Shopping trips to Boston

Every once in awhile my mother would drive into Boston to go shopping. It was an all day event. In the nice weather I would get dropped off at the Boston Public Gardens. There was a fenced in area where all the children stayed while their mothers shopped. It had a set of cubbies and you put your brown bag lunch in one of them. There were playground ladies to look after the children. We played all day and watched the swan boats. Other times I would get dropped off at my grandmother's house in Belmont. Grammy and I would often hide in the pantry and sneak potato chips. My mother never bought potato chips and Grammy took great delight in us hiding what we were doing from my mother.


My mother shopped at Filene's (especially the basement), Jordan Marsh, R.H. Stearns, and Gilchrists. These were the major department stores of the day. They had massive window displays along the streets that were decorated at Christmas with animated holiday scenes. It was an annual event to go "window shopping" on a Sunday before Christmas and then have brunch at the Parker House. There would be crowds of people lining the sidewalks, looking at the windows, as the stores were closed on Sundays then .



My father was the one with the favorite saying in our house at Christmas. He would open his presents and exclaim "oh, my favorite brand...irregular!" Just as he was known for his tailor made suits, my mother was known for her shopping prowess at Filene's basement. Labels on all their marked down items were always stamped "irregular". I grew up wearing clothes that my mother had sewn or the infamous irregular brand. One of the first things I bought when I got my first job was a pair of Papagallo shoes from the Papagallo store, $25.00 on my $65.00 a week salary. My mother was mortified and I was in shoe heaven. Like Carrie and her Manolo's, I had designer shoes in colors to match every outfit. I was determined that "irregular" was not going to be in my vocabulary.

The "woody" and the bread truck and the milkman

Next to our house there was a two story barn with a hay loft. My father had all his tools and the big lawn mower on the lower floor. He refinished the first floor for a two car garage with a stone driveway. I don't remember my father's car at all but my mother had a woody wagon and it was probably a Ford. Her tag number was 26133 and she kept that for many years through many cars. She hit a bread truck one time and even though she used the acceptable seat belt of that era, which was when your mother reached across you with her right arm, I never the less smacked into the round plastic face of the clock on the dashboard. The clock sustained a crack and I sustained the confirmation of my reputation for being "hard headed".

Bread trucks and milk trucks delivered door to door . The milk crate was on your back porch stoop and the milkman would deliver full bottles for however many empty ones were in the crate. Milk came in quart size glass bottles. The cream rose to the top of the milk and my mother would carefully pour the cream out and put it in another container. Cream was for coffee. You would always have to shake the milk a little before you poured it so that any cream left in the bottle would blend with the milk. I have read that you put a card in the window when you wanted bread delivered but I really don't remember that.

The hat, the suit and the shoes

My father was a really sharp dresser. He wore custom made suits and Brooks Brothers shirts and his shoes were from Stacy Adams. The shoes came from Brockton, Mass. which was then known as the shoe capital of the world. Rocky Marciano worked there before he became known for his boxing prowess. Once a year my father would box up a pair and send them back to the factory to be refurbished, resoled and heeled when necessary. He would get them back and always exclaim to us that they were like new. The company didn't charge for this because the shoes were meant to last a lifetime. Every day he would brush his shoes and on Saturday he had a whole routine about polishing his shoes. He had Kiwi tins in oxblood and cordovan, a brush and his "spit and polish" cloth. The combination of colors had to be put on in such a manner that this perfect and individual color was achieved. It was a slow and steady process that he never deviated from, a remnant of his time in the Army where you had to be able to see yourself in the shine of your boots. The ad that is shown here is actually from that time, Life magazine 1950. My father also wore a fedora and I thought he was tremendously handsome.

Off to school

And so it was that I went off to school. Sacred Heart catholic school. We wore uniforms and somewhere there is a picture of me with braids and wearing a red blouse with white polka dots and red panties and a navy blue jumper. I know, the panties part is just too much information but they were RED! Daddy drove me somewhere every morning and from there I rode in this van to school. Since I was the youngest they made me sit on the wheel cover in the back instead of a regular seat. It was a very hard and bumpy ride. Sometimes my parents would go away for the weekend and I would stay overnight at the school in the dorm. I remember that we had cocoa for breakfast and it always had this "scum" floating on top...yuck...and I don't remember us having anything else except macaroni and cheese, but I'm sure we must have. One weekend we went on a field trip in the woods and came upon a fire tower. It had metal steps that went up forever. I was scared to death. Whether or not my fear of heights arrived on that day, I do not know.

Walking to the library

I have been an avid reader since I was four. One of my favorite places, when I was little, was the library. You can google the Clift Rodgers free library in Marshfield Hills and it looks very much the same now as it did then. Remarkably, it is one of only a few self sufficient libraries in the country. There are no computers, no internet connections and no library cards. There was one room with childrens' books. I had to get my mother to give the librarian permission for me to read books in the adult sections of the library because I had read every single childrens book they had. Needless to say, I was quite precocious and was enrolled in first grade at Sacred Heart school in Plymouth at the age of five. None of that pre-k or kindergarten stuff for me.

You can go home again

All this remeniscing about riding up and down in front of my house got me thinking about that house I grew up in. Well, you know how they tell you that everything is on the internet, you just have to know how to find it. So, I typed in Marshfield Hills, Mass. and started looking. There was a house that had sold in June and it looked somewhat like what I remembered. I googled the satellite photo and matched up the roads from memory and this had to be the house. I went back and found another website where the realtor had posted pictures. The kitchen was a modern wonder with skylights and a stainless refridgerator and a Viking stove. The house that had the most modern conveniences of the time now had them again. Then I saw the living room and could not believe my eyes. Where we had wall to wall carpeting you could see a beautiful wood floor. And then I saw the fireplace. The man who had built the kitchen cabinets had made the built in wall surrounding the fireplace. And there it was exactly the same as when I was a little girl over sixty years ago. I remember the top left cabinet held the record player, a concept way before its time. We had very few records but I remember one was Caruso and one was "Little Jimmy Brown" that I still know all the words to. You can see through the doorway into what we called the sunroom. Children didn't go in the living room or the dining room except on special occasions. The sunroom had the television. I grew up with Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger, Howdy Doody and Clarabelle the clown, Kookla, Fran and Ollie and test patterns when there wasn't anything being broadcast. Now there are hundreds of stations and "nothing to watch". For us, sometimes there really wasn't anything to watch except a test pattern. So don't let anyone tell you that you can't go home again. You can, if only in your memories.

The red tricycle and the "Indian Princess"

One of my favorite things to do was to ride on my "trike". It was red and I would zoom up and down the sidewalk in front of my house. I could only ride as far as the fire station and then back down to the end of the sidewalk, always in sight of my house. Sometimes I would stand on the back where there was a ridged platform, hold onto the handlebars and then push off like a scooter. I could ride forever. Forever was the length of four front yards. Daddy had a bicycle and at some point the tricycle became a symbol of a little kid and that bicycle was all I coveted. I begged and pleaded for a bicycle but to no avail. Then one day the answer came to me. I took my trike and rode it as fast as I could and smashed it into this big tree that grew out of the sidewalk. There, now they would have to buy me a bicycle. Well, they didn't. They were going to teach me a lesson. I got on my roller skates and went zooming up and down the sidewalk. The tricycle was history and I had moved on. Tricycles were for little kids. It was a long time before I got a real bicycle, an Indian Princess.