In the summer of 1939 my parents took me to Woods Hole
They sat me cross legged in my dad's bicycle basket.
We spent some time at the beach, and my mother remarked that I learned to lie in the water and kick my legs. But that they could no longer leave me on the beach and go out to swim together because I would follow them right out into the deep water
On Nobska beach, both men and women had to wear tops to their bathing suits
My parents left me with a sitter and they took a trip to Martha's Vinyard on the ferry with friends from Yale, Millie and Ed Boell
My dad was fond of a kind of hat called a :"Cape Codder" which had an extra long bill.
Christmas 1939 with my grandparents in Philadelphia
Then June 5, 1940 my little sister was born
In 1940 our father applied for a sabbatical year (with half salary), so in the summer - after Barbara was born, we moved to New Haven CT for him to study at Yale with L. C. Strong. I don’t remember this move as I was only 2.5 years old.
My mother had told me that not only did she have a new baby and a toddler, but her father gave her a boxer dog puppy which had the mange and had to be treated several times a day. My mother also told me that she had hired a girl named Lorraine to help with us and the housework.
This is from what our mother dictated to Barbara - “Daddy got a Rockefeller fellowship, and we were to go to Denmark to study under August Krogh. But the war came along, and we couldn’t go to Europe. So he decided to go to Yale.
“Daddy had to go to New Haven on his own and look for a house. He found a house. They didn’t want to rent to him for a year but Yale came to his rescue. We lived at 81 Main Street in West Haven, near the corner where he got the bus to go to the university. It was a nice house, a wonderful house, but he had to buy a stove. Up there, stoves were not part of a house’s equipment. So he bought an electric stove. We had the furniture from our one-bedroom apartment. We had Greyhound as the movers. Mother came down to help me move. Barbara was probably two months old. The movers had to put the handhewn chair with the rush bottom on the back of the truck, not in the truck, because it took as much space, they said, as a chest of drawers. It arrived OK but one piece of a coffee service made of pewter, a wedding present from the Hess family in Millbourne was mashed, so they took it and had it fixed but they polished it so it looked like silver and didn’t match the rest of the set. Daddy drove up and got the furniture stuff unloaded. I went up on the train with Rosalie Ann and Barbara, as a nursing baby.
“It was a wonderful house. It was our first whole single house. It had a nice entrance hall, nice sized living room, dining room, and a wonderful kitchen. The cupboards below the counter space were the kind that when you opened the door the shelves would come out automatically, and one of the shelves went around and around. It was heated by hot air, which was new to me, and Daddy found, in the cellar, that the previous occupant had stuffed a wicker rocker in a sort of a tunnel that had to do with the hot air system, and we used the rocker.
“It wasn’t a cellar you used as a cellar, because the laundry was between the kitchen and the sunporch. In the laundry was a dryer and washer and laundry tubs. That’s where I kept the potty chair to train Rosalie Ann on. The living room had a fireplace, and you could go into the sunporch from there, which had windows on three sides, the length of the living room on one end.
Rosalie Ann playing in the sandbox with Lorraine, New Haven May 1941
“I was happy enough not to have rugs, but I had to have curtains. I had to make curtains for that BIG sunporch by hand.
“At the top of the stairs was our bedroom, and next to it the room we had a crib in, and next to that the room we had Rosalie Ann in.
“Several rooms we didn’t have anything in. And they were nice size rooms. There were large closets and you could walk through the closets to the next room. There were two bathrooms. One of them, I used to bathe Barbara in the sink. She had long dark brown hair like a Chinaman’s queue down her back. Finally mother persuaded me to cut it off. It was very hard to give her a bath in that sink because she was very wiggly and didn’t like having her hair washed, and so I had trouble with cradle cap.
“Various rooms had the hot air grating in the floor. In the laundry was a grating and I had a clothes horse dryer that I opened up over it.
“The back yard was very nice. It had a tree that we could put a swing on for Rosalie Ann. It had a garage. It was just one step out the back door to the yard, and there was a gate, so we didn’t have to worry about her going outdoors. There wasn’t much front yard.
“Before we heard about the fellowship, we had put the huge enormous sum of $10 down as a deposit on a house in Rodgers Forge. Roads were still being built, and there were mud tracks. The end houses were three stories, and we wanted that, so we would have room for a study somewhere. But there was no bathroom on the first floor. And I would be toilet training children. So I told the builders we had to have a bathroom, in the corner of the dining room. And then he heard about the fellowship. We were so worried and so upset — would we get our $10 back? It might have been a thousand.
The four of us in New Haven
Barbara was christened in New Haven and Millie and Ed Boell were her godparents
Me, Millie, Ed and Barbara
When the time came to come back, we had no place to settle. We came down, and looked and looked. We stayed with Mrs. Musser when we were looking for a house. They had a big place in Roland Park with lots of space. They put us up. I don’t know what we did with you two. We found a house at 4636 Schenley Road. We rented it, because it was the parsonage for that side of Roland Avenue for the Methodist Protestant church on the next street over. It didn’t have a married minister so the church people rented the parsonage out.
“The house was big, Victorian, with a nice front porch. It had a side door that you could use as a closet to store boots. It had a back door and a back porch and a big living room across the front. Back of that was a dining room. The living room went into the dining room on one side and the breakfast room on the other and in the middle was the stairwell. Kitchen and pantry and a nice back yard. Upstairs were four bedrooms with a bath. The fourth bedroom was a study. There was a bathroom on the first floor. It had a garage. ”
I don’t remember anything about the move, and the only thing I remember about this house is that it had a central section and I could run around in a circle from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen and then back to the living room.
RosalieAnn and Barbara in the back yard of the Schenley Road house - my dad was shifting to color film.
World War II was going on at this time and there was rationing. In particular there was gas rationing. So when my sister and I decided (she thinks it was her idea but she was only 2 and I am sure it was my idea) to run away from home, our mother - and the neighbors who were trying to help — had to use up precious gas rations. We walked north on Schenley until we reached the corner. Then since we weren’t allowed to cross the street, we turned left on Oakdale. We followed Oakdale around (this was the way we walked when we went to meet Daddy at night) until we got to the corner of Hawthorne. Here we turned left again and walked all the way down to Cold Spring Lane. I realized that if we turned left again, we’d be back home, so this was the time I chose to do the forbidden – cross the street.
Unlike the peaceful quiet streets we had been walking along, Cold Spring Lane was a big busy street. After we crossed the road, we didn’t know what else to do, so we were just standing there when we saw our mother steaming down the road on the other side of Cold Spring Lane. Uh Oh. We were in trouble.
In 1942 because of gas rationing, we went out to Colorado to visit my grandmother and my father's family on the train. Dad's brother Harry had a child about my sister's age
Granny on the porch with my sister, me and our cousin Carol Lynn
I got to ride Old Man Dieckmann's horse again. He was still riding into his 90's. But my sister refused to sit on his horse by herself
Photo taken in 1942 in Denver with our cousin who was just about the same age as Barbara
We went up Pikes Peak and tried on the Indian headdresses but it was too heavy for my sister
My Aunt Alice with two children in front of her - the little one is my cousin. We can't identify the older girl. My mom with my sister and my dad with me.
They sat me cross legged in my dad's bicycle basket.
We spent some time at the beach, and my mother remarked that I learned to lie in the water and kick my legs. But that they could no longer leave me on the beach and go out to swim together because I would follow them right out into the deep water
On Nobska beach, both men and women had to wear tops to their bathing suits
My parents left me with a sitter and they took a trip to Martha's Vinyard on the ferry with friends from Yale, Millie and Ed Boell
My dad was fond of a kind of hat called a :"Cape Codder" which had an extra long bill.
Christmas 1939 with my grandparents in Philadelphia
Then June 5, 1940 my little sister was born
In 1940 our father applied for a sabbatical year (with half salary), so in the summer - after Barbara was born, we moved to New Haven CT for him to study at Yale with L. C. Strong. I don’t remember this move as I was only 2.5 years old.
My mother had told me that not only did she have a new baby and a toddler, but her father gave her a boxer dog puppy which had the mange and had to be treated several times a day. My mother also told me that she had hired a girl named Lorraine to help with us and the housework.
This is from what our mother dictated to Barbara - “Daddy got a Rockefeller fellowship, and we were to go to Denmark to study under August Krogh. But the war came along, and we couldn’t go to Europe. So he decided to go to Yale.
“Daddy had to go to New Haven on his own and look for a house. He found a house. They didn’t want to rent to him for a year but Yale came to his rescue. We lived at 81 Main Street in West Haven, near the corner where he got the bus to go to the university. It was a nice house, a wonderful house, but he had to buy a stove. Up there, stoves were not part of a house’s equipment. So he bought an electric stove. We had the furniture from our one-bedroom apartment. We had Greyhound as the movers. Mother came down to help me move. Barbara was probably two months old. The movers had to put the handhewn chair with the rush bottom on the back of the truck, not in the truck, because it took as much space, they said, as a chest of drawers. It arrived OK but one piece of a coffee service made of pewter, a wedding present from the Hess family in Millbourne was mashed, so they took it and had it fixed but they polished it so it looked like silver and didn’t match the rest of the set. Daddy drove up and got the furniture stuff unloaded. I went up on the train with Rosalie Ann and Barbara, as a nursing baby.
“It was a wonderful house. It was our first whole single house. It had a nice entrance hall, nice sized living room, dining room, and a wonderful kitchen. The cupboards below the counter space were the kind that when you opened the door the shelves would come out automatically, and one of the shelves went around and around. It was heated by hot air, which was new to me, and Daddy found, in the cellar, that the previous occupant had stuffed a wicker rocker in a sort of a tunnel that had to do with the hot air system, and we used the rocker.
“It wasn’t a cellar you used as a cellar, because the laundry was between the kitchen and the sunporch. In the laundry was a dryer and washer and laundry tubs. That’s where I kept the potty chair to train Rosalie Ann on. The living room had a fireplace, and you could go into the sunporch from there, which had windows on three sides, the length of the living room on one end.
Rosalie Ann playing in the sandbox with Lorraine, New Haven May 1941
“I was happy enough not to have rugs, but I had to have curtains. I had to make curtains for that BIG sunporch by hand.
“At the top of the stairs was our bedroom, and next to it the room we had a crib in, and next to that the room we had Rosalie Ann in.
“Several rooms we didn’t have anything in. And they were nice size rooms. There were large closets and you could walk through the closets to the next room. There were two bathrooms. One of them, I used to bathe Barbara in the sink. She had long dark brown hair like a Chinaman’s queue down her back. Finally mother persuaded me to cut it off. It was very hard to give her a bath in that sink because she was very wiggly and didn’t like having her hair washed, and so I had trouble with cradle cap.
“Various rooms had the hot air grating in the floor. In the laundry was a grating and I had a clothes horse dryer that I opened up over it.
“The back yard was very nice. It had a tree that we could put a swing on for Rosalie Ann. It had a garage. It was just one step out the back door to the yard, and there was a gate, so we didn’t have to worry about her going outdoors. There wasn’t much front yard.
“Before we heard about the fellowship, we had put the huge enormous sum of $10 down as a deposit on a house in Rodgers Forge. Roads were still being built, and there were mud tracks. The end houses were three stories, and we wanted that, so we would have room for a study somewhere. But there was no bathroom on the first floor. And I would be toilet training children. So I told the builders we had to have a bathroom, in the corner of the dining room. And then he heard about the fellowship. We were so worried and so upset — would we get our $10 back? It might have been a thousand.
The four of us in New Haven
Barbara was christened in New Haven and Millie and Ed Boell were her godparents
Me, Millie, Ed and Barbara
When the time came to come back, we had no place to settle. We came down, and looked and looked. We stayed with Mrs. Musser when we were looking for a house. They had a big place in Roland Park with lots of space. They put us up. I don’t know what we did with you two. We found a house at 4636 Schenley Road. We rented it, because it was the parsonage for that side of Roland Avenue for the Methodist Protestant church on the next street over. It didn’t have a married minister so the church people rented the parsonage out.
“The house was big, Victorian, with a nice front porch. It had a side door that you could use as a closet to store boots. It had a back door and a back porch and a big living room across the front. Back of that was a dining room. The living room went into the dining room on one side and the breakfast room on the other and in the middle was the stairwell. Kitchen and pantry and a nice back yard. Upstairs were four bedrooms with a bath. The fourth bedroom was a study. There was a bathroom on the first floor. It had a garage. ”
I don’t remember anything about the move, and the only thing I remember about this house is that it had a central section and I could run around in a circle from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen and then back to the living room.
RosalieAnn and Barbara in the back yard of the Schenley Road house - my dad was shifting to color film.
World War II was going on at this time and there was rationing. In particular there was gas rationing. So when my sister and I decided (she thinks it was her idea but she was only 2 and I am sure it was my idea) to run away from home, our mother - and the neighbors who were trying to help — had to use up precious gas rations. We walked north on Schenley until we reached the corner. Then since we weren’t allowed to cross the street, we turned left on Oakdale. We followed Oakdale around (this was the way we walked when we went to meet Daddy at night) until we got to the corner of Hawthorne. Here we turned left again and walked all the way down to Cold Spring Lane. I realized that if we turned left again, we’d be back home, so this was the time I chose to do the forbidden – cross the street.
Unlike the peaceful quiet streets we had been walking along, Cold Spring Lane was a big busy street. After we crossed the road, we didn’t know what else to do, so we were just standing there when we saw our mother steaming down the road on the other side of Cold Spring Lane. Uh Oh. We were in trouble.
In 1942 because of gas rationing, we went out to Colorado to visit my grandmother and my father's family on the train. Dad's brother Harry had a child about my sister's age
Granny on the porch with my sister, me and our cousin Carol Lynn
I got to ride Old Man Dieckmann's horse again. He was still riding into his 90's. But my sister refused to sit on his horse by herself
Photo taken in 1942 in Denver with our cousin who was just about the same age as Barbara
We went up Pikes Peak and tried on the Indian headdresses but it was too heavy for my sister
My Aunt Alice with two children in front of her - the little one is my cousin. We can't identify the older girl. My mom with my sister and my dad with me.
- Next entry in the series 'Exploring the USA by Car': Family travel - Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in 1946
- Previous entry in the series 'Exploring the USA by Car': Second Part of 1938 -Colorado and the World's Fair
