The Summer of ’53

Bill

I moved from Jamaica Plain to Hyde Park at the beginning of the summer of 1953. It was only the second place I had ever lived.  I would live there a decade until l went off to college at the age of seventeen.

While it’s true I was a kid when I moved to that brand-new house on Prospect Street, in many ways, even though the transition from childhood to adulthood began in Hyde Park, I was still a kid when I left.

That first summer was a special one. Moving to Hyde Park after school was out in late June was a smart idea on the part of my parents. With no school to deal with, I had plenty of time to learn the layout of my neighborhood, make new friends, explore the yards, the streets, the woods and the fields of this unique expanse on the top of Fairmount Hill.

Our new house was one of four capes, single family, all just built, all with that "new house smell", constructed, just a few months ago, in what had been woods. The houses were styled after similar houses which originated on Cape Cod. Ironically, when my house was built, there weren’t that many capes left on Cape Cod. The houses there were susceptible to the vagaries of the ocean air washing right through them. Though situated miles from the ocean, our cape was drafty as well. However, in an era of cheap oil all you did was turn up the heat. Trouble was our oil furnace, way down in the basement, wasn’t powerful enough to get that heat up through the air ducts to the attic space where my brothers and I slept. It was chilly up there. Being a kid I dealt with it by snuggling deeper into the blankets. In the summer it was just the opposite, sleeping with just a sheet. 

It was a small house for the six of us living there, so we had to use the space efficiently.  There were two bedrooms downstairs, unfinished space under the roof, lots of space in the cellar. Just one bathroom though.  That must have been a hassle for my sister. The living room had a fireplace. The kitchen was small although it never felt small to me.

Our house was unadorned on the outside without the two traditional dormers designed to let light.  Our attic windows were situated on each end of the space. Dormers would have been great, for looking out to see if kids were on the street, for playing in, using as forts or hiding in.  Dormers would have changed the whole attic space profoundly.  But, not to be. The roof was steep as an aid to shed rain and lessen the weight of snow. I’m thinking the house was painted blue. Was the house next to us red?  I seem to recall a vivid color among the four capes that lined the street. 

Walking up Prospect Street from Fairmount Avenue, you’d pass two of the capes before coming to the one we lived in, number 48.  The fourth and last house was adjacent to our driveway. I was most familiar with this house because it was the one that greeted me every time I walked out my kitchen door. Prospect Street went uphill from Fairmount so this house next door was on land higher than ours. It seemed to loom above me as I walked down our driveway. The couple that lived in that house had three kids, two girls and a boy, all younger than I was.  On the other side was a fireman and his wife.  Of their three girls, one was my age, the others younger.  At the end, on the corner, lived a doctor, his wife and their two kids.  Four houses, four families, four futures.

In many ways the four houses represented what was going on in the post war world.  Most of the kids who were our neighbors were what would be termed baby boomers, kids born after the war.  They represented the pent up energy of a country that was poised to enter a new era, of consumption, of innovation, of global involvement, for good and bad. Changes were not just on the horizon, they were already happening.

Returning service men and women wanted to forget the things they had endured over the past several years. The momentum was such that no one was going to return to an America as it had been before the war.  There was pressure for change.  Young people returning from the war or those who had supported the war at home working in factories or in the government wanted a new normalcy in the form of families, houses, jobs.  They had sacrificed for a future that was now here. They wanted those futures. (One of the first housing developments to take advantage of this demand was Levittown on Long Island.  Thousands and thousands of capes were built, all exactly the same.) 

My father, although older than most of the people who had been overseas, was also caught up in this societal shift. He had spent the war years working at the Navy Yard in South Boston as an electrician in the power house. During the war Boston was a focal point keeping the naval fleet in peak condition.  Moving out of Jamaica Plain was a move from the past; moving to Hyde Park was a vote of confidence for the future. Like so many others, the people living in the four capes would be carried along by the flow of energy beginning to surge as the fifties began.  It’s also true that while the four houses were visible symbols of that change, that change was not to everyone’s liking.

All anyone would have seen walking up Prospect Street looking for the four capes in 1952 would have been woods. In an established neighborhood no one likes to see trees cut down, particularly land cleared for houses, modest as they were.  The four capes were the smallest houses on top of the hill. And the newest. This was essentially a neighborhood of traditional homes, few of them resembling the capes.  The capes were still settling in, airing out. The houses surrounding the capes were much older, lived in by families for a generation or more.  I can imagine the chagrin of some of them when they realized four small houses were being constructed in their settled neighborhood. The construction of the four capes was the beginning of a building boom that slowly gained momentum over the years.  All the open spaces in the Fairmount Hill neighborhood where my friends and I played during the fifties now have houses on them.  It’s not an exaggeration to say the top of the hill in those pre-development days was a kind of paradise.  Especially to me.

How different from the urban streets of Jamaica Plain were the country streets of Hyde Park. Some of these streets, Fairmount Avenue down to Brush Hill Road, had no sidewalks. Prospect up to Milton Avenue, no sidewalks. You walked in the street. Something you would never do in Jamaica Plain. You’d be run over. There wasn’t a school right behind my house as in Jamaica Plain. There were woods.  I had a much longer walk down to Williams Avenue to my new school. Cleary Square was also much further away than Egleston Square had been, down off the hill. I didn’t know what an estate was then but that’s what I found that first summer when I began to venture up Prospect Street.

At the end of long driveways, surrounded by wide lawns, were all these huge houses. Often you couldn’t see them from the street.  But the driveways had to lead somewhere, I thought.  They reminded me of parks.  At the top of Prospect Street at Milton Avenue was a place we called the Pink Castle. It was made of pink stucco. Cement posts, a throwback to an earlier time, stood by the entrance to the private street by which the owner gained access. This was Brush Hill Lane. There were a lot of big old houses along that road but I was nervous to walk down there.  There were signs proclaiming it was a private road. Later when I had my bike I’d cautiously venture past the private road sign.  I was anxious not only because every house came with a large barking dog but also I was told the road was patrolled by the police. I heard more dogs than saw police but it made me aware these home owners took their privacy seriously.

In Jamaica Plain I lived right on the border with Roxbury. In Hyde Park my backyard was the border to Milton, a well to do suburb of Boston. While I never thought of Roxbury as being particularly interesting, Milton was different. I spent a lot of time there especially in the summer. I didn’t go near the large estates but I did play in the open spaces that surrounded them. To me all of Milton was a park. 

Down at the corner of Prospect and Fairmount, a left would take you into Milton while a right would take you down the hill to Cleary Square, a very different environment. Cleary Square was a commercial area similar to Egleston Square but with a big difference, at least to my mother: no elevated trains, no trolleys, buses only. It wasn’t as convenient to get into Boston from Cleary Square as it had been in Jamaica Plain. It also took longer to walk to Cleary Square from our new house than it had to Egleston: down off the hill, across Truman Highway, across a bridge spanning the Neponset River, crossing an even longer bridge that went over railroad tracks, past peripheral stores until you got to the heart of the square at River Street. I didn’t mind the walk. I liked Cleary Square.  It seemed modern to me with more stores, more places that might appeal to a kid.  There were fish in the five and dime.  A movie theatre that became a second home on Saturday afternoons. In 1953 the square was big and busy and bustling all the way to Hyde Park Avenue.

While I was exploring this new neighborhood, my mother was discovering the ins and outs of her new house. The house came with many of the conveniences she didn’t have in Jamaica Plain: an electric stove, kitchen cabinets, a new refrigerator, a shower in the bathroom, a clean cellar without a coal bin, and a couple of years later an automatic washer and dryer These became the clichés of the 1950s housewife but presumably they made her life easier.

While the house was new and modern, it was still on top of the hill. At Adams Circle, Egleston Square was a few minutes walk.  In Hyde Park getting to Cleary Square, where all the stores were, required a considerably longer walk. My mother enjoyed walking up to Egleston Square.  It was convenient. She did it almost every day for more than twenty-five years.  She did food shopping there, she went to the movies there, she had her hair done there.  Everything.  It’s true by 1953 Egleston Square was beginning to change, losing some of those qualities my mother enjoyed, stores closed, it became less safe. Eventually even the elevated tracks would be taken down.

Regardless, it had been such a part of her routine all her life, during her childhood, as a young married woman living with my father’s parents on School Street and during those twelve years when she had her own household on Adams Circle, that its convenience and familiarity were difficult to give up. I think our move to Hyde Park was a more difficult adjustment for my mother than for any of the rest of us. One telling point. She never walked down to the movies in Cleary Square as she had so many times to the movies up to Egleston Square. Now when she went to the movies it was with my father, and they drove there. 

I'm a kid, full of energy, wanting to be outside, in the mood to explore, so coming down off the hill, to school, to the Fairmount movies in Cleary Square, being in the square with my friends, was just a normal part of my life. Still, what goes down has to come up. That’s one of the things that bothered my mother, trekking back up the hill, especially if she had bundles. The MTA bus service was not convenient and she would never ever take a cab. “What an extravagance!” she’d exclaim.

Walking up the hill was tough even for me. I’d start up aggressively  but by mid-hill, like the moving truck, I'm in low gear. It was a lot more difficult for my mother, not just the physicality required of the hill, but also what it represented. For the first time in years she is not able to walk to her mother and father’s house, a huge comfort to her in Jamaica Plain. 

Egleston Square also allowed her close access to the elevated train and to downtown Boston. In Hyde Park, once off the hill, the elevated was still a long bus ride away down Hyde Park Avenue to Forest Hills. My mother loved going in town, to shop at Jordan Marsh, to pay bills at city hall.  She still took the MTA into Boston when she lived in Hyde Park but it was a much longer trek. 

My mother was friendly with her neighbors in Jamaica Plain; she looked forward to talking with them during the day when the husbands were at work. In Hyde Park during those first few years the neighbors were younger than my mother; their kids were younger.  There may have been other reasons but my mother didn’t have as close relationships with her neighbors in Hyde Park as she did in Jamaica Plain.  She missed those day to day connections. She began to feel stranded.

“I am trapped on this hill,” was a common refrain. For my mother, living on the hill contributed to a growing sense of isolation. Her distress would eventually effect us all as the years passed. The new house may have been a welcome change for her but being up on Fairmount Hill wasn’t.  One regret she voiced many times, “When I moved to Hyde Park, the first thing I should have done was learn how to drive a car.”  Looking back on it now, my mother behind the wheel of a car, (odd to even imagine that), would have had a huge impact on all our lives.

Even though our backyard was small, it was still larger than the one in Jamaica Plain. There wasn’t a school behind us, no brick wall to climb; instead there were woods. Not a thickly wooded landscape; I didn’t live in Maine.  It was more like an open area with paths through the heavier brush. There were stands of weedy sumac trees. Well, maybe more a bush than a tree.These were not the poison kind; they were small with fern-like leaves.  They did look pretty in the fall with their bright crimson color. Sumacs are often used ornamentally as small courtyard trees. It’s one reason I always thought the woods behind our house was once more of a tended landscape.  There was evidence of paths, of rosebushes, a stream trickled through part of it. Its centerpiece were two spectacular beech trees with sinewy limbs, copper leaves, smooth almost supple bark. Those trees took a lot of abuse.  In one we built a tree house.  I used the other for climbing.  I loved to go up there high enough, maybe 30 feet off the ground, to see over the woods to my house.

The woods were also full of brambles and vines, a few crabapple trees; there were forsythia bushes as well.  My younger brother loved the shape of this thicket, the curving intertwined roots and branches, collaborating in such a way as to allow a kid to find space within the entanglements. We called them forts.  We’d bring things inside these natural shelters, a small chair, plastic dishes, an old rug we might find somewhere, empty tin cans.  Any kind of junk that made it feel as if we were living outside.

Walk through the woods a couple of minutes and you came to the Reeces’ house.  This was another one of those large estates that were scattered just over the Milton town line. Ned and Frankie were the two boys who lived there.  Their family was well-to-do, their money from buttons of all things. Their grandfather had invented a button hole machine for shoes and had a factory in Boston.  The machinery was later adapted for clothing.  I never connected shoes with buttons.  I had enough trouble tying my shoe laces.  

The woods and fields around their house were meant not only to showcase it in a park-like setting, there we again with the parks, but also to provide privacy and protection. That part of their land that extended to Prospect Street was the area cleared to allow for the construction of the four capes.  The need to have something substantial between their house and the street may have been the reason the Reece’s sold the land for house lots in the first place.  Protection from what? Well, a less benign incursion than that of my brother and me.  The Gobi’s.

The Gobi’s were a family that lived on Warren Avenue, one street over from us.  Essentially some of the Gobi kids spent their days harassing the neighbors. Terrorized was a word I heard long before it took on its current more lethal meaning.  Before the Gobi’s moved in, people who lived on the hill embraced their tranquil living conditions. Now they had to deal with the Gobi brats. That could have been why some people resented any more new neighbors. They thought, “First the Gobi kids running around causing trouble. Now more new people moving in.  Are they going to bother us too?”

Mr. and Mrs. Gobi seemed to be hard working people. He ran an auto body business somewhere in Watertown. (As a kid I thought that was the funniest name.) But they had, what, nine kids, most of the time unsupervised, free to roam the streets and yards, to bother their neighbors in ways both trivial and devious. Stolen milk bottles from stoops and steps, broken windows, vandalism, threats and backtalk, trespassing, bullying, stolen items from yards. Once during that first summer they pelted my neighbor’s house with eggs. “They tormented everyone,” my mother said.

It's likely the family were scapegoats, anything and everything negative about life on the hill attributed to them. If someone came out to find their doghouse tipped over, the Gobi’s would automatically be blamed, no evidence required. The fact there were so many Gobi kids, that they were unruly and largely left on their own, didn't help their reputation. Many of the people complaining about the Gobi’s were the same people who were opposed to any new families moving into their pristine environment. I myself had run-ins with some of those neighbors that first summer. Sometimes I’d get yelled at for something as casual of walking on their lawns instead of in the street.  “Hey, get off the lawn!”  Where am I supposed to walk, I think. There is no sidewalk.

Some of the established families were more accommodating to kids.  Across the street from us were an older couple, the Rices, their large house on the opposite corner of Fairmount and Prospect. Their yard, actually a sort of formal garden surrounded by trees, was just across the street from our front yard.  I didn’t have much to do with them except at Halloween when they would invite a group of us in to their living room, take pictures of us in our costumes and then send us on our way with treats. Few other adults were as friendly to the neighborhood kids as the Rices.  (Later I found out Mr. Rice was an FBI agent. I still don’t associate that kindly older man with that profession but there it was.)

Initially the Gobi’s targeted my family as well. They were a confrontational bunch not particularly afraid of adults. Luckily my older brother got to be friends with a couple of them so they never bothered us to the extent they did the other people in the neighborhood.

My older brother also became friendly with another kid just up the street.  Gene lived in an enormous house with the usual attributes of many of the houses near us, the huge yard, the long driveway, two old granite posts on either side of the entrance. My brother Ralph had made friends with him first. I was envious because I wanted Gene to be my friend. I really had no need to be jealous. As it turned out, he and Ralph were too separated by age for Gene to be much more than a little kid to him. Probably an annoying one.  So Gene became my best friend those early years in Hyde Park. His enormous yard became our play world as I detail in another blog,

The rural character of my neighborhood was not limited to the woods behind our house but extended in all directions especially to the north and west. Blue Hills Reservation with Great Blue Hill as its center piece was just a few miles away. Down Brush Hill Road was the Neponset Reservation, a wetlands where my father would take us ice skating when it was cold enough for the water to freeze. 

Past the woods on the other side of Reece’s there were expansive fields of tall grass and shrubs we’d often walk through or play in.  The people who owned them never bothered us but we’d be careful not to play too closely to their houses.

My older brother knew a kid who lived down in that direction. Once during that first summer on a breezy Saturday afternoon, he and I cut through our woods, skirted the Reece's property and then headed down through the open meadows that led to Brush Hill Road. As we crossed the road, I’m thinking, “Wow, I’m really far from my house right now.”

The kid my brother knew had a barn near his house.  What I remember about it was the barn was full of hay bales. Hay for a horse, I thought, but my brother remembers a mule.  On the side of the barn was a winch for hoisting the bales into the top space. This was all amazing to me. On that summer afternoon there were bits of straw in the breeze, glinting yellow in the sun.

Inside the barn the sunlight decorated the dirt floor with shafts of quivering light. The stacks of just cut hay were rich and pungent, the smell of just mowed lawns. For a kid who relied so much on my senses, this atmosphere was an exquisite sensory overload. I’ve been saying this a lot but, once again, nothing like this in Jamaica Plain.

On the way back, the sun low in the sky, the light scattered by trees, we cross back over Brush Hill Road into the tall grass of the field.  I fall behind. I know how to get home from here.

I kneel in the grass, then lie down. I see the grass is greener at the top than at the bottom, each strand a candidate for a future hay bale. I’m a grass angel, the tall grass flattening under the contours of my body.  I think of my life now.  A friendship with Gene developing, a new house to live in,  a new school to walk to in a few weeks, a new world all around me.

A breeze comes up waving the tops of the grass, tickling my ears and cheeks. I feel so relaxed, comfortably nestled in my little patch of meadow. Although the peak of summer is passing, the sun setting earlier than it did just a few weeks ago, the heat-infused air still warms me in my grassy bed like a blanket.

I turn on my side, sliding my hand through the grass, watching the tips point, waver and bend.  Turning onto my back I look up into the inky blue of the sky.  That feeling of well being takes hold. Maybe I let out a contented sigh. It’s a singular moment encapsulating all that is so different and wonderful about my new life in Hyde Park.

Is my mother calling? I couldn't hear her down here anyway. But it’s getting dark. Time to go. Freed of my weight, the grass begins to spring back as it will continue to do so until all traces of the boy who paused here so long ago are gone.