Category Archives: personal reminiscences of Roger W. Smith

APBA

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Beginning in the sixth grade, when we were still living in Cambridge, I became an avid reader of baseball articles in Sport magazine. There was an advertisement in Sport for a table baseball game called APBA. (I did not know it at the time, but the letters stood for American Professional Baseball Association.) It looked intriguing. I responded to the ad and materials came in the mail that made me very desirous of purchasing the game. The price was $18.75, which seemed a little steep then, though it was actually quite reasonable in view of the product and turned out to be incredibly so in view of the hours of enjoyment I got out of the game.

There was a foldout brochure. And, there was a sample player card for Ted Williams! The brochure included an account of and box score for a simulated game replaying a 1957 World Series game between the Yankees and Milwaukee Braves in which Warren Spahn struck out 14 batters (in the simulated game, that is). It seemed so real, and the idea of a table game where you could play Major League baseball games at home with real players intrigued me. I was hooked.

My older brother and I purchased the game. It was, as I have noted above, a baseball simulation table game using cards to represent each major league player and boards to represent different on-base scenarios e.g. Bases Empty , Runners on First and Third, Bases Loaded with the results corresponding to the roll of the dice and the corresponding number on a player s card, with the roll of the dice used to generate random numbers. You would check the board for a given situation (runner on first, say) to see the result. Funny things could happen: an injury, an ejection, a rainout.

The game could be played against another person or in solitaire fashion. I always played games by myself, so that I was managing both teams (making the lineup, substitutions, pitching changes, etc.), and I announced them out loud as the game progressed. (I had vague thoughts about becoming a baseball announcer and admired announcers such as the Red Sox s Curt Gowdy and Ned Martin.)

I kept score for each game and recorded statistics in a ruled notebook. It was amazing that, in most cases, the players performances came close to matching their real life statistics. (The individual cards represented real players, and had ratings for batting, fielding, base running, pitching, and so forth.) You could make managerial decisions: elect to bunt, say; or stipulate in advance that on a single, a runner should not try to advance to an extra base because the runner was rated as slow.

Some funny results occurred.

In one simulated game that I was playing, for example, Tom (Ploughboy) Morgan was pitching for the Detroit Tigers. I seem to recall that the score was 10-0 in favor of the Tigers, partly because Morgan, who was pitching in relief in the simulated game, had hit a grand slam home run.

In real life, Morgan, in 1959, the season on which his APBA player card was based, hit two homeruns in twenty-three at bats. This gave him as an excellent rating on his APBA player card as a power hitter.

If you got the result of a 23 or 41 i.e., this result on the game board corresponding to whatever the dice roll showed you would get something unusual, say an injury, a rainout, an ejection, or a weird play.

The Tigers, as I said, were leading by around 10-0 somewhere well into the simulated game and the opposing team batter got a dice roll of 26 (or some such number), which I think corresponded to a 23 on the game board, with a result that on the game board read ball pitcher ejected for disputing umpire s call. The Tigers were leading by ten runs or so at the time (in the simulated game I was playing).

Each year, APBA would come out with a complete set of player cards, based on the prior season’s results, that cost six dollars. They would mail rosters to game owners in advance. When the rosters came out, I would scan them eagerly. In those days, there were eight teams in each league, and each team played 154 games in a season. I played just over half a season, over 300 games, for the 1959 National League, kept box scores for each game, and compiled statistics.

The company s headquarters were at 118 E. James St. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It turned out that the company was a single statistically minded baseball fan, J. Richard Seitz, who had created the game in 1951 and marketed it from his home.

In the summer of 1962, my father, mother, younger brother, sister, and I took to trip to Pennsylvania to visit my older brother, who had a summer job there. We took a side trip and drove through the beautiful Amish Country, making a stop in Lancaster, which I had requested.

It took my father a while to find 118 E. James Street. We finally found it and it was just an ordinary house. It turned out that it was the residence of APBA developer and owner Seitz and his mother.

We went to the post office to inquire and were told by a friendly postal clerk that, yes, we had the right address and that Seitz occasionally stopped at the post office to mail APBA games to costumers.

Around this time, the company came out with a pro football game with player cards with ratings for running, passing, kicking, blocking, and defense.

My father got me the APBA football game, which I had requested, for my birthday. They had a policy of usually requiring two to three weeks for shipping, but my Dad wrote them a letter pleading for expedited delivery and got it in about three days. Then he handed me an envelope that had, in the return address on front, the APBA Game Company and their address, below which my father had written “from a big game company” with his own cartoon-ish drawing of a factory building with smokestacks and smoke billowing from them.

The APBA football game had player cards representing the 1958 NFL season. That was the season of the championship game between the Colts and Giants which the Colts won in overtime on Alan Ameche s touchdown run. I played that game over and over again with the APBA simulated table game, and I also played games with various other teams such as the Browns, Rams, and Packers.

Once, my older brother and I decided to replay the Colts-Giants playoff game against one another. I forget which team each of us chose. But, at the end of the game, my team was behind by a few points and I had the ball on something like the opposition s 27-yard line. The way the game was designed (each play represented a designated portion of the clock ), I had one play left.

The APBA football game required you to make coaching decisions. My older brother set his defense, wisely, for a pass play. I rolled boxcars, two sixes, on the dice. This roll of dice would give you the best result for a given situation. There were boards for end run, plunge play, short pass, and long pass; I had elected short pass. For that situation, and, taking into account the respective team ratings for offense (blocking) and defense, the result was disappointing. The gain on the play was one yard short of a touchdown. I was certain that for a dice roll of boxcars, I had scored a touchdown. (If I had chosen a long pass or run, I would have scored.) I was so frustrated and upset, I actually started to cry. It seemed that my older brother always won.

My time spent playing APBA board games comprised some of the happiest moments of my life.

— posted by Roger W. Smith

 

 

the crooked straight

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“Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.”

William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell”

* * *

“He would never make concessions for money—always was so.” – George W. Whitman (Walt Whitman’s brother), as told to Horace Traubel

* * *

“There was silence in the room. It was an awed, a dreadful silence, the vacant interval when death itself was yet a moment away.”

Roger Sugrue: ‘ “I think we can say this: that knowing what he knows now, if he had it to do all over again, there’s not the slightest doubt but that he’d do it all very, very differently!”

Frank Skeffington: “The hell I would!”*

*The Last Hurrah by Edwin O’Connor. The main character, Frank Skeffington, was based on Boston Mayor James Michael Curly.

 

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my work/life experience

high school senior summer job as night clerk in hotel on Cape Cod … $35 a week plus room and board

college freshman; great job in library … my supervisor, a Haitian guy, was very nice to me

1965: horrible summer jobs … busboy dishwasher; boss was a jerk didn’t like me I got fired … got job in factory. I was inept and hated job … foreman was an a-hole; everyone hated him …. maybe $2.50 per hr

summer 1966: got great summer job on college grounds crew $2.50 per hr … J loved being outdoors weeding gardens, raking, etc. I became good friends with Jim Sweeney, a regular employee, and his family

1968: worked on a private estate near Boston as an assistant gardener … boss (head gardener) was Dutch

1969: first job in NYC … worked for a nonprofit on East 18th Street … office boy … salary $80 per week

1970-1972: conscientious objector status … did alternative service in hospitals on psychiatric ward and an intensive care unit

Christmas 1972: worked as temp in Boston department store

1973-77: worked in clerical capacity in dean’s office at Columbia University … took lots of courses

1977-1986: publishing firms: copywriter … freelance writing and editing

1986-1988: grad school at NYU … internship at New York Newsday …. freelance writing

1989-2001: worked for international consulting firm in Communications and Marketing departments

2001-present: freelance writing and scholarship … taught briefly in English Dept of St. John’s University (not a great job) … developed websites and became proficient at translating

The people I met! The experiences! The opportunities for study and learning.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   March 2025

haying

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Julien Dupré. “Haying Time”

And unperceived unfolds the spreading day,
Before the ripened field the reapers stand
In fair array, each by the lass he loves,
To bear the rougher part and mitigate
By nameless gentle offices her toil.
At once they stoop, and swell the lusty sheaves;

— James Thomson, The Seasons, “Autumn”

 

These lines brought something to mind.

This is what poetry can do.

 

*****************************************************

It was the fall of 1968. I had a job as an assistant gardener on a 37-acre estate in the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, which is right outside of Boston.

There were three of us assistants – me, Jack, and Jim; plus Peter, the head gardener, who was Dutch. Jack was my age. Jim was an elderly Irish guy still employed. On warm days he wore a floppy straw hat.

The fall was splendid, as only New England falls can be.

To my surprise, one morning we were told we would spend the day haying.

You have big wooden hay rakes. The sun has dried the tall blades of grass. You rake and the dried shoots (the hay) stick in clumps to the rake.

One of us workers was driving a flatbed truck. You throw the hay over the side onto the back of the truck. You have to shake some of it off and keep shaking until the hay is all dislodged.

The truck drove to a shed, backed up, and the hay was dumped into a hayloft by raising the back of the truck.

It was pleasurable work in the warm sun. And now I knew what haying entailed.

Golden memories. The poem brought them to mind today.

(Well, maybe haying and reaping aren’t quite the same thing, but they’re close enough.)

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

  April 2023

Memory preserves the past and fixes the imagination.

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There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master—outward sense
The obedient servant of her will. Such moments
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood.

— William Wordsworth, The Prelude; Book Twelfth: Imagination and Taste, How Repaired and Restored

 

Music distills, packages, and holds emotion. — Roger W. Smith

 

So do precise memories. As Wordsworth well knew.

 

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I am at freshman football practice. It is a beautiful New England Indian summer. The practices are long and exhausting.

I am probably too small to have gone out for football. We do leg lifts and other exercises on a hot, sweaty day. Drills against a blocking dummy. The freshman squad coach with a green cap, Mr. Strumski, is a heavy set guy.

Another kid says to me, “You think you’re a football player? What did you go out for football for?”

It’s my senior year. English class is first period. I pass the principal’s office on the way to class. I hear someone say to the principal, Mr. Alvino. “How are things going today, Mr. Alvino?” He answers, “I have all sorts of headaches. ______ of my teachers called in sick.”

I am always rushing not to be late for school. Our stately old house on Chapman Street, a prime address in the town, was built in the previous century. We have only a bathtub. I take a bath, gulp down my mother’s breakfast, and race to school through woods, a path leading to the football field, past which is the school–the best way to get there. My hair and clothes are always still wet.

I am at the Oak Crest Inn on Cape Cod. Summer 1964. My first job ever (other than paperboy). My title is Night Clerk. $35 a week plus room and board. I have to make rounds every hour with a watchclock on my shoulder and – in my capacity as night clerk — admit the occasional last minute guest. I have a weighty tome to read; there is usually not that much to do.

At eight a.m., my eleven hours shift is finished. I go to the dining room for breakfast. Leo, a crusty old guy, is the cook. He is always making dirty jokes with the waitresses. They are mostly college students. They have pert, saucy comebacks for him. They regard Leo (justly) as a dirty old man, but don’t mind him. One of the waitresses likes to do things like stick her finger in whipped cream and take a taste of it before delivering a strawberry shortcake to a table. All the waitresses are smart and witty. Leo is a short order cook. I am thankful for his breakfasts: greasy eggs with hash browns. His coffee is terrible.

Then I go up to a garret, a tiny space in the rooftop of the Oak Crest Inn, and crawl into bed, having placed LPs on the portable stereo my parents gave me as a high school graduation present. It is always classical: Beethoven piano sonatas, Schumann’s piano concerto, and Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. The music soothes me.

I can’t sleep that long. Wake up in midafternoon –- if not earlier — and head to the beach.

One evening, before my shift, among a gathering in the common room, Mrs. King, a teacher and guest for the whole summer (making her permanent; the hotel is open only during summers) — she is given red carpet treatment, but is never demanding — asks me, could I please get her a cup of coffee.

I panic, There is a full coffee urn at hand, but what is one supposed to put in a coffee cup, how prepare it? I buttonhole another guest and ask them to please help me. Just put some milk and sugar in the cup, they tell me. It’s a relief to me to know.

It is a Monday morning, my first day of work at Columbia University. In the spring of 1973.

In those days, I always had difficulty being on time. I get there precisely at 9 a.m. The door to the Office of Admissions and Counseling, on the fourth floor of Lewisohn Hall, is locked. It is about 9:15 before anyone shows up. Someone arrives and unlocks the door. They seem completely unconcerned. My boss, the Assistant Dean, shows up a few minutes later. He says something like “good, you’re here,” points out my desk, and goes into his office. He basically ignores me. I am left wondering, what am I supposed to be doing?

Susan S, the receptionist, is very good looking and voluptuous. She is always cheerful and friendly. Sunny disposition. The idiosyncrasies of the others in the office amuse her, but she doesn’t take anything too seriously.

Susan is married to a lawyer who is friendly and unassuming like her. She is pregnant. She invitees me and others to feel her stomach and her child (it turns out to be a girl) moving.

Didi, the Financial Aid Officer’s secretary, often brings her daughter to work.

Margaretha, an academic advisor, looks like a Scandinavian movie star. She speaks with a heavy accent (she is Swedish), and Gerry, another advisor who never seems to be busy, can do a very good imitation of her.

The so called professional staff with any sort of title always affect importance.

Nobody dresses that well. Well, most don’t. My boss, the dean, does not look like a businessman, but he is always neat. Dean ______ is always having meltdowns as the result of constant demands from students. and superiors. He calls in sick only rarely, telling me he is “on my bed of pain”; he has a penchant for cliches. On lunch hours, he often goes for a swim in the Teachers College pool. I call it “hydrotherapy,” which amuses him. He lives on West 16th Street (he commutes every day uptown on the No 1 train) and loves the ballet.

It is 1978. I get off the No 1 train at Times Square and almost sprint the few blocks crosstown to Madison Avenue and 40th Street; 270 Madison Avenue to be exact.

I have been hired as a promotion copywriter by a scientific and technical publishing firm. We have to sign in on a timesheet in Eridania’s office. She somehow knows the head of the firm and has a good job as office manager.

Eridania is Puerto Rican. She has handsome features and a charming accent. She is nice and diligent but never seems to have that much to do. Eddie, as she is known, has her own office. So does Mary Ann L., who has connections through her father or husband that make her a pooh-bah. She lives near Sutton Place; her husband is a doctor. She only shows up when she feels like it. The firm is supposed to be publishing scientific and medical books, but she has started up a line of books on ballet. She affects to be arty. She can be hard to take.

There are six or seven desks in the room, which is on an upper floor which the firm occupies.

Inez is from Jamaica. She is Eddie’s secretary. She is very good natured and friendly and is always seeing the humor in things. Gail is someone or other’s secretary. She is loud mouthed — outspoken — says whatever come to mind. She has a sharp wit.

The firm has this supposedly great policy of giving us a half day on Fridays. Actually workdays begin at 8:30, somehow making it the case that we have a couple or more hours coming to us at the end of the week, so the workday ends at 1:30 on Friday. Some of us go to Central Park to play ball. We have joined a softball league. It was Ted’s idea. Ted sells advertising in our medical journals. He works in the same room. He is very handsome and is a good athlete. He just graduated from college. He is young, earnest, and diffident.

Ted’s father is a staff writer for Time magazine. Sometimes he comes to watch our games. We elect Ted team captain and manager.

Around 12 noon, Gail announces that she will get lunch for everyone at a deli on the avenue. She loves fulfilling this duty; takes everyone’s order. Comes back with a cardboard box filled with everything from pizza slices to club sandwiches.

l always order a grilled cheese. The food is never good.

The building has horrible ventilation, is a so called “sick building.” I get a terrible cold. Of course, one can’t open the windows.

People still smoked in those days, I have quit recently, but I occasionally bum a filter cigarette from my immediate superior, Gerry. This always annoys him. He doesn’t hide it, but he proffers a cigarette.

 

It is memories like these that reconstitute the past for me, bring it back as if it were today or yesterday. Bring the past back exactly as it was; and everything I was experiencing and felt then.

 

— posted by Roger W Smith

  February 2023

my first few days in the City

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I was hired by the New York Friends Group at a salary of eighty dollars a week. My job title was Workroom Supervisor. I sorted mail, ran the mimeograph machine, kept office supplies intact, was messenger and delivery boy.

I had stayed overnight in Westchester with a college roommate and his girlfriend. They were visiting her family there. They drove me to Manhattan on my first day of work. It was April 1969.

My roommate said, while we on the FDR Drive, do you have any cash? Not much, I answered. He was a rich kid with a fancy sports car and was generous. He pulled $150 out of his wallet – it seemed like a large sum to me – and handed it to me.

I had almost no money and had made no arrangements for an apartment or room. I wouldn’t be paid for a couple of weeks.

Someone – an older woman, a longtime New Yorker — at the office kindly suggested a YMCA – I think on 34th Street – to me. I don’t know why I didn’t check it out. I believe it was because it kind of sounded “institutional” and the thought of staying there did not appeal to me.

The office manager at 218 East 18th Street, who was living with his girlfriend – she worked at the same place – and his girlfriend Betsy put me up overnight on my first night at their apartment in Greenwich Village. Where his wife was or the state of his marriage I didn’t know. In the morning, his two sons – the typical precocious city kids – were at the breakfast table.

Betsy, the girlfriend, and I took a cab to the office, which was on East 18th Street. I guess the office manager reported to work either earlier or later. Betsy was in her late twenties. She wore sunglasses in New York fashion and kept saying to the taxi driver, “DRIVER, turn here. DRIVER …” Imperiously. I was sort of put off by it.

For several days, I slept on the office floor. As office boy, I had been given a key to the building. (I think I had the responsibility of opening up in the morning.) I would pretend to go home at 5 p.m., would do a reversal and come back; unlock the door, go to one of the upper floors (my “office” was in the basement), and sleep on a rug. It was relatively comfortable.

The only thing I knew how, practically, to cook was rice. Boiled. I bought a box of rice at Bohack supermarket on Third Avenue. I would cook it in a kitchen that was on one of the upper floors. I had probably bought soy sauce too.

Over the weekend, probably, I would go out and explore the neighborhood, feeling pretty lonely.

This went on a for a week or less; and then I had a series of improvised living arrangements which were mostly unsatisfactory and of short duration. I finally found a studio apartment in Queens.

 

— Roger W. Smith

  January 2023

carpe diem

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When my father would get into an argument with his second wife Jan — my stepmother — he would, as she told me, grit his teeth and say, “I’m not going to let it ruin my day.”

We (siblings and stepmother) had a surprise birthday party at my father’s home on Cape Cod on his 65th birthday.

At the end of the day, after the guests had left, he said to us that he almost didn’t want to go to bed. He didn’t want his wonderful day to be over.

 

– posted by Roger W. Smith

  June 2022

sophomoric

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This story was told to me by my older brother. We both had the same outstanding English teacher in high school.

There was a student in our school, Canton High School in Canton, Massachusetts, named Kim Hubbard. His mother, known to us kids as Mrs. Hubbard, was the kindly and perpetually cheerful librarian at the circulation desk at the local library. She seemed to always accidentally on purpose not take note of the fact that a fine was required when a book was overdue.

Her son Kim was a student for a couple of years at a prep school before transferring to Canton High. He was in the graduating class one year ahead of my brother. I vaguely remember him as a high spirited, intelligent kid known for his sense of humor and penchant for acting zany to get a laugh.

For his first assignment in English class — as the story goes — Kim turned in a paper from his sophomore year at the prep school. I recall that my brother said that he got a C.

“This paper is rather sophomoric,” the teacher, Mr. Tighe, said.

 

— Roger W. Smith

    May 2022

true wisdom

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My mother died tragically at a young age of cancer.

I overheard her once one evening in our house when as far as she knew no one was listening saying several times, repeatedly, to her herself, “I am going to die. I am going to die,” as if an incantatory saying could ward off evil; or better yet, help her face it. She was obviously terrified.

Hearing her say this alarmed me.

Several years later, I shared this with my wife Janet. It seemed in a way that cancer had unhinged my mother.

“What was wrong with that?” my wife said. “She was dying.”

My mother knew it. I, at the time, could not admit or face it.

 

– Roger W. Smith

   November 2021

a memory

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“Well,” his father said, “reckon I’ll hoist me a couple.”

They turned through the swinging doors into a blast of odor and sound. There was no music: only the density of bodies and of the smell of a market bar, of beer, whiskey and country bodies, salt and leather; no clamor, only the thick quietude of crumpled talk. Rufus stood looking at the light on a damp spittoon and he heard his father ask for whiskey, and knew he was looking up and down the bar for men he might know. But they seldom came from so far away as the Powell River Valley; and Rufus soon realized that his father had found, tonight, no one he knew. He looked up his father’s length and watched him bend backwards tossing one off in one jolt in a lordly manner, and a moment later heard him say to the man next him, “That’s my boy”; and felt a warmth of love. Next moment he felt his father’s hands under his armpits, and he was lifted, high, and seated on the bar, looking into a long row of huge bristling and bearded red faces. The eyes of the men nearest him were interested, and kind; some of them smiled; further away, the eyes were impersonal and questioning, but now even some of these began to smile. Somewhat timidly, but feeling assured that his father was proud of him and that he was liked, and liked these men, he smiled back; and suddenly many of the men laughed. He was disconcerted by their laughter and lost his smile a moment; then, realizing it was friendly, smiled again; and again they laughed. His father smiled at him. “That’s my boy,” he said warmly. “Six years old, and he can already read like I couldn’t read when I was twice his age.”

Rufus felt a sudden hollowness in his voice, and all along the bar, and in his own heart. But how does he fight, he thought. You don’t brag about smartness if your son is brave. He felt the anguish of shame, but his father did not seem to notice, except that as suddenly as he had lifted him up to the bar, he gently lifted him down again. “Reckon I’ll have another,” he said, and drank it more slowly; then, with a few good nights, they went out.

— James Agee, A Death in the Family

 

*****************************************************

I sent the following email to my brothers and my sister this afternoon:

to my siblings

I am in a favorite bar near Carnegie Hall. The waitresses are so nice to me.

A guy just walked in with a little kid under five. They are sitting in a booth right next to me.

It triggered a memory which made me feel very sentimental. I have not thought about it for years.

I wound up at a bar with Dad, probably in Cambridge, when I was around six or seven.

I sat on a barstool. Everyone — the bartender and everyone else — was so nice to me. They treated me like an honored guest.

The bartender gave me a bowl of potato chips …. how I enjoyed them!

I was bathed in warmth and kindness.

miss Dad terribly

ROGER

 

— posted  by Roger W. Smith

    July 31, 2021

 

Walden Pond, Concord, Mass., early 50’s. My father, me, and my two brothers. I am the furthest to the left.

a tale of … (which two cities)?

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I have been corresponding with a second cousin of mine from my mother’s side of the family. My second cousin lives on the West Coast.

We are catching up on genealogy, mostly. But I have shared a few tidbits (stories). We never met before, although I had some correspondence prior to his passing with my second cousin, Margaret’s, father.

 

*****************************************************

August 20, 2020

Dear Margaret,

 

Aunt Etta [my mother’s aunt; my and Margaret’s great-aunt] used to spend Thanksgivings with us. I always looked forward to it. You might enjoy my blog post about Thanksgiving at

Thanksgiving

Near the end of her life, Aunt Etta missed a Thanksgiving. She had moved out of her apartment (I think near Copley Square [in Boston]) to an assisted living place that was very nice. I said to my parents after dinner: I miss Aunt Etta. I am going to visit her. My younger brother went with me. We took the family car. Aunt Etta looked frail but otherwise okay. She was very pleased to see us and appreciated the visit. It was the last time I saw Aunt Etta. [I sensed this, had a premonition.]

 

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August 21. 2020

Dear Margaret,

 

A couple of stories about Aunt Etta.

She used to always say “extry” instead of “extra.” I think my mother was her favorite niece or nephew. She liked my mother, and why not? My mother was gracious and just plain nice to everyone. I talked about this aspect of her in one of my blog posts. May I share it with you?

Some people aren’t interested in people.

My mother was annoyed that Aunt Etta belonged to the DAR because of its anti-Black stance. My mother was very pro civil rights. But they did not come to blows over this. Aunt Etta was justifiably proud of her great-grandfather William Handy and had an interest in genealogy and local history. William Handy’s revolutionary war experience is covered in my post at

my Revolutionary War ancestor

In the 1950’s, Aunt Etta — who was always thoughtful and people-oriented, and who seemed to have values much like my grandfather Ralph, her brother (who died when I was an infant) — invited my older brother and me to spend a weekend at her apartment in Boston. She went out of her way to make it an enjoyable visit.

On a Saturday, she took us skating on the Boston Common. My brother was a good skater, I wasn’t. Aunt Etta did not go skating herself. I remember her lacing up our skates in the freezing cold. Her fingers were numb. She was a very un-self-centered person. It did not seem to be a nuisance to her to have to wait for us in the freezing cold.

When we got back to her warm, cozy apartment, we were watching TV or reading magazines and we somehow mentioned Elvis Presley. My brother and I were Elvis fans. Aunt Etta said she didn’t quite know what she thought about him, but, she said, he sure had long “side whiskers” (her word for sideburns). Little things intrigued her.

Aunt Etta brought out a plate of brownies she had baked. They had pecans in them. I meticulously removed all the nuts before eating my brownie. Aunt Etta thought that was so funny. I spent all morning chopping up those nuts, she said. She wasn’t angry, just highly amused.

I believe this was true of my grandfather Ralph, from what I was always told, it was certainly true of my mother; and also of Aunt Etta, whom I knew well, but not intimately — they were all modest and the opposite of pushy, and just plain decent, as well as nice.

 

*****************************************************

August 27, 2020

 

Dear Margaret,

A story or two which I just recalled.

The one time I met Uncle Rob [Robert S. Handy, my grandfather’s brother and mother’s uncle; he was a cranberry farmer on Cape Cod], he said one thing to me that I remember distinctly. He told me to buy a house at the first opportunity. He said that that was the best move I could make to ensure financial security.

I was single, probably in my early twenties. I had just graduated from college. The thought of buying a house seemed hard to grasp for me then.

Aunt Etta, as you no doubt know, was frugal and money conscious. She gave me $2,000 on Christmas 1967. It was a bank book with $2,000 in the account. It seemed like a huge gift. She told me — then, or around that time — how she had opened her first bank account when she was young and her father [Henry T. Handy] had advised her to do so and keep her money so it could grow. She wanted to give me helpful advice. I listened but did not pay that much heed then. I was kind of the starving poet type.

 

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September 14, 2020

Dear Margaret,

I thought you would find this memorial tribute to Jill Jillson [daughter of my mother’s cousin Carol (Handy) Jillson] of interest.

Jill and I were about the same age and we would see her and her siblings on visits, usually to the Cape, with my mother’s cousin Carol (Handy) Jillson and her husband, Jack Jillson.

Somehow it got mentioned to me once that Jack Jillson [Jill Jillson’s father, husband of my mother’s cousin Carol] was a Harvard grad, like my father. I said to my mother, he went to Harvard, really? He was quiet (soft spoken) and self-effacing, and he didn’t seem quite like a “blue blood” (not that my father was) or intellectual.

“He hides his candle under a bushel,” my mother said.

In my freshman year in high school, the Jillsons were visiting us in Canton [Massachusetts]. My father and Jack Jillson were on chaise longues in the back yard. It was a hot day. I was reading Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities for English class. I mentioned this, and Jack said, what two cities: Baltimore and St. Louis? They both thought this was very funny.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   September 2020

 

Etta H. Handy (Aunt Etta)

Robert S. Handy (Uncle Rob)