Sundays

Bill 

The Animals

During those early years in Jamaica Plain we would go somewhere as a family most Sundays. I refer to my parents and two brothers. I don't recall my sister being with us; at this point she had graduated high school, was working and likely preferred being with her own friends.  

Franklin Park was only a short distance from the house on Adams Circle.  It became a regular destination for us on a summer Sunday. Even though Franklin Park was still a popular place for Boston families to visit, by the early 50s there were signs of neglect.  As a seven-year old,  I wasn't as aware of its run-down condition as my father was as he had been coming to the park since the early 1930s. I found the park to be a bustling, interesting place made more so because of the Franklin Park zoo. I also recall a lot of walking.

It was a place for spiffy outfits, especially on a Sunday. I have photographs of me and my two brothers standing side by side in front of our house dressed for a Sunday in the park. In one I have on a silvery winter coat with zippered pockets.  Around the middle is a belt held together in the front with a metal clasp. My mother likely bought it at Sears.  In other photos, taken when it was warmer, we're posed in front of various venues at Franklin Park wearing suit jackets with pressed pants neatly creased.  I have on a bow tie; my younger brother is holding a cloth cap in one hand and a flower in the other. These pictures may have been taken at Easter, a time when people did get dressed up merely to take a walk, the Easter Parade situation, or perhaps my parents felt getting dressed up would teach us this is what people did on special occasions.  Perhaps they thought being dressed up would curtail some of the running around, climbing rocks, or not getting along with each other, that often prevailed when we were more casually dressed.

One way to get to the park was to walk all the way up School Street This led to a path to the bear dens.  There were several other entrances. There was Montebello Road which took you to the recently built White Stadium, a venue for high school sports. Past the stadium on Playstead Road you’d come to the entrance I was most familiar with as a kid.

On either side of the entrance, there were a pair of sculptures which towered over me. Some might call them majestic. I thought of them as odd. Then again my knowledge of allegorical groupings was quite limited at age seven. The statues are by Daniel Chester French whose summer studio coincidentally was in the Berkshires where Gin lived. Science Controlling the Forces of Steam and Electricity is one. Labor, Art and the Family is the other. Both on pedestals making them even larger than ever to a little kid. 

Knowing the names would not have helped me understand what they were about. On one I saw a woman balancing an urn against her thigh. As I walked by I remember thinking it seemed an awkward way to hold something. The other statue featured someone I could more readily identify with, a boy about my age standing next to a woman. The boy is supposed to represent electricity.  That was way beyond my comprehension at the time.  With his arms outstretched it looked to me like the boy was going to take a dive off the statute into the park below. But where is the artistic pretension in that? 

A short distance away from the statues was what I called "the giant bird cage."  Actually that is what it was.  It's still there as part of the bird exhibit at the renovated zoo.  Technically it's a flight house to allow the birds to do what comes naturally, take wing. It was another structure that impressed me because of its size.  It was made of a wire mesh big enough to see through but small enough to keep the birds inside.  It was filled with trees and bushes, places for the birds inside to alight and roost. It was also noisy: squawks and chirps and whistles. I liked walking around the outside of the cage listening to that natural cacophony before going into the building itself to check out the parrots hoping I would hear them talk. More than anything though I wanted to see the peacocks displaying their array of feathers.  Mostly they strutted about, keeping their plumage tightly wrapped.

All kids loved the monkeys.  I wasn’t any different. As with all the spaces for animals at Franklin Park, room for the monkeys was limited.  It was still enjoyable to watch them climb so effortlessly and hang so gracefully from the branches available to them.  At times they would emit these awful screeches and then go back to hanging or eating as if nothing had happened.

As for the eating, I was often aghast at how messy it all was.  I wasn't fastidious. I was a seven-year-old boy after all, but watching one of those monkeys squashing a piece of fruit all over its face as it ate, juices dripping down, pulp on its fur, I was glad I didn't eat that way.  They were animals, I thought, which meant they were without manners or abilities or intelligence. This is how I perceived them even though the monkeys were the animals at the zoo that most looked like me. It was by noting their behavior on numerous visits that I began to form my first ideas of the ways in which we were different from each other.  I realize now this attitude was a condescending human-superior philosophy shared by most people.  Because I saw these animals in cages, out of their natural environment, I thought their behavior was representative of how they lived in the wild.  Sloppy eating habits may have been normal for a monkey but living in that limited space was not. As I became older I became more knowledgeable of the roles of all creatures in nature.  As a kid, misinterpreting the simple act of a monkey eating a piece of fruit, contributed to my own young ignorance of what these amazing creatures were really like. 

  

Other animals offered their own examples of behavior unique to living in these artificial, run-down environments.  

The lion house is gone now as is the elephant house.  Even when I visited in the early 50's these buildings were in a state of deterioration.  Financial cuts, outdated facilities, even its popularity on these Sunday afternoons were all factors.  Looking closely even I noticed this was far from an ideal environment for animals. I saw this through their eyes.

Consider the lion house.  On nice days some of the great cats would be confined to cages on the outside of the building.  This was better than being inside. There their cages were aligned on one side of a long room. The lion might be huddled in a corner, the tiger stretched out with its enormous paws crossed in front of him, the leopard pacing back and forth, back and forth.  State of the art when the enclosures were built in 1920, it was obvious even to me these cats needed more room in which to spend their lives.  Their keepers did the best they could taking care of them, but I couldn't help noticing how their fur looked: patchy, washed out, dirty. Of course I didn't like it when they were asleep or in a corner not moving but I also realized something wasn't quite right when they incessantly walked to one end of their cage, made a quick turn and then back to the other end, doing this over and over. They were moving.  I liked that. Nonetheless their movements displayed a nervousness, a feeling they were trapped.  

It was a relief to come back outside through the opposite door into the sunshine.  The elephants seemed to have a lot more space in their outside enclosure but I also noticed the chain around a hind leg attached to a post in the ground.  The elephant so confined would sway back and forth, its trunk dangling.  Nearby was a large concrete tank in the ground where the hippopotamus should be.  You didn't know if there was a hippo in there or not.  You'd wait a few minutes hoping he'd rear his enormous head above the water, open his equally enormous mouth, make some sort of grunting sound and then submerge again.  When that happened, it was fun to see.

Before walking over to the antelope house or the farm animal enclosures, my father would stop at the small structure where goodies were sold.  For me it was always a box of Cracker Jack, a sticky molasses-flavored concoction of caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts with a picture of a sailor and his dog on the front.  In the blog entry Dilemmas I mention going to the dentist.  Cracker Jack is one of the reasons.

Inside every box was a toy surprise so the state of my teeth was not a concern as I tore open the top of the box.  My concern was to find the toy without spilling the Cracker Jack all over the sidewalk. You would think I'd just happily eat my way down to the toy which was always at the bottom of the box somewhere.  No, the idea was to get the toy out first and then eat.  (With the same determination we'd dig through a box of cereal to find that prize inside.) You could shake out some of the popcorn in your hand hoping the little paper envelope with the toy would fall out as well. You could squeeze the sides of the box to look down inside hoping to spot the edge of that envelope hiding amidst the mixture. You'd shake the box around and then look again. There it is. Now, carefully, using two fingers, you'd work to extricate the toy without doing too much damage to the box.

Was all this effort worth it?  Probably not.  But try telling that to a seven-year old. I think it was more fun tearing open that envelope in anticipation than in getting the surprise which usually consisted of a plastic figurine. Brightly colored cowboys or Indians were common, a spin top or a cheap ring.  I did get a neat little elephant once that I kept for a long time.

On the other side of the antelope house were a series of open-air enclosures separated by wire fences where a variety of animals were displayed.  These pens were adjacent to each other, zebra in one, next to a buffalo, next to cows.  The arrangement didn't make much sense but I didn't care.  It was fun walking by hoping the animals you liked, the giraffe in particular, was close to the walkway.  Some of the enclosures were so deep if the animals were back there or, worse, inside their shelters, you didn't get to see them at all.  Maybe that's why as I walked by I wondered why some of the enclosures seemed empty. In the summer when the weather was warm the chances you'd see your favorite animal close-up were greater.  I remember one time the giraffe was so close, his head towering above the fence, I could plainly see the mottled pattern of his fur. My father explained about camouflage. "So he could blend in where he lived," he told me. No need for camouflage in Jamaica Plain but it was wonderful to see such an iconic animal just a few feet away.

I mentioned cows. The zoo also had goats, animals I thought particularly odd with their narrow heads, array of horns and cloven hooves.  The sheep I found more likable probably because children's books referred to them as soft and cuddly.  My favorite had to be the pigs. Their enclosure was often a muddy morass with the pigs in the thick in it. Sometimes one of them would be close to the fence so I could get a good look at its nose which took up almost its entire face.  I loved to watch them walk around up to their bellies in the mud. I mentioned earlier my thoughts of distancing myself from slovenly animals but playing in mud was something that appealed to the animal in me. 

Franklin Park had a special significance to my parents; it's where they first met.  In 1932 a friend introduced them to each other.  An attraction developed. They were married two years later.  My sister showed up a year after.  As we walked my father would talk to me about what the park had been like twenty years before.  It was my first inkling that time was not static. There was a past, where my father and mother were always young; there was a present where I lived; and there was a future, a place I would someday find myself. This conception of the flow of time would both intrigue and plague me for years. 

"The park isn't just a zoo," my father would tell me. "A park is a place you can go to relax, have a picnic, take a walk in woods."  There was a wooded area on the other side of the park called The Wilderness.  It wasn't impenetrable by any means but apart from some trails it was undeveloped. It was the location of the landscape picture I talked about in the blog Moving Day, painted by my father's uncle.  

To the east of The Wilderness is Schoolmaster Hill.  "In the winter we would go sledding there," my father tells me.  "There was a toboggan run there as well," he added. This is the center of the entire park.  From the top you can see some miles over to Big Blue Hill, a hiking area that would have great significance when I moved to Hyde Park.

Schoolmaster Hill is also the area from where the puddingstone was quarried when the park was being built.  My father told me puddingstone is a unique stone found only in the Roxbury section of Boston, in particular, in Franklin Park. It's a conglomerate of small rounded stones embedded in a sandstone matrix, almost like a concrete. It's all over Franklin Park. Along with individual boulders, there were buildings and stairways made out of it.  In the Long Crouch Woods area, the site of the bear dens, there were vast ledges of puddingstone. I loved it as a kid.  Easy to climb, fun to try to count the different stones embedded in it.

Many of the structures my father knew when he came to the park as a young man were in ruins when I used to go there.  Once there were buildings on top of Schoolmaster Hill and an overlook north of The Wilderness. There were sets of stairs I used to climb that led to empty areas where all that was left of an earlier building was a chimney.

From my father I learned the fanciful names given to certain areas of the park. "Let's take a walk over to Mother's Rest," he said on one visit. It was a spot just south of the zoo near a park exit to a busy street.  In the original plans it was designed as a collection of benches in the shade of trees with a nearby water fountain where mothers and children could refresh themselves during a hot afternoon. The bubbler (as I called the fountain) was always a point of contention. I preferred to stand on the cube of stone set in front of it to have a drink.  Sometimes my father would fill a bottle and I'd have to drink out of that or my older brother would put his thumb over the bubbler nozzle and try to squirt me.  

I have in my head this romantic image of my parents getting to know each other as they walked the park those years ago. There was a pond, picnic groves, fields where you could watch baseball, and lovely granite footbridges to carry you over a stream or brook. Still there when I was a kid was the rose garden located near where the Tropical Forest Pavilion is now.  It was a boring place for a kid although I did like to smell the flowers.  For my parents it was a favorite spot to visit over the many years.

One feature of the park I did like were the stone towers.  There were two of them in the zoo area, remnants of farming estates before the park was laid out in the 1880s. They looked a bit like the turrets you'd see on the corner of a castle. The architectural term for them is folly, an extravagant symbol representing classical virtues or ideals. People with money and large estates would build replicas of Chinese temples, Egyptian pyramids or even a ruined abbey. Before the park came into being, the Sargent family built these castle-like structures as landscape decoration, rural nostalgia linking them to the distant past with the implication they were descendants of rich European families who built not just towers but actual castles.  

All well and good.  Except my brother told me the towers were gorilla cages.  Now the towers had no roofs and no bars across the several elongated openings which served as entrance and egress. I knew there couldn't be gorillas in such a place; they'd all have escaped a long time ago. "They're in there," he'd tell me. "They're hiding."  It was only when my father walked over to look inside that I felt safe to follow. 

I mentioned Long Crouch Woods. While most of the animals were within a short distance from one another, the bears were a different story. The bear dens were off in a far corner of the park, the Long Crouch Woods section, a considerable walk from the main zoo where most people gathered. I remember seeing polar bears so our family must have walked over there.  Perhaps we didn't visit the bears every trip to the zoo. There was also a raccoon enclosure nearby. Eventually the bears were removed and their enclosure abandoned.  Unlike the lion and elephant houses, the remains of the bear dens still exist, up there in the woods, as if in a movie about a dystopian future.

Shortly after I moved to Hyde Park the zoo reached a point where it required serious intervention.  That intervention was slow in coming.  By the 1960s Franklin Park was considered an unsafe place to visit.  The bears way up in the corner were particularly vulnerable to the urban malaise from the surrounding communities.  Animals were moved to other zoos, exhibition areas closed, the lion house was torn down along with the elephant enclosure. Graffiti and vandalism increased.

The park had become a very different place from the one just a few years earlier where a little boy enjoyed his wallowing pigs, looked forward to his Cracker Jack surprise, and loved scampering up the puddingstone boulders that are a unique aspect of the Franklin Park environment.  Always the crowds, people dressed up, out for the day, looking and pointing and smiling at the sights around them. 

There is a new zoo there now, rejuvenated, modernized, nicer for both the animals and the visitors.  Seven year-olds enjoy it as much as I did.  Pigs still oink, monkeys still screech, kids still connect.  I still value animals.

The Water

Another Sunday destination back in the early 50's was Lake Pearl in Wrentham where my father's family had a little cabin right on the water. I liked the name, envisioning that small lake as a pearl of sorts surrounded by woods. My grandparents' spot was on a spit of land on the south side of the lake. We always called it the camp, as "We're spending the day today at the camp." From the back seat of the car I recall turning off Route 1A onto a dirt road which went over some railroad tracks.  After parking there'd be a brief walk along a path through woods until we could see the lake on the right. A few more steps we'd reach a little grassy front yard area with the cabin in back and a dock extending into the water.

The land and the small cabin were owned by my father's family who bought it just after the war. My grandmother always liked to be near water, ocean preferably, but the little compound at Lake Pearl was more than adequate for summer and weekend visits.  

I don't remember much about the house. The few times I was inside it struck me as very dark, the other people almost like shadows as they moved about.  The outside was a different matter.  With the lake acting as a giant reflector, the summer light during the day was dazzling, only becoming more subdued in the later afternoon as the sun fell behind the surrounding trees. My grandfather used to set up an outdoor barber shop under those trees, a chair, a small table, where he would cut my hair.  The scissors, combs and clippers would be stored in a scuffed wooden box which he would bring from the house, set on the table and then select which one would be best to use. My hair was closely cropped as was the style for little kids in those days so it couldn't have taken too long.  I sat as still as I could admonished by my grandfather who did not want to "nip off my ears" as he put it. 

Just off the yard near the cabin was a set of wooden stairs with rustic handrails fashioned by my grandfather from branches gathered from nearby. The stairs led down to the pier, a classic dock made with wooden pilings and slatted boards which stretched out over the water maybe twenty feet.   It's where my father and uncles would dive off  to "take a dip.” I was more than okay just sitting and dangling my feet in the water.  If I felt particularly adventurous I might, very cautiously, slip down into the water all the time holding on to the edge of the dock for dear life.  I was not a swimmer; I didn't like the water.  All attempts to teach me to swim ended with me thrashing about until the person trying to teach me just gave up.  It always felt so good to be back on dry land.

I had a reason for my concern.  A few years before there had been a near drowning at the camp.  Somehow a cousin, then a young child, had wandered on to the dock and fallen into the water.  My father was inside the cottage taking a nap.  He woke from a sound sleep to all the commotion.  The child's mother was screaming, "My little boy has drowned!" Running from the house my father plunged into the water, grabbed my cousin and revived him.  I knew my cousin as a kid a few years older than me.  He was full of energy and a good swimmer.  If he could nearly drown, my reasoning went, what chance did I have.

The dock was also where we would launch the rowboat.  For some reason I didn't mind being on top of the water in a boat.  I wore a scruffy orange life jacket while holding on tightly to the side of the boat for extra security as we left the dock.  One of the enjoyments of being in the rowboat was seeing the dock and the little house above it, the trees and the grassy yard, becoming smaller and smaller as my father or uncle or grandfather rowed further and further out.  I'd dip my hand in the water leaving a trail of  undulations.  I was fascinated by the patterns the oars would make as they rhythmically dipped into the water creating miniature whirlpools which drifted by before breaking up into tiny eddies. At the end of the stroke the oars would be drawn back, their edges dripping water before slicing again into the sky-reflected lake.

It was very calming out there.  Quiet except for the soothing sounds of oar in water, drips, the creak of the small boat as it moved forward.  I was impressed by the very act of rowing.  It seemed difficult.  I knew the oars were heavy and unwieldy as sometimes I'd try to hand them to the person in the boat.  Mostly I marveled at the precision required in using them, the coordination, how the flat part of the oar had to precisely slice into the water at a particular angle to pull the boat forward. It seemed to require so much strength. Most interesting of all the person doing the rowing did it backwards; he wasn't able to see where he was going!

As we slowly made our way out onto the water, I'd watch for any activity on the island to my left.  The island was a short distance across from my grandparent's cottage.  You could swim to it in few minutes. If you could swim! There was a house on it but I never did see any evidence of the family that lived there. The story was the family lost a son in the war. They must have had many happy memories of him on that island because after his death they rarely visited. I thought it would be great living there since no matter in which direction you walked you'd always be heading toward water.  

Sometimes before heading back, we'd stop in the middle of the lake.  My father might say something to my uncle, or to me. I loved that our voices seemed so different out on the water, no echoes off ceilings, or that muffled sound when inside a car.  Our voices were like the water, crisp, clear, buoyant. There was no need to talk loudly.  The only competition were the ripples gently lapping against the hull of our little boat.  Mellow, melodic, assuring.

Anxiety returned once I was back on land.  I had to use to the bathroom. Actually, I wish there had been a bathroom. Instead there was an outhouse. It's the place I feared more than anything else, even being in the water.  The outhouse was a small wooden structure at the far end of the lawn. Opening the rickety door I saw just darkness mitigated by a slant of sunshine coming through the cracks. What I couldn't see was what I dreaded most. Spiders!

I don't recall if I ever saw I single spider during all the times I visited that scary structure. It didn't make any difference.  I knew they were there, just waiting. It was definitely awkward accomplishing your business out there, sitting not on porcelain but over the classic hole cut into some sort of wooden seat.  My grandfather probably built this too; it served its purpose. I was always so relieved when I could close the door  and put some distance between me and that old outhouse.

There’s old movie film of the camp taken on a lovely Sunday summer afternoon. There’s Thomas and Edward, two of my father’s brothers, his sister, Mildred, wives, husbands, kids.  There I am, thin as a rail, but obviously enjoying myself. My grandmother reads a Life magazine on a chair by the large chimney.  There’s a bunch of us on the dock, my uncle Edward trying to push my father into the water. I try to stay out of his way. The trees are lush, the water sparkles in the sunlight, the people laugh and smile.  The silent film speaks loudly of the enjoyable times we all had at the camp.

My older brother used to stay at the camp for an extended period during the summer. Along with my grandparents, my Uncle Thomas would often take advantage of the camp's serene location to relax. Uncle Thomas had a son also named Thomas who went by the name Little Tommy.  He and my brother would hang out together at the lake during the time my brother would spend there on his overnights.  It was to be a long lasting friendship between the cousins, keeping in touch through the years even when Little Tommy, (perhaps now just called Tommy or even Tom), moved to Indiana as an adult.

I didn't know Little Tommy well.  He was older, or so it seemed.  Too, I was a solitary kid in many ways.  At home in Jamaica Plain when my brother was away at the camp, I wondered if that was something I might like to do someday.  Be away from my parents. Be on my own.  I had conflicted feelings.  I liked making my own decisions, having some independence but just the thought of being at the camp by myself made me anxious.  As it turned out I never did spend any time away from home on my own until I went off to college at age seventeen.  That turned out to be a difficult transition. I liked the camp.  It was a unique environment, peaceful.  It may have done me some good to have been there for a few days like my brother, learning how to be your own person if even for a little while.

Some of my best moments at the camp were spent by myself. Even though some people may have thought of me as lonely, I liked the solitude. Late in the afternoon on those summer Sundays when my parents would be inside the house talking with my relatives, my brothers off somewhere else, I would stand at the end of the pier looking across the lake to the public beach which I identified by a white strip of sand. There was no beach on our side, no gentle slope to the water.  The yard abruptly dropped off at the water's edge. Sometimes I'd imagine what the lake looked like in winter, ice right up against the land, the summer ripples frozen out, the brisk wind in my face.

Summer was best though. The gentle breeze. The blue sky.  The lake deep and liquid, quivering slightly in its bowl of land.  I'd look down into the water, barely making out the rocks and sand below, slightly yellow in the reduced sunlight. Then there was the island just across the way.  Small, wooded, it took on a darker more mysterious tone as the sun leaned lower in the sky. The island was special to me, its position, the trees, its narrow shoreline.  It oriented me on the lake, breaking the expanse of water with its substance. I understood an island was land completely surrounded by water. I loved being able to see a real one every time I visited. It added perspective to those quiet moments by myself at the end of the dock as the afternoon became evening. Looking way out over the water, I knew deep down that solitude was not loneliness.