Before Me

The Year was 1930. People were struggling to get back on their feet after the start of the Great Depression the year before. My parents were no exception.

Mother was working as a sales clerk for Hudson's Dress Shop in Boston, Massachusetts while still living at home with her father and stepmother and four younger brothers.

She had been seeing my father for quite some time. They had met at Revere Beach Amusement Park the year before.

He was in the Merchant Marines and was out to sea a greater part of the time. He had applied for advancement but was turned down because he was blind in one eye due to an accident during early childhood.

He had asked my mother to marry him several times and said that he would leave the Merchants Marines and find work locally. If she had needed more time to decide, he would take the next ship out and would be gone for several months.

But she accepted, and they were married on September 28, 1930. Little did they know that the ship my father did not sail on was never to return. It was lost at sea somewhere in the rough waters of the North Atlantic.

So it was that Frances L. Morgan and George R. Sollis would begin their lives together, a marriage that would last for forty-eight years through hard times and good times. They settled in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a quaint little pilgrim town eight miles north of Plymouth. It was my dad's birth place and he knew he could make a living from the bay. At one time he owned thirteen dories. He would rent them out to clam diggers and collect two dollars a week for each dory that was rented. He would average about twenty dollars a week which, back in those days, was enough money to keep a roof over one's head and food on the table. It didn't matter too much what the weather was like. People just knew they had to depend on the bay and they would go out when the tides were right, even if the temperature dropped below freezing. The men would put on their heavy black rubber boots and coats and head out to the mud flats in the hopes of a good day's dig. The winters were very hard. The days were short. And most of the time the clam diggers could only make one tide a day. Sometimes a snowstorm would come up or very strong winds and heavy rains which would make it impossible to work.

With the longer days and warmer temperatures it was often possible to catch an early morning tide as well as the early evening one. By mid day the sun would be out and it would get very hot, eighty to one hundred degrees, even in New England. The heat, combined with the humidity, made for very unfavorable working conditions and many would head back to shore before they had their quota for the day.

My dad had to make sure all of his dories were accounted for at the end of the week. He did all of the repairs needed to keep them in useable condition. The bottoms had to be scraped to remove the seaweed and barnacles that collected over time. They had to be painted. The oars and oarlocks had to be in working order at all times.

When they were expecting their first child, my parents knew they would need more than just the two room house they were renting on Park Street. After shopping around for several weeks, they came upon a house on Tremont Street less than a mile from where they were living. The house had been taken over by the bank as many were at that time. The bank wanted to sell it to get it off its hands for a price of two thousand dollars with no down payment. But my parents were not ready to accept the responsibilities that went with owning a house. The bank told them that they could rent it until a buyer could be found. For the moment that was just fine.

The house was set on three quarters of an acre of land, half of which extended to include the Mill Pond at the foot of the street. There were no other houses in sight at that time. It was on Route 3A, the shore route from Nameloc Heights to Quincy. There were lots of trees, mostly cedar, white pine, birch and spruce with a few maples and oaks. There was even a pussy willow tree growing in the front yard near the pond. During the summer the front yard was a blanket of yellow daisies. In autumn, just before the trees lost their brilliantly colored dresses of all shades of yellows, oranges, and reds, the view around the pond was just so magnificently breath taking. People passing through would stop to admire the view and take photographs.

There was another very unusual picturesque sight on this pond that caught the eyes of many passers-by. It was the old icehouse. It was owned and run by a man by the name of Roger Cushing. He later built his Cape Cod home directly across the street from it. This icehouse was one of the very few left in New England. It was unfortunate that it burned to the ground, I think sometime in the 1960s. As are many old barns and homes in the area, it was left weather beaten, having never been painted. They usually turn charcoal grey with age. Now-a-days people put a protective sealer on to prevent the outside from drying out from over exposure to the hot sun of summer, and snow and rain that would rot the shingles. In winter, Mr. Cushing would wait patiently for a long cold spell when the temperature would drop into the teens and remain there for several days, more like two weeks. He kept checking the thickness of the ice and when it was just right, he and his crew headed out with their heavy equipment, sometimes working into the wee hours of the morning. I was never permitted on the ice while the men were working. But if they were out during the day, I would watch with fascination from our living room window. They cut each block a certain size to fit on a conveyer-like ramp that was operated by hand, somehow using pulleys to get the ice to the top of the chute where it would be dropped into the ice-house for proper storage. The ice was carefully layered in sawdust which acted as insulation from the heat of summer.

Sometimes, for something to do on a hot summer afternoon, my friends and I would accidentally on purpose wander into the icehouse to get cooled off. We would come home covered in sawdust. Mother never said anything. We had to take the outside hose and get it all off before we entered the house.

I have only one regret here, and that is that I never took any...