Some Stories

Beatrice Nash Horowitz

Description

Memoir of a girl’s mid twentieth century New England childhood
Every family is unique. Loyal and Katherine Nash raised their four children to be honest, fair, and proud of their origins. Born during a Vermont blizzard, Beatrice was welcomed by her older brothers and nine cows. But as would happen several times in her childhood, her family soon moved, packing up and heading for the Northwest.
In a fascinating memoir accompanied by original photographs, Beatrice chronicles her childhood from birth through her varied experiences as her family eventually traveled from the Northwest to an isolated farm in Maine shortly after the Second World War. As she details how she contended with her older brothers and explored as far as her curiosity and legs would take her, Beatrice shares a glimpse into her coming-of-age journey as she played heated games of cowboys and Indians, ran through the sprinkler, built imaginary cities in the hay, and knelt in school bathroom stalls to protect herself from the Communists. But it was not until she turned thirteen and enrolled in boarding school that Beatrice finally saw a world beyond that of her parents’ dreams.
Some Stories is the memoir of a girl’s mid-twentieth century New England childhood as she learned lessons, found happiness in the simple gifts, and ultimately attained independence.

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Biography
• Lettres et linguistique
• Historical

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 14 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663246455
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Some Stories

Early Memories and Family Tales





Beatrice Nash Horowitz












SOME STORIES
EARLY MEMORIES AND FAMILY TALES

Copyright © 2022 Beatrice Nash Horowitz.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.






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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4644-8 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4645-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022918613



iUniverse rev. date: 11/07/2022



CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1943 - 1948
Chapter 1 Beginnings
Chapter 2 Life in Portland
Chapter 3 Were We Happy?
Chapter 4 Portland Doesn’t Last
1948 -1955
Chapter 5 Country Living
Chapter 6 Brothers
Chapter 7 Three Squares a Day
Chapter 8 Why Lake Forest was Important to Us
Chapter 9 School Begins in 1949
Chapter 10 The World Outside
Chapter 11 My Outside World
Chapter 12 Change is Coming
Chapter 13 The Big Trip
Chapter 14 The Big Move
1956 And Onward
Chapter 15 Moving On
Chapter 16 Junior High Lasts One Year
Chapter 17 It Begins
Chapter 18 It Is This
Chapter 19 It Moves On
Chapter 20 Mom

Addendum /Extras



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to my readers, Bonnie, Cheryl, Judy, Marie, Susan and Verna: your support and suggestions enlightened me and kept me going.
My gratitude to my son Chris and my daughter-in-law Erinn for raising the three beautiful women who inspired this book.
As for my ‘second husband’ mentioned in Chapter Four: Mark, without your support (What are you doing? Editing. Still?) and feedback (Too much crying here!) this book would never have been finished.



PROLOGUE
Our Family Life
The lawn under my feet was crunchy and yellow, not yet recovered from Maine’s fierce winter. Behind me our farmhouse faced its windows towards Woodville Road, a quarter mile away. Across our dirt driveway the chimney of Daddy’s shop puffed wispy clouds into the iron gray sky. Daddy was in there working on something. I didn’t know what, I never went inside that building. Billy came around the corner of the house holding a triangle of wood as if it were a six shooter. “Let’s play cowboys and Indians,” he called. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, I was seven years old, and the whole family was at home. My mother was probably cooking dinner. Douglas, my oldest brother, was probably in his room doing a teenager’s thing. Duncan, the next oldest, would arrive soon to play with Billy and me.
My father, Loyal Reid Nash, had what Mom called an independent income. A Chicago bank sent his money every three months to wherever he happened to be living. Growing up, I didn’t know any other family with an independent income. Everyone else’s father worked for a living. Our independent income was one of the things that made us Nashes different.
When I was young, in the 1940s and 50s, fathers worked and mothers stayed home. After World War II ended in 1945 the government told the women to stay home, so that the returning soldiers could take the jobs. The women kept house and had babies, lots of babies. (Boom!) The civilian economy simmered and then boiled; people began buying homes, cars, dishwashers and TVs. In 1946 seven thousand TVs were sold in the USA. In 1950 customers bought five million sets. (encyclopedia.com) My parents were not among those buyers.
It was too bad that Daddy didn’t have to work. A job can give you importance and purpose and prestige and often even a social life. It also ties you down. My parents were not tied down; they could pick up and move whenever they felt like it. And they frequently felt like it during the first years of their marriage.
Mummy and Daddy had all their children before the War ended and the baby boom began. (The youngest, Billy, was born after Germany surrendered but before Japan gave up.) Loyal and Katharine spent the first nine years of their marriage having four children and wandering about, from California to Oregon to Vermont to Washington State to Maine.
It sounds carefree, but my parents were not happy-go-lucky. They believed life was serious, and they expected their children to believe this also. They did not make friends as they wandered the country, and they kept their distance from their own families. When I was in grade school our independent income allowed us to live in the country, where there were few neighbors and no salaried jobs. Almost nobody came to visit us, it was just the six of us on sixty-five acres of southern Maine fields and woods.
Our parents worked hard on their farm. Daddy had a workshop where he made tables and shelves. He constructed cabinets inside the house, and he painted both inside and outside. He never got around to painting my bedroom in Falmouth, and for the seven years we lived there I fell asleep at night terrorized by the monsters lurking in the splotchy old plaster walls. He did build me a wooden doll house, larger and heavier than the commercial plastic ones. It had two stories of bright red and yellow rooms, but where the stairs belonged there was just a hole. My dolls jumped between the floors.
Daddy planted trees and strung fences and built a serious vegetable garden. There were chickens, geese and pigs to care for. Mummy cooked three meals a day from scratch, sewed most of my clothing, braided rugs, knit sweaters and scarves and jackets. She made curtains and bedspreads. She decorated vases with tole painting and decoupage. She washed masses of laundry and ironed almost everything, including our bed sheets and my father’s underwear. In between these tasks she read to us and played board games with us. She took us sledding and skating and to church; she drove us to our swimming and piano lessons. In her spare time she took a correspondence course in counterpoint musical theory from the University of California, practicing her lessons on the piano in the living room.
Does it sound like a pioneer life, with the addition of a car? This was the middle of the twentieth century, the beginning of the modern consumer society and the rise of the suburbs. Our house had no TV, and there was just one car in the garage. Our furniture was inherited: dark carved mahogany, not blond curvy mid-century. We did not have fancy toys. Mom thought living in the country was “romantic.”
Dad’s independent income didn’t make us rich, it just made us different. If we’d been rich, we would have known other people without jobs. We didn’t. All my schoolmates had fathers with jobs. At the dinner table Daddy complained about the liabilities of a “fixed income,” especially when the Democrats were determined to keep raising your taxes until they forced you into poverty. When classmates asked what my father did, I explained about the independent income. Their astonishment and envy embarrassed me. How could I tell them the difficulties he struggled with?
We moved to the farm in Falmouth, Maine, when I was four, and we left when I was eleven. After school and on weekends my brothers and I rambled the fields or invented games in the basement playroom and our bedrooms. I was the only girl, expected to be different from my brothers in ways I didn’t wholly agree with.
Then when I was eleven I found out that Mom wanted friends. We left the farm in Maine for the small town of Bennington, Vermont, where Mom insisted on developing a social life, against Dad’s inclinations and cooperation.
But I’m getting ahead of myself in the story I want to tell you. Let’s go back to the beginning. When I was born.



1943 - 1948



CHAPTER ONE
Beginnings
From Shelburne, Vermont Town Clerk Records:
7/26/43 chattel mortgage deed granted by William R. Nash to Loyal and Katharine Nash for the purchase of nine cows.
2/7/44 chattel mortgage discharged
8/31/44 warranty deed granted by Loyal and Catherine (sic) Nash to Bradford and Lida Caldwell
9/26/44 warranty deed granted by Loyal and Catherine (sic) Nash to Roy Laurens and Roy Adelard

K. C. N. 1942
(Dad’s handwriting)
I was born during a Vermont blizzard on Thanksgiving day, 1943. Mom went into labor while the roads were disappearing under snow. It was wartime, so gas rationing meant the plows would not be brought out on a holiday. A neighbor hitched a sleigh to his horse and slid Mom over the fields and into the hospital in Burlington. “And then you were a little girl! I was so happy!” Mom told this story every Thanksgiving for the rest of her life.
Mother and baby went home in three days. (Before the War mothers and new babies stayed in the hospital for two weeks.) At two weeks old I contracted chicken pox, and Mom said I cried incessantly. I doubt that my older brothers Douglas and Duncan, ages six and two, shared Mummy’s enthusiasm for this new arrival.
No matter; life in tha