Before Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have only one regret here, and that is that I never took any pictures of the icehouse and neither did my parents.

Our house itself was rather small. The original house had two rooms, a cellar and an attic with two rooms which became our bedrooms. The kitchen was in the cellar. It had a set tub for a sink. That was used for doing dishes and laundry and even bathing. It had a potbelly wood burning stove which was used for cooking as well as for heat during the winter months. There was a small pantry here. There was a back room where the icebox was kept. This had a dirt floor and because of this, the room stayed very damp and dingy. The kitchen had two very small windows on the barn side which allowed some outside light in but they could not be opened and a larger one on the street side. I don't think this one could be opened either.

There was a sunroom which was added to the cellar and faced the pond. My parents used this room for a dining room. They did most of their entertaining there. There was an outside door on both the front and back side of this room. In the main part of the house, were the living room, and another room on the backside which was the main entrance. I have no idea what this room was used for when my parents first moved there. There was a sun parlor which was also added sometime after the house was built. It went the full length of the house and faced the street, and it had a front outside door with a small porch. This room was originally used as a tea room by its previous owners.

I have no way on knowing whether or not the back porch was a part of the original structure. It seems to me that it was. It also went the full length of the house with the main entrance to the house in the middle of it. The roof was level with the lower part of the back window of the attic, my bedroom.

The bathroom, if you could call it a room, was to the left of the entrance. It was no wider than its door. All it had was a toilet and a very small wash basin with running cold water only. The toilet tank was above the toilet and had a pull chain for flushing. This room had a very small window over the toilet.

The other room was the sitting room. The doors to both the attic and the cellar were there. The stairs to both were very steep and narrow. To use the attic steps, one had to go up and down on tip toes or turn sideways. Luckily, in all the years we lived there, nobody in our family ever had an accident on them.

My parents had their bedroom up in the attic in the front room. It had plenty of floor space. But because of the slant in the roof, these two rooms appeared much smaller. There was a very small closet over the stairs where my mother hung blouses and kept her shoes. The only other closet in the house at this time was in the smaller bedroom, and it too was very small. These two rooms would get unbearably hot in summer, and uncomfortably cold during the winter months, since there would be very little heat getting to them. The sun parlor was originally built as a tearoom. It had many windows across the front and pond side with a front outside door, which we would never use. I don't know why, but it was eventually nailed shut. The entrance was through the back room. There was a window in the sitting room facing the street and looking into the sun parlor. The door was often kept closed during the winter months to keep the main part of the house warm and cozy.

There was also a large barn that would serve as a workshop, a garage, and later, a boathouse. It had two big doors that swung out and hooked to the front of the building when fully opened, to prevent them from blowing in the wind. When they were closed, they were secured at the top and bottom. The barn had a small door on the house side, which was kept padlocked most of the time. Just inside this small door there was a trapdoor which led to the cellar which had a dirt floor. This part of the barn was very dark and dingy, since it had no doors on it. It would later become a chicken coop and even later still a duck coop. Both of which were short lived. The upper part of the barn later served as a boat house, and also a workshop from time to time also.

The outside appearance of the house and barn did not change much over the years, but there were many improvements made to the interior of the house. There were two additions to the outside of the barn. One was when my mother got her own car, and the other was to put our boat under cover during the winter months.

The year my parents moved into their new home was anything but easy for both of them. Mother gave birth to a baby boy. They named him George William after his father and Grandfather Morgan. My dad was a junior and he hated it when his aunts and uncles would address him as Junior instead of using his first name. I don't think the baby ever made it home from the hospital. He was very ill and passed away several months later. Years later, when I would ask my mother for the details all she would tell me is that he had died as an infant. My father never mentioned the baby to me either. He would use a shaving mug with the initials G.W.S. engraved in gold lettering on it. I still have this mug tucked away amongst my family treasures.

That winter the temperature would drop to below zero for more than a week at a time. My parents spent most of their waking hours by the wood burning stove in the kitchen trying to keep warm. Most of my mother's time was spent preparing meals and doing dishes, that is until the water pipes froze

At this point, my father decided he'd had enough of living in the cellar. He knew neither of them could live this way much longer. He knew he had to do something, and quick. He told my mother to pack her heavy clothes and a blanket for the car, a model A Ford. He was taking her to spend a week with her father in Belmont while he built a new kitchen upstairs in the back room. He would put in a cooking stove and a sink, the first of many remodeling jobs the house would undergo.

The wood burning stove remained in the cellar, and the room served as my father's workshop for as long as we owned the house.

Shortly after my father completed the new kitchen, my grandfather came for a visit. He measured for new kitchen cabinets. He was in that business. He brought them the next week and together, he and my father had them up within an hour. Mother painted them. A drop-leaf table was brought up from the cellar, so now they had an eat-in kitchen in the main part of the house. Life began to show signs of improvement after a rocky start.

My father's first big construction job came in 1934, when construction of the new Sagamore Bridge began. The original bridge was built in 1912, two years prior to the opening of the Cape Cod Canal. The Federal Railroad Administration acquired the canal in 1918 after a German submarine opened fire on an American tugboat working in the area three miles off the coast of Nauset Beach, Cape Cod.

In 1928 Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to widen and deepen the Cape Cod Canal to accommodate the increased ship traffic through the canal. They were also put in charge of building the two road bridges and the railroad bridge connecting the Cape to the U.S. mainland.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed emergency legislation that authorized the Public Works Administration, (PWA) to finance and build the three bridges on September 6, 1933. Work began three months later.

My dad had read about the project in a Boston newspaper and had been following its progress for several months. Then one day in the spring of 1934 he and another young fellow decided to take a drive to the construction site to see for themselves just how far along the work had come, not knowing what to expect.

When they got out of the car, a man greeted them and asked them if they were new on the job. My dad told him he wasn't working there. The man told them if they wanted a job to come back the next morning prepared to work a ten-hour day as long as the weather held out. So this was how my dad got his first big construction job on the Sagamore Bridge.

He stayed with the project to see its completion in June of the next year. This bridge was built over the original drawbridge, which was demolished following the completion of the new one. This new bridge was a 135 foot clearance to accommodate any large ships and naval vessels, and its length was 1,408 feet from end to end. With the predicted increase of motor traffic to and from the Cape, the new bridge was built with four lanes, double that of the old one.

My dad would tell me years later, when he drove my friend Holly and me to Provincetown on a day's outing, how he dropped his lever when he was working on the bridge and he was so high up that it disappeared in thin air; he couldn't see it when it hit the water. He also told me that when the three bridges were dedicated and opened on June 22nd, 1935, he and my mother were on hand for the ceremony. He just had to be one of the first to make the round trip on both the Sagamore and the Bourne bridges. They are only one and a half miles apart along the canal.