Red Headed Stepchild
(The Barrett family memoir of Navy Life)
by Sophie Ruth Meranski with photos
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#329 p. 42 variegated panax hedge is visible between #2415 Ala Wai Boulevard, which Barrett family rented for $95 per month from Walter Glockner, who spent war years brewing beer in Stevens Point,Wisconsin, after being interned December 8, l941 by FBI because of his birth in Germany.Walter Glockner wrote the Barretts friendly letters, and Sophie tried to help him with minor problems. He returned after the war and wanted to use his upstairs apartment, but a Samoan lady with two young children Tommy and a small baby resisted his eviction effort in court and still lived upstairs when the Barrett family left Waikiki June 4, l947 for their summer tour of western national parks and return to Jack's old home aty 640 E.ast Seventh Street, South Boston.NEW YORK chapter HYDROGRAPHIC OFFICE August 1939 to June 1941 and departure for Hawaii about July 10, 1941. [follows TRINITY chapter] TEXT: AUGUST 1939 We had a three week visit in South Boston with Jack's eighty-four year old father and his sister Mollie in very hot August weather. The three weeks John and I spent in South Boston in August 1939 [while Jack was househunting in New York and Brooklyn] were the longest opportunity for John and his grandfather to become acquainted. Grandpa Barrett had visited Norfolk {Virginia] in [May] 1936 and [Bala Cynwyd] Philadelphia in 1937 and 1938 when John was a baby, and saw him again briefly in June 1941 juat before we left for Hawaii. John sent carefully lettered cards to him from Hawaii when he was six years old, and Jack took countless picutres of us to send to Grandpa and Mollie to keep their spirits high. A very large batch of pictures were sent to him from Hawaii in June, l942. Grandpa saw and enjoyed them before he died two months later [August 21, l942 less than] four months before his eighty-eighth birthday. The old house at 640 East Seventh Street was not an ideal place for an active three year old boy in the August heat. Grandpa wanted to keep all the doors shut, but John and I felt the need of fresh air. He also thought that John should get more sleep, but John was not accustomed to going to bed right after supper in broad daylight, and I thought it would be cruel to put him to bed so early, especially when he always had an afternoon nap. Mollie even brought down from the attic some of the kindergarten supplies -wooden pegs and puzzles,- which her brother Bill's first wife Catherine Miley used in teaching her kindergarten classes in New York in the 1920s. [Catherine married Bill Barrett in 1923, died of cancer February 1931 while we were in Tientsin, China.]= Grandpa thought they should occupy John for days on end.[end p. 189, notebook Two] [p. 259 Notebook Four]--Plagued by the heat and fatigue, Jack reported to Captain Baggaley at the Naval Hydrographic Office, then in New York Customs House, and found a temporary furnished apartment for himself in Brooklyn. We remained at 640 East Seventh Street [South Boston] as the guests of Grandpa and Aunt Mollie, who did all they could for our comfort that stifling hot summer. ett in her teaching days. SEPTEMBER 1939 The war in Europe was about to begin September 3, 1939 with Hitler's invasion of Poland. The New York Branch Hydrographic Office would be an important and sensitve center for the Navy to receive reports of mine, blockade, and submarine hazards as well as the usual weather, ice, and water depth reports. Finally with the help of his Fordham Law School friend John Papp, Jack found an unfurnished apartment at 9615 Shore Road in Brooklyn,-Apartment 2A on the second floor - arranged the furniture which had arrived from storage in San Diego,-found a garage where he left his car,came to Boston for us, - and Jack, John and I traveled by train to the Grand Central Station, then took a taxi to the apartment in Brooklyn. There was a central long corridor, an excellent view,two large bedrooms,a large living room, a good sized kitchen, and plenty of room for all our Chinese rugs and other furnishings. John was three and a half years old then and still remembers that apartment, thirty years later. The rent was very reasonable.The very large apartment house [six floors] belonged to the State of New York, which kept in excellent repair with a capable superintendant, two hall boys in the large entrance hall, and an exterminator who came frequently to inquire about roaches or other bugs. The area across Shore Road was a mixture of tall grass, trees, sand, shrubs, and flowers, - unfortunately sacrificed only a few years later to build vast expanses of paved highways. But when we lived there, Jack and John enjoyed many happy hours picking wild grasses, buttercups, daisies, and dandelions for my bouquets, and they took many excellent snapshots of John's toy animals there. John loved that apartment and vicinity. His crib was in our bedroom, but John had his own play room, and had his father with him every evening and weekend.The play room faced on New York Harbor- we could see the ships coming and going in and out of New York. Jack raised and photographed flowers in pots in the room- flowers that John liked very much, - amaryllis, ranunculus, tuberous begonias, anemones and other potted plants. Jack had no luck with freesias. He used three toothpicks in a triangle to suspend the stones from avocadoes over water in glass milk bottles, and the avocadoes would sprout several feet with big leaves. There was a large Chinese ancient kassu rug on the play room floor, - building blocks, Tinkertoys,a small and a large rocking chair, and a blackboard on the wall. There was also a solidly built writing table, on which Jack had cut off the legs to make the writing surface about two feet from the floor, and a small straight chair to fit the table. The room had many child's books including a Koala book from Australia- all the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit series books - Uncle Bill's gift of French Becassine books he purchased in Europe on his 1938 honeymoon- - "The Little Engine That Could" and many paper books about animals. One book about a dog and a cat "Sniffy and Mitzi" provided a name for a favorite toy cat, Mitzi. I used to read to John by the hour, pointing to the words as I -p. 260- read, and by the time John was three and a half years old, I was amazed to find that he could read although I had made no effort to teach him. As a matter of fact I thought he was correcting me from memory, until he actually read something to me =Not long after Billy Barrett was born August 26, 1939, Bill & Virginia had trouble getting help & were glad to get Miss Caffey's name from Jack as a nurse for Billy. OCTOBER She was working for them in Darien Connecticut when we visited them at suppertime one day in October l939.Since Virginia expected us early in the afternoon & didn't expect us to have dinner there, I am afraid we ate Miss Caffey's hamburger- but she was most gracious & happy to see John again.If she happens to read this, I hope she'll send her address.In l940 Bill called up to give me my first news of Jack's promotion to Commander.He also had been the first one to read the news when Jack made Lieutenant Commander early in l932. NOVEMBER At Thanksgiving we drove to Overbrook Pennsylvania near Philadelphia to see my sister Bee. Sam Pollack worked for LaRoux liquers making cordials, & their two children Jason & Thalia were somewhat older than John.Jen & Pete Meranski drove up from Baltimore for a fine Thanksgiving dinner. we met the Pollacks at Atlantic City New Jersey in 1940, where Jack said John dog-paddled without instruction and was ready to "head for Europe." Members of my family visited us many times in Brooklyn, especially my brother Harry's wife's sister Marion Taylor, who was then a nurse in Brooklyn at Greenpoint hospital. My sister-in-law Ethyle Meranski and her son Ted and daughter Carol Jane were among the visitors, and my sister Esther, and several times we saw my sister Bertha Pollack and her children Jason and Thalia. Other frequent vistors were my 1927-1930 landlady social worker Ann Taylor McCormack, and Helen Miller of the Commonwealth Fund, Sometimes we took guests to Jones Beach on Long Island, where once Jack Barrett had to take a deep breath before being rolled around the beach under a ten-foot high breaking ocean wave.Jones Beach was much cleaner and less crowded than Coney Island where we went once or twice.It did have high waves, however, and rather cold water.Sometimes we would take guests to New York World's Fair at Flushing,where Jack photographed the Perisphere and Trilon. Visitors to West Roxbury in 1950s admired the light and dark contrasts in Jack's nighttime photo of the illuminated Perisphere, where Worlds Fair visitors watched movies inside. DECEMBER 1939 John was quite interested in the snow in the back courtyard at 96l5 Shore Road after the mild winter the year before in the San Diego area.The paved courtyard used to have curious little whirlwinds produced by the shape of the building- his father would point them out& talk about low pressure systems.Jack explained the terms "transparent, translucent, opaque" as we has a translucent frosted bathroom window. There was a small patch of poison ivy on our back fence downstairs, & Jack would tell how his father once in autumn met some tourists who ignored his advice & collected bright-red bunches of three-leaved poison ivy, with a little stem on the middle leaf. Both Christmases at Brooklyn l939-40 we devoted considerable energy to decorating small Christmas trees.One year there was a considerable problem with a leak in a tub of water that was used to prevent the tree from drying out. We have photos from both Christmases, & Joan Rooney age five from downstairs appears in the l940 Christmas photos.We still have l970 much of the Chinese furniture which appears in pictures in the Brooklyn apartment.Jack fashioned clothesline swings on the roof for John. The stores in Brooklyn on Third, Fourth & Fifth Streets were about five blocks walk up 97th Street from Shore Road.This was also the route to the subway Jack rode to work at the Custom House tower.There was a good meat market on Third Avenue where we bought rib roasts & chopped sirloin.We soon made the acquaintance of the George Rooney family on the first floor & became very good friends.For recreation we would walk to Fort Hamilton, drive to Prospect Park or Owls Head park to see the squirrels.Later on we made more ambitious trips to Jones Beach, Coney Island,& the l939-40 World's Fair at Flushing. FEBRUARY 1940 After dinner every evening John enjoyed a very leisurely bath, playing with a transparent plastic ball which contained a few toy fish, - and with a large red, celluloid fish.Then his father put on his own pajamas, and John wore his,and the two of them would study the stars at the bedroom window, which faced Shore Road and the Ocean near the Narrows..-In February l940 there was a spectacular display of the five planets Mercury,Venus,Mars,Jupiter & Saturn all visible shortly after sunset in the western sky over the Narrows, where on the New Jersey side west of us there was a big red illuminated Wrigley's chewing gum advertising neon sign.We used to say we hoped Venus wouldn't get stuck in the chewing gum. This close alignment of the five visible planets is infrequent, occuring evering twenty years or so. John's bedroom was on the front of the house where they could get an excellent view of the stars over the water, and John developed a lasting interest in astronomy, -p. 189- which his navigator father always encouraged. Before he was four years old, John could point out the North Star, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia's Chair, Venus, Mercury, Deneb, and many others. When he was five or six years old, in Hawaii, he could point out the Southern Cross to me over Diamond Head in Waikiki. Sometimes when Jack was tired he would say he "wouldn't go across the street to see the Statue of Liberty do a dance."We began to accumulate the Beatrix Potter series of illustrated books Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny,the Flopsy Bunnies, Mrs. Tittlemouse, the Tailor of Gloucester,Timmy Tiptoes, Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, Tom Kitten, the Roly-Poly Pudding, Jeremy Fisher, the Two Bad Mice, Johnny Townmouse, and the rest.Jack began to invent his own sequels to these stories.[A little child's story ??] JUNE 1940 Jack was scheduled to retire June 30, but received notice June 12 he would remainon active duty for the DURATION of the National Emergency. The word "DURATION" was heard frequently throughout the war i Hawaii in relation to shortages, miitary law, and inmany contexts. SUMMER 1940 Photo web. p 18 # 142 In Jack Barrett's left hand he holds device to snap his own picture with German Voightlander camera bought San Francisco June l929 en route to Asiatic Fleet duty Philippines.The Barretts frequently watched gray squirrels at Owls Head park a few blocks from home at 96l5 Shore Road overlooking Narrows in Southwest Brooklyn..One time Jack had to hold his breath when a ten-foot-high wave suddenly crested near him - he rolled around on Jones Beach, and the wave passed over and he got up. He said John tried to swim to Europe with a dog-paddle.He stressed ability to float and tread water. We also visited the Bronx zoo and relatives in Boston and Darien, Connecticut.We tried Coney Island once but regularly went to Jones Beach. AUGUST 1940 Wednesday, August 28, 1940 was Jack's fifty-second birthday, and it happened that his 1912 shipmate Chester Swanner from the Lighthouse Tender ZIZANIA came to visit that day and accompanied Jack to Macy's Stores at 34th Street, where Jack bought a Baldwin spinet piano, of which we were very fond. John learned to play "Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?" and other melodies. The piano remained in storage during our six years in Hawaii but was unpacked after we moved into our West Roxbury home on Thanksgiving Day 1947, where both Jack and John and our music teacher Giuseppe deLellis used it extensively. Chester Swanner was a native of Mississippi who was many years at sea. He went with us to the New York World's Fair that day but wanted to study the cattle in detail while we toured many exhibits. APRIL 1941 -43-977 [Black Notebook 2 -p 157] "April 10, 1941 - 4701 Reservoir Road, Washington DC To. Commander John B. Barrett, Branch Hydrographic Office, New York, N.Y. Dear Doc: It was very kind of you to call attention to the discrepancies between the New York and Boston broadcasts. This matter does not come under my section, but I was glad to bring it to the attention of Watt, who is in charge of Pilot Charts. = He explains to me that the first broadcast, either New York or Boston, is used as a basis for the Washington broadcast. It is considered here that the mailgram would be too late for a radio broadcast from here. It seems that errors in transmission occasionally creep in, for recently the latitude of one of these submarine areas was given as twenty-one degrees -- the requested repeat still came twenty-one degrees - which was, of course, an obvious error. = In the case of forty degrees thirty minutes instead of forty degrees fifty minutes the larger area was chosen for the reason you advanced - for being on the safe side. Watt emphasizes the fact that he takes either your broadcast or that of Boston, - whichever comes first into the office, - and the mailgram is too late. The Coast Survey has placed these areas on their charts at our particular request,and what we are looking to do is to be able, after a time,to simplify the broadcasts by using the letters. This, I think, will be done as soon as the new charts beome thoroughly disseminated in the Navy and merchant marine. = The office is very busy here, as you may well imagine, but the work is increasingly interesting. I keep going pretty well and hope to see you if you make a trip this way. Be sure I appreciate your letter. Sincerely, s/Brad --P.S. Watt has just shown me a radiogram from Branch Hydrographic Office New York ... "between Latitudes forty - fifty northward and eight North and twenty-one twenty North. " We sent for a report, and it came back o.k except 'Latitude twenty-one". [Gershom Bradford, editor Notices to Mariners 1935-1942 Naval Hydrographic office,Washington D.C.] MAY 1941 In the spring of 1941 Jack was consulted by Charles Edey Fay of Connecticut, who had access of Atlantic Insurance Company records of the disappearance of the five man crew of the New Bedford fishing schooner MARY CELESTE November, 1872. Fay wanted Jack's interpretation of certain navigational notes of the MARY CELESTE near the Azores. He suggested the crew suddenly abandoned ship and got into small boats because they FEARED AN EXPLOSION OF ALCOHOL VAPORS FROM CARGO. Gershom Bradford published in American Neptune magazine his theory that waterspouts are frequent near the Azores in November - local severe tornados that draw water and sometimes fish high in the air and threaten small ships. Jack kept four of Fay's letters from around the time the Barretts left for Pearl Harbor mid-l941. Not long before we left New York, we spent an afternoon visiting Virginia, Bill, and Billy in Darien, where our former nursemaid Miss Blanche Caffey from Norfolk was helping look after young Billy.John, Jack, and Billy went swimming at the Darien Country Club. Jack took a photo of five year old John kneeling on the grass next to his twenty-month-old cousin Billy. We had it in our West Roxbury bedroom in 1950s and 1960s. ] |
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p42 # 965 - H-O-M-E -I-S -T-H-E -S-A-I-L-O-R 1947-1969 H-O-M-E I-S T-H-E S-A-I-L-O-R Hartigan,Pops,RLS- South Boston-West Roxbury-(p. 144) There were many interesting curios at 640- some from Jack's trips.One was an alligator with a pencil inserted into the jaws, with an African native's head sticking out on the head of the pencil.Jack had an old Boston Traveler l907 World Atlas in the cold front room by the stairs, where he used to sleep, and where John slept August to November, l947. There was a fancy lampshade which Jack's deceased sister Katie had made, and some cushions she had embroadered.On the front stairway, a slightly phosphorescent glass knob hung down from the electric light so that Mollie could find it when she came home and up the stairs after dark. I wish we had photographs of the old set tubs and barn before Mollie modernized everything in l948. The things provided quite a link with Grandpa Barrett. The refill water closet of the toilet, which he had made years earlier, was up overhead to utilize gravity.There were coal stove in the parlor and kitchen. A portion of the house dated from before 1860, but additions were made several times.Grandpa had a victory garden in l9l8 and peach trees. An old asparagus plant and many hollyhocks grew in l948 and lilacs.Jack had to report at Boston Navy Yard to show he had completed his authorized travel to Boston. Before long we took a trip to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire to see Jack's brother Bill and his son Billy and "Gram" (Billy's mother's mother) and Billy's aunt Vivian Walsh, Virginia's sister.Jack made inquiry at Phillips Andover Academy thst day but learned their school had a four year course starting in the ninth grade, whereas John was entering the seventh grade. We began house hunting very soon after we arrived in Boston.At this time we expected John would enroll in Boston Latin, and his father had started him learning "Adeste fideles" and other Latin materials.However, Peggy Hurley, entertaining the four of us at dinner at her house, suggested we look into Roxbury Latin School, a private day school in West Roxbury, where her son-in-law Broderick had been a member of the l944 class. This ultimately influenced our choice of a house. Mr. William Cunningham, a school teacher who did part-time realty work for the Fowler agency of Jamaica Plain. showed us a number of houses- Allandale Road and Ardale Road- then on August 28, l947 - Jack's fifty-ninth birthday, he showed Jack and John a house at 52 Emmonsdale Road, West Roxbury, which we later bought.That day after showing the house, Mr. Cunningham bought a round of ice cream cones to celebrate Jack's birthday.The house was only two and a half blocks from Roxbury Latin School, and Mr. Cunningham with nine children lived only two blocks from us himself, so we were ready to believe him about the neighborhood, and he was friendly for many years afterward.He became principal of Roslindale High School, and one of his sons was President of Wang computer corporation.The house on Emmonsdale was owned by the Van Steenbergen family.Mr. Van Steenbergen taught at Boston Latin School, where John was actually enrolled for three days.He was in Mr. Jamieson's room there, along with our neighbor Eddie Brickley of Tennyson Street. John was somewhat upset when his father changed his plans and went rather unwillingly to an interview at Roxbury Latin The new head master Frederick R. Weed without applying pressure either way permitted John to take the entrance exam with some other late applicants including G. Robert Macdonald of Dedham. John scored very well and was admitted. Rather to John's surprise, Jack made the decision to send John to Roxbury Latin and buy the Emmonsdale Road house where no commuting would be necessary.The tuition at Roxbury Latin was only one hundred dollars per year at that time for residents in the area of the old town of Roxbury. The school had just celebrated its third centennial in l945 and received publicity in Life magazine as 'the oldest continuously operating Independent school in the Country" and the "biggest educational bargain in the country." At one time it was very heavily endowed, but its finances suffered severely in the l930's. A new school building was opened in l926 in West Roxbury, but a planned gymnasium was deferred until l955.Peggy Hurley, widow of Jack's South Boston friend Joe of the Boston Post, who had died in l94l, was very friendly when we arrived back from Hawaii.Besides having us to dinner, she invited us to her daughter's wedding in Duxbury spring l948 and introduced me to Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Collins one block away from us on Emmonsdale Road.They visited us at our new home two days after we moved in on Thanksgiving l947. Jack also found his former French teacher at Boston Latin School William Pride Henderson living in West Roxbury -aged eighty-four in l947. Bill Barrett's Latin School l912 classmate John Vaccaro was one of the first people John Barrett met in Boston as he had John and his father to lunch at Lockober's Restaurant in August.He also searched the title to the new house, and another l9l2 Latin School classmate of Bill's Archie Dresser appraised the house at a value of eleven thousand dollars.We ultimately paid Mr. Van Steenbergen twelve thousand dollars plus the commission. Jack's l906 classmates Dan Lyne and Edward Illingworth wrote recommendations for John at Roxbury Latin. Illingworth an organist and vocal and piano teacher lived at 64 Hastings Street West Roxbury and was very well acquainted through the Highland Club of West Roxbury with Roxbury Latin French master Joseph Henry Sasserno.Our house is on the slope of Bellevue Hill, the highest ground within the city limits of Boston.Survey maps say the top of the hill is 328 feet, and the Boston state house is visible, and the South Boston waterfront. Our house is at about 210 feet elevation. Mr. Illingworth, who Jack knew from the fourth grade in South Boston onward through Boston Latin School, was nicknamed "the eternal question mark." He studied in Rome with the composer and virtuoso Ferruchio Busoni. His wife was a South Boston neighbor from L Street.He invited Jack to join the Highland Club, but Jack was not much of a joiner, and also passed up the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars as well. Mr. Illingworth one time drilled John on the dotted rhythms of Beethoven's "Minuet in G." Mr. Joseph Sasserno had a considerable conversation with Jack at the Roxbury Latin parking lot the first day of school.He was one year older than Jack and had attended Boston English High School and Harvard College- then taught seven years at Norwich Military Academy in Vermont l911-l9l8. He later was a close friend of his former pupil General Harmon,who became President of Norwich and asked Mr. Sasserno to write a history of Norwich, which was incomplete when he died in Genoa, Italy August 12, l962. Mr. Sasserno and his sister Mary and brother Henry lived in apartments near us at 30 Bellevue Street. Their family were from East Boston and Dorchester.Henry was later our investment broker at Kidder Peabody Company.Joe was active in the Italian Historical Society and West Roxbury Historical Society.Jack's conversation with Mr. Sasserno undoubtedly helped sell him on Roxbury Latin School, where John attended for six years. There was a high attrition rate among the students, but a very fine education was available, and all twelve members of the small faculty were of great ability and became our very good friends.John began piano lessons with Giuseppe deLellis, who took a very wonderful special interest in Jack senior in his last two years, l967-l969.He and his family have been wonderful friends throughout more than twenty-two years.For the first two months Jack drove John from South Boston to school. John was unfamiliar with the Boston streetcars, and the trip was slow and roundabout, with several changes of cars and trolleys.Sometimes Gil Hoag would ride to Dorchester with us to his home in Savin Hill, and Ronald Havelock would ride to the Elevated to connect to Cambridge.We later often regretted that Mollie was not closer to us. Mollie at this time worked in a Metropolitan Life Insurance local office on West Broadway near F Street just beyond Dorchester Street, ten or fiteen minutes walk from her home. She received weekly cash collections at the cashier window and so knew a great many people in the neighborhood.At this time she frequently saw the Barretts' former next door neighbors Katherine Kinnaly and Mr. and Mrs. Daniel and Emily Kinnaly who lived on Clement Street in West Roxbury. Danny worked in the Post Office and was very cordial when he heard we were copming to West Roxbury.Our new house was painted by Meissner Brothers of South Boston, and a new heater and shower and cellar bathroom were installed by Rull Company. Jack's second cousins, Gertrude and Mary Hartigan were still at 80 Brown Avenue, Roslindale, near Cummins Highway and Sacred Heart Church,where their mother moved from South Boston in l9l7.May gave Jack a cordial greeting on his return and frequently brought us poinsettias, azaleas and other plants as presents. Her brother, Father Edward Hartigan, was in North Braintree as pastor until l953- then he became pastor of Immaculate Conception parish, Everett, retiring in l970.For a while May Hartigan kept her car in our two-car garage, as she lived only two miles away and parking was scarce.Until her retirement in l956 at age seventy, she taught mathematics at the Washington Irving intermediate school in Roslindale. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Buckley dropped in soon after we moved in.Subsequently Jack would see Joe around City Hall where he worked in the Sewer Department- and also in Joe's private law office.Joe wrote a recommendation when Jack applied for the Graduate Law Course at Northeastern University in l95l.While we were still living at 640 East Seventh Street, we went with Mollie to 168 I Street to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of Mrs. Fortunato Pistorino, the mother of a family of nine, among whom several sisters were very good friends of Mollie Barrett.Mr. and Mrs. Pistorino observed their fiftieth wedding anniversary about the end of the war, and now they were having quite a birthday celebration. Josephine Pistorino worked for Bell Telephone Company.Her sister Frances was a legal secretary, and their brother John was a barber. Their paternal grandfather came from a distinguished family of Messina, and the Pistorino family operated a business in Boston. One of the nephews was with United Fruit company.Mrs. Pistorino's family, long in South Boston, traced back to Skibbereen, Cork, Ireland. Their name was Daly, and they may be related to Jack Barrett's father's mother.Mollie would often have Wednesday and Sunday meals at the Pistorino home, while Josephine and Frances would come to Mollie's for fish dinner on Friday. Jack's second cousins Gertrude and Mary Hartigan lived at 80 Brown Avenue, near Cummins highway and Sacred Heart Church in nearby Roslindale, and their brother Father Hartigan was in Braintree but in l953 became pastor at Immaculate Conception church in Everett.May gave Jack a very cordial welcome home and gave us several azalea plants.For a while she kept her car in our two-car garage.Until her retirement in l956 at age seventy, she taught mathematics at the Washington Irving intermediate school in Roslindale. Mr, and Mrs. Joseph Buckley of South Boston - with whom Jack had been friendly since young boyhood, came to call.Jack saw him frequently at City Hall, where Joe worked for the Sewer Department.After dropping John at Roxbury Latin in time for the start of school at 8:42 every morning, Jack would drive to our new home at 52 Emmonsdale road, where the Meissner workers were painting and papering, and Rull, the plumber was putting a new bathroom in the cellar.Jack unpacked furniture, put the Chinese rugs on the floor, washed dishes, pots and pans, and when the telephone was installed, he called me to say that he had just unpacked the piano, so I listened while he played one of his favorite piano pieces.The piano was in perfect condition although many other items of furniture had been damaged in the round trip to and from Pearl Harbor in 1941 to storage in Boston.By the time the painters,plumbers,and electricians had finished their work, Jack had the place ready for occupancy by John and me.The floors were scraped. Jack bought an electric wax polisher, and on the Sunday before Thanksgiving Jack and John missed their Sunday dinner at 640 because they were determined to finishing waxing the floors and polishing them so we could move in. -and we did move in on Thanksgiving Day l947, when Mollie came out with us and was most helpful in getting us settled. Our next door neighbors at 21 Rustic Road, Tony and Mabel Bernazzani and their two daughters were flower lovers. He was a professional gardener with an unusually green thumb.He had planted the peonies, day lilies, and hydrangeas on the Van Steenbergen property we bought. His own property had a wide variety of rambler roses, yuccas, hollyhocks, violets, Spanish iris,tomatoes, strawberries, bulbs, and ususual trees.The Bernazzanis enjoyed the outdoors and had a large fireplace, where they invited us and other neighbors for spaghetti and steak dinner, which we enjoyed at long outdoor tables. One Sunday noon Mollie called up to invite us to dinner at six o'clock..Since it was a very cold day, I at first refused, but Jack and John, who loved 640 East Seventh Street accepted gladly, as it was a very dull cold day here.I simply suffered in that cold weather- couldn't get warm despite the adequate oil heat.After they left, the house was so quiet, I decided to go to South Boston by subway, even though I wasn't sure how to get there. But our Emmonsdale neighbors, Joe and Grace Collins,picked me up in their carand took me to the Jamaica Plain Civil War Monument, where they put me on a trolley car to Park Street under Boston Common, where I changed for a subway train to South Boston.Jack was glad to see me.it was a lovely party, with the smell of ham pleasant after the long cold trip. Everybody was there - Mollie's cousins, Tom and Bessie Palmer of North Cambridge, her old neighbor Katherine Kinnaly, her cousin Bill Lane of Melrose and his wife Jean,Josephine Pistorino of 168 I Street, and Mollie's second cousins Mary Elizabeth and Helen Lynch of Hyde Park. There was a lot of good talk, the food was excellent, and it was far better for me than sitting at home.Our next door neighbor at 44 Emmonsdale Road was Mrs. Allen, a widow with two grown sons. She was enthusiastic when John made the honor roll for the first marking period at Roxbury Latin. Two neighbors on Rustic Road, Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Ethel Maier came to call one day while John was studying for mid-year examinations.We told them about our trip across the country. Mrs. Maier's father retired police Captain Anderson, lived with her and her husband Otto.Our first winter in Boston was an unusually snowy one. Usually when the Boston public school closed because of snow, Roxbury Latin remained in session, but one morning at 8:30 when the snow was very deep, and it was still snowing, we heard via radio that there would be no school at Roxbury Latin. Against my advice, John went off to school, two and a half blocks away.About noon, when it was still snowing, with the snow two feet deep, I began to be concerned.About two o'clock Mrs. Heffler, wife of the school custodian, telephoned and told me she was surprised when her husband found john reading in the School Library- and when she learned John had been there since 8:30 AM, she gave him a bowl of soup and some crackers.He finally returned late in the afternoon, and when I asked him how he got into the school, he said that the head master had been there and said to him, "Don't you know there is no school?" John admitted he knew it but asked permission to use the library that snowy day. He was eleven and a half years old. Mr. Richard Whitney was the Sixth Class home room master and taught English and geography.When John told the class about some of his experiences in the western national Parks, en route from Hawaii to Boston, Mr. Whitney suggested he use the subject for the annual Fowler Prize history essay competition, offered for the best paper in each class on a subject related to United States History.John used his spring vacation to write the paper and won the five dollar prize. The winner was ineligible the next year, but in l950 John again won with an essay on "Life on Oahu from July l941 to June, l947."John got his best grade in Latin, with Mr. Earl Taylor, who ran the bookstore before school in the mornings - John would often go in early and discuss difficult points in the assignments. Mr. Taylor led singing of hymns in Hall four mornings a week. On Tuesdays and Fridays Giuseppe deLellis came to the school to teach music, and played the piano accompaniment.John soon continued the piano lessons he had begun with Laura Canafax at Punahou in l946.They worked in the Schirmer collection "59 piano solos you like to play" -the Schubert Moment Musical in f op. 94 #3, and Military March, the Beethoven Minuet in G, the Strauss Blue Danube Waltz, Verdi's Grand March from "Aida", the Brahms Waltz in A Flat, the Mozart Turkish Rondo, and the Tannhauser Act 3 March of Wagner, Handel's "Largo" from "Xerxes".and Bach Prelude in c from Well Tempered Clavier #1. Mr. DeLellis and his wife Connie became family friends,and we visited back and forth from their home in West Newton.I met many of the mothers of the sixth class students at a tea party given by the Parents Auxiliary in October l947 At a second tea party given by Mrs. Clifford Ronan and Mrs. Huston Banton I saw the mothers again., and I met many other parents of the Auxiliary at meetings in Rousmaniere Hall.After the meeting we went to the school dining room, where the hospitality committee served coffee,sandwiches, and small cupcakes. We enjoyed talks by Mr. Weed and other invited speakers., and at the Spring meeting we heard the Roxbury Latin Debating Team. We also met parents at school football and baseball games, after which we gathered in the dining room. Since John was interested in debating, we attended many debates at the school and even drove to Groton the fifth class year, where John was a speaker in a junior debate. Roxbury Latin won taking the affirmative on the topic, "Should Athletic Scholarships be Granted by colleges? Mr. J. Clifford Ronan, father of John's classmate Cliff and two younger children, Frank and Dorothy, was a track coach at Boston English High School, and he cited the case of Center College in Kentucky, which was little known until highly successful sports teams brought publicity - then the school was able to raise money and develop a strong academic program. Mr.Ronan's material worked out well in the debate, and when John had finished speaking, Headmaster Peabody of Groton remarked to me, "That boy has a head" In the spring of l948 our former Waikiki neighbors Mimi and Harry Bronson came to visit us. Harry was working as an entomologist for the state of California,and they had bought a home in Santa Paula but were visiting Mimi's parents and sister Frances Gage in Marlboro. Since they had movies and slides of the Hawaiian Islands to show us that Sunday afternoon, we telephoned Aunt Mollie and invited her to come and see them and bring home John, who was visiting in South Boston that day.They also showed views of brightly colored spring flowers from their hikes high in the Sierra Nevada. We bought only two tickets for Roxbury Latin Night at the Boston Pops in May, l948, because it was the last Friday in May, the night I was scheduled to attend my twenty-fifth reunion at Mount Holyoke college.I went to Pops the next year when John was in the fifth class. We sat next to Randy Hare and his mother,- had a pleasant evening. MR. DELELLIS WAS THE PIANO SOLOIST WITH ARTHUR FIEDLER IN A BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE of RACHMANINOFF'S SECOND PIANO CONCERTO. On that last Friday in May l948, Jack drove me to Brookline to the home of my classmate Carol Fisher Mallory.Clara Michael, Ruth Phinney and I rode with Carol to a Howard Johnson's for dinner and then on to Mount Holyoke. where we registered for reunion at Student Alumni Hall. I spent the early part of that evening rehearsing for my part in the play written by my classmate and friend Rebecca Glover Smaltz.The play was to be presented Saturday afternoon. We then went to Pearsons Hall, where I lived freshman year.and where we had Reunion rooms and breakfast Saturday and Sunday.We had a class meeting at which our president Marion Lewis Smart read letters from classmates not in attendance at reunion.When we awoke Saturday morning, it was raining so we could not have the Alumnae parade.So we gathered in student Alumnae Hall, where I sat next to my friend Betty Gilman Roberts, and we had box lunches. In the afternoon l923 presented a good skit by Becky Smaltz, and the Alumnae President announced gifts to the college by various classes. Late in the afternoon we went to Pearsons Hall to dress for dinner- a banquet at a hotel in Holyoke.Ruth Peck Doyle drove Betty Giles Howard, Betty Gilman Roberts and me to the hotel. The drive was one of the highlights of the Reunion for me, because I had lived with them in Brigham Hall junior and senior years, and Betty Gilman and I had taken Master's degrees together in l925 -the only two candidates for the degree that year. at the dinner we were seated alphabetically just as we had been for chapel for four years so I was surrounded by people I knew well. Marion Lewis Smart, our class president asked me as Sergeant-at-Arms of the class to pour the champagne, which I did after saying that this was a strange state of affairs after I had spent so many years in the Navy advising against the use of liquor.The classmates applauded and laughed. As Carol Fisher had two young children left in her husband Dr. Mallory's care, we left South Hadley right after breakfast Sunday morning. Carol came to my house to meet Jack and John.She had met her husband Kenneth Mallory in Vienna when they were doing graduate study in biology and medicine.Dr. Mallory was a pathologist at Boston City Hospital where the Mallory building was named for his relative. we were invited to the Mallorys for Sunday dinner later in June BEFORE CAROL LEFT FOR MOUNT DESERT ISLAND MAINE with the children. Carol was an active member of the League of Women Voters. That summer Jack and I had considerable contact with Roxbury Latin parents. Mrs. Martin of Dedham, mother of Fred Martin came to visit one morning in June before Fred left for summer camp Kabeyun. Mrs. Stikeleather, mother of Robert Stikeleather wanted John to spend a week at their summer home in Stow to help Robert learn some French, before the boys officially started the new language with Joseph Sasserno that fall in the fifth Class. We saw her when we drove John to Stow, and Mr. Stikeleather had come from their East Dedham home to West Roxbury to give us a local map showing their place by the lake.When we went to get John the next week our neighbors Mr.and Mrs.Sweeney of 229 Wren Street rode with us, so we got well acquainted with them too. Mr. Sweeney taught shop in Boston Public Schools,and their son John was class president for three years, until he lost a year with bone tuberculosis, for which he was successfully treated at Lakeville Sanitarium. We also had an invitation for lunch and a swim with Mrs. and Mrs. J. Clifford Ronan at their summer home "Silver Hills" West Newburyport, in the area where Mr. Ronan had grown up.He taught mechanical drawing and was the track coach at Boston English High School. John Sweeney was with us, and Mrs. Ronan urged us to stay for supper. - we had cream of tomato soup- most welcome after a cool swim.Mr. Ronan in later years became a landscape painter. His home on Tennyson Street West Roxbury, and the summer place at West Newbury, which became their home after his retirement, became filled with paintings, and they gave us one - a lovely snow scene which hung many years in our dining room.Mr. Ronan wrote a newspaper sports column "Ronan's Reckonings"- a forecast or "educated guess" on the standings of high school in the track competitions. Mrs. Ronan's father and mother Mrs. Goodwin and her sister Grace Antell lived near us on Howitt Street. Cliff went to Amherst, and his brother Frank did track at Bowdoin. In l948 Jack finally had a chance to grow some good sized tomatoes after fighting insects and mildew in Hawaii. His favorite was the Winsall tomato. We had many three-pound fruits, and once he had a five pound tomato. They were delicious but too fragile for commercial use. He supplied many friends and neighbors with tomatoes and plants and seed to start new ones in February. indoors. He also grew"Crystal White" tomatoes, a variety l45 developed from the yellow tomato. We grew some for many years. Originally we obtained the seed from Peter Henderson Company later from Breck's of Boston. Since l965 we have had to use seed from our own crystal white plants as they now seem to be unavailable commercially.Jack grew tomatoes every year until l965.-#55- p.148 (#55)). With my encouragement Jack entered the accelerated two-and-a half year daytime course at Boston College Law School in January, l949 financed as a War Veteran under the G.I. Bill.He made inquiry at Harvard, where Dean Erwin Griswold was courteous, but explained he was crowded with returning veterans. Griswold encouraged Jack to talk to Father Kenealy of Boston College, who strongly welcomed his effort, even though Fordham Law School had not been nationally accredited, and Jack did not get credit for his two years' hard work there 1927-9.One of the professors told the entering law students,"Look at the man on your right and the man on your left, as one of the three of you won't be here when you graduate." There were fewer women in those days, but Jack was friendly with Phyllis Levine, who was on the committee for the excellent Yearbook "Sui Juris". Louise Day Hicks of South Boston was at the Law School one year and was always friendly with Jack in later years when they both spent much time at the Registries of Deeds and Probate. The teachers included Father Kenealy in Jurisprudence, Wendell Grimes, John D. O'Reilly, Emil Slizewski, Cornelius Moynihan, and Law Librarian Steven Morrison. Under the case method students were expected to read and abstract cases carefully in preparation for class discussion. Some professors occasionally threatened to cancel classes when not enough students did these assignments, but Jack and the more serious students usually talked them out of such extreme action. One of the faculty may have been the source of a student joke, "It is sufficient to say 'NOT PREPARED.' It is uncessary to demonstrate." The property professor taught them about the disadvantages of joint interests in real property and joint bank accounts, especially under modern tax laws, "Stay out of expensive joints". All his new classmates were much younger-serious men with a living to make in the law but a number of them told me at various times that Jack had a wonderful mind & that the professors liked to draw him out in class.We went together to the Red Mass an annual event sponsored by the Boston College Law School every fall to mark the opening of the legal season.Father Kenealy conducted the Mass, where we enjoyed a most learned speaker from the legal profession.During the second year his class sponsored a dance at the Recreation Hall of Boston College in Chestnut Hill to raise money to defray some of the expense of the class yearbook. We sat with some of his young friends including Larry Burkart,Frank Amsler,Gene Lyne & his wife Ruth- Gene's Jack's law school classmate was the son of Jack's l906 Boston Latin classmate Dan Lyne, who lived nearby on Beacon Street, Chestnut Hill. John and I attended one of the moot court sessions in which Larry Burkart of Newton and Joe Neylon of Somerville participated - they were members of the very successful moot court team named in honor of 1840s Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, father-in-law of Herman Melville and author of a leading opinion on circumstantial evidence, Commonwealth v. Webster.At the end of two and a half years of hard work, he received the LL.B degree in June,l95l twenty-four years after starting his law studies.When he passed the Massachusetts Bar exam in October 1951 and was admitted to law practice,he Boston Globe gave him first page headlines in big print-wrote a long first page account of his accomplishment at 63 years of age & published a picture of him with his Navy hat & law books in our West Roxbury dining room with John & me.Father Kenealy had asked the Boston Globe to feature Jack. Jack passed the Massachusetts Bar examination on the first try, even though a majority failed to pass,& "there was weeping at the Bar".He then applied for Northeastern University's night classes at the law school to earn a l953 Master's degree, writing a tax thesis he typed himself & taking course in Taxation, Admiralty, Massachusetts Practice, International Law (using the Louis Sohn "World Law" textbook). He took a tax course with Massachusetts Tax Commissioner Henry Long, a colorful & outspoken thirty-year veteran originally appointed by governor Calvin Coolidge around l9l9- & arranged for John to interview the Commissioner in l952 for Albert Kelsey's English course,which required students to record conversations in the style of James Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson" (l788). Professor Gardner gave the Admiralty course. I [Sophie] read Catherine Drinker Bowen's biography of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes junior and was amused by his wife Fanny's remark that Washington D.C. is full of eminent old men and the women they married when they were young. Jack's books included Clark and Marshall on Crimes, Salmond on Jurisprudence, Erwin Griswold's Taxation text, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr "The Common Law" James Casner and Barton Leach Property text, Warren Seavey Restatement of Agency. Samuel Williston "Restatement of Contracts", Mottla in Massachsetts Practice series. Jack liked to quote Holmes's definition of an 'act' as a 'voluntary muscular contraction' and his remark, "I used to think when I was a young man that TRUTH was the majority vote of that nation which could like all others." At a time when Holmes's ideas were in great vogue, Jack had reservations about the positivistic side of Holmes's thinking, although he read him carefully. In Father Kenealy's Jurisprudence course, they compared the views of several natural law theorists, including Lon Fuller and Jacques Maritain, who wrote "The American Philosophy of Law" and whose words Jack often quoted, "The Lord always gives light enough for one more step. Don't stop walking until the light gives out." In l948 Jack,John & I were crossing Linnet Street on Bellevue Street in West Roxbury,when an elderly lady emerged from a house at l65 Bellevue Stree.Struck by the color of her Alice-blue big felt hat, I smiled at her as we approached -I remarked "Your blue hat brightens up this dark afternoon."She was carrying a cane, & when I noticed that she had letters to mail,I offered to mail them for her to save her from crossing Linnet Street.She accepted, & as John went to the mailbox, she Jack & I chatted as we waited for him.We told Mrs. Gertrude Cutter that we were comparatively new in the neighborhood & that the Reverend Harold Arnold lived right across the street from us on Emmonsdale Road.She told us that he was the retired minister of her Unitarian Church at the corner of Corey & Centre Streets l50 & a distant cousin of James Arnold for whom the Arnold Arboretum was named. When we were out walking Christmas afternoon,we impulsively rang Mrs. Cutter's bell, as John wanted to talk with her,& it was calling-hour.She greeted us graciously,& for the next half-hour we were treated to an account of the very old houses on Centre Street between Richwood & Corey.A few of them were being demolished to make room for a supermarket-to Mrs. Cutter's regret.She invited us to call on her very often.She told us that Mr. Cary Potter of Roxbury Latin was the grandson of Bishop Potter. She & John enjoyed many games of backgammon through the years . Often after playing with her he came home with a can of peanuts.Each Christmas she sent John a calendar from the Museum of Fine Arts.Often about noon she would telephone me to call on her about three in the afternoon.She was hard of hearing but amazingly adept at lip reading if you looked right at her as you talked.She liked to tell about her mother-in-law "Madam Cutter" whom she considered an outstanding woman.One afternoon she told me about her father-in-law's experience in job hunting: one day - as he was on his way from Winchester where he lived to Harvard college to see President Charles Eliot to inquire whether he was to be appointed Librarian of Harvard College, President Eliot was on his way to the Cutter home in Winchester to offer him the job.When Mr.Cutter learned that President Eliot was not in his office, he went to the Boston Athenaeum & accepted the job as librarian there & developed that famous library for many years 151 His Cutter library classification was the forerunner of the Library of Congress system.As a young woman Miss Gertrude Cross took a job as an art teacher in the Winchester school and declared,"l'll never marry a man from Winchester", but she married Madam Cutter's second son Roland, an MIT graduate & an engineer for the city of Boston.Madame Cutter's first son was named Ammi, as the first son in every Cutter family for some generations is named.Mrs. Cutter's nephew Ammi is a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (l97l).One of their family friends was founder of the Windsor school for girls.When the author of a widely used book on geometry was revising his work,he showed the new illustrations to Gertrude,the young art teacher.She examined the drawings & said,"I could do better myself." She was stunned when the author said,"All right. You are hired.You make the illustrations for the book.I'll pay you anything you ask & give you an unlimited expense account." He told her to take all the time she needed to make the illustrations, so important in math work.She regretted her rash statement but took on the job.He accepted all of her illustrations & acknowledged her work in the introduction to the new edition. Jack had the book- a well-worn copy `-& that acknowedgement appeared in the mathematics text he had used at Revenue Cutter School in l909.He immediately telephoned Mrs Cutter, who was pleased the future Coast Guard officers had benefited from her work.Mrs.Cutter had an arthritic back for which she had a brace called "Gracey Bracey"She was rationed as to daily trips up & down stairs. A friend designed an ingenious thirty-inch long wooded scissors that she used to pick up papers or small books from the floor.In l955 Mrs. Cutter moved to a nursing home on Alfreton Road,Needham and gave us a large collection of books Jack picked out -a complete set of Charles Dickens, several Trollope novels -"Barchester Towers" and "The Warden," - and Pagan & Christian Rome.There is even a history of the Cutter family.When she had back troubles, her motto was "Cooperate with calamity." She lived to age 83 - l874 to March l958. She knew the Codman family,who were Brook Farmers 1843 & preserved an l846 engraving of the Brook Farm site, which was given to West roxbury historical Society & has proved useful to archaeologists interested in tracing positions of the buildings - some of which have been moved from their foundations & later destroyed by fire.There are very few extant pictures of Brook Farm from l84l-46, the era of the social experiment. The engraving also clarifies what areas have been flooded or filled. |
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p.42 probably #331 -note to Jim and Chris at CCI (temporary entry)This is good and sharp, but I am wondering if we could gain size and viewer appreciation by making an eight by eleven inch color photocopy and adding it below later on website. |Don't change or delete this photo, which is very good as is, but I expect to send further message suggesting we try enlargement. Bill me as necessary for any special handling.--+In the spring of 1941 Jack was consulted by Charles Edey Fay of Connecticut, who had access of Atlantic Insurance Company records of the disappearance of the five man crew of the New Bedford fishing schooner MARY CELESTE November, 1872. Fay wanted Jack's interpretation of certain navigational notes of the MARY CELESTE near the Azores. He suggested the crew suddenly abandoned ship and got into small boats because they feARED AN EXPLOSION OF ALCOHOL VAPORS FROM CARGO. Gershom Bradford published in American Neptune magazine his theory that waterspouts are frequent near the Azores in November - local severe tornados that draw water and sometimes fish high in the air and threaten small ships. Jack kept four of Fay's letters from around the time the Barretts left for Pearl Harbor mid-l941.+The Barretts frequently watched gray squirrels at Owls Head park a few blocks from home at 96l5 Shore Road overlooking Narrows in Southwest Brooklyn..One time Jack had to hold his breath when a ten-foot-high wave suddenly crested near him - he rolled around on Jones Beach, and the wave passed over and he got up. He said John tried to swim to Europe with a dog-paddle.He stressed ability to float and tread water. We also visited the Bronx zoo and relatives in Boston and Darien, Connecticut.We tried Coney Island once but regularly went to Jones Beach. #142 p 18 NEW YORK chapter September 1939 to June 1941 and departure for Hawaii about July 10, 1941. [follows TRINITY chapter] We had a three week visit in South Boston with Jack's eighty-four year old father and his sister Mollie in very hot August weather._ p. 259 Notebook Four New York--Plagued by the heat and fatigue, Jack reported to Captain Baggaley at the Naval Hydrographic Office, then in New York Customs House, and found a temporary furnished aprtment for himself in Brooklyn. We remained at 640 East Seventh Street {South Boston] as the guests of Grandpa and Aunt Mollie, who did all they could for our comfort that stifling hot summer. Mollie even brought down from the attic some of the kindergarten supplies used by Catherine Miley Barrett in her teaching days. She married Bill Barrett in 1923.= Finally with the help of his Fordham Law School friend John Papp, Jack found an unfurnished apartment at 9615 Shore Road in Brooklyn,-Apartment 2A on the seond floor - arranged the furniture which had arrived from storage in San Diego,-found a garage where he left his car,came to Boston for us, - and Jack, John and I traveled by train to the Grand Central Station, then took a taxi to the apartment in Brooklyn. John loved that apartment and vicinity. His crib was in our bedroom, but John had his own play room, and had his father with him every evening and weekend.The play room faced on New York Harbor- we could see the ships coming and going in and out of New York. Jack raised flowers in pots in the room- flowers that John liked very much, - amaryllis, ranunculus, begonias, anemones. Jack had no luck with freesias. He used three toothpicks in a triangle to suspend the stones from avocadoes over water in glass milk bottles, and the avocadoes would sprout several feet with big leaves. There was a large Chinese ancient kassu rug on the play room floor, - building blocks, Tinkertoys,a small and a large rocking chair, and a blackboard on the wall. There was also a solidly built writing table, on which Jack had cut off the legs to make the writing surface about two feet from the floor, and a small straight chair to fit the table. The room had many child's books including a Koala book from Australia- all the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit series books - Uncle Bill's gift of French Becassine books he purchased in Europe on his 1938 honeymmon- - "he Little Engine That Could" and many paper books about animals. One book about a dog and a cat "Sniffy and Mitzi" provided a name for a favorite toy cat, Mitzi. I used to read to John by the hour, pointing to the words as I -p. 260- read, and by the time John was three and a half years old, I was amazed to find that he could read although I had made no effort to teach him. As a matter of fact I thought he was correcting me from memory, until he actually read something to me = After dinner every evening John enjoyed a very leisurely bath, playing with a transparent plastic ball which contained a few toy fish, - and with a large red, celluloid fish.Then his father put on his own pajamas, and John wore his,and the two of them would study the starts at the bedroom window, which faced Shore Road and the Ocean [the Narrows]. There was a large Wrigley chewing gum sign in the distance west, and John and Jack used to say that Venus might get stuck in the chewing gum.John continued his interest in astronomy.Members of my family visited us many times in Brooklyn, especially my brother Harry's wife's sister Marion Taylor, who was then a nurse in Brooklyn at Greenpoint hospital. My sister-in-law Ethyle Meranski and her son Ted and daughter Carol Jane were among the visitors, and my sister Esther, and several times we saw my sister Bertha Pollack and her children Jason and Thalia. Sometimes we took guests to Jones Beach on Long Island, where once Jack Barrett had to take a deep breath before being rolled around the beach under a ten-foot high breaking ocean wave.Jones Beach was much cleaner and less crowded than Coney Island where we went once or twice.It did have high waves, however, and rather cold water.Sometimes we would take guests to New York World's Fair at Flushing,where Jack photographed Perisphere and Trilon.We spent Thanksgiving 1939 with the Pollack family at Overbrook, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia, where my brother Pete Meranski and his wife Jen joined us from Baltimore, and we met the Pollacks at Atlantic City New Jersey in 1940, where Jack said John dog-paddled without instruction and was ready to "head for Europe." My 1927-1930 landlady social worker Ann Taylor McCormack, , Helen Miller of the Commonwealth Fund, Chester Swanner from the Lighthouse Service 1912 The stores in Brooklyn on Third, Fourth & Fifth Streets were about five blocks walk up 97th Street from Shore Road.This was also the route to the subway Jack rode to work at the Custom House tower.There was a good meat market on Third Avenue where we bought rib roasts & chopped sirloin.We soon made the acquaintance ofthe George Rooney family on the first floor & became very good friends.For recreation we would walk to Fort Hamilton, drive to Prospect Park or Owls Head park to see the squirrels.Later on we made more ambitious trips to Jones Beach, Coney Island,& the l939-40 World's Fair at Flushing.Not long after Billy Barrett was born August 26, 1939, Bill & Virginia had trouble getting help & were glad to get Miss Caffey's name from Jack as a nurse for Billy.She was working for them in Darien Connecticut when we visited them at suppertime one day in October l939.Since Virginia expected us early in the afternoon & didn't expect us to have dinner there, I am afraid we ate Miss Caffey's hamburger- but she was mostgracious & happy to see John again.If she happens to read this, I hope she'll send her address.In l940 Bill called up to give me my first news of Jack's promotion to Commander.He also had been the first one to read the news when Jack made Lieutenant Commander early in l932.At Thanksgiving we drove to Overbrook Pennsylvania near Philadelphia to see my sister Bee. Sam Pollack worked for LaRoux liquers making cordials, & theirtwo children Jason & Thalia were somewhat older than John.Jen & Pete Meranski drove up from Baltimore for a fine Thanksgiving dinner.John was quite interested in the snow in the back courtyard at 96l5 Shore Road after the mild winter the year before in the San Diego area.The paved courtyard used to have curious little whirlwinds producedby the shape of the building- his father would point them out& talk about low pressure systems.Jack explained the terms "transparent, translucent, opaque" as we has a translucent frosted bathroom window. There was a small patch of poison ivy on our back fence downstairs, & Jack would tell how his father once in autumn met some tourists who ignored his advice & collected bright-red bunches of three-leaved poison ivy, with a little stem on the middle leaf.Jack grew & photographed many amaryllis, ranunculus, anemones,tuberous begonias & other potted plants. He never had any luck with freesias.Both Christmases at Brooklyn l939-40 we devoted considerable energy to decorating small Christmas trees.One year there was a considerable problem with a leak in a tub of water that was used toprevent the tree fromdrying out. We have photos from both Christmases, & JoanRooney age five from downstairs appears in the l940 Christmas photos.We still have l970 much of the Chinese furniture which appears in pictures in the Brooklyn apartment.Jack fashioned clothesline swings on the roof for John. InFebruary l940 there was a spectacular display of the five planets Mercury,Venus,Mars,Jupiter & Saturn all visible shortly after sunset in the western sky over theNarrows, where there was a big red illuminated Wrigley's chewing gum advertising neon sign.We used to say we hoped Venus would'tget stuck in the chewing gum.Sometimes whenJack was tired he would say he "wouldn't go across the street to see the Statue of Liberty do a dance."We began to accumulate the Beatrix Potter series of illustatrated books Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny,the Flopsy Bunnies, Mrs. Tittlemouse, the Tailor of Gloucester,Timmy Tiptoes, Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, Tom Kitten, the Roly-Poly Pudding, Jeremy Fisher, the Two Bad Mice, Johnny Townmouse, and the rest.Jack began to invent his own sequels to these stories.A little child's story Not long before we left New York, we spent an afternoon visiting Virginia, Bill, and Billy in Darien, where our former nursemaid Miss Blanche Caffey from Norfolk was helping look after young Billy.John, Jack, and Billy went swimming at the Darien Country Club. |
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probably in Florida Teddy Thalia Klein is neiece of Sophie Meranski Barrett, daughter of Bertha Meranski and Sam Pollack - lived in Phiuladelphia and Cincinnati growing up and in Mansfiield Ohio and Boynton Beach Florida after marriage.Bob Klein practiced dentistry in Mansfield Ohio twenty-five years.Sophie used to enjoy the health and nutrition newsletter he sent his patients.....NEW YORK chapter HYDROGRAPHIC OFFICE August 1939 to June 1941 and departure for Hawaii about July 10, 1941. [follows TRINITY chapter] TEXT: AUGUST 1939 We had a three week visit in South Boston with Jack's eighty-four year old father and his sister Mollie in very hot August weather. The three weeks John and I spent in South Boston in August 1939 [while Jack was househunting in New York and Brooklyn] were the longest opportunity for John and his grandfather to become acquainted. Grandpa Barrett had visited Norfolk {Virginia] in [May] 1936 and [Bala Cynwyd] Philadelphia in 1937 and 1938 when John was a baby, and saw him again briefly in June 1941 juat before we left for Hawaii. John sent carefully lettered cards to him from Hawaii when he was six years old, and Jack took countless picutres of us to send to Grandpa and Mollie to keep their spirits high. A very large batch of pictures were sent to him from Hawaii in June, l942. Grandpa saw and enjoyed them before he died two months later [August 21, l942 less than] four months before his eighty-eighth birthday. The old house at 640 East Seventh Street was not an ideal place for an active three year old boy in the August heat. Grandpa wanted to keep all the doors shut, but John and I felt the need of fresh air. He also thought that John should get more sleep, but John was not accustomed to going to bed right after supper in broad daylight, and I thought it would be cruel to put him to bed so early, especially when he always had an afternoon nap. Mollie even brought down from the attic some of the kindergarten supplies -wooden pegs and puzzles,- which her brother Bill's first wife Catherine Miley used in teaching her kindergarten classes in New York in the 1920s. [Catherine married Bill Barrett in 1923, died of cancer February 1931 while we were in Tientsin, China.]= Grandpa thought they should occupy John for days on end.[end p. 189, notebook Two] [p. 259 Notebook Four]--Plagued by the heat and fatigue, Jack reported to Captain Baggaley at the Naval Hydrographic Office, then in New York Customs House, and found a temporary furnished apartment for himself in Brooklyn. We remained at 640 East Seventh Street [South Boston] as the guests of Grandpa and Aunt Mollie, who did all they could for our comfort that stifling hot summer. ett in her teaching days. SEPTEMBER 1939 The war in Europe was about to begin September 3, 1939 with Hitler's invasion of Poland. The New York Branch Hydrographic Office would be an important and sensitve center for the Navy to receive reports of mine, blockade, and submarine hazards as well as the usual weather, ice, and water depth reports. Finally with the help of his Fordham Law School friend John Papp, Jack found an unfurnished apartment at 9615 Shore Road in Brooklyn,-Apartment 2A on the second floor - arranged the furniture which had arrived from storage in San Diego,-found a garage where he left his car,came to Boston for us, - and Jack, John and I traveled by train to the Grand Central Station, then took a taxi to the apartment in Brooklyn. There was a central long corridor, an excellent view,two large bedrooms,a large living room, a good sized kitchen, and plenty of room for all our Chinese rugs and other furnishings. John was three and a half years old then and still remembers that apartment, thirty years later. The rent was very reasonable.The very large apartment house [six floors] belonged to the State of New York, which kept in excellent repair with a capable superintendant, two hall boys in the large entrance hall, and an exterminator who came frequently to inquire about roaches or other bugs. The area across Shore Road was a mixture of tall grass, trees, sand, shrubs, and flowers, - unfortunately sacrificed only a few years later to build vast expanses of paved highways. But when we lived there, Jack and John enjoyed many happy hours picking wild grasses, buttercups, daisies, and dandelions for my bouquets, and they took many excellent snapshots of John's toy animals there. John loved that apartment and vicinity. His crib was in our bedroom, but John had his own play room, and had his father with him every evening and weekend.The play room faced on New York Harbor- we could see the ships coming and going in and out of New York. Jack raised and photographed flowers in pots in the room- flowers that John liked very much, - amaryllis, ranunculus, tuberous begonias, anemones and other potted plants. Jack had no luck with freesias. He used three toothpicks in a triangle to suspend the stones from avocadoes over water in glass milk bottles, and the avocadoes would sprout several feet with big leaves. There was a large Chinese ancient kassu rug on the play room floor, - building blocks, Tinkertoys,a small and a large rocking chair, and a blackboard on the wall. There was also a solidly built writing table, on which Jack had cut off the legs to make the writing surface about two feet from the floor, and a small straight chair to fit the table. The room had many child's books including a Koala book from Australia- all the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit series books - Uncle Bill's gift of French Becassine books he purchased in Europe on his 1938 honeymoon- - "The Little Engine That Could" and many paper books about animals. One book about a dog and a cat "Sniffy and Mitzi" provided a name for a favorite toy cat, Mitzi. I used to read to John by the hour, pointing to the words as I -p. 260- read, and by the time John was three and a half years old, I was amazed to find that he could read although I had made no effort to teach him. As a matter of fact I thought he was correcting me from memory, until he actually read something to me =Not long after Billy Barrett was born August 26, 1939, Bill & Virginia had trouble getting help & were glad to get Miss Caffey's name from Jack as a nurse for Billy. OCTOBER She was working for them in Darien Connecticut when we visited them at suppertime one day in October l939.Since Virginia expected us early in the afternoon & didn't expect us to have dinner there, I am afraid we ate Miss Caffey's hamburger- but she was most gracious & happy to see John again.If she happens to read this, I hope she'll send her address.In l940 Bill called up to give me my first news of Jack's promotion to Commander.He also had been the first one to read the news when Jack made Lieutenant Commander early in l932. NOVEMBER At Thanksgiving we drove to Overbrook Pennsylvania near Philadelphia to see my sister Bee. Sam Pollack worked for LaRoux liquers making cordials, & their two children Jason & Thalia were somewhat older than John.Jen & Pete Meranski drove up from Baltimore for a fine Thanksgiving dinner. we met the Pollacks at Atlantic City New Jersey in 1940, where Jack said John dog-paddled without instruction and was ready to "head for Europe." Members of my family visited us many times in Brooklyn, especially my brother Harry's wife's sister Marion Taylor, who was then a nurse in Brooklyn at Greenpoint hospital. My sister-in-law Ethyle Meranski and her son Ted and daughter Carol Jane were among the visitors, and my sister Esther, and several times we saw my sister Bertha Pollack and her children Jason and Thalia. Other frequent vistors were my 1927-1930 landlady social worker Ann Taylor McCormack, and Helen Miller of the Commonwealth Fund, Sometimes we took guests to Jones Beach on Long Island, where once Jack Barrett had to take a deep breath before being rolled around the beach under a ten-foot high breaking ocean wave.Jones Beach was much cleaner and less crowded than Coney Island where we went once or twice.It did have high waves, however, and rather cold water.Sometimes we would take guests to New York World's Fair at Flushing,where Jack photographed the Perisphere and Trilon. Visitors to West Roxbury in 1950s admired the light and dark contrasts in Jack's nighttime photo of the illuminated Perisphere, where Worlds Fair visitors watched movies inside. DECEMBER 1939 John was quite interested in the snow in the back courtyard at 96l5 Shore Road after the mild winter the year before in the San Diego area.The paved courtyard used to have curious little whirlwinds produced by the shape of the building- his father would point them out& talk about low pressure systems.Jack explained the terms "transparent, translucent, opaque" as we has a translucent frosted bathroom window. There was a small patch of poison ivy on our back fence downstairs, & Jack would tell how his father once in autumn met some tourists who ignored his advice & collected bright-red bunches of three-leaved poison ivy, with a little stem on the middle leaf. Both Christmases at Brooklyn l939-40 we devoted considerable energy to decorating small Christmas trees.One year there was a considerable problem with a leak in a tub of water that was used to prevent the tree from drying out. We have photos from both Christmases, & Joan Rooney age five from downstairs appears in the l940 Christmas photos.We still have l970 much of the Chinese furniture which appears in pictures in the Brooklyn apartment.Jack fashioned clothesline swings on the roof for John. The stores in Brooklyn on Third, Fourth & Fifth Streets were about five blocks walk up 97th Street from Shore Road.This was also the route to the subway Jack rode to work at the Custom House tower.There was a good meat market on Third Avenue where we bought rib roasts & chopped sirloin.We soon made the acquaintance of the George Rooney family on the first floor & became very good friends.For recreation we would walk to Fort Hamilton, drive to Prospect Park or Owls Head park to see the squirrels.Later on we made more ambitious trips to Jones Beach, Coney Island,& the l939-40 World's Fair at Flushing. FEBRUARY 1940 After dinner every evening John enjoyed a very leisurely bath, playing with a transparent plastic ball which contained a few toy fish, - and with a large red, celluloid fish.Then his father put on his own pajamas, and John wore his,and the two of them would study the stars at the bedroom window, which faced Shore Road and the Ocean near the Narrows..-In February l940 there was a spectacular display of the five planets Mercury,Venus,Mars,Jupiter & Saturn all visible shortly after sunset in the western sky over the Narrows, where on the New Jersey side west of us there was a big red illuminated Wrigley's chewing gum advertising neon sign.We used to say we hoped Venus wouldn't get stuck in the chewing gum. This close alignment of the five visible planets is infrequent, occuring evering twenty years or so. John's bedroom was on the front of the house where they could get an excellent view of the stars over the water, and John developed a lasting interest in astronomy, -p. 189- which his navigator father always encouraged. Before he was four years old, John could point out the North Star, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia's Chair, Venus, Mercury, Deneb, and many others. When he was five or six years old, in Hawaii, he could point out the Southern Cross to me over Diamond Head in Waikiki. Sometimes when Jack was tired he would say he "wouldn't go across the street to see the Statue of Liberty do a dance."We began to accumulate the Beatrix Potter series of illustrated books Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny,the Flopsy Bunnies, Mrs. Tittlemouse, the Tailor of Gloucester,Timmy Tiptoes, Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, Tom Kitten, the Roly-Poly Pudding, Jeremy Fisher, the Two Bad Mice, Johnny Townmouse, and the rest.Jack began to invent his own sequels to these stories.[A little child's story ??] JUNE 1940 Jack was scheduled to retire June 30, but received notice June 12 he would remainon active duty for the DURATION of the National Emergency. The word "DURATION" was heard frequently throughout the war i Hawaii in relation to shortages, miitary law, and inmany contexts. SUMMER 1940 Photo web. p 18 # 142 In Jack Barrett's left hand he holds device to snap his own picture with German Voightlander camera bought San Francisco June l929 en route to Asiatic Fleet duty Philippines.The Barretts frequently watched gray squirrels at Owls Head park a few blocks from home at 96l5 Shore Road overlooking Narrows in Southwest Brooklyn..One time Jack had to hold his breath when a ten-foot-high wave suddenly crested near him - he rolled around on Jones Beach, and the wave passed over and he got up. He said John tried to swim to Europe with a dog-paddle.He stressed ability to float and tread water. We also visited the Bronx zoo and relatives in Boston and Darien, Connecticut.We tried Coney Island once but regularly went to Jones Beach. AUGUST 1940 Wednesday, August 28, 1940 was Jack's fifty-second birthday, and it happened that his 1912 shipmate Chester Swanner from the Lighthouse Tender ZIZANIA came to visit that day and accompanied Jack to Macy's Stores at 34th Street, where Jack bought a Baldwin spinet piano, of which we were very fond. John learned to play "Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?" and other melodies. The piano remained in storage during our six years in Hawaii but was unpacked after we moved into our West Roxbury home on Thanksgiving Day 1947, where both Jack and John and our music teacher Giuseppe deLellis used it extensively. Chester Swanner was a native of Mississippi who was many years at sea. He went with us to the New York World's Fair that day but wanted to study the cattle in detail while we toured many exhibits. APRIL 1941 -43-977 [Black Notebook 2 -p 157] "April 10, 1941 - 4701 Reservoir Road, Washington DC To. Commander John B. Barrett, Branch Hydrographic Office, New York, N.Y. Dear Doc: It was very kind of you to call attention to the discrepancies between the New York and Boston broadcasts. This matter does not come under my section, but I was glad to bring it to the attention of Watt, who is in charge of Pilot Charts. = He explains to me that the first broadcast, either New York or Boston, is used as a basis for the Washington broadcast. It is considered here that the mailgram would be too late for a radio broadcast from here. It seems that errors in transmission occasionally creep in, for recently the latitude of one of these submarine areas was given as twenty-one degrees -- the requested repeat still came twenty-one degrees - which was, of course, an obvious error. = In the case of forty degrees thirty minutes instead of forty degrees fifty minutes the larger area was chosen for the reason you advanced - for being on the safe side. Watt emphasizes the fact that he takes either your broadcast or that of Boston, - whichever comes first into the office, - and the mailgram is too late. The Coast Survey has placed these areas on their charts at our particular request,and what we are looking to do is to be able, after a time,to simplify the broadcasts by using the letters. This, I think, will be done as soon as the new charts beome thoroughly disseminated in the Navy and merchant marine. = The office is very busy here, as you may well imagine, but the work is increasingly interesting. I keep going pretty well and hope to see you if you make a trip this way. Be sure I appreciate your letter. Sincerely, s/Brad --P.S. Watt has just shown me a radiogram from Branch Hydrographic Office New York ... "between Latitudes forty - fifty northward and eight North and twenty-one twenty North. " We sent for a report, and it came back o.k except 'Latitude twenty-one". [Gershom Bradford, editor Notices to Mariners 1935-1942 Naval Hydrographic office,Washington D.C.] MAY 1941 In the spring of 1941 Jack was consulted by Charles Edey Fay of Connecticut, who had access of Atlantic Insurance Company records of the disappearance of the five man crew of the New Bedford fishing schooner MARY CELESTE November, 1872. Fay wanted Jack's interpretation of certain navigational notes of the MARY CELESTE near the Azores. He suggested the crew suddenly abandoned ship and got into small boats because they FEARED AN EXPLOSION OF ALCOHOL VAPORS FROM CARGO. Gershom Bradford published in American Neptune magazine his theory that waterspouts are frequent near the Azores in November - local severe tornados that draw water and sometimes fish high in the air and threaten small ships. Jack kept four of Fay's letters from around the time the Barretts left for Pearl Harbor mid-l941. Not long before we left New York, we spent an afternoon visiting Virginia, Bill, and Billy in Darien, where our former nursemaid Miss Blanche Caffey from Norfolk was helping look after young Billy.John, Jack, and Billy went swimming at the Darien Country Club. Jack took a photo of five year old John kneeling on the grass next to his twenty-month-old cousin Billy. We had it in our West Roxbury bedroom in 1950s and 1960s. ] |
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enlargement Sophie Mereanski & Jack Barrett in garden 1966 West Roxbury #333 p 42 + - H-O-M-E -I-S -T-H-E -S-A-I-L-O-R 1947-1969 H-O-M-E I-S T-H-E S-A-I-L-O-R Hartigan,Pops,RLS- South Boston-West Roxbury-(p. 144) There were many interesting curios at 640- some from Jack's trips.One was an alligator with a pencil inserted into the jaws, with an African native's head sticking out on the head of the pencil.Jack had an old Boston Traveler l907 World Atlas in the cold front room by the stairs, where he used to sleep, and where John slept August to November, l947. There was a fancy lampshade which Jack's deceased sister Katie had made, and some cushions she had embroadered.On the front stairway, a slightly phosphorescent glass knob hung down from the electric light so that Mollie could find it when she came home and up the stairs after dark. I wish we had photographs of the old set tubs and barn before Mollie modernized everything in l948. The things provided quite a link with Grandpa Barrett. The refill water closet of the toilet, which he had made years earlier, was up overhead to utilize gravity.There were coal stove in the parlor and kitchen. A portion of the house dated from before 1860, but additions were made several times.Grandpa had a victory garden in l9l8 and peach trees. An old asparagus plant and many hollyhocks grew in l948 and lilacs.Jack had to report at Boston Navy Yard to show he had completed his authorized travel to Boston. Before long we took a trip to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire to see Jack's brother Bill and his son Billy and "Gram" (Billy's mother's mother) and Billy's aunt Vivian Walsh, Virginia's sister.Jack made inquiry at Phillips Andover Academy thst day but learned their school had a four year course starting in the ninth grade, whereas John was entering the seventh grade. We began house hunting very soon after we arrived in Boston.At this time we expected John would enroll in Boston Latin, and his father had started him learning "Adeste fideles" and other Latin materials.However, Peggy Hurley, entertaining the four of us at dinner at her house, suggested we look into Roxbury Latin School, a private day school in West Roxbury, where her son-in-law Broderick had been a member of the l944 class. This ultimately influenced our choice of a house. Mr. William Cunningham, a school teacher who did part-time realty work for the Fowler agency of Jamaica Plain. showed us a number of houses- Allandale Road and Ardale Road- then on August 28, l947 - Jack's fifty-ninth birthday, he showed Jack and John a house at 52 Emmonsdale Road, West Roxbury, which we later bought.That day after showing the house, Mr. Cunningham bought a round of ice cream cones to celebrate Jack's birthday.The house was only two and a half blocks from Roxbury Latin School, and Mr. Cunningham with nine children lived only two blocks from us himself, so we were ready to believe him about the neighborhood, and he was friendly for many years afterward.He became principal of Roslindale High School, and one of his sons was President of Wang computer corporation.The house on Emmonsdale was owned by the Van Steenbergen family.Mr. Van Steenbergen taught at Boston Latin School, where John was actually enrolled for three days.He was in Mr. Jamieson's room there, along with our neighbor Eddie Brickley of Tennyson Street. John was somewhat upset when his father changed his plans and went rather unwillingly to an interview at Roxbury Latin The new head master Frederick R. Weed without applying pressure either way permitted John to take the entrance exam with some other late applicants including G. Robert Macdonald of Dedham. John scored very well and was admitted. Rather to John's surprise, Jack made the decision to send John to Roxbury Latin and buy the Emmonsdale Road house where no commuting would be necessary.The tuition at Roxbury Latin was only one hundred dollars per year at that time for residents in the area of the old town of Roxbury. The school had just celebrated its third centennial in l945 and received publicity in Life magazine as 'the oldest continuously operating Independent school in the Country" and the "biggest educational bargain in the country." At one time it was very heavily endowed, but its finances suffered severely in the l930's. A new school building was opened in l926 in West Roxbury, but a planned gymnasium was deferred until l955.Peggy Hurley, widow of Jack's South Boston friend Joe of the Boston Post, who had died in l94l, was very friendly when we arrived back from Hawaii.Besides having us to dinner, she invited us to her daughter's wedding in Duxbury spring l948 and introduced me to Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Collins one block away from us on Emmonsdale Road.They visited us at our new home two days after we moved in on Thanksgiving l947. Jack also found his former French teacher at Boston Latin School William Pride Henderson living in West Roxbury -aged eighty-four in l947. Bill Barrett's Latin School l912 classmate John Vaccaro was one of the first people John Barrett met in Boston as he had John and his father to lunch at Lockober's Restaurant in August.He also searched the title to the new house, and another l9l2 Latin School classmate of Bill's Archie Dresser appraised the house at a value of eleven thousand dollars.We ultimately paid Mr. Van Steenbergen twelve thousand dollars plus the commission. Jack's l906 classmates Dan Lyne and Edward Illingworth wrote recommendations for John at Roxbury Latin. Illingworth an organist and vocal and piano teacher lived at 64 Hastings Street West Roxbury and was very well acquainted through the Highland Club of West Roxbury with Roxbury Latin French master Joseph Henry Sasserno.Our house is on the slope of Bellevue Hill, the highest ground within the city limits of Boston.Survey maps say the top of the hill is 328 feet, and the Boston state house is visible, and the South Boston waterfront. Our house is at about 210 feet elevation. Mr. Illingworth, who Jack knew from the fourth grade in South Boston onward through Boston Latin School, was nicknamed "the eternal question mark." He studied in Rome with the composer and virtuoso Ferruchio Busoni. His wife was a South Boston neighbor from L Street.He invited Jack to join the Highland Club, but Jack was not much of a joiner, and also passed up the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars as well. Mr. Illingworth one time drilled John on the dotted rhythms of Beethoven's "Minuet in G." Mr. Joseph Sasserno had a considerable conversation with Jack at the Roxbury Latin parking lot the first day of school.He was one year older than Jack and had attended Boston English High School and Harvard College- then taught seven years at Norwich Military Academy in Vermont l911-l9l8. He later was a close friend of his former pupil General Harmon,who became President of Norwich and asked Mr. Sasserno to write a history of Norwich, which was incomplete when he died in Genoa, Italy August 12, l962. Mr. Sasserno and his sister Mary and brother Henry lived in apartments near us at 30 Bellevue Street. Their family were from East Boston and Dorchester.Henry was later our investment broker at Kidder Peabody Company.Joe was active in the Italian Historical Society and West Roxbury Historical Society.Jack's conversation with Mr. Sasserno undoubtedly helped sell him on Roxbury Latin School, where John attended for six years. There was a high attrition rate among the students, but a very fine education was available, and all twelve members of the small faculty were of great ability and became our very good friends.John began piano lessons with Giuseppe deLellis, who took a very wonderful special interest in Jack senior in his last two years, l967-l969.He and his family have been wonderful friends throughout more than twenty-two years.For the first two months Jack drove John from South Boston to school. John was unfamiliar with the Boston streetcars, and the trip was slow and roundabout, with several changes of cars and trolleys.Sometimes Gil Hoag would ride to Dorchester with us to his home in Savin Hill, and Ronald Havelock would ride to the Elevated to connect to Cambridge.We later often regretted that Mollie was not closer to us. Mollie at this time worked in a Metropolitan Life Insurance local office on West Broadway near F Street just beyond Dorchester Street, ten or fiteen minutes walk from her home. She received weekly cash collections at the cashier window and so knew a great many people in the neighborhood.At this time she frequently saw the Barretts' former next door neighbors Katherine Kinnaly and Mr. and Mrs. Daniel and Emily Kinnaly who lived on Clement Street in West Roxbury. Danny worked in the Post Office and was very cordial when he heard we were copming to West Roxbury.Our new house was painted by Meissner Brothers of South Boston, and a new heater and shower and cellar bathroom were installed by Rull Company. Jack's second cousins, Gertrude and Mary Hartigan were still at 80 Brown Avenue, Roslindale, near Cummins Highway and Sacred Heart Church,where their mother moved from South Boston in l9l7.May gave Jack a cordial greeting on his return and frequently brought us poinsettias, azaleas and other plants as presents. Her brother, Father Edward Hartigan, was in North Braintree as pastor until l953- then he became pastor of Immaculate Conception parish, Everett, retiring in l970.For a while May Hartigan kept her car in our two-car garage, as she lived only two miles away and parking was scarce.Until her retirement in l956 at age seventy, she taught mathematics at the Washington Irving intermediate school in Roslindale. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Buckley dropped in soon after we moved in.Subsequently Jack would see Joe around City Hall where he worked in the Sewer Department- and also in Joe's private law office.Joe wrote a recommendation when Jack applied for the Graduate Law Course at Northeastern University in l95l.While we were still living at 640 East Seventh Street, we went with Mollie to 168 I Street to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of Mrs. Fortunato Pistorino, the mother of a family of nine, among whom several sisters were very good friends of Mollie Barrett.Mr. and Mrs. Pistorino observed their fiftieth wedding anniversary about the end of the war, and now they were having quite a birthday celebration. Josephine Pistorino worked for Bell Telephone Company.Her sister Frances was a legal secretary, and their brother John was a barber. Their paternal grandfather came from a distinguished family of Messina, and the Pistorino family operated a business in Boston. One of the nephews was with United Fruit company.Mrs. Pistorino's family, long in South Boston, traced back to Skibbereen, Cork, Ireland. Their name was Daly, and they may be related to Jack Barrett's father's mother.Mollie would often have Wednesday and Sunday meals at the Pistorino home, while Josephine and Frances would come to Mollie's for fish dinner on Friday. Jack's second cousins Gertrude and Mary Hartigan lived at 80 Brown Avenue, near Cummins highway and Sacred Heart Church in nearby Roslindale, and their brother Father Hartigan was in Braintree but in l953 became pastor at Immaculate Conception church in Everett.May gave Jack a very cordial welcome home and gave us several azalea plants.For a while she kept her car in our two-car garage.Until her retirement in l956 at age seventy, she taught mathematics at the Washington Irving intermediate school in Roslindale. Mr, and Mrs. Joseph Buckley of South Boston - with whom Jack had been friendly since young boyhood, came to call.Jack saw him frequently at City Hall, where Joe worked for the Sewer Department.After dropping John at Roxbury Latin in time for the start of school at 8:42 every morning, Jack would drive to our new home at 52 Emmonsdale road, where the Meissner workers were painting and papering, and Rull, the plumber was putting a new bathroom in the cellar.Jack unpacked furniture, put the Chinese rugs on the floor, washed dishes, pots and pans, and when the telephone was installed, he called me to say that he had just unpacked the piano, so I listened while he played one of his favorite piano pieces.The piano was in perfect condition although many other items of furniture had been damaged in the round trip to and from Pearl Harbor in 1941 to storage in Boston.By the time the painters,plumbers,and electricians had finished their work, Jack had the place ready for occupancy by John and me.The floors were scraped. Jack bought an electric wax polisher, and on the Sunday before Thanksgiving Jack and John missed their Sunday dinner at 640 because they were determined to finishing waxing the floors and polishing them so we could move in. -and we did move in on Thanksgiving Day l947, when Mollie came out with us and was most helpful in getting us settled. Our next door neighbors at 21 Rustic Road, Tony and Mabel Bernazzani and their two daughters were flower lovers. He was a professional gardener with an unusually green thumb.He had planted the peonies, day lilies, and hydrangeas on the Van Steenbergen property we bought. His own property had a wide variety of rambler roses, yuccas, hollyhocks, violets, Spanish iris,tomatoes, strawberries, bulbs, and ususual trees.The Bernazzanis enjoyed the outdoors and had a large fireplace, where they invited us and other neighbors for spaghetti and steak dinner, which we enjoyed at long outdoor tables. One Sunday noon Mollie called up to invite us to dinner at six o'clock..Since it was a very cold day, I at first refused, but Jack and John, who loved 640 East Seventh Street accepted gladly, as it was a very dull cold day here.I simply suffered in that cold weather- couldn't get warm despite the adequate oil heat.After they left, the house was so quiet, I decided to go to South Boston by subway, even though I wasn't sure how to get there. But our Emmonsdale neighbors, Joe and Grace Collins,picked me up in their carand took me to the Jamaica Plain Civil War Monument, where they put me on a trolley car to Park Street under Boston Common, where I changed for a subway train to South Boston.Jack was glad to see me.it was a lovely party, with the smell of ham pleasant after the long cold trip. Everybody was there - Mollie's cousins, Tom and Bessie Palmer of North Cambridge, her old neighbor Katherine Kinnaly, her cousin Bill Lane of Melrose and his wife Jean,Josephine Pistorino of 168 I Street, and Mollie's second cousins Mary Elizabeth and Helen Lynch of Hyde Park. There was a lot of good talk, the food was excellent, and it was far better for me than sitting at home.Our next door neighbor at 44 Emmonsdale Road was Mrs. Allen, a widow with two grown sons. She was enthusiastic when John made the honor roll for the first marking period at Roxbury Latin. Two neighbors on Rustic Road, Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Ethel Maier came to call one day while John was studying for mid-year examinations.We told them about our trip across the country. Mrs. Maier's father retired police Captain Anderson, lived with her and her husband Otto.Our first winter in Boston was an unusually snowy one. Usually when the Boston public school closed because of snow, Roxbury Latin remained in session, but one morning at 8:30 when the snow was very deep, and it was still snowing, we heard via radio that there would be no school at Roxbury Latin. Against my advice, John went off to school, two and a half blocks away.About noon, when it was still snowing, with the snow two feet deep, I began to be concerned.About two o'clock Mrs. Heffler, wife of the school custodian, telephoned and told me she was surprised when her husband found john reading in the School Library- and when she learned John had been there since 8:30 AM, she gave him a bowl of soup and some crackers.He finally returned late in the afternoon, and when I asked him how he got into the school, he said that the head master had been there and said to him, "Don't you know there is no school?" John admitted he knew it but asked permission to use the library that snowy day. He was eleven and a half years old. Mr. Richard Whitney was the Sixth Class home room master and taught English and geography.When John told the class about some of his experiences in the western national Parks, en route from Hawaii to Boston, Mr. Whitney suggested he use the subject for the annual Fowler Prize history essay competition, offered for the best paper in each class on a subject related to United States History.John used his spring vacation to write the paper and won the five dollar prize. The winner was ineligible the next year, but in l950 John again won with an essay on "Life on Oahu from July l941 to June, l947."John got his best grade in Latin, with Mr. Earl Taylor, who ran the bookstore before school in the mornings - John would often go in early and discuss difficult points in the assignments. Mr. Taylor led singing of hymns in Hall four mornings a week. On Tuesdays and Fridays Giuseppe deLellis came to the school to teach music, and played the piano accompaniment.John soon continued the piano lessons he had begun with Laura Canafax at Punahou in l946.They worked in the Schirmer collection "59 piano solos you like to play" -the Schubert Moment Musical in f op. 94 #3, and Military March, the Beethoven Minuet in G, the Strauss Blue Danube Waltz, Verdi's Grand March from "Aida", the Brahms Waltz in A Flat, the Mozart Turkish Rondo, and the Tannhauser Act 3 March of Wagner, Handel's "Largo" from "Xerxes".and Bach Prelude in c from Well Tempered Clavier #1. Mr. DeLellis and his wife Connie became family friends,and we visited back and forth from their home in West Newton.I met many of the mothers of the sixth class students at a tea party given by the Parents Auxiliary in October l947 At a second tea party given by Mrs. Clifford Ronan and Mrs. Huston Banton I saw the mothers again., and I met many other parents of the Auxiliary at meetings in Rousmaniere Hall.After the meeting we went to the school dining room, where the hospitality committee served coffee,sandwiches, and small cupcakes. We enjoyed talks by Mr. Weed and other invited speakers., and at the Spring meeting we heard the Roxbury Latin Debating Team. We also met parents at school football and baseball games, after which we gathered in the dining room. Since John was interested in debating, we attended many debates at the school and even drove to Groton the fifth class year, where John was a speaker in a junior debate. Roxbury Latin won taking the affirmative on the topic, "Should Athletic Scholarships be Granted by colleges? Mr. J. Clifford Ronan, father of John's classmate Cliff and two younger children, Frank and Dorothy, was a track coach at Boston English High School, and he cited the case of Center College in Kentucky, which was little known until highly successful sports teams brought publicity - then the school was able to raise money and develop a strong academic program. Mr.Ronan's material worked out well in the debate, and when John had finished speaking, Headmaster Peabody of Groton remarked to me, "That boy has a head" In the spring of l948 our former Waikiki neighbors Mimi and Harry Bronson came to visit us. Harry was working as an entomologist for the state of California,and they had bought a home in Santa Paula but were visiting Mimi's parents and sister Frances Gage in Marlboro. Since they had movies and slides of the Hawaiian Islands to show us that Sunday afternoon, we telephoned Aunt Mollie and invited her to come and see them and bring home John, who was visiting in South Boston that day.They also showed views of brightly colored spring flowers from their hikes high in the Sierra Nevada. We bought only two tickets for Roxbury Latin Night at the Boston Pops in May, l948, because it was the last Friday in May, the night I was scheduled to attend my twenty-fifth reunion at Mount Holyoke college.I went to Pops the next year when John was in the fifth class. We sat next to Randy Hare and his mother,- had a pleasant evening. MR. DELELLIS WAS THE PIANO SOLOIST WITH ARTHUR FIEDLER IN A BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE of RACHMANINOFF'S SECOND PIANO CONCERTO. On that last Friday in May l948, Jack drove me to Brookline to the home of my classmate Carol Fisher Mallory.Clara Michael, Ruth Phinney and I rode with Carol to a Howard Johnson's for dinner and then on to Mount Holyoke. where we registered for reunion at Student Alumni Hall. I spent the early part of that evening rehearsing for my part in the play written by my classmate and friend Rebecca Glover Smaltz.The play was to be presented Saturday afternoon. We then went to Pearsons Hall, where I lived freshman year.and where we had Reunion rooms and breakfast Saturday and Sunday.We had a class meeting at which our president Marion Lewis Smart read letters from classmates not in attendance at reunion.When we awoke Saturday morning, it was raining so we could not have the Alumnae parade.So we gathered in student Alumnae Hall, where I sat next to my friend Betty Gilman Roberts, and we had box lunches. In the afternoon l923 presented a good skit by Becky Smaltz, and the Alumnae President announced gifts to the college by various classes. Late in the afternoon we went to Pearsons Hall to dress for dinner- a banquet at a hotel in Holyoke.Ruth Peck Doyle drove Betty Giles Howard, Betty Gilman Roberts and me to the hotel. The drive was one of the highlights of the Reunion for me, because I had lived with them in Brigham Hall junior and senior years, and Betty Gilman and I had taken Master's degrees together in l925 -the only two candidates for the degree that year. at the dinner we were seated alphabetically just as we had been for chapel for four years so I was surrounded by people I knew well. Marion Lewis Smart, our class president asked me as Sergeant-at-Arms of the class to pour the champagne, which I did after saying that this was a strange state of affairs after I had spent so many years in the Navy advising against the use of liquor.The classmates applauded and laughed. As Carol Fisher had two young children left in her husband Dr. Mallory's care, we left South Hadley right after breakfast Sunday morning. Carol came to my house to meet Jack and John.She had met her husband Kenneth Mallory in Vienna when they were doing graduate study in biology and medicine.Dr. Mallory was a pathologist at Boston City Hospital where the Mallory building was named for his relative. we were invited to the Mallorys for Sunday dinner later in June BEFORE CAROL LEFT FOR MOUNT DESERT ISLAND MAINE with the children. Carol was an active member of the League of Women Voters. That summer Jack and I had considerable contact with Roxbury Latin parents. Mrs. Martin of Dedham, mother of Fred Martin came to visit one morning in June before Fred left for summer camp Kabeyun. Mrs. Stikeleather, mother of Robert Stikeleather wanted John to spend a week at their summer home in Stow to help Robert learn some French, before the boys officially started the new language with Joseph Sasserno that fall in the fifth Class. We saw her when we drove John to Stow, and Mr. Stikeleather had come from their East Dedham home to West Roxbury to give us a local map showing their place by the lake.When we went to get John the next week our neighbors Mr.and Mrs.Sweeney of 229 Wren Street rode with us, so we got well acquainted with them too. Mr. Sweeney taught shop in Boston Public Schools,and their son John was class president for three years, until he lost a year with bone tuberculosis, for which he was successfully treated at Lakeville Sanitarium. We also had an invitation for lunch and a swim with Mrs. and Mrs. J. Clifford Ronan at their summer home "Silver Hills" West Newburyport, in the area where Mr. Ronan had grown up.He taught mechanical drawing and was the track coach at Boston English High School. John Sweeney was with us, and Mrs. Ronan urged us to stay for supper. - we had cream of tomato soup- most welcome after a cool swim.Mr. Ronan in later years became a landscape painter. His home on Tennyson Street West Roxbury, and the summer place at West Newbury, which became their home after his retirement, became filled with paintings, and they gave us one - a lovely snow scene which hung many years in our dining room.Mr. Ronan wrote a newspaper sports column "Ronan's Reckonings"- a forecast or "educated guess" on the standings of high school in the track competitions. Mrs. Ronan's father and mother Mrs. Goodwin and her sister Grace Antell lived near us on Howitt Street. Cliff went to Amherst, and his brother Frank did track at Bowdoin. In l948 Jack finally had a chance to grow some good sized tomatoes after fighting insects and mildew in Hawaii. His favorite was the Winsall tomato. We had many three-pound fruits, and once he had a five pound tomato. They were delicious but too fragile for commercial use. He supplied many friends and neighbors with tomatoes and plants and seed to start new ones in February. indoors. He also grew"Crystal White" tomatoes, a variety l45 developed from the yellow tomato. We grew some for many years. Originally we obtained the seed from Peter Henderson Company later from Breck's of Boston. Since l965 we have had to use seed from our own crystal white plants as they now seem to be unavailable commercially.Jack grew tomatoes every year until l965.-#55- p.148 (#55)). With my encouragement Jack entered the accelerated two-and-a half year daytime course at Boston College Law School in January, l949 financed as a War Veteran under the G.I. Bill.He made inquiry at Harvard, where Dean Erwin Griswold was courteous, but explained he was crowded with returning veterans. Griswold encouraged Jack to talk to Father Kenealy of Boston College, who strongly welcomed his effort, even though Fordham Law School had not been nationally accredited, and Jack did not get credit for his two years' hard work there 1927-9.One of the professors told the entering law students,"Look at the man on your right and the man on your left, as one of the three of you won't be here when you graduate." There were fewer women in those days, but Jack was friendly with Phyllis Levine, who was on the committee for the excellent Yearbook "Sui Juris". Louise Day Hicks of South Boston was at the Law School one year and was always friendly with Jack in later years when they both spent much time at the Registries of Deeds and Probate. The teachers included Father Kenealy in Jurisprudence, Wendell Grimes, John D. O'Reilly, Emil Slizewski, Cornelius Moynihan, and Law Librarian Steven Morrison. Under the case method students were expected to read and abstract cases carefully in preparation for class discussion. Some professors occasionally threatened to cancel classes when not enough students did these assignments, but Jack and the more serious students usually talked them out of such extreme action. One of the faculty may have been the source of a student joke, "It is sufficient to say 'NOT PREPARED.' It is uncessary to demonstrate." The property professor taught them about the disadvantages of joint interests in real property and joint bank accounts, especially under modern tax laws, "Stay out of expensive joints". All his new classmates were much younger-serious men with a living to make in the law but a number of them told me at various times that Jack had a wonderful mind & that the professors liked to draw him out in class.We went together to the Red Mass an annual event sponsored by the Boston College Law School every fall to mark the opening of the legal season.Father Kenealy conducted the Mass, where we enjoyed a most learned speaker from the legal profession.During the second year his class sponsored a dance at the Recreation Hall of Boston College in Chestnut Hill to raise money to defray some of the expense of the class yearbook. We sat with some of his young friends including Larry Burkart,Frank Amsler,Gene Lyne & his wife Ruth- Gene's Jack's law school classmate was the son of Jack's l906 Boston Latin classmate Dan Lyne, who lived nearby on Beacon Street, Chestnut Hill. John and I attended one of the moot court sessions in which Larry Burkart of Newton and Joe Neylon of Somerville participated - they were members of the very successful moot court team named in honor of 1840s Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, father-in-law of Herman Melville and author of a leading opinion on circumstantial evidence, Commonwealth v. Webster.At the end of two and a half years of hard work, he received the LL.B degree in June,l95l twenty-four years after starting his law studies.When he passed the Massachusetts Bar exam in October 1951 and was admitted to law practice,he Boston Globe gave him first page headlines in big print-wrote a long first page account of his accomplishment at 63 years of age & published a picture of him with his Navy hat & law books in our West Roxbury dining room with John & me.Father Kenealy had asked the Boston Globe to feature Jack. Jack passed the Massachusetts Bar examination on the first try, even though a majority failed to pass,& "there was weeping at the Bar".He then applied for Northeastern University's night classes at the law school to earn a l953 Master's degree, writing a tax thesis he typed himself & taking course in Taxation, Admiralty, Massachusetts Practice, International Law (using the Louis Sohn "World Law" textbook). He took a tax course with Massachusetts Tax Commissioner Henry Long, a colorful & outspoken thirty-year veteran originally appointed by governor Calvin Coolidge around l9l9- & arranged for John to interview the Commissioner in l952 for Albert Kelsey's English course,which required students to record conversations in the style of James Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson" (l788). Professor Gardner gave the Admiralty course. I [Sophie] read Catherine Drinker Bowen's biography of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes junior and was amused by his wife Fanny's remark that Washington D.C. is full of eminent old men and the women they married when they were young. Jack's books included Clark and Marshall on Crimes, Salmond on Jurisprudence, Erwin Griswold's Taxation text, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr "The Common Law" James Casner and Barton Leach Property text, Warren Seavey Restatement of Agency. Samuel Williston "Restatement of Contracts", Mottla in Massachsetts Practice series. Jack liked to quote Holmes's definition of an 'act' as a 'voluntary muscular contraction' and his remark, "I used to think when I was a young man that TRUTH was the majority vote of that nation which could like all others." At a time when Holmes's ideas were in great vogue, Jack had reservations about the positivistic side of Holmes's thinking, although he read him carefully. In Father Kenealy's Jurisprudence course, they compared the views of several natural law theorists, including Lon Fuller and Jacques Maritain, who wrote "The American Philosophy of Law" and whose words Jack often quoted, "The Lord always gives light enough for one more step. Don't stop walking until the light gives out." In l948 Jack,John & I were crossing Linnet Street on Bellevue Street in West Roxbury,when an elderly lady emerged from a house at l65 Bellevue Stree.Struck by the color of her Alice-blue big felt hat, I smiled at her as we approached -I remarked "Your blue hat brightens up this dark afternoon."She was carrying a cane, & when I noticed that she had letters to mail,I offered to mail them for her to save her from crossing Linnet Street.She accepted, & as John went to the mailbox, she Jack & I chatted as we waited for him.We told Mrs. Gertrude Cutter that we were comparatively new in the neighborhood & that the Reverend Harold Arnold lived right across the street from us on Emmonsdale Road.She told us that he was the retired minister of her Unitarian Church at the corner of Corey & Centre Streets l50 & a distant cousin of James Arnold for whom the Arnold Arboretum was named. When we were out walking Christmas afternoon,we impulsively rang Mrs. Cutter's bell, as John wanted to talk with her,& it was calling-hour.She greeted us graciously,& for the next half-hour we were treated to an account of the very old houses on Centre Street between Richwood & Corey.A few of them were being demolished to make room for a supermarket-to Mrs. Cutter's regret.She invited us to call on her very often.She told us that Mr. Cary Potter of Roxbury Latin was the grandson of Bishop Potter. She & John enjoyed many games of backgammon through the years . Often after playing with her he came home with a can of peanuts.Each Christmas she sent John a calendar from the Museum of Fine Arts.Often about noon she would telephone me to call on her about three in the afternoon.She was hard of hearing but amazingly adept at lip reading if you looked right at her as you talked.She liked to tell about her mother-in-law "Madam Cutter" whom she considered an outstanding woman.One afternoon she told me about her father-in-law's experience in job hunting: one day - as he was on his way from Winchester where he lived to Harvard college to see President Charles Eliot to inquire whether he was to be appointed Librarian of Harvard College, President Eliot was on his way to the Cutter home in Winchester to offer him the job.When Mr.Cutter learned that President Eliot was not in his office, he went to the Boston Athenaeum & accepted the job as librarian there & developed that famous library for many years 151 His Cutter library classification was the forerunner of the Library of Congress system.As a young woman Miss Gertrude Cross took a job as an art teacher in the Winchester school and declared,"l'll never marry a man from Winchester", but she married Madam Cutter's second son Roland, an MIT graduate & an engineer for the city of Boston.Madame Cutter's first son was named Ammi, as the first son in every Cutter family for some generations is named.Mrs. Cutter's nephew Ammi is a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (l97l).One of their family friends was founder of the Windsor school for girls.When the author of a widely used book on geometry was revising his work,he showed the new illustrations to Gertrude,the young art teacher.She examined the drawings & said,"I could do better myself." She was stunned when the author said,"All right. You are hired.You make the illustrations for the book.I'll pay you anything you ask & give you an unlimited expense account." He told her to take all the time she needed to make the illustrations, so important in math work.She regretted her rash statement but took on the job.He accepted all of her illustrations & acknowledged her work in the introduction to the new edition. Jack had the book- a well-worn copy `-& that acknowedgement appeared in the mathematics text he had used at Revenue Cutter School in l909.He immediately telephoned Mrs Cutter, who was pleased the future Coast Guard officers had benefited from her work.Mrs.Cutter had an arthritic back for which she had a brace called "Gracey Bracey"She was rationed as to daily trips up & down stairs. A friend designed an ingenious thirty-inch long wooded scissors that she used to pick up papers or small books from the floor.In l955 Mrs. Cutter moved to a nursing home on Alfreton Road,Needham and gave us a large collection of books Jack picked out -a complete set of Charles Dickens, several Trollope novels -"Barchester Towers" and "The Warden," - and Pagan & Christian Rome.There is even a history of the Cutter family.When she had back troubles, her motto was "Cooperate with calamity." She lived to age 83 - l874 to March l958. She knew the Codman family,who were Brook Farmers 1843 & preserved an l846 engraving of the Brook Farm site, which was given to West roxbury historical Society & has proved useful to archaeologists interested in tracing positions of the buildings - some of which have been moved from their foundations & later destroyed by fire.There are very few extant pictures of Brook Farm from l84l-46, the era of the social experiment. The engraving also clarifies what areas have been flooded or filled. |
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#334 p. 42 possible further enlargement? temporary entry nbk 8 -23 Dear John. Bob was leaving for Brussels when your letter arrived. After our reading it he took it with him as there was no time for him to do so here. Wish you had played the piano oftener when you were here. You have talent. We enjoyed your visit. I remember little of my early years. Never heard my father or mother say anything about --- but records must be right. Was there a primary piublic school in or near {Eighth?{] St I spent first two years there then walkied a long distance to parochial school two years. Sensitive about my age 1894. Then we moved to Buffalo 1903. Was there a record of a Thomas Buckley? I had a baby brother who died at sixteen months and ws buried in Milford 1902. my mother was inconsolable. Her brother my uncle Tom wa Howe sent for us. My father was a granite cutter here. I showed you horse trough he carved. Melrose is familiar . Probably Katie Buckley lived there. No one ever stayed over night with us as far as I can remember. Best wishes to your mother. Bob's address is 178Avenue Louise, 1050 Brussels, Belg Richard + Helen Buckley Seemed I walkedd one or two blocks to school in second grade. nbk8-p9 N 9, 1971 Dear John The Address is O Mahony The Lake Castle Lack, Bandon, county Cork Ireland. Your very welcome letter arrived safe, and we hope your mother and you are keeping well as we are here. Jack is very much better. He had to call to the doctor so he is taking tablets and must take them for at least five weeks. S F is home since Fri and is in fair form. Fr O Neill is also home and is very well. He has got a very nice car. Don't bother writing ton the Bishop as he may not at tue like to have antything done for the priests. I called to the old people with Ella Collins. julia Mehigan is in great from up and moving around. She had her glasses. She loved the two pictures you sent me to take her she has kept them in her bag- the lady in the picture looks like her sister - maggie she is called and she went to American in her early life. She did not say much about the man but will try to find out more about her own family. I also found P Grainger. She is a sister to the nun that was in the convent with Aunt Ellie Sister Peter She is ot bery sure but she thinks her grandmother was Buckley. to call to her very soon.She also say she will come to Moskeigh in the summer. It was a great surprise to her when I told her who I was.+ enlargement Sophie Mereanski & Jack Barrett in garden 1966 West Roxbury #333 p 42 + . . NEW YORK chapter September 1939 to June 1941 and departure for Hawaii about July 10, 1941. [follows TRINITY chapter] We had a three week visit in South Boston with Jack's eighty-four year old father and his sister Mollie in very hot August weather._ p. 259 Notebook Four New York--Plagued by the heat and fatigue, Jack reported to Captain Baggaley at the Naval Hydrographic Office, then in New York Customs House, and found a temporary furnished aprtment for himself in Brooklyn. We remained at 640 East Seventh Street {South Boston] as the guests of Grandpa and Aunt Mollie, who did all they could for our comfort that stifling hot summer. Mollie even brought down from the attic some of the kindergarten supplies used by Catherine Miley Barrett in her teaching days. [Catherine married Bill Barrett in 1923, died of cancer February 1931 while we were in Tientsin.]= Finally with the help of his Fordham Law School friend John Papp, Jack found an unfurnished apartment at 9615 Shore Road in Brooklyn,-Apartment 2A on the second floor - arranged the furniture which had arrived from storage in San Diego,-found a garage where he left his car,came to Boston for us, - and Jack, John and I traveled by train to the Grand Central Station, then took a taxi to the apartment in Brooklyn. John loved that apartment and vicinity. His crib was in our bedroom, but John had his own play room, and had his father with him every evening and weekend.The play room faced on New York Harbor- we could see the ships coming and going in and out of New York. Jack raised and photographed flowers in pots in the room- flowers that John liked very much, - amaryllis, ranunculus, tuberous begonias, anemones and other ptten plants. Jack had no luck with freesias. He used three toothpicks in a triangle to suspend the stones from avocadoes over water in glass milk bottles, and the avocadoes would sprout several feet with big leaves. There was a large Chinese ancient kassu rug on the play room floor, - building blocks, Tinkertoys,a small and a large rocking chair, and a blackboard on the wall. There was also a solidly built writing table, on which Jack had cut off the legs to make the writing surface about two feet from the floor, and a small straight chair to fit the table. The room had many child's books including a Koala book from Australia- all the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit series books - Uncle Bill's gift of French Becassine books he purchased in Europe on his 1938 honeymoon- - "he Little Engine That Could" and many paper books about animals. One book about a dog and a cat "Sniffy and Mitzi" provided a name for a favorite toy cat, Mitzi. I used to read to John by the hour, pointing to the words as I -p. 260- read, and by the time John was three and a half years old, I was amazed to find that he could read although I had made no effort to teach him. As a matter of fact I thought he was correcting me from memory, until he actually read something to me =Not long after Billy Barrett was born August 26, 1939, Bill & Virginia had trouble getting help & were glad to get Miss Caffey's name from Jack as a nurse for Billy.She was working for them in Darien Connecticut when we visited them at suppertime one day in October l939.Since Virginia expected us early in the afternoon & didn't expect us to have dinner there, I am afraid we ate Miss Caffey's hamburger- but she was most gracious & happy to see John again.If she happens to read this, I hope she'll send her address.In l940 Bill called up to give me my first news of Jack's promotion to Commander.He also had been the first one to read the news when Jack made Lieutenant Commander early in l932.At Thanksgiving we drove to Overbrook Pennsylvania near Philadelphia to see my sister Bee. Sam Pollack worked for LaRoux liquers making cordials, & their two children Jason & Thalia were somewhat older than John.Jen & Pete Meranski drove up from Baltimore for a fine Thanksgiving dinner. we met the Pollacks at Atlantic City New Jersey in 1940, where Jack said John dog-paddled without instruction and was ready to "head for Europe." Members of my family visited us many times in Brooklyn, especially my brother Harry's wife's sister Marion Taylor, who was then a nurse in Brooklyn at Greenpoint hospital. My sister-in-law Ethyle Meranski and her son Ted and daughter Carol Jane were among the visitors, and my sister Esther, and several times we saw my sister Bertha Pollack and her children Jason and Thalia. Sometimes we took guests to Jones Beach on Long Island, where once Jack Barrett had to take a deep breath before being rolled around the beach under a ten-foot high breaking ocean wave.Jones Beach was much cleaner and less crowded than Coney Island where we went once or twice.It did have high waves, however, and rather cold water.Sometimes we would take guests to New York World's Fair at Flushing,where Jack photographed the Perisphere and Trilon. Visitors to West Roxbury in 1950s admired the light and dark contrasts in Jack's nighttime photo of the illuminated Perisphere, where Worlds Fair visitors watched movies inside. John was quite interested in the snow in the back courtyard at 96l5 Shore Road after the mild winter the year before in the San Diego area.The paved courtyard used to have curious little whirlwinds producedby the shape of the building- his father would point them out& talk about low pressure systems.Jack explained the terms "transparent, translucent, opaque" as we has a translucent frosted bathroom window. There was a small patch of poison ivy on our back fence downstairs, & Jack would tell how his father once in autumn met some tourists who ignored his advice & collected bright-red bunches of three-leaved poison ivy, with a little stem on the middle leaf. Both Christmases at Brooklyn l939-40 we devoted considerable energy to decorating small Christmas trees.One year there was a considerable problem with a leak in a tub of water that was used to prevent the tree from drying out. We have photos from both Christmases, & Joan Rooney age five from downstairs appears in the l940 Christmas photos.We still have l970 much of the Chinese furniture which appears in pictures in the Brooklyn apartment.Jack fashioned clothesline swings on the roof for John. After dinner every evening John enjoyed a very leisurely bath, playing with a transparent plastic ball which contained a few toy fish, - and with a large red, celluloid fish.Then his father put on his own pajamas, and John wore his,and the two of them would study the stars at the bedroom window, which faced Shore Road and the Ocean [the Narrows]. There was a large Wrigley chewing gum sign in the distance west, and John and Jack used to say that Venus might get stuck in the chewing gum.John continued his interest in astronomy.-My 1927-1930 landlady social worker Ann Taylor McCormack, , Helen Miller of the Commonwealth Fund, Chester Swanner from the Lighthouse Service 1912 The stores in Brooklyn on Third, Fourth & Fifth Streets were about five blocks walk up 97th Street from Shore Road.This was also the route to the subway Jack rode to work at the Custom House tower.There was a good meat market on Third Avenue where we bought rib roasts & chopped sirloin.We soon made the acquaintance of the George Rooney family on the first floor & became very good friends.For recreation we would walk to Fort Hamilton, drive to Prospect Park or Owls Head park to see the squirrels.Later on we made more ambitious trips to Jones Beach, Coney Island,& the l939-40 World's Fair at Flushing. After dinner every evening John enjoyed a very leisurely bath, playing with a transparent plastic ball which contained a few toy fish, - and with a large red, celluloid fish.Then his father put on his own pajamas, and John wore his,and the two of them would study the stars at the bedroom window, which faced Shore Road and the Ocean [the Narrows]. There was a large Wrigley chewing gum sign in the distance west, and John and Jack used to say that Venus might get stuck in the chewing gum.John continued his interest in astronomy.-My 1927-1930 landlady social worker Ann Taylor McCormack, , Helen Miller of the Commonwealth Fund, Chester Swanner from the Lighthouse Service 1912 InFebruary l940 there was a spectacular display of the five planets Mercury,Venus,Mars,Jupiter & Saturn all visible shortly after sunset in the western sky over theNarrows, where there was a big red illuminated Wrigley's chewing gum advertising neon sign.We used to say we hoped Venus would'tget stuck in the chewing gum.Sometimes whenJack was tired he would say he "wouldn't go across the street to see the Statue of Liberty do a dance."We began to accumulate the Beatrix Potter series of illustatrated books Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny,the Flopsy Bunnies, Mrs. Tittlemouse, the Tailor of Gloucester,Timmy Tiptoes, Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, Tom Kitten, the Roly-Poly Pudding, Jeremy Fisher, the Two Bad Mice, Johnny Townmouse, and the rest.Jack began to invent his own sequels to these stories.A little child's story Not long before we left New York, we spent an afternoon visiting Virginia, Bill, and Billy in Darien, where our former nursemaid Miss Blanche Caffey from Norfolk was helping look after young Billy.John, Jack, and Billy went swimming at the Darien Country Club. Jack took a photo of five year old John kneeling on the grass next to his twenty-month-old cousin Billy. We had it in our West Roxbury bedroom in 1950s and 1960s. |
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Sophie's youngest brother "Izzy" or "Pete" served in Army l942-l946 Georgia and France.He located his nephew Arthur Meranski in France in late l944 at a time when Arthur's mother Sade (Sarah) Taylor Meranski had had no news of him for some time.Pete married Jeanette Goldberg in Baltimore June 9, l929 after his fiance and her parents assisted him at University of Maryland Medical School. He met his future wife his first year at medical school in Baltimore. His sister Sophie made a number of visits to Baltimore, meeting the Goldberg family, as did her father David Meranski. Sophie attended Pete and Jen's wedding in Baltimore June 9, l929, and on their honeymoon they attended Rebkah Meranski's wedding to Dr. Isadore Getter the following Sunday June 16, l929 at the "Shack" with Rabbi Silverman near the Farmington River CT- where Jack Barrett and Sophie were present. Then Pete and en were guests of Jack Barrett Thursday night June 20 for roast Long Island duck, a specialty at Longchamps Restaurant, New York- the night before Jack married Sophie and left for duty in Philippines and China.Pete became a pediatrician.His daughter Deborah born l935 deaf received exceptiojnal education, lip reading, pronouncing, learning to drive automobuile, did Ph.D. on handicapped access in Art Museums after graduiating from Gallaudet University D>C. l957 and teaching art history.Her mothert played major roel. in her early education, and then Debbie learned American sign language, which has become the preferred medium of expression asmong the deaf in recent years. |
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enlargement. His son Daniel was born 1951 and became clinical psychologist primarily with children and teenagers. Danny and wife Karen had one daughter Diane Meranski born l983 Baltimore.In May 1988 Arthur and Betty Meranski and John Barrett junior had lunch with Mrs. Jen Meranski and Deborah Meranski Sonnenstrahl near Jen's apartment at Warren Park Drive Baltimore after John Barrett attended Amy Meranski's graduation from Havre de Grace High School.Deborah Sonnensnstrahl has lectured on Goya and other deaf artists and in l998 is completing a book on Deaf American Artists. She is also a sales representative for USANA Nutritional products and Emeritus in Art History at Gallaudet University Washington D.C.where she was chair of art department.She helped developed captioned TV in sign language for the hearing-impaired.Her daughter Beth Sonnenstrahl Benedict mother of two is a counselor and dean at Gallaudet,married to Dwight Benedict, who is in the Deaf Sports program.Debbie's son Sam Sonnenstrahl is in computer programming, married with two children also. |
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