost of each present at varying drug stores, saying he could have got it cheaper. At Christmas we’d go at noon to Grandma Meadway’s in Buffalo on Longnecker St off Lovejoy Street and it was dreadfully dreary. It was churchy as Grampa Meadway was head of the Sunday school so we always said grace and they had a piano and someone would play hymns and we’d sing around the piano. Then at 4 pm we’d drive 3 miles to Grandma Stone’s which was a relief because we’d have supper and everyone was more relaxed. Aunt Gin and I would take the presents and put them on the stairs. We had a stair for each family member and I was allowed to help Aunt Gin pass them out. Grandpa Stone always got a bottle of whiskey and everyone would try to get him to open the bottle and share it, but he refused and we never had anything to drink at either house.
Aunt Ruth was the youngest and a bit weird. She smoked and we assumed she also hit the bottle. She had petty epilepsy. She didn’t have seizures, but she’d be talking and then have one of her ‘spells’ as we called it and wouldn’t say a word. I never thought much about it as you don’t notice those things when you were a kid and it took a friend making a comment for me to think it was odd. She was married to George and neither one of them were real bright and George worked as a waiter. George didn’t like turkey on Thanksgiving so he got steak and all the men had a fit for missing out on steak. George played the piano and I thought he was a real good pianist, but later realized he was quite average.
Grandpa Stone and my mother used to tease each other. Grandpa Stone would hear what he wanted to hear…of course he never missed her snide remarks. It was all in good fun.
In the summer, we had a lot of family picnics. We’d go to Horseshoe Lake near Akron.
We didn’t have any money. It was the depression and my father had two drugstores and lost them both and went bankrupt around 1932. My mother had a lot of serious illness and we ended up living with my grandparents when I was in 1st, second, and third grade. My brother lived at my other grandparents house. Mother had 3 serious back operations and had surgery in Boston. Back then when you had an operation you were in the hospital for a month or more. For breast cancer, she had a prosthesis and always had a problem with her clothes trying to make her prosethesis match her other natural breast. We only had one bathroom, so when I was a teenager, I remember seeing her horrible scarring under her arm and her burns from cauterizing the amputation.
She still worked as a legal stenographer and was a good one. She was smart in school but skipped grades and left high school at 13 or 14 and went to business school. She and Aunt Gin were both excellent typists at 120 wds a min. and passed civil service exams to work for the government. She would enter soap and toothpaste contests like “I like Duz Because” where you had to write in 25 words or less why you liked the product to win the contest. You had to have a knack, and just before she died she started winning small prizes (5 dollars, 15 dollars) and we always hoped for the big prize, the new car or a house trailer or 50 dollars a month for life. “Spic and Span” was another of her favorite contests. Aunt Pearl and I were going to the movies and we asked mother to go but she was working on this spic and span contest. Her entries were always too wordy (I always had to bring a dictionary when we’d go for a ride because she had such a massive vocabulary I could never understand her). She didn’t go to a good school and skipped a few grades and went to work at about 14, but she worked for lawyers so I guess that is where she gleaned much of her vocabulary.
We went to the movies alone and poopooed her poem she was working on saying it was too wordy. When we returned she said, “Here, this is more your style!”
We had a cleaning lady:
Our Lou was a fine Irish Lass (our cleaning lady)
Each Sunday she went off to mass
That gal was a beaut
But she Turned Prostitute
When Spic and Span took the skin off her Ass!
She never turned that one in, but that was a big thing in the 30s these contests. I always thought her more serious poems were wonderful but she told me they were only for Christmas presents and gave them only to the family.
My mother bought me a pretty dress in high school which she watched for weeks until it went on sale. It was a lovely navy blue with white piping around the neck which you could take out and wash, which was often required since I wore it so often. I went on dates as a senior in high school and we’d go to local bars in Buffalo and order a Tom Collins with soda and gin and nurse it all night. We usually went to movies on dates.
As a college graduate my father made 15 dollars for a 60 hr week as a pharmacist, so my mother always worked. In 1934 we moved to Almira where father could make 40 dollars a week and shortly after they cut wages to 30 dollars a week. I was around 7 years old when we were most poor. When we moved to Almyra in Southern New York we rented our house for 15 dollars a month. My mother and father said they’d set aside Monday night to worry about money, and forget about it for the rest of the week. We never went hungry, but we ate a lot of crap. My father got an ox tail from the guy who lived downstairs who worked in a meatpacking place. We’d have ox tail soup with vegetables and ate a lot of spam. Steak was eaten only on special occasions and it was cooked in the coal furnace and he’d broil the steak in the cellar and the whole house would smell wonderful.
When I was living at my grandparents house, Grandpa collected the dues and he had a cigar box in his desk. A couple times I took money and bought ice cream and treated a little girl down the street. I had terrible guilt about it and confessed to my mother and she forgave me. My mother was pretty good about making me not shoot myself over it and said she promised to return the money to him if I promised not to do it again.
High School
In high school I used to come home late and think I’d be getting away with something but my mother would be waiting for me in my bed. Generally, though I was well behaved.
In high school, my friend Shirley used to shock me half to death because she’d write her own notes to get out of class and I thought she was the devil. I guess I was a goody two shoes. In high school I belonged to a sorority, and ours was a pretty mild one. We rented a cottage a few times at the Canadian side of Lake Erie for a week or two in the summer and someone came as a chaperone to stay at the cottage because girls just didn’t go anywhere alone at that age. Shirley was my best friend and another Italian girl and the girl next door Mary Lois Tatue. She was a year older than me and we’d go the movies all the time and beg to see double features. We’d buy a candy bar and mostly ignored the boys. I had a boyfriend in Akron and I went to the movies there and held hands with him. Another boyfriend Fran was very Catholic and we used to neck a lot. I had more boyfriends at Brockport. One boyfriend I was smitten with who had the nickname ‘Smitty’. I quickly dropped him at Brockport, where we few ladies were hot commodities. We had one friend who’s father made hard cider in the basement and we’d steal it, drink it, then go to the bars in town and buy ‘maybes’ for 15 cents which were wine and ginger ale, since if you mixed the two, you could get a cheaper drink.
College
We used to hitchhike regularly since nobody had cars. I’d hitchhike coming home from school but wouldn’t tell my parents because I knew they wouldn’t approve. After I left the house, my mother and I argued more. I think I was pretty bratty and nasty as a teenager. I was spanked by my father because I was so sassy to my mother when I was 13 or 14 and he turned me over his knee and paddled me because I was so fresh. It left a lasting impression for quite a while.
When I went to college, my parents would give me 8 or 10 dollars a week and that was a struggle. When I went to Cornell and got paid 10 dollars a week, I was able to save money because I worked through the summer. Tuition was 50 dollars a semester and I earned enough money to pay for tuition and books. That was in 1941-42 and things were looking up since the war had started and my father went to work at Blissenlacklen Steel foundry as a chemist to support war efforts.
I took the test to go to a state college in Buffalo State teacher’s college but I didn’t get in to the school, and got accepted at Brockport, NY (30 miles from home) for teacher’s college. I attended for a week and then got accepted at Buffalo but was having a ball at Brockport as we could smoke in the lounge. There were mostly girls but a few guys were allowed, the ones who couldn’t pass the physical for the army (“4F’s”). In 1943, after 2 and a half years, I saw an article in the paper saying Curtis Wright was sending 800 girls to school to 8 different colleges…MIT, PennState, Ohio, Cornell, and Michigan, Perdue, etc. I took the test and passed and was sent to Cornell. It was intensified engineering study and there were 6 groups. We went to school for 40 hrs a week and we took Calculus and difficult courses. The girls who went to fancy schools were in group 6, and I was in 1, for girls who weren’t considered that bright.
We had a great time as Cornell was full of men with classes for service men, navy, army, and marines. We had senior rules and didn’t have to be in until 12 pm. You could have 3 different dates in a night in each regiment. We went to football games and dances. We were in a dorm and had an apartment with a living room, two bedrooms, and bath. They were meant for 4, but there were 6 of us girls in Comstock Hall on the 4th floor. There were two other apartments for girls on campus. We ate in the dining hall across the way. We were happy to be away from home.
I saw some great shows living in New York. I saw Katherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story in Rochester. We’d go to Che’s Buffalo Theater and there were dance contests in the 40’s in which my brother’s friend was often a contender. There was always a live stage show before the dancing. We saw Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Greer Garson, Betty Davis, Claudette Colbert perform on stage at the theater and afterward a movie was shown. At Cornell big time bands were always employed at dances, and we saw them all. Judy Garland, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Grace Kelly were a few favorite stars.
I’d go home for the weekend with our friend Stevie where she lived on a farm with sheep and other animals. She was a bridesmaid at our wedding. We didn’t go home when I was at Cornell because it was 150 miles away and you had to go by train or bus. At Cornell, schooling was accelerated and the courses were called ’90 day wonders’. With my 21/2 years at teachers college and 10 months at Cornell which would have been enough to get a degree. Many of the Curtis Wright Cadets carried on and got degrees, but every time I’d go back to school, getting married or pregnant seemed to get in the way. In grammar school I was the head of my class, in high school I passed in 4 years and took New York State Regent Exams. There were 500 people in my class and 150 people flunked the exam and didn’t graduate. I passed, and upon going to college I was a C average student but had a lot more fun.
I always aimed to be a school teacher and the options were otherwise limited to school teacher, nurse, or secretary for women. Working at Worthington Pump and Machinery during one summer was different. We’d go up a ladder to pull out big flat drawers of blueprints of pumps and machinery and filed them. I wore blue jean overalls in that job but in most other positions I wore a skirt, blouse, and sweater as was customary.
18 Years with Al
I met Al through his sister who was my roommate at Brockport when I was a freshman. The first time I met him he came to Brockport to see his sister. She got him a date with one of our girlfriends and I had a date with someone else, but we switched in the end because she wasn’t interested in him, and I wasn’t interested in my date. For our first date, we had a picnic at the beach on the weekend as he was working in Buffalo at the time at an airport then went to work for Curtis Wright.
When I was a sophomore, Al went to Africa for a year and then came back while I was at Cornell, then went to India for Pan American Airways for almost 3 years (1943-1945) as an ANE (aircraft and engine) mechanic. He was a representative, then returned and worked for Curtis Wright again. He had a picture in the paper when he was on the “We the People” radio show christening an airplane cracking a champagne bottle on it. The article about Curtis Wright sending girls to school was next to his picture which was how I ended up taking the test for Cornell.
I liked Al a lot but he was gone so much, I was torn between him and this Jonny Reardon who was Catholic. I was raised by a lukewarm protestant family (my father didn’t like going to church) and you didn’t combine Catholics and Protestants easily in marriage but it was ok to be friends. One of the two usually had to convert, and the Catholics always won out. I was quite serious with Jonny who was a Marine. Al got home before he did, and I guess that’s how he won out.
When Al came home from India, we went to his mother’s cottage with his sister at one of the Finger Lakes in New York. He proposed, and, being overwhelmed, I said I’d tell him in the morning. I got up in the morning and he was nowhere to be found. He’d gone fishing, and I thought he should have been waiting around for my response and was quite put out.
My mother always told me she didn’t believe in long engagements. She and my father were engaged for 3 years and Al and I were engaged for 3 weeks because he was slated to return to India. Mother had a fit. We had a big wedding. My brother was in the service in California and tried to get home for the wedding but got stuck somewhere and missed it. We had a nice wedding at night at 7 o’ clock. My uncle who was a dentist had some pull at the Statler Hotel in Buffalo and got us a room for a reception and a nice room for the wedding night. We had about 70 guests.
The minute the war ended, we lost our jobs the next day and I collected 20 dollars a week unemployment insurance. The war ended when Al and I were on our honeymoon in the Adirondacks, New York, and Vermont for several weeks. We paid for the honeymoon from our wages of 2 years of working. I made a 1.25 an hr which was fabulous. Al was supposed to return to India to work for the war effort. He wasn’t in the service but was in uniform.
Al had terrible eyesight and wanted to fly, but couldn’t get into the air corps. So he went into service as a rep of Curtis Wright, but had an army ID and uniform but was getting paid well. After we got married, we both lost our jobs (due to the finish of the war), so Al was working at a small airport and bought an old rundown airport with one hanger in Depew, NY where he re-built airplanes with the money he saved working in India. He learned to fly and got a pilot’s license when he had this airport and on weekends we’d make a little money flying folks around. I’d help at the airport where they had an old wood stove. I fell asleep in a chair and woke up cold and yelled to the guys, “How do you get this fire going!?” and they said I should pour some gasoline on the fire. This resulted in me burning my hands badly.
The first year we were married, we had an apartment and a nasty landlady who required that I clean the stairway squeaky clean. I got a nasty infection. Later I got pregnant and we were asked to leave as children were not allowed. The apartment was formerly a fancy home, but we lived in a small room off to the side which was for the butler or maid.
The airport burned to the ground with 7 airplanes inside after only a year of business. I think we had insurance. All of Al’s planes were destroyed. I was pregnant at the time, and Al went to learn to fly a helicopter in Buffalo with Bell Helicopter company. Al had three partners who bought a helicopter together. His uncle was one of the partners. My father had a heart attack and he flew my father in the helicopter to Vermont where his uncle lived and had a farm. The uncle was tied in with the Maine Potato Association and after my father returned to Buffalo, Al picked me and Rae up and we went to Maine to dust potatoes with his two partners.
Rae was 4 months old and we lived in one room but ended up with the home of our good friends who had a restaurant downstairs. They had a baby Norma who was a couple months older than Rae and I ended up working with them at the restaurant one day and hated it as I was a terrible waitress. It was a madhouse this “Shanty” which served burgers and hotdogs. They did the laundry in the cellar where they peeled the potatoes. I had the use of the kitchen to feed the baby but they had a young obnoxious boy who was always in my hair. Their girl working for them was playing ‘coochie coochie’ with Rae until she told me her baby had ‘the clap’ and she lost it. I was a wreck after that with worry.
The next summer we moved back to Buffalo and bought a trailer so we could live together. We took the trailer to a hanger in Holton, Maine, banked snow up around it, and spent the winter in this hanger in Maine building up the helicopter business. The lads worked on the helicopter there and I used the bathroom in the hanger in the freezing cold. The electricity was hooked up only one hr out of 4, and I would yell out the trailer “when is the electricity goin back on?” and they would say it had just gone off. I used to piddle in the milk bottle in the night and occasionally Al had already piddled in the bottle and it would spill all over the floor. I was pregnant with Brian and had enough so I went home to Mother to have the baby in a little more comfort. Then I returned to Maine where I’d dry the blankets and diapers hanging them over the doors. We really had a good time but some of it was pretty awful in retrospect. We were young and it didn’t matter. After the first summer, Al and his uncle bought out the other partner and eventually Al bought out his uncle.
Elinor and Al Averill came on the scene then. Al was working with Al, who was also a mechanic. During summers we crop dusted together in Maine and in winter we would move the trailers to Florida for dusting tomatoes. There were 3 to 5 pilots all living in trailers and Al owned the helicopters. One year they leased a Kaman helicopter in Maine, which provided future work contacts.
There were 4 or 5 trailers in our troupe, a couple trucks, and a few cars. We were gypsies of sorts moving all over Florida in winter and returning to Maine in the summer. One time I rode with them while they were crop dusting and it was harrowing flying low and making sharp turns for several hours. I never rode with them again.
Then the Korean War started so they couldn’t get parts. One of the pilots was killed in Florida when he flew into power lines. As crop dusting was a dangerous low flying job, there were many accidents. Al sold the business after 5 years and went to work for Kaman in Connecticut. Brian was 3 years old and we moved into a trailer park in East Hartford. I had an ectoptic pregnancy and damn near died. I went out of the trailer one time and asked Rae, “where’s your brother?” and she said, “Oh, he’s all runned over.” I can’t remember what the comment was about, but he turned out fine.
We went back and forth from Maine to Connecticut pulling trucks and cars. One time I ended up riding with Al pulling the trailer and someone else had Brian in the back seat of another car. We didn’t have phones then, and we’d get in touch with the police if we had a problem coordinating. One time we drove all night thinking the car with the baby was ahead of us but in fact it was behind. I thought he’d be crying all night, but he was sound asleep when we met up with them.
When we moved to Connecticut in 1952, we bought a house in Avon at 48 Sylvan Street and got in a scrap with the real estate agent and the guy who owned the house and it took ages to move in, but we did eventually and lived across the street from the Kilgores. Mark was born in 1957 and money was good. Brian looked across the street and said, “Ohh, look at the baby. Me like the baby. Me hit the baby!” Little did he know that Memme would be his step sister some day. Lynn, her mother, said, “Yes, and Brian did hit the baby a lot!”
The Moledeskies, Lynn’s brother next door to us, had a son Larry who was a year or two older than our kids. He was a monster propositioning Rae and bullying Brian. One summer, I sent Brian to camp so he could get away from Larry. Mostly though, we got on well with the neighbors.
Neighborhood parties were frequent. We’d have barbeques and gin and tonics while the kids played at the sand hill, and on the circle, and on their bikes and with their baby carriages and tractors. The Kilgore kids had a big 3 wheel bike and we had a red pedal tractor and a jungle gym in the backyards. There weren’t many house rules. The kids would go out in the morning and come home for lunch and go out again till dark. The Kilgores had 3 kids, Dennie, Memme, and Sue, and we had 3 kids. The Festas, The Masurs, the Wards, and the Giantonios all had kids so there was always someone to play with and someone getting hurt.
Dennie ruptured her spleen nearly impaling herself walking along the fence and knowing she wasn’t supposed to be walking on the fence tried to hide it until the kids let us know later when she didn’t look too good upstairs in bed. Brian fell out of a tree house he built and fractured his skull. The kids came home from school one day and I said “Where’s Brian?” and they said he’d been kicked off the bus. I was mad the school didn’t notify me and learned later they had unintentionally notified Brian Woods parents, who gave him quite a hard time.
The kids favorite place to play was around the corner beyond the Mateva’s house called Pussywillow Creek. They wandered pretty far and wide, knowing they weren’t supposed to be there, but we didn’t pay much attention to what they were doing. We were having coffee at Festas when Rae robbed one of the kids piggie banks and walked to the drug store to buy herself some candy. She returned and we didn’t even know she was gone. I can’t remember how old she was, but not old enough to be going to the drug store that’s for damn sure. I guess we were more relaxed than most.
Most of the neighborhood women worked as housewives, so I had a lot of company aside from when the kids were sick and I was sequestered at home. Rae was often very sick with asthma and there wasn’t much treatment. Inhalers weren’t used then. Mark had terrible Croup and you could hear him breathe all over the hospital. When my father died, we took a hurried trip to Buffalo where he was in the hospital. Mark was so sick while we were gone, the doctor came to the house and stayed up all night with Mark steaming his head in the bathroom. We left my father and Al asked permission to speed on the highway and it was not granted. We traveled 400 miles on the highway in 5 hrs anyway and found Mark in an isolated ward where he could hardly breathe and you could see his chest cave in. A steam room seemed to be the only treatment. He had Croup at 5 months and 10 months and was a very small baby.
Rae had whooping cough and was in the hospital for a few days or more. I had a babysitter for the boys and they were scared to death of her because she was a great big woman. Brian hid in the closet until she left.
Giving birth was different then. I was in the hospital for a week or more with Rae. She was born in Buffalo and you went from the delivery room to the recovery room and had to stay in the recovery room for 8 hrs with no visitors. During my first birth, Al was with me until Rae was born, but then I was bleeding all over the place in the recovery room alone. I remember several other women bouncing all over the place who were having their third or 4th babies so it was old hat, but I still didn’t know what sex my baby was. I was afraid to make a stink so didn’t ask, but I thought something was horribly wrong as babies were brought to all the other women and the nurses couldn’t even tell me if I’d had a boy or a girl. After 8 hours, Al came in with Rae and I learned my first baby was a girl.
Rae was only 15 months old when Brian was born. I remember them saying ‘get the delivery room ready! The head is right here!” Al was just starting with a helicopter job in Vermont, so had to return home just in time to take me to the hospital. Mark was born in a big fat hurry 3 weeks early. He weighed 5 lbs 4 oz and just made it out of the weight class of incubators. All was flying a helicopter in Florida and was scared when he heard about it since it was so early and he wanted to be home for the birth. The neighbors took me to the hospital which was in Hartford, a 35 minute drive.
It was hard having Al gone so much with work and with crazy hours. It made raising a family hard, but I had some outside help and Al was good about paying for support cleaning house and babysitting. One day Al was asked to do a stunt job for a hotel in which a famous female stunt aviator, Betty Skelton, was to be lifted from a diving board in the hotel pool in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. With crowds watching and cameras snapping, he hovered over the pool and lifted her on a rope and swung her to the side of the pool. After the trick, Al was out until two am at the celebration party and I almost went home to my parents I was so mad to be left home with the kids while he was out partying with such an attractive young star, 22 year old, only 3 years younger than me. I learned later that she set many world records, owned one of the most famous stunt planes in history, and was inducted into the Aviator Hall of the Fame, and when I think about it now, it still irritates me.
Al helped with rescues in the 1955 Farmington Valley flood which affected much of Connecticut. People were in the third floor of their houses or on their roofs and couldn’t escape because the excessive rain caused dams to break and the Farmington River to flood and take houses away. Al hung a rope down with a tire tied to the end and was surprised to find that people knew to climb into the tire. One man was swinging so violently, Al had to dunk him in the water to stop the swing. Al landed in Canton and a man ran out and directly into the Rotars and was killed. Al removed at least 15 people from their houses and was featured in a photo in a local newspaper. Winsted, Canton, Farmington, and Unionville town centers, and Avon were severely damaged and Winstead town center was completely wiped away. We didn’t have electricity for a week, which meant we couldn’t have water because we had pumps. The women got together and organized tetnus shots to protect people from infection. Eventually the U.S. Marine helicopters arrived to help with the rescue efforts.
We were married for 18 years when one morning in 1963 Charlie Kaman called to tell me that Al was killed in a helicopter accident in Bloomfield, CT that morning. Al was the co-pilot and the report said they had taken the back seats out to drop weight for the test flight for a world speed record attempt. The report said Al turned around for some reason and got his foot caught in a wire which caused the helicopter to go down. The pilot, Bill Gruenwald, and Al were killed when they crashed on a driveway of a guy who was returning from a shopping trip, decapitating him. His two teenage sons witnessed it.
At the time we were living at 73 Wright Drive in a nice house on Avon Mountain with a view of the center of town. We paid 7,000 dollars for 3.5 acres on the side of the mountain. It was expensive for the time but would be worth several million more now (2008). We had it designed with all rooms facing the view including the kitchen, dining room, and living room. It was a poor design and there was a long hall going to nowhere in particular. When we designed the place it was a sad time as our very close friend’s son, Freddie Doud, was in a car accident with 6 buddies, and the 3 in the backseat all died. Freddie survived, but it was never proven who was driving and all were from Avon, so it was a horror for the community. I sold the house for 45,000 dollars and bought the house at 71 Wellington Heights for 30,000 dollars.
It was a 2 story colonial with 3 bedrooms for the kids. I went back to work at the nursery school when Al died. Though I had 3 kids to support, I wasn’t concerned about the finances after Al died as we were covered by his insurance, but I was very lonely for the first two years after his death and life was hard. These days there are all sorts of articles about how to grieve and what to do, but I think I did everything wrong. I tried to be too brave but I knew I wasn’t. We were good friends with many of the Kaman people, but those relationships dwindled. My best friends at the time were Lynn (Charlie’s wife), Milly Doud, Marge Pond, and Ellie Mazur. They were kind, but life wasn’t the same.
Many happy years with Charlie
I had a fight with Al once and he said, “I suppose you’d like me to be like Charlie Kilgore!” our neighbor across the street who came home every night and worked regular hours. Charlie and Al were friends and Charlie was a home builder who bid on building our house on the hill but we went with Bud Zeiner’s lower bid. Three years after Al died, I was ready to marry again but was quite busy with three kids. Charlie’s wife, my friend Lynn, died in 1966 of cancer. We had a whirlwind romance as I guess we were both single and desperate with three kids each. I had just had a hysterectomy a few weeks before, and we had to hurry up and get married because the kids were going to college. Some of the kids didn’t want to be there and some didn’t approve, but they were all there, though some reluctantly. Brian and Denne left early and Sue wasn’t going to come live with us. Charlie and I married in the Avon Congregational Church, where Mark, Dennie, Rae, and our grandchild Erin were later also hitched. Charlie moved in with me on Wellington Heights and added another garage, bedroom, and bath. Rae, Mark, Sue, and Memme moved in with us. Sue had just finished college.
Grampy bought a property in the smack dab center of Avon where the West Avon Congregational Church was previously located before they jacked it up and moved it across the street to a bigger lot. The lot was just short of an acre and cost 15,000 dollars. Charlie designed a 1600 sq ft two level ‘Cape’ house and built it himself with two helpers. He built all the cabinets, trim, and detailing, and set up a workshop in the basement for his furniture projects. There were sugar maple trees behind the house which the church tapped for maple syrup but they were old and beginning to die, so we replaced some of them, added trees given to us by our kids, and we added the pine trees to the front garden.
We hosted Dennie’s reception in Sept 1979 at our 66 Burnham house shortly after moving in. Dennie was married in the Avon Congregational Church in the center of town, and on the morning of the wedding she tied yellow ribbons on all the trees between the church and our house which was about 3 miles away. She told her guests after the ceremony to follow the ribbons to the reception. The upstairs bathroom was to be used for guests, but it stopped up so Grampy revived the old church two-hole outhouse at the back of the yard for the men. Dennie’s husband Fred’s friends practiced maneuvers on the lawn while we set up a bar and dance floor with a live band in the backyard. We closed the bar at 9 am because the maneuvers on the golf course were getting pretty wild.
Our little mutt Eor, a beagle, was an orphan who Joe Major found wandering on the street. Wiskey and Lucy were a “limey” breed, jack russels. Charlie was yelling for Whiskey out on the golf course when a golfer yelled back, “Yeah, I’ll have some!”
Lucy was scrappy. She’d bark at animals on TV and would watch it for hours. She tangled with a porcupine in New Hampshire and got a quill straight through her throat. Charlie took her to the vet and got the quill out and saved it in his treasure box.
They were trained and bred as hunting dogs, so were very good diggers. Lucy would jump out of the canoe and swim around until she got tired and we’d pull her back in. She had a heart attack and died in Bill’s Pond. Lucy dug such a big hole in the yard, we buried her in it.
Mark broke his neck diving into the Farmington River in Canton. His friends floated him to shore when they realized he wasn’t kidding. They probably saved his life because they kept him flat and floating until someone at Hinnman’s Flower shop saw them and went for help. Mark remembers looking up through water and realizing he couldn’t move his arms and legs to swim to the surface.
We were at a wedding in Pennsylvania and didn’t hear about it until we got home at 10 at night and Rae said we had to head to the hospital. He was a mess with his head full of sand and dirt. He had screws in his head to hold his head steady and pull his neck up. He needed a major operation, but the Yukon hospital was so new, he had to be moved to the Hartford hospital and the doctor escorted him to hold his head. He was in traction for a week at the hospital before they did the operation. He was then in a back brace for 6 months and couldn’t decide if he wanted to go away to college at New England Aeronautical Institute (Never Educated Always Intoxicated) in New Hampshire. He ended up going after we scrambled to get him re-enlisted, but we didn’t get his high school diploma until he finished his first semester in college because he hadn’t finished a history paper and didn’t get credit for the class.
Charlie built two houses in New Hampshire for family retreat vacations. He built the first one and built a second house on speculation to pay for the first one. We’d take the family the 3 hr drive in summer and winter for 17 years. The kids skied at Pat’s Peak in Winter and could walk through the woods from our house to the ski tow. Hannecker, NH, a college town, was the nearby town, but we didn’t spend much time there accept to visit the drugstore, hardware store, and grocery store. In the summer we went to Crany Pond in the canoe and went swimming. In later years on the Farmington River Brian took the canoe through some rapids where he shouldn’t have been and got stuck between some rocks. He took about 4 feet off the front of the canoe and turned it into half boat, or as we later called it, a “ba-noe”.
One of the first times in New Hampshire ski area, the kids got lost in the woods on the way home and we were home worrying about them. We didn’t go looking for them, but I was pretty upset and scared when they didn’t get home in the late evening.
Rascal, our pain-in-the-ass cocker spaniel, was a nice dog who stole food.
A raccoon moved into the tree in the front yard when Mark and Donna were married and had one set of babies, which the grandkids loved to go out and watch.
We had tons of golf balls in the back yard being backed up on a golf course. Charlie collected the golf balls and put them in an egg carton and gave them to Dutch. Dutch’s wife, Ruth, used to say, “Dutch plays with Charlie’s balls.”
Robert and David tried to have a lemonade stand out front and tried to sell the golf balls, but didn’t have much success. One snotty manager at the golf course sent us a letter saying you couldn’t walk on the golf course, though our family had been taking walks there for years to look at the geese and walk around the lake. We were annoyed because the golfers walked on our land all the time to find their damn golf balls. We kept walking on the course, and Charlie would sit out under his pine tree smoking his pipe in the yard and chat with golfers who stopped by to visit him. Various animals wandered past our house including a bear, deer, squirrels, a hog nosed skunk, wild turkeys, and a plethora of bird species. We kept feeders with sunflower seeds, suit, fox, and thissleseed to attract the birds and had regular visits from cardinals, blue jays, white breasted nuthatch, tufted tit mouse, chikadees, juncos, red bellied woodpecker, downie and harry woodpeckers, morning doves, and occasional blue birds. We had an eagle stop in once and a few hawks.
Charlie had an ongoing friendly war with the squirrels and chipmunks, trying to adjust the birdfeeders so that they were loose enough to allow a bird to land on them, but would close when a squirrel tried to get in. He trapped ‘chippies’ all year long in the garage and would let them go over and over again. They got so brazen, they were his company out by the pine tree and would get trapped just to get the food knowing they’d be released. We’d also had plenty of raccoons in the garage getting into the trash and making quite a ruckus until Charlie chased them out.
One Christmas the church bells across the street got stuck, and at 3 in the morning I called someone over at the church to tell them for crying out loud to shut up. I eventually made it back to sleep. The church bells ring every hour from 7 in the morning to 11 and night and on Sunday they play recorded songs at noon, but we got so we don’t hear them anymore.
When we lived on Wright drive we told Rae she could take 3-4 kids for lunch at Old Farms Inn, an expensive outing, and when she was all through, she asked, “When is the party?” We never did much for kids parties, but the Kilgores had some big parties so we sent the kids over there.
I taught the kids and grandkids to make apple pie with homemade crust and with the leftovers dough, they’d make cinnamon and sugar rolled snails. Belly button cookies are also a favorite. The family meals during the week consisted of meat and potatoes and at least one vegetable. If they didn’t like what was on the table, they could have peanut butter and jelly.
We picked asparagus and raspberries in the summer at the Pickin Patch down on Nod Road where the tobacco farms were. We got Rhubarb from my friend in Winstead for pies, and we bought corn from all the local farmers, the sweetest variety ‘sugar and butter’ is available in July, Aug, and September when we have it every night with supper. Sometimes we get fresh peas, tomatoes, and beans from local farms. We bought apples from Apple Smith’s in Avon nearby.
Brian’s favorite food was stringy meat or ‘pot roast’ and at Thanksgiving I made the traditional fare from my own recipes for turkey, homemade cranberry sauce, potatoes, green beans, creamed onions, and homemade bread. A family favorite was scalloped potatoes and pork in a cast iron pan with the crusty parts on the edges being the tasty bits. We had that with Waldorf Salad, a British favorite, my parents both being British. St. Patrick’s Day we always had corn beef and cabbage. Rae ate everything, and Mark ate peanut butter and jelly.
The kids worked for a few summers at the tobacco fields in the summer picking leaves and drying them in greenhouses. The boys were paid by the basket (appx 49 cents an hr) and the girls who were spreading the leaves were paid by the hour. Brian, Denne and Memme also worked at the West Avon Community swimming pool in the summers as lifeguards.
Rae, Al, and Brian all had very bad eyesight and needed glasses from young ages. Rae and Brian were nearsighted. I got glasses when I was around 40 and Mark started to need them when he was around 50.
A good friend of ours from Buffalo, Bob Jeffery’s (brother of our best man at our wedding), died at Pearl Harbor on the U.S.S. Arizona. There’s a memorial built on top of the sunken ship with the men’s names engraved which we visited upon visiting Memme and Ron in Hawaii.
When our grandkids were in elementary school and high school, I had two martinis at Thanksgiving and rashly invited the whole family to see Alaska on a cruise ship. Our grandson Robert, or “Soxie” so named after Bobby Soxers who were running after Frank Sinantra and…There were 32 people on the first cruise and later we went to Jamaica together. The kids entered talent shows, put together skits, and swam. In the evenings they ate excessively at the desert buffets, drank at the bar and danced all night and ran around on the windy decks.
Denne went to college at Albertus Magnus in New Haven and brought home one of her boyfriends one weekend. He was a different case and Charlie was surprised when he came in and announced, “The tissues are depleted” because we didn’t talk like that around here.
Memme and Ronnie met in high school and dated then when Ronnie lived two doors down in Wellington Heights. Memme went to Southern Connecticut State College while Ron went to Barber, Kentucky for school and they married after they graduated from college. Mem and Ron moved to England to work for US Intelligence. He was stationed at Harrogate near the controversial spy compound Menwith Hills. We took a train from London to York to visit them. On the train a young British girl was stamping her feet and our first memorable introduction to the British accent was when when the little girl said with composure, “Mum, I can’t cope!”
Bridge became one of hobbies in college and Ramir was a favorite card game I played with the family for money.
Questions I never got to ask her:
Kids in college.
Feels like to outlive most of your friends.
Tuesday crafters, bridge, poker, West Avon congregational church, hobbies
Grampy’s projects/work/ and political differences in opinion/ fire fighting
Child Rearing tips
Three important ways to live a good life.
House work, cooking, division of labor, discussion of money