Dear Bob,

You have done such a good job with the family history that I would like to contribute a bit about what they were like as I remember.  When Billie asked me to write the story of my years at the Ocean Park Garage, I started this way  “You can tell an original Oriental rug by it’s imperfections.  By these standards please judge my story.”

During my growing up years Nannie told me over and over about her early life.  Her father married a girl from Maine.  I can only surmise that she came to Mass. to visit and met him.  They lived in the family home on Winter Street.  I spent a lot of time in that house when I was small.  Grandma Hollis (our great-great grandmother) had a lot of children.  Luther was the oldest and Elvira the youngest.

Luther went to war and soon his daughter, Alma was born on the tenth birthday of Elvira who was Auntie from then on through three generations.  Just imagine turning ten and having a baby girl born that day in your own home.  How she did love that baby--a love that lasted along with companionship until Auntie died.

Alma’s first memory was of holding on to her mothers and her fathers hands and walking to the corner of Winter and No. Cary Streets to look at the home that he had purchased.  She was then three years old.  It was a nice Cape Cod style house.  Across the street was the Charles Cary homestead.  They had three sons.  The middle one - Martin - was Alma’s age and they played together, went to school together and planned a life together.

The Carys adored her for they longed for a girl.  Mr. Cary once told her that the day she and Martin were married he would give her a thousand dollars.  A vast amount in those days.  It was to be just for herself.

Alma’s father built a shoe factory on the lot next door and had a prosperous business.  He catered to his daughters every wish.  She said that she never had to cry for anything that he refused her.  She just took out her hankie and waved it a bit and he always gave in.

Auntie married Newland Snell.  I knew him very well.  His family was prosperous and owned a tack factory on Montello.  They lived in the homestead and had two daughters.  He was good but very strict father and those two girls - Edith and Mary - had to do as they were told but a few years later, about the time that your father was born, Hazel came along and she was something else again.  I’m sure she was born laughing and until her last few years she never stopped.  She was born to have fun and although she was years older than I was we were great pals especially when I was in High School.  She was the bright spot in my growing up years.  She married Jim Ricketts a wonderful man and a good provider.  He owned a fine meat market on Main Street in Montello and they bought the big two family house next door to the Junior HIgh School.  One day he took Hazel with him and bought a huge touring car then said send another for my wife.  I was likely eight years old then and she took Mary and me to South Station to meet Nannie and Auntie who had been visiting in Maine.  All the way in I teased to sit in one of the little jump seats but she said NO but on the way home she gave in and I soon found out why she didn’t want me to sit there.  Boy, did those seats ride hard.  Every once in a while she would ask if I wanted to change but I never gave in much as I wanted to.

Auntie was noted as the best dressmaker in Brockton.  In wedding write ups in the paper it sometimes said wedding gown by Elvira Snell and you knew that i was a real high society wedding.

All three of her girls married but none produced a grandchild and then I came along.  My mother took me down to Aunties every Sunday afternoon and her other son-in-law Sidney Wate who lived next door never put me down while we were there.  I have been told many times that the day I went from diapers to panties I insisted that mother take me down to show Siddy.  She did and how it pleased him.

Back to Nannie.  She had one grand time growing up - adoring parents - Carys who loved her - Auntie to make her lovely clothes and to teach her to sew - hand made dancing shoes - a driving horse and carriage.  As she grew older the men used to race their horses down Main Street in Brockton.  She joined them and usually won - the only woman to get into their sport and they hated it.  She was popular and had a brief association with a newspaper reporter but men of that career were low on the social scale and they had to meet in the Brockton Railway Station.  However, it came to the attention of her father and for once he put his foot down.  There was an infatuation with Bradford Poole but he married her cousin, Annie Ayers.  However, she gave your father his middle name.

How she met A. W. Butler I’m not sure but she told me about the excursion trip they were on and he put his hand in the water and patted her back all the print faded out of her new shirtwaist.  They set their wedding date and followed her mothers Quaker tradition of being married quietly at home.  It was kept a secret to all but a few select family members.

It was a cold, snowy January day and Martin came over for the afternoon as he usually did.  She sewed the last touches on her dress while her mother made oyster stew to feed the wedding guests.  At supper time Martin went home saying he would be over later.  When he started over again he saw several carriages and a fancy “hack” so decided not to go in.  She demanded violets to wear on her wedding trip so Daddy had to go to Boston that morning to find some.  Violets were not easy to find in January.  However, I remember in later years the fury if she did not get violets on their anniversary.

The next day Martin learned that the girl he expected to marry was on her wedding trip.  He did marry some time later and built a house close by.

They came back to live with her parents and soon built an ell on the house so that each had their own kitchen but after the boys got active they disturbed her mother so the big house was built next door.  The factory had burned so there was always a lovely lot between the houses.

Almy, as she was so fondly called, had no intention of slowing up after her marriage.  Even when the first baby was on the way she still raced her horse, danced and did whatever she wanted to do and finally, in desperation Dr. Paine gave her medication to quiet her down.  It came in a small tin box with many paper wrapped doses in white powder form and for most of the rest of her life she was addicted.  How well I remember being sent down town for her powders.  To jump way ahead, once she went to open the house at Ocean Bluffs.  She took her small bag, her pocketbook and her little dog and off she went with her horse and buggy.  Later Daddy found a small bag with her toilet articles and the powders on the table.  I was likely seven or eight at the time and how frightened I was to see Daddy rush into our house yelling “Ma’s powders.  She has left her powders.”  Your father had a motor cycle at the time and he drove in to supper.  He grabbed the little bag, strapped it to the back of the cycle and took off.  He had never been far on that machine and how they all did worry but he made it.  I don’t know how long it took him to drive down but it was a three hour drive with a horse.

So, back to the first baby - a big beautiful, almost red headed boy and in a few months she entered him in the annual Brockton Baby Show and he took first prize.  Five years later your father was born.  Daddy came to her bed and took one look at him and said “Aint he homley” and walked out.  Perhaps that’s when her arrogance toward him began.  I’m not sure.

As a youngster I thought my father was the handsomest man ever and he was.  However, in all my life he never held me nor said an endearing word to me.  He never told me that I was doing well nor in any way let me know that he loved me.  On the other hand, your father was so loving, so kind and so thoughtful that I followed him around constantly.  He spent a whole Sunday afternoon teaching me to tell time by his big pocket watch.  He patiently taught me to tie my shoe laces.  He gave Billie and me each five cents every Saturday night to spend at Fred cary’s store across the street.  He was a very bright spot in my growing up years and how I did love him.

When my parents were married his folks wanted to keep him on the farm so they moved their bedroom down stairs into the dining room and made a kitchen in the back room up stairs so there was a three room apartment and that was where I was born on the third of July in 1907.  For many years Cary Hill celebrated the 4th of July with much noise.  I was told that Martin Cary used to load his gun and stand it on his back porch so as to be ready to shoot it off at midnight before anyone else was awake.  One night Daddy crept over and shot that gun off at a minute before midnight.  He was pleased that he got ahead of Martin but I guess no one else thought it so smart.  Then I was born on the third and there was no celebration that year for fear of disturbing my mother.  The next year no one bothered and I was often told that I spoiled a lot of fun.

My mother was pretty, capable and loved the life she had chosen.  She adored her children and bought books to amuse and to educate us.  She spent short periods of time whenever she could reading us Longfellow’s poems.  My Billie has her leather bound book in his home.

The first thing that I remember is standing in the bay window of the big house watching for the wagon loaded with our furniture to move us into the house on the corner.  When Bill was born more room was needed and for a time we lived up the street a few houses but the man who was foreman on the farm left and the house was empty.  My father wanted to leave and work in a shoe factory.  Nannie went down to the cottage and wrote him a letter saying that if he loved his mother he would take the foreman job.  What else she put in that letter I do not know but he took the job.  So I stood in the window and watched.  I knew that something exciting was going on and I had no part in it but my baby brother was in the midst of it all and I felt left out.  I presume that they would have been happy to leave us both with Nannie but likely she only agreed to keep me.  To make matters worse I had to eat my supper there and after milking my father came for e and took me to my new home.  They were tired, the baby was asleep and I was a lively little girl who wanted to explore.  How well I remember that time.

My mother made that old house shine.  She wall papered, painted, made curtains and clothes for all of us.  She was so cheerful and so loving.  For all that her mother was a wonderful cook she never taught her daughters so my mother went to her mother-in-law to learn to be as good a cook and housekeeper as she was.  While Nannie thought mother below her status, she relied on her a lot and mother tried so hard to gain her favor.  She never imposed and was always ready to go out and help get the cows in when a fence broke down.  When the men were away, she would go to the barn to calm a roaring bull or to put a cow about to give birth into the quiet box stall.  She never went to the parents when my father’s very infrequent bad times came.  They knew it but it was a sin to mention the problem.  How well I learned that in later years.

Nannie took off summers.  One year to visit cousins in Maine and rented the cottage.  The next summer to Ocean Bluffs.  At these times my mother bore the brunt of the business of the farm and contracts of the double teams with the city.

My father was too young for so much responsibility but he had a cheerful attitude and people liked him.  He worked long hard hours.  Daddy was always looking to expand and besides his contracts with the city to use the teams as needed he took on snow plowing.  They never could teach him to pound on their bedroom window when the early call came  to start plowing sidewalks and he would bang on our room and scare Bill and me half to death.  He was always involved in the State House in Boston in one way or another.  He was possessed to outdo Martin Cary and never did let up.

There were happy times in our house.  Both mother and father had fine voices and once in a while after supper they sang and we loved that.  There would be a dance once in a while in the hall over Fred Cary’s store and they always went usually inviting mother’s favorite cousins to come from Campello and they would sleep at our house.  As I have said mother was a proud lady and she loved her children but I grew tall, thin, overactive with stringy blond hair and she tried so hard to make me attractive while my brother was darker, plumper, better disposition and so much more appealing that she couldn’t help doting on him.  Her mother came to visit now and then.  She had raised four girls and only one boy and she loved little boys so she would tell me to go and play so she could amuse Billy.

On the other hand, Nannie never took Billie but wanted me all the time and constantly brain washed me against my other grandparents and most anyone else I made friends with.  She took me to the beach for the whole summer but Billie never spent a night there so far as I know.  I had to do just as she ordered or suffer the consequences -- silence from her for hours.

I was quick to learn from adult talk what a hard life my mother had and other women wondered why Grace didn’t just tell her mother-in-law off but she never did and tried so hard to at least earn her respect if not her love.

We did have good times.  Nannie always had a full cookie jar and we were allowed to go into the pantry and help ourselves.  We could sit in the big warm kitchen and watch her get supper and then go home with our father when he finished milking.  We had wonderful family dinners on holidays.  The Thanksgiving was at the big house and after the meal your father and mine got out the rifle and we could watch them target shoot.  That is the only time I ever saw them do anything together.  We would have a big supper then sit by a blazing fire and visit.  The only time we ever did that.  Later my parents would each take a sleepy child and carry us home.  Yes, there were happy times.

The Christmas dinner was always at our house.  Daddy always cut a tree for each house but I do not remember that he ever took us into the woods with him.  Mother had us help decorate the afternoon before and we put a few gifts under the tree then after supper or rather very late evening both grandparents came over each holding a handle of a big basket full of gifts for Daddy went into Brockton as soon as the milking was done and bought close-out toys.  These were in addition to the already bought gifts.  His parents were very frugal and he and Uncle Alva always hung their stocking but usually found only a nickel way down in the toe so he wanted to do a lot for u.  I imagine he went all out for his own boys when they were little.  Next morning the turkey went into the oven at dawn and my father helped prepare the vegetables after the milking was done.  We had our stocking things to amuse us till everyone came to dinner and we had the tree things.  Again there was a big supper.  We didn’t have a cherry tree but the Dunbars did so my mother made sure that she bought enough from them so that we had a big bowl on the table on that holiday night.  She had canned them and put them way back on the preserve shelf so no one would be tempted to open them.  What a treat.

Uncle Alva always had grampa to his house for holidays as they were so close but I remember one year he came to our house to the supper and we were in awe of him with his long beard.  I am sure he looked with disgust at the array of food and gifts.  Grampa never used a fork and it amused us to see him pile food onto his knife and manage.

The years went by happily for a couple of carefree kids.  We had a nice home, a beautiful grandparents house close by, acres of land to roam, hen houses and a rabbit house to explore, a big barn with 16 cows, a stable with five or six horses, a pig pen to dump extra food into, a milk room at the end of a long open building to house wagons, a riding horse in the lower stable, carriage and sleigh to play in but the hay mow was our most favorite place.  In the cellar of the big house were all kinds of interesting things.  Barrels of apples, shelves of preserves, crocks of salt pork, dried salt herring and a blue crock of butter cut in squares.  How good that cellar did smell.  The floor was dirt packed so hard that it was easy to sweep.  There was a vinegar barrel and a cider barrel and a basket of eggs.  There was a big glass mustard jar and first thing in the morning before going out to milk Daddy would pour a glass of the cider, break in and egg and drink it and that would hold him till breakfast at seven.

World War came and business was brisk.  Shoe workers got more money than they ever dreamed of and your father and mother got married and had a room and kitchenette on Warren Avenue.  Daddy took me in there once on an errand and when we came out he shed tears that a son of his lived in such a place.  They both worked and had a lot of friends and family and they had a real good time till you were on the way then asked to have the rooms up stairs in the big house where my parents started out.  So Nannie moved down stairs again.  It was a mistake for your parents loved a crowd and a party and there was a large, energetic family who liked to be together.  Nannie and Daddy both had a very strict religion.  Sunday was the Lords day and all sewing, games etc. were put away Saturday night and no unnecessary work was done.  The peace and quiet were gone.  How they suffered to know that cards were being played in their house on this day.  Sometimes it got so noisy that they sent me down to Aunties.

My mother had been failing in health for some time and finally they realized that she had cancer.  I was nine then.  She was in too much pain to cope with two lively children.  All working women had gone into the shoe shops for more money so it was not possible to hire help.  She was in bed a lot and I remember carrying the bean pot to her bed to see if I had enough water in it.  How she did cry and said that I was too little to have to work so hard.

Finally the Flu outbreak was rampant so they packed a trunk and sent mother, Billie and me down to her parents on the Vineyard where there was no Flu.  I remember that day that Daddy talked to my father about it.  He said, “We know that we are going to lose Grace but we can not lose the children too.”  So we went to a big farm at Lambert’s Cove and were sent to a one room school house over a mile away.  As you know, the Island is quite flat but half way home was a little knoll and on the day that the war ended Billie and I lay down there and watched the boats and listened to the bells at Woods Hole.

The next week our grandfather Clark had business in Boston so he took Billie and me and when the train stopped in Brockton he passed us out to Daddy -- two unkempt, frightened nine and eleven year old children.  Pa had been on the Island a couple months caring for mother as best he could.

Your father had been near death with the Flu and they sent to Maine for Aunt Mabel who was there to meet and comfort us.  There was little fresh water at the Cove so baths were infrequent and it took a lot of washing, shampooing and reclothing to get us ready to go off to Cary School across the street.  We stayed in the big house but I used to go next door to our home and walk through the house and make believe that mother was in the kitchen.

You were six months old when we came home and your father was gaining his strength.  You were a beautiful plump baby and one bright spot in my life.

Mother died one week before Christmas and Pa settled down with Billie in our home but gave me to his parents.  It was a horrible situation.

There was a world of difference between your mother and mine.  Both equally good women but of a different culture and certainly a different way of life.  I wonder whether my mother would have broken in time from frustration of trying to please her mother-in-law.  Your mother, from the start, would not bend to her.  I heard her tell her off on more than one occasion.  Something no one ever did before.

I haven’t written much about our grandfather.  For my part he was a thoroughly good man.  He was good to me - I’m sure he loved me and I know he was proud when I did well in school and when I worked so hard for seven and a half years in our church organizing and teaching a kindergarten.  I was the only teenager ever to be sent to the Conference in Boston and I’m sure that pleased him.  When I was little he had taught me to groom the riding horse, how to do things in the barn and he took me with him in town and talked about life and what was right and wrong.  When he was running for office he took me to rallies and told people that I was his campaign manager.  I met a lot of people including Honey Fitzgerald.  Later, he took me to Masonic affairs and a couple of weeks before he would buy me a nice dress to wear to the affair.  How I did love that for Auntie made all my clothes and lovely as her work was I wished for a store dress.  By then we lived in West Bridgewater.

The year after mother died he came down with asthma and lived in a big chair one winter.  I spent all my spare time amusing him for it was horrible to see such an active man confined.  They knew that he could not go in a barn again so decided to sell.  Why they did not sell the land and tear down the barn I have never figured out but they bought the W. Bridgewater house.  Nannie was devastated at giving up her home.  We moved down to the cottage and I went to Marshfield High School.  She then turned against the cottage and sold that so we settled in W. Bridgewater and I went to Howard High.

Daddy had a terrible voice but when we were out to ride we would sing laugh at the discord.  We never tried it at home.  Some of the neighbor kids learned to whistle and we were pretty good.  I tried it in the house once and Nannie flew at me in a rage.  She said, “Whistling girls and crowing hens are loved by neither fowl nor men.”

I always thought that your father and mine inherited their alcoholic tendencies from her reliance on those powders before they were born.  Somehow she didn’t seem to mind those bad times too much but how it did hurt their father.  I have heard him ask them whether he did not set a good example and they would say too good for them to live up to.  I never heard your father swear.  My father’s language was filthy always and his mother would say, “Why Lawrence.” but her eyes would twinkle.

Anna Edson was Nannies age.  They lived next door and played together as little children remaining close friends for life.  Anna married a Dunbar and they lived at the homestead.  When my father gave me to his parents, Anna called me into her house.  She put her arms around me and said, “O, Elva, how I pity you.”  I never forgot.

I was a slave to Nannie’s every whim - an unpaid servant until I got married.

Perhaps you think that this story should never have been written but as you delve into the family tree this is what they were like up until the time that you can remember.

This December I phoned Bill on the 75th anniversary of mother’s death and we wondered what our lives would have been like had she lived.  He said he could tell me one thing.  It could only have been better.

He was shifted about worse than I was for Pa’s problems got worse and he sent him to the other grandparents but they were older and about to retire and had poor health so, after a brief stay back home he was sent to Thompson Island to board for six years.

                Love Elva