Happy Birthday Jack!
You turning10 today brought back a flood of memories, including what life was like when I was your age. Climb into the way-back time machine to get a glimpse of my life in 1963 and 1964. Here’s part one.
I was born September 21, 1953 in Rochester, NH but grew up in Somersworth, NH. Here’s a photo of my parents, Rita and Donald. This photo was taken the day they were married (in Berlin, NH) in 1951. My Mom grew up in Berlin and my Dad in Somersworth.
After living in Peabody, MA and some apartments in Somersworth, my parents bought a house at the end of a dead-end street called “Lord’s Court,” close to downtown, but still off the beaten path. Somersworth was (and still is, now more than ever) a bare bones blue collar town where it would be hard, maybe impossible, to find one pretty scene to photograph. It was a meat and potatoes place … simple, unassuming, nothing special, and yet my entire universe.
We lived in a duplex, rented out the upstairs and kept the first floor and basement for ourselves. It was a basic house: two bedrooms, a kitchen, small living room and one bathroom. My sister had the biggest bedroom but mine was a hallway between the kitchen and my parent’s bedroom, with barely enough room for a single bed and built in desk. My parents had to walk through my “bedroom” to get to theirs. Privacy? Ha! That was something I didn’t have growing up. My bedroom was a hallway. I finally got my own room when my parents built a new house, but that was 1974 and I was 20. I only lived there one year, then got married.
My elementary school was called “Academie St. Martin” and Catholic. Every kid was white and most, like me, were from French Canadian descent. We never had a Hispanic, African American, Latino or Indian student in our school over eight years. Heck, there probably wasn’t one in the entire city of 10,000.
This is what my school looked like. Behind it is the church where I did my altar boy thing.
My house was about a half mile to school; I walked there every day, in good weather and bad. My favorite subjects were reading and history. I struggled with math. Religion was a mystery and a bore. I don’t remember learning much about science or the arts. In those days they taught the basics, “the three R’s,” as they used to say, Readin’, Ritin’ & Rithmetic.
Religion was the big thing; we were taught by nuns, who we called “crows,” because of their black and white outfits. Most of them were crazy scary to me and my classmates. A few of them were nice, but many couldn’t speak English well (they came from the Quebec region of Canada) and a few were downright mean. They would resort to mild physical violence, pulling cheeks, slapping wrists with metal rulers and screaming when kids got out of line.
Grammy went to a different school where there also were nuns; she remembers one nun telling a kid who had misbehaved to go under her desk. He should have run away – but he did what he was told. The nun spent most of the class kicking him under the desk.
The worst nun I ever had was “Big Bertha.” I was terrified of her. When Big Bertha got angry her face turned beet red and eyes bulged out. Sometimes she’d verbally explode, pushing the words out so fast and hard the spit would fly on my wooden desktop. Look out! I was scared to death and that no doubt contributed to my good grades.
This is what the Sisters of the Holy Cross (the nuns who taught me) looked like. Scary huh? They spoke french, stuffed handkerchiefs up their sleeves and had no use for small talk or making any kid feel better about anything.
I was an altar boy at church. My job was to help the priest as he said “mass,” which is a celebration of Jesus Christ with prayers and preaching. Catholics went to mass at the big old church off Green Street called St. Martin’s. The priest said the mass in Latin, not English, so I never knew what was being said. MEA CULPA! Some of the things I had to do included giving the priest oil and wine, ringing the bell and holding the cross. Before mass, I had to light the incense charcoal with a match, but they were tiny paper matches and I often burned the tips of my fingers. I hated that. Once the priest added incense to the charcoal, all kinds of smoke would come out and it would stink-up the church!
You’ve heard of Boy Scouts, right? Well, I was active from an early age, progressing from Cub Scout to Scout to Explorer. I eventually became a Life Scout which is the second highest achievement level below Eagle Scout. I went on overnight camping expeditions, participated in winter “Klondike Derbies,” and earned new merit badges. Every summer I went to a week-long Boy Scout summer camp in Manchester, NH called Camp Carpenter. My biggest achievement was swimming one mile in an open lake and learning how to light a fire with a flint stone.
I was fairly popular at your age, confident and fearless (this changed as I got a little older). Every day at morning recess, a bunch of us boys would go in the empty car garages behind the school and have boxing matches, usually me against Maurice Houde. Despite being smaller than “Moe,” I’d beat him every time. I took no mercy. We’d always have one or two kids watching out for the nuns to give us a heads up in case they came our way.
I loved boxing because my Dad loved boxing. In those days, it was a popular sport on TV. Sonny Liston was the heavyweight champion of the world in 1963 and 1964, followed by Cassius Clay who became Mohammad Ali, the most famous of them all. I remember staying up late watching boxing matches with him. My Dad bought me gold gloves at a young age (see photo), and one time I gave him a bloody nose. My Dad couldn’t stand the sight of blood, so he passed out. Ding, Ding, Ding, Knock-Out! I thought I was awesome, a tough guy, but really was just a skinny kid with a big head, big ears and a dose of spunk. Here’s a photo my Dad took of me :
My parents both worked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard so I had to go to my grandmother’s after school. Later on, we had babysitters. I hated going to the babysitter in the summer because they never paid any attention to me and generally weren’t friendly.
One summer we got lucky and had a young, fun babysitter who stayed with us at our house; my sister and I liked her a lot. Unfortunately, she didn’t keep the job long. She filled a metal bucket with water and spun it around and around her head in big loops to demonstrate how water will stay in a bucket through all the motion. My sister Fran and I watched in awe for awhile, but her arms got tired and the bucket – and water – landed on her head! It was hilarious! When my parents found out, they fired her.
I loved to ride my red Schwinn bike (with red and white handlebar streamers, a rear metal basket and baseball cards making cool sounds in the wheel spokes). Ditto for my blue metal scooter which I pushed up and down the steep hills of Somersworth which is nicknamed “the Hilltop City.”
I’d fly on that bike and scooter… going straight down the steepest hills in town. It was amazing I never got hurt. In those days no one wore a helmet. This is what it looked like:
A favorite haunt was “the Pines,” our town’s biggest park and recreation area. I’d play with friends on the swings, cross the monkey bars and hit wiffle balls against the giant water tower. Hitting the ball up at the bottom first row was a single, second row a double, third row a triple, etc.
Highland Street, right off Lord Court, was one of the steepest hills in Somersworth. At the top, it connected with Grand Street which led directly to the Pines. For 10 years or so, I walked or rode by 31 Grand Street, never meeting, noticing or bumping into a girl who lived there: Karen St. Laurent. I finally met her in 1969, in high school. She became my wife in 1975. And your Grammy.
My parents had no idea where I was most of the time, as it was for most kids in 1963 and 1964. America was a safer place back then, and parents didn’t worry as much. It was common for kids (during the summer or on a day off) to leave in the morning after breakfast, come back for lunch and not be seen again until suppertime.
One year I went trick or treating – with a pillow case for candy – walking miles around Somersworth at night with my Mom and Dad at home. By comparison, when your Mom was the same age, Grammy and I only let her (and Uncle Tim) ride his bike on the street where we lived (Laurel Lane, Somersworth). The world had changed that much in a couple decades.
Speaking of suppertime, we always ate at home. The bad news is that my Mom wasn’t a very good cook! She’d serve us all kinds of yucky food from dried out lima beans to disgusting blood sausage to smelly turnip. Once in awhile she’d make a pea soup, which was horrible. Sometimes I’d try to hide my food, like under my mashed potatoes. If I was bad, they’d make me kneel in the corner by the stove. It was better than eating blood sausage which tasted even worse than it looked:
I don’t remember our family ever getting takeout, not even a sub or pizza. I was in High School the first time I ate at Villa Pizza in downtown Somersworth; that pizza tasted like heaven. My parents went out to dinner once in awhile, but they never brought us. My Dad would bring a packet of sugar home from each restaurant they visited. Big deal! That always made me a little angry. Later on, when I was older and was dating Grammy, her Mom and Dad took us all kinds of places and always picked up the tab. I gained 30 pounds between high school and college and couldn’t believe my good fortune. I’d eat two giant cheeseburgers and drink chocolate frappes for dinner, then have a tuna sub as a snack three hours later.
My Dad used to own his own photography business – BEAU STUDIO – in the 1950’s (before I was born) on High Street. He had a dark room in the basement of our Lord Street house where he’d “develop” the photographs he took. In those days cameras all used film – there was no such thing as digital anything. It was my job to swish the blank photo paper (containing invisible images) in a special chemical bath in a sink until the images revealed themselves. It was a magical thing; one minute I was staring at a blank sheet of paper… the next minute, a picture slowly started to appear. That’s where my interest in photography began.
One of the weird fads that swept America in 1963 was the Troll doll. My sister and I both had trolls – they came with different outfits and hair color. They were ugly, but cute at the same time. Millions were sold:
I fell in love with music when I was 10, buying my first record in a little store called Kinsman’s on High Street. My sister Fran was with me. We’d walk down to Kinsman’s together, buy penny candy and look through a box of 45 rpm records. “45’s” were pressed on black vinyl and were 7 inches in diameter. There was one song on each side – Side A was always the hit, Side B was an extra song. Every once in a great while a Side B song became a surprise hit.
My first record was “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie Small. It became the first reggae hit in America, but in those days I had never heard of reggae. My sister bought “Chapel of Love” by the Dixie Cups. The singles were called 45 rpm records; the hit was on Side A; fIip it over and there was “the B Side” – an album cut that generally wasn’t a hit. Sometimes the B Side surprised everyone and became a bigger hit. I still have boxes of those records. My Boy Lollipop climbed to #2 on the Billboard charts and Chapel of Love made it to #1.
I owned a little transistor radio, and listened to rock and roll music on radio stations like WRKO in Boston. FM hadn’t been invented yet, so we listened to AM radio which sounded scratchy and came in lousy most of the time, especially during a storm. Sometimes I’d put it under my pilllow at night so I could hear the DJ’s talk and play songs. My transistor radio looked something like this without the plastic wrap:
My favorite song in 1963 was an instrumental hit called “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris. I used to play the drum beat made famous in that song with my fingers on the side of a desk. I still do that from time to time!
in February 1964, the Beatles came to America for the first time and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. “Beatlemania” swept our country and all the kids went crazy for John, Paul, George and Ringo. My sister and I loved them, collected their bubblegum cards and endlessly played their 45’s. They were called “the mop tops” because of their long hair – nearly every man and boy in America at that time had crew cuts. Many parents hated them, including mine, because they were so different and “dangerous.” The Beatles changed music forever, rocked my world, and remain my favorite musical act.
Music became an important part of my life from those days forward. I couldn’t get enough of it, and still can’t! I continue to buy music, listen to it daily and still go to rock and roll concerts every year. I’ve seen nearly 200. It would be fun to bring you to one someday.
Grammy and I brought your Mom to a lot concerts, starting when she was about your age. Her first concert was Debbie Gibson, a popular solo artist of the 1980’s. We saw her in Portland, Maine in 1989. Your Mom’s favorite friend – Jen Bertoulin – came along and they both dressed up like Debbie Gibson. They were VERY excited. A lot of people thought they were twins ( on many different occasions, including the Debbie Gibson experience).
When she was in high school, we saw a lot of concerts together. This was during the 1990’s, the last great decade of rock and roll. It was the time of “grunge,” with groups like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Live, Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters and Green Day.
Okay, back to when I was 10 years old…
Like you, I was a reader and tackled several books a month. At school, we got paper flyers every month selling paperback books – similar to what you and your sisters get at your schools. My parents let me buy a few – hooray! Picking new books was always a highlight, like having Christmas nine months a year. My favorite book was:
My Dad built a small log cabin for me. It fit about four kids and had split logs on the outside and a brown blanket for a front door. I had fun with that log cabin because of my passion for cowboys, indians, soldiers and pioneers , and an active imagination. I loved the French & Indian War, the American Revolution and Civil War. I’d take my hundreds of little toy “men” and spend hours staging battles.
One of my buddies was Paul Martin, a cousin of mine who lived two hills over on Mt. Vernon Street in the same house my Grandmother lived in (she owned it). When I got a bit older (12, maybe 13), I gave my entire collection of toy men to him, except for one hand painted Indian with a tomahawk. I kept that figurine on my bookshelf until two years ago when I brought him to my cousin in Philadelphia, completing the cycle of a full and complete gift. He died earlier this year at the age of 57, so sad.
My favorite war story was The Alamo where Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie fought to their death battling Mexicans in San Antonio, Texas. I finally got to see the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas a few years ago; it was a lifelong “bucket list” goal of mine. Here’s one of the photos I took:
We had a graveyard right next to our house – it was the oldest cemetery in Somersworth, always scary at night. There were chestnut trees in that old graveyard, and in the fall, when the nuts fell from the trees – encased in a hard green shell with prickly spines – we’d have chestnut battles in the cemetery with other kids, throwing them at each other or launching them from slingshots carved from branches. It hurt if you got hit!
(end part one)
