Alexander Frank Tripp, memoir of a Westport Farmer

Alexander Frank Tripp (1920 – 2004), an autobiography

Alexander Tripp in his barn

“I was born in 1920. My father went to get Dr. Hicks in South Dartmouth on Slades Corner Road. The snow was so deep (4 feet) that he drove his horse and sleigh over stone walls and through fields and woods. It was so cold that winter that Buzzards Bay was frozen over to Martha’s Vineyard.”

Born in Westport, the son of Arthur and Agnes Tripp, Alexander was a 1938 graduate of Westport High School and a 1939 graduate of Stockbridge School of Agriculture, School of Animal Husbandry at UMass Amherst. He was a partner in Bojuma Farm before purchasing White Rock Farm in Little Compton in 1960.

His autobiography covers his childhood in Westport MA, life on the farm on Horseneck Road and Main Road, stories of rum running, chicken farms, dairy farming, and turnips. It provides an authentic, unfiltered record of Westport’s agricultural community during the 20th century.

Alexander Frank Tripp Born 1920

My Grandfather had bought the farm on Horseneck Road for his grown children to run. When my father and mother were married, they lived and worked on the farm with Uncle Willis and Aunt Helen. It was what you might call a satellite farm.

I was born in 1920. My father went to get Dr. Hicks in South Dartmouth on Slades Comer Road. The snow was so deep ( 4 feet) that he drove his horse and sleigh over stone walls and through fields and woods. It was so cold that winter that Buzzards Bay was frozen over to Martha’s Vineyard.

In the fall of 1921 my Grandfather had put up a barn on the Horseneck Road property and had a big clambake. I can remember going to it in my mother’s laundry basket. Those are my first memories, the new barn, and the smell of the clambake.
Later Willis rebuilt his house around the old house which stood there. There was a big cellar where he kept his eggs and grain for his chickens and on the other side a root cellar where Aunt Helen kept her preserves. Well water came from a spring. Milk was kept cool in that spring. Years later they made a pond there below the barn.

I can remember that when I was very small, I was kept in a wooden crib. The mattress part could come out and then it could be flipped over and used as a play pen. When I jumped, I could make the entire playpen move, and sometimes tip it over.

In 1923-1924 Pa worked at painting houses for George Russell in the summer and cut wood in the winter. In 1924 we moved to Milton Wood’s on Sodom Road. When I was a little kid, I loved cats but my mother hated them. She would always stop whatever she was doing and make me take the cat out. She didn’t like cleaning up whatever the cat did in the house.

I was born in 1920. My father went to get Dr. Hicks in South Dartmouth on Slades Corner Road. The snow was so deep (4 feet) that he drove his horse and sleigh over stone walls and through fields and woods. It was so cold that winter that Buzzards Bay was frozen over to Martha’s Vineyard.In the fall of 1921 my Grandfather had put up a barn on the Horseneck Road property and had a big clambake. I can remember going to it in my mother’s laundry basket. Those are my first memories, the new barn, and the smell of the clambake.I can remember that when I was very small, I was kept in a wooden crib. The mattress part could come out and then it could be flipped over and used as a play pen. When I jumped, I could make the entire playpen move, and sometimes tip it over.I can remember that when I was very small, I was kept in a wooden crib. The mattres part could come out and then it could be flipped over and used as a play pen. When I jumped, I could make the entire playpen move, and sometimes tip it over.

I remember when my brother Art and I both had impetigo. We swelled up under the arms.
Quite a project getting over that back then as there were no antibiotics. Our lips would break out at the corners of our mouth.My mother made me take a nap every afternoon. One day I decided to break that habit and went over to the barn. When it was about time for me to get up from the nap, my mother came looking for me but didn’t see me. I had crawled under a pile of hay and made off I was asleep. She went back to the house. After about half an hour, I felt guilty
and went home.While we were living at Milton Wood’s, Art and I had the job of scraping the platform off in the barn every day. One time the cow kicked the hoe out of my hand and it went through the window, breaking the glass. Jim Tripp worked for Milt Wood and really gave me heck.While we were living at Milton Wood’s, Art and I had the job of scraping the platform off in the barn every day. One time the cow kicked the hoe out of my hand and it went through the window, breaking the glass. Jim Tripp worked for Milt Wood and really gave
me heck.In 1925, I can remember, we saw two airplanes going over us. They were the first airplanes I’d ever seen. They each had double wings and were flying side by side. Me an Art both watched them as long as we could. Somewhere around that time there was a
total eclipse of the sun and my mother smoked glass so we could look at it.My mother would sometimes talk about the May basket my father left her. It was made up of June bugs. People don’t give May baskets anymore, it’s a thing of the past and they especially wouldn’t be giving them full of June bugs.In 1925 we had a big wind storm and it blew down most of the trees in front of Sylvia Wood’s place. One of them took down the corner of the roof on the eve side of the house.
Holland King cleaned up all trees and the big butts he hauled up the corner of Charlotte White Road. He rolled them into the ditch on the north side of the road. They were still
there in the 1950-60’s. Long time before they rotted away.
Up to Fred Wood’s the jackass would bay every night. We could hear him down where we lived. There was a stone crusher that was used to crush stone in the road. One foot of crushed stone, that was a ton. They moved it around from place to place. That was the last place they moved it to.

One day, Art began to pick flowers along the side of the road. He said he was going to take them down to old lady Peckham so when he went, I went with him. I stopped at the gate and he went in to give them to her. I was scared but he didn’t have any trouble. She was crazy. Years later I heard that when they were working on the road, she came out with a gun. Pumpkin Head Haskell was working on the road and he dropped everything and ran.I went with my father down to Emile Beaulieu’s. He was milking cows when we got there. My father said, “it’s cold, isn’t it”, and Emile said, “yes, all I’ve got on is tin pants” So on the way home I asked my father why Emile was wearing tin pants and that was when I understood that it was his French accent and he meant “thin” pants. Another time I went with my father over to Grillo’s to get rhubarb so my mother could can it. He had a small field of it. 100′ x 100′ surrounded by walls and we picked quite a bit of rhubarb. I know we used to go up to Norman Gifford’s down Martin’s Lane. There were two houses down in there. Eventually, that house burned down. Hazel Cahill was one of those Giffords. She always asks me how Arthur is doing when I see her. She is his age.Come Christmas, Art and I both got sleds and we would go up on top of this shed which was banked with dirt and we could slide right out to the road.1 garage stood along the laneway that went to Devol Pond. That’s where Milt Wood rept his canopy truck and Jim Tripp had farm machinery to keep in there on rainy days. I vould get his goat by scraping something on the cement floor. He was always threatening to throw me out in the rain if I didn’t stop it.

Milt Wood had bought the school house down below Ike’s place where one of the twins now lives. They moved it up to Milton Wood’s on the laneway to the pond. There was a little laneway and they set it up. All the farmers grew oats then for their horses. Milton Wood had his oats put in it and they had a nice peak and pile in there. While they were doing something there I ran through those oats barefoot and flattened them out all over the place. I got the devil for that.Milton Wood had a pair of oxen, brass ends on their horns. At his mother’s, Sylvia Wood’s, they had a place to throw the oxen. They could put them in and “throw them”
Strap the oxen in and tip them right over so as to shoe them.Sometimes Milton Wood would ask me and Art if we wanted to go around the square.

We would go down Charlotte White Road and Main Road and then Milton would stop at Charlie Woods to see a cow he would be thinking about buying in the future. He always had to go see them 2 or 3 times before he bought them. When we left, we would go down Adamsville Road and up Sodom Road. That was around the square. Art’s first day at school at Brownell’s Corner School (now the corner of Sanford Rd and Rte 177) he was missing at recess. My Aunt Jenny was the teacher and thought she knew where he had gone, since she knew my mother and her sisters and some other women had made goodies to sell in a tent they had at the old fairgrounds on Old County Road at the Head. Aunt Jenny got him before he got there, but at noontime he made it all the way down there.In 1923, my sister Virginia was born and then Gloria in 1925 when we moved to Ed King’s place across from Tom Petty’s and Grundy’s on Old County Road, now Rte. 177.
Ike Tripp plowed the garden for us. He had a horse named Handsome. He was only a small horse but could pull anything, but he would always start with a jump. He came with a plow and harrow. He made one pass across the garden and started back and hit a stone with the plow and of course Handsome jumped and broke the whiffletree. That’s the thing that goes behind the horse to hold him to the wagon. Ike had to unhook, take the wagon and go back home to get another whiffletree. Uncle Granville had given him that horse and a cow for a wedding present. Granville always kept a pair of horses, but he liked big showy horses that could pull a lot.Our job, when we didn’t have anything else to do, was raking up glass. There was originally an old dump there and when Pa thought we needed something to do he would put us out there.Art and me used to ride down the hill there on an old axle and two wheels. That was great fun until we hit a rock and went flying. That was the end of that business. When we were about 5-6 years old, we had to walk up to Brownell’s Corner School and Harold Amaral (he was 10-11 years old) used to pound little kids, so when we were coming home at night we always walked in groups, with the older kids watching out for the little kids. Roy Petty lived in the house below. He was Tom Petty’s son. He had a motorcycle and sometimes on Sunday he would come and get my father and they would go to New Bedford to see other motorcyclist ride in the cyclone.In the 20’s, before my Grandfather Tripp died, we would go up there to visit him every Sunday and I can remember my Grandmother’s kitchen, how good it smelled and she always had a red table cloth on the table. She was always busy and never came into theliving room while we were visiting my Grandfather. I don’t remember her, but Russell Tripp says she always moved at a trot, never walked.My grandfather would sit on a couch in the living room, Art on one side and me on the other side. Gramp would put two pennies between his fingers on each hand and Art and I would try to pick them out while Pa would talk to Gramp. We always succeeded in getting the pennies out of his hand just before we went home. Gramp was a modern farmer. He was the first one to have a pump to pump water from the well with a gasoline engine. He even had the agency to sell the pumps. I went to his funeral in 1923, it was the first funeral I went to and I went to Gramma Tripp’s in 1933.About my great grandfather, Howard Tripp. He had 17 kids, 4 boys and 13 girls. A lot of the daughters died of TB when they were 6 – 12 years old. He was a veterinarian and a horse trader. He would go to Canada and buy horses. George Mosher’s grandmother, Carrie Tripp, used to tell me what a good veterinarian he was. She said that if her folks had a sick horse or cow they would get him and he would prescribe a medicine and she would have to go out and pick it. Different kinds of herbs. She claimed he was an excellent vet. My grandfather Alexander was the youngest of those boys. Another Tripp, John Tripp married one of his daughters and that was John Tripp, father of Audrey Tripp.I remember when Pa brought home frost fish. These were Whiting that would come up on Horseneck Beach every winter. A storm with northwest wind and tide going out fast would bring them in and they would be frozen on the beach for the picking up. He would clean and salt them and put them in the cellar in crocks. I can’t remember how my mother
would prepare these fish, but I think she fried them.

Pa bought a pig at Antone Viera’s auction on Old County Road. We asked him how he could tell which one it was since he didn’t bring it home with him. He marked it but he didn’t tell us how, so when the pig arrived there was a notch in the ear. That was the mark. On the coldest night of the year she had 3-4 pigs. We brought them in the house to keep them warm, but they all died.Pa bought a cross cut saw from Sears and Roebuck. We took it to the edge of the swamp and cut a dead tree.Tom Petty came over at breakfast one morning. He had his shot gun and he said he had an eagle stealing his hens and it was on the peak of the barn. He wanted to know if he could shoot it, so he shot it. It had a wing span of 6-7 feet. It was an Arctic Owl (all white). I saw it about 20 years later. It was hanging in the corn crib over at Tom Petty’s.

Another thing, they had a gang that worked about two months down in back of Tom Petty’s. All I know about that is that they were cutting a path into the woods, eventually they hauled a mill stone out of there.Pa would take us down to Walter Kirby’s store at the Head of Westport when we wanted to get something. Of course we wanted candy, so we would ask him for pennies. You could get quite a lot of candy for a penny. Once in a great while we would ask for a nickel and we would get it some of the time.When we needed a haircut my father would take us to Potter’s Barbershop. The barbershop was located in the house Pa would later buy on Main Road. The haircut cost 15 cents. When we were done we would walk home by ourselves – 3 miles.

On my first day of school I was chewing gum. The teacher made me spit it out and I was crying because I had only had it one day. You could usually chew it for a week.
Pa ran for assessor in 1927-28 and he got elected.My father bought the place on Main Road, where we used to get the haircuts, on April 5, 1928, Virginia’s birth day and we started to move. Art and I led the cow down there from Old County Road, about three miles. Main Road north of Charlotte White Road was like going through a tunnel. There used to be a big wide space in the road north of Charlotte White Road. Later years when the town widened the road they eliminated that. It was a beautiful day. I could already milk that cow. When we got there we tied her up and then we went to the dump, down back under the pine tree. Art found a half cent piece and a lot of odds and ends in there and we spent a long time there. In this dump we found the
barber Potter’s old shoes, one shoe had to be elevated and we found 6-7 of these rocker’s that fit onto his shoes. Junk that interested us. After a while we cut a path along the back to widen it out some. Note: The Tripp Homestead Alexander speaks about here is presently the location of the restaurant Bittersweet Farm and the farm house is now A.S. Deams. Up in the first lot in the back where we eventually had a garden, there were 2 big black snakes out there sunning themselves every day. They would go into the hole when they heard us. Joe Travis and I went up there one day to see them. One went into the hole but the other one came after us. He raised himself up about 6 inches from the ground and came lopping after us fast. We ran, Joe went back but it was just going into its hole.In this field where we eventually had the garden, there were always a lot of arrowheads t be found. George Mosher always seemed to find a lot of them. I had quite a few. I also
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found a hatchet, blunt at both ends and a groove around it. That disappeared when my mother’s house got broken into. I always thought there were a lot more arrowheads down the hill from my father’s and Harry Kirby’s line but we never went down there and dug in the bushes to find them. I think that the Indians liked to camp at that spot where the brook comes through and the bank is nice with clover and moss. We liked it there too.We had a rainy, foggy day and Pa went blue berrying. He got lost but came home with 10 quarts of blueberries. He was over in back of Winsor Tripp’s. Years later I went with

The neighborhood boys were the Zaro boys, Clarence Woodcock and the Bowles boys and Roy Petty. They were most of the guys I grew up with. Bert Hathaway had a place
up where the Hancocks live now. He had rented that place. He was a horse dealer. They killed the old nags and took their hide off them and hauled them back up in the woods. the “bone lot” we called it. We would go up there on Sunday morning and they would be breaking green horses. They would buy a carload of them from out west and to break them they would hook them to the lumber wagon with front and rear wheels tied together on both sides and they would drag it like a sleigh. After a couple of sessions of that they were pretty well worn out and pretty well trained. After that they would team it with one green horse and one draft horse. He was pretty well trained by then.
Winsor Tripp’s father, Steve Tripp was a horse trader, mostly when the family lived way up in the woods, up Stevio’s Lane. Night time he used to be up to Harry Kirby’s two or three nights a week and he would go home any time around 11:00 or midnight. One night he came through my father’s cornfield. May have been a wet foggy night and we could see

was laid out in the living room That was the first dead person I had ever seen. I was amazed how clean everything was in the house. They lived as poor as any one could live.
Old Zaro used to raise some oats. They only came about knee high, he would cut them with a sythe when they got about half way dried out he would begin to make haycocks out of them. In fact, he hayed the same way. Every night he would have the hay all cocked up. If it looked like rain, 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning he would get the boys up and get it loaded and take it to the barn. The next day he would have them out in the road raking up
every little strand of oats they had lost. How they lived through it, I don’t know, but the old
man lived to be almost 100

Pa bought a cow from Bert Hathaway for $10. He brought her home and she died the next day. He bought a goose from him and brought her home and she laid an egg every other day and we kids would fight over who was going to get it for breakfast. She stopped laying come fall and my father killed her for Thanksgiving. The goose was about 20 years old. It had a lot of grease in it and my mother saved it. She never threw anything out. The grease got rancid and she always put it in cakes so we had rancid cakes for the next year.Clayty Tripp lived at Bert Hathaways. He used to shoot the horses and skin them. One Sunday Art and I were up there and he shot a horse. Bert said he shot it with both barrels.
Clayty was skinning it, Art and I watched him. He was asking Art about the teachers.
They were all women. We went home and when we went back in the afternoon, Bert was finishing skinning the horse. Clayty had gone to sleep right aside of it. Clayty used to dig wells and stone them up. That is what he was, a stone mason. He came down to the
house night times so my father could take him someplace, to a dance where he would play his fiddle. While we were eating supper, he would play the fiddle for us and sing a few songs. He used to get under a big tree and call the crows. When he got a big group of them he would shoot some. There was a bounty on crows of $1.00 a piece.

Birdie Peckham lived at the town farm. Most of the time he would stand at the end of Kirby Road on Drift Road and stand at the water trough. He would keep a straw across his mouth sideways and the politicians, especially my father, when they would go to
One morning he was sitting on the cemetery wall at the corner of Main and Hix Bridge Road reading the paper. Somebody came along and asked him what the news was. He
said the New York boat had turned upside down. He had the paper upside down. He was a character.My brother Art was over to Willis’s for the day about that time. About midnight that night, when he got home, he woke up with pains all over him. He had been swinging in the barn on the hay rope. He grabbed the wrong rope and the rope pulled right through the pulley and landed on the cement floor. He was all bruised up. Pa rebuilt the barn and the silo, and Art climbed up and put his foot on the roof of the barn, kind of stretched out there, slipped and fell on the rocks below. Another miserable night.Clarence Woodcock and I went down back and found some swamp apples. Before we got through, we went across the road and went up Milton Wood’s woodlot eating apples all the way. I had the worst bellyache I ever had. Never ate another one before nor after.We used to have to drive the milking cows down to Ephraim Tripp’s every day and the dry cows would be driven down to Frank Dean Tripp’s, George Mosher’s grandfather. My father went down there one day to check on them. The cow they just brought was a kicker. He got close to her before she calved. She knocked him down and rolled him around. The only way he got away from her was to reach up, grab her ear and bite right into it. He came home, cleaned up, but he missed his corn cob pipe He went back down to the pasture and found it. When we were driving the cows to Ephraim Tripp’s the first apples of the season would be down by Ephraim’s gate where we turned the cows into the pasture. Last of the apples were at Travis’ orchard along the side of the road.

Schools
I started school on Brownell’s Corner(1-2), then (2-3) at Booth’s Corner, then the Poin for 4th grade, 5th and 6th grade at Booth’s Corner School, the Factory School 7-8 and then High School at Central Village.

Boy Scouts
I joined the Boy Scouts when I was 13, 7th grade. On a special Sunday we went to church at the Union Church on Union Avenue. Charlie Holmes was the Scout Master a
Superintendent of the Sunday School at the Union Church. The first Sunday we went u to St. George’s Catholic Church on the Highland Road. All scouts went to that. The second year we went to the Union Church, not one Catholic kid went to that church service. That’s how much things jave changed. I got to be a life scout. One of my mer badges was for a 14 mile hike. To get the merit badge we had to have a composition (I words). I wrote it out and didn’t have no where near enough. To make enough words increased all the adjectives.We went to Pine Island with the boy scouts. That is a town-owned island off Willis’s shore. It was in September, and we had chowder. We had dug the clams there and cooked some crabs and we picked dangleberries and had them in the pan cakes. We were there several days.In 1934 the Boy Scout Troop was going to pick two boys to go to Washington DC to the International Boy Scout Jamboree. We collected $100. It was going to cost $50 each.
There were four of us going. I had to go over to Cherry and Webb in New Bedford with my folks to buy a whole new Boy Scout outfit. Two days before we were to leave, we got notice that there would be no Jamboree, that it was called off because of the polio epidemic (called infantile paralysis in those days) which was massive back then. The boys going were Freeman Meader, Wilbur Smith, Malcolm Collins, and myself. It wasn’t until years later I asked Milton Earle who financed the two extra boys. He said that the four fathers contributed $25 extra for the other 2 boys.

Anytime someone was coming from Maine or we would be going down to Maine, we ki would always be waiting for some chewing gum. That was a lump of sap off the fir tree Getting a chuck of that and you would have a good piece of gum after awhile. When yo were through chewing it you could put it up and it would dry up. In about 1937, I went with the Boy Scouts to New Hampshire. Just me from the Westport troop and 5 scouts from New Bedford. We went to Gorham and camped and at the Boy Scout campgroun The first day we walked up to the face of the Old Man of the Mountains and we walked around it and the next day another mountain. Finally along the last of it we walked up N Madison and across to Mt. Washington. That was an interesting walk. You got up abo the tree line where it’s all rocks. When we came back we came down by way of Tuckerman’s Ravine. That area all fills up with snow and is a dangerous place in the wintertime. Very tough walk.In 1934 my father took me to the city to buy shoes. We bought a pair of sneakers. My feet used to sweat at that time and the next day I went down to John Davis’s and when I came home my feet were stinking so much and sweating, I found out I had athletes foot.
So we got some Absorbine Jr. and in a week they got better.In 1934 I was delivering papers. We had three real cold days and nights. My father took me around in his car the first two nights, but by the 3rd night it was 8 degrees above at
4:00 in the afternoon and his car wouldn’t start. So I peddled the papers, bicycling sixteer and a half miles, nothing to it. One heel was a little cold, that’s all. The next morning it was 24 below.I had a paper route. I walked it down as far as John Davis’s, 6 days a week. Later I started my 16 mile route. Art stayed home because he had asthma, so he milked the cows.
We shared the profit. That turned out to be my bike riding training. I entered and won

three races, three bicycles. The first bike was supposed to be a balloon tire bike. I saw it at the Fall River Labor Union. When I got up there, 3-4 days later, it was just an ordinary bike, small tires. I’ve never had any use for labor unions after that. That was in 1936.Another race in ’38, no way would they let me in. They said no one else would enter if they let me in. I got mad and told them that I would get someone else to run the race and they would win it. So I got Johnnie Davis to go in it and he won it.Well, I remember back then we had apple trees north of the house. Baldwins and Rhode Island Greening. We would store them on the north side of the house until it got real cold, then we would put them in the cellar where all the vegetables for the winter were.
During the summer, about that time, lightening struck Roy Petty’s house on Charlotte White Road. Roy came down and called the fire department from our house. Art and I went up to see the house burning up. It didn’t burn, but made an 8″ x 12″ hole in the roof and filled the house with smoke. You could follow where the lightening went all around the house and pulled the trim nail out outside. We had a thunderstorm and we had
hailstones as big as marbles. At our back door they came down off the roof and we had a big pile of them. Ice in the summertime made us think of ice cream so my mother said we would make it if we picked the strawberries and if we went to Brillards Store to get the
condensed milk. So we made strawberry ice cream.In this period of time there was a bunch of wild dogs that ran between MacDonald s Slaughter house on Old County Road and Wood’s Slaughter house at Central Village. had an outbreak of rabbies so the Town of Westport hired someone to shoot them all which they did.

My father used to buy hen houses. He bought a hen house down there on Wordell’s Lane in Little Compton and a lot of wire fencing and he had Harry Kirby came down with a
horse and wagon and my father, brother and I went down there and started taking down wire fence. When Harry Kirby arrived, we loaded the hen house on the wagon. Harry started home with the hen house and we finished taking down the wire fencing, making a
truckload. We unloaded that hen house west of the path down back and that was the #2 hen house. Then he bought another hen house somewhere else and that was unloaded down to the north side of the farm. That was the #3 hen house. Eventually, he bought another one a little bigger than the three others. Then he bought one up there in Tiverton.
He bought a Willie’s car there and also a hen house. We knocked the hen house all apart, brought it home and built it onto another one.We always had a garden. My father planted what we thought were watermelons. Art and I watched them grow but they never seemed to be getting ripe so we opened one up one day and it was nowhere near ripe. Eventually, we found out why. They were citrons. My mother cooked some of them and they were real good. No one plants them any more.
My mother always had to start early in the spring and get her dandelions, her water cress, her cow slips, her blueberries, her black berries, huckleberries, dangleberries, cranberries and beach plums. As scared as she was of snakes, she still had to get those berries.Art had a go round with the teachers. One day they told him to stay in at recess but he said he was going out. The teacher stopped him going out and that led to the teacher trying to give him a lickin’. At recess, the kids were all looking in the windows, so at noontime they pulled the curtains down and two teachers tried to give him a lickin’. Miss Lanagan, his teacher, and Mary Partington in the other room. It ended up there was no lickin’, but the teachers each had a nosebleed and one of them had a black eye. When I peddled papers that afternoon, I found him at Winsor Tripp’s about 5:00 eating his dinner.

He was telling me about it but he got home about 6:00. My father had done chores and we were all eating supper. My father got Art’s story where he had been and why he wasn’t around. While we were eating supper, the teachers came and stopped out front and explained what had happened, expelling Art from school. Art had been saving all his school papers and my father told him to go get them. His papers were marked wrong, whether they were right or wrong, he was failing in all of his subjects, getting marks of 20- 50. The teacher’s pet had been correcting them. My father handed them to Lanagan and asked her what she thought of that. She looked at them and said she couldn’t explain it.
They left and later my father called Milton Earle, Superintendent, to tell him that Art had been expelled but would go to school at the next day. The next day Art went to school, my father had a lot of lobster pot rope. He took a coil of it down to the school about
10:30, knocked on the door and went right in. He told the teacher right in front of the class if she wanted to lick him this would help. Five days later Art was shipped to the
Head of Westport. He got along good with Mrs. Newman down there. He began to learn and got better marks.My brother Art kept chickens. Elmer Grundy came to get the grain order from Art and he found him in the brooder house coming out the door with a dead cat that had been stealing
his chickens. In catching the cat, he scared all of the week-old chickens into the corner and they were all dead too. But Art was happy, he got the cat. Another time there was another cat stealing my father’s chickens. Art and I saw him on the wall down in back of the orchard so we told my father and he got his shot gun. He shot at the cat and the cat jumped right up in the air about 2 feet. Apparently, nothing hit the cat because he was still around afterwards but Art came in the shop, the back part of the house, one night and told me the cat was upstairs in the open chamber and he shut the door on him. The cat went upstairs and we went up and found a hole in the side of the wall that went up into the open chamber. We finally got him cornered and after about a half hour or more we killed him.
He was a big cat, he weighed 12 lbs.1920’s – ’30’s. A few things back when we were kids. When anyone had a birthday, they got their noses greased. Olive tells about Fred Webb being there to see my father, so Fred got some grease and chased her all over the house and outside before he finally caught her and put some grease on her nose. Going to school back in the 30’s, May 1st was May Day and we always had a May pole with a big ribbon coming down for everyone at school.
There were two different colors, the paper ribbon that were carrying. Every other person went one way and then others went the other way. That wrapped the two different colors around the May pole. When that was done, we went the other way and unwrapped it.
Those two things are out of style now. Gone out of existence.If they didn’t have it with them they would take the order and bring it with them next time around. The fish man had anything in season. The meat man was Sanford’s truck and the bakers were Pomphrey, then there was Hathaway and Bond bakers. Then there was Kirby’s store. My father would go down there, set at the stove and talk with people about what was going on. They would set around the stove talking all politics and any gossip there was. Lauren Parks lived up on the hill and was running for Assessor. He had Frankie White go down to the store to see if he could find out about the elections and how things were going. So Frankie went under the store and got his ear right up to the hole in the floor right over Bill Ritter. Bill was chewing tobacco and spit and it went right into Frankie’s ear. Frankie got out of that. He used to have a bicycle and called it his bi-wheel.If they didn’t have it with them they would take the order and bring it with them next time around. The fish man had anything in season. The meat man was Sanford’s truck and the bakers were Pomphrey, then there was Hathaway and Bond bakers. Then there was Kirby’s store. My father would go down there, set at the stove and talk with people about what was going on. They would set around the stove talking all politics and any gossip there was. Lauren Parks lived up on the hill and was running for Assessor. He had Frankie White go down to the store to see if he could find out about the elections and how things were going. So Frankie went under the store and got his ear right up to the hole in the floor right over Bill Ritter. Bill was chewing tobacco and spit and it went right into Frankie’s ear. Frankie got out of that. He used to have a bicycle and called it his bi-wheel.Somebody hid it on him and he came into the store telling that somebody stole his bi-wheel. Lauren Parks had 3 geese that were always running out on the landing. Somebody

put an ad in the New Bedford paper, “Toulouse geese, call Lauren Park, Head of Westport”.Eventually, Kirby went out of business. Walter Kirby’s store was sold. First they cut it in half and moved the back half and made an apartment house out of it. The other half was
bought by Frank Azevedo and he went into the farm equipment business. He was selling Case machinery. Eventually his business got better and he moved up to the State Road in Dartmouth. Jimmy went to work for him along with Gerald Souza. He ended up putting
up television aerials all over the nearby towns and cities. Eventually, Frank went out of the machinery business. Bowling allies were the thing then, so he went into the bowling ally business and built the big one and went broke on it. Their time had gone by.I was out in the yard all day. I was about 10-11 years old in the spring of the year. Walter Kirby and his wife Gladys and Lizzie Gifford came by in the Ford delivery truck and stopped and asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. I told them sure and told my mother I
was going with them. The place we were going, I found out, was Peckham’s Greenhouse down here in Little Compton. Walter had come down to get a mess of different kinds of
plants to sell at the store. What I remember most was that the road was a dirt road and there were haystacks on both sides of the road. I guess that most of the hay went for the horses. Everybody had horses.Nat Haskell had a horse. He did a lot of work for George Russell. When he was working that horse you could hear him half a mile away cursing it. It was a big stallion horse and I guess that was all he could understand was the cursing.

nember one time we were all out in the back shop and on Main Road we decided that vould put Gloria in a bag and drop her through the scuttle down into the cellar. She willing. So we did it. Today she tells that we pretty near smothered her before we her out of the bag. Kids play.More on the 30’s. My father was the Treasurer of the Fall River Milk Producers. He would take us to the Academy Building for monthly meetings. We would go to the movie pictures there, never knowing what we were going to see. One time we saw Frankenstein.
Another time we took Albert Brownell with us. He had never been to a movie before.
We saw an exciting bar room fight and so forth. The next morning he came down to the house about 10:30. My father asked him how he liked the movies. He said gosh he never went to sleep until the rooster crowed in the morning.

In the late 1930’s, the two best movies that I remember were the ones my father wanted to see. He took Art and me to the movies to see them. The original Oregon Trail and the Grapes of Wrath. Those were two good pictures. Another fellow I remember was Will Rogers. He was on the radio and he got killed in an airplane crash in Alaska.

Other times my father would leave us off at my cousin Herbie Tripp’s on upper Sanford Road. In the winter, we would go down through the chicken yard to the edge of North Watuppa Pond. If we heard somebody coming down the sidewalk, we’d get out of there in a hurry. That would be the cop coming down. Later on, Herbie built an ice boat propelled by a motor with a propeller on the front of it. He got it on the pond one day, gave his father a ride, hit a crack on the ice, swerved and threw his father off and he slid a long, long way. His father didn’t get hurt because he had a heavy leather coat on. The next day the cops told him to take that machine off the ice. It would go 50 – 60 miles per hour and they were afraid somebody would get hurt.

They My cousin Herbie Tripp was stout and very strong. He only weighed 120 pounds. If he had somebody with him and had a flat tire he would loosen up the nuts on the wheels and then lift it off the ground so the other guy could change the wheel. No jack needed. First class mechanic and welder. He ended up working at Brown and Sharp, Quincy Shipyard and Wilcox in Fall River. He retired from making escape ladders for Salvo. In 1934 when it got so cold, down to 24 below, they only had 6′ of ice but a foot and a half of snow on top and in order to get the ice to freeze so that they could fill the ice house, he and his father, Mert and Herbie’s grandfather Lassond spent 3 days boring holes in the ice to let the water up so it would freeze, and then they went to icing and the ice was 20″ thick.
They filled the ice house at the Narrows then they went down Sanford Road where
Lassond had another ice house started. They began filling them. They got it half way up and the apparatus broke, the ice was too heavy so they quit icing for that year.

In the 1930’s Pa had bought the house on the landing at the head that Jack Dolman had lived in and owned by the town. The town had put it up to auction. He paid $50 for it.
This Maynard always wanted Pa to knock the house down. He didn’t have anything to do with him but he did call Pa once in a while to ask him why he hadn’t knocked it down.
One day he called Pa early in the morning and told Pa he would give him $200 for it. Pa said he would be right down to get the check. He had just came in from doing chores and for breakfast, he still had his boots on, dirty clothes and so forth, but didn’t change and went right down to Maynards and got the check. From there he went to Fall River and cashed the check. Later that day Maynard called back up and said he was backing out of the deal. He told Pa that he was going to stop payment on the check. Pa said that was all right, he had already cashed it. So later, Maynard burned the house down. That was the end of that deal.

Jack Dolman was Pa’s uncle. A veteran of the Spanish American War. He lived for his pension check. When he got it, there was a big party and he might be found laying around drunk anywhere at the Head of Westport.

My Aunt Evelyn told me that when my Grandfather was giving out orders, things to do, Arthur was never there. He would say, “Where’s Art”, but Art was up in a tree somewhere where Gramp couldn’t see him, escaping from work. Pa and his brothers along with Ike Tripp and his brothers used to go to Fall River on the train. They would meet the train about 7 or 8 at night going to Fall River from New Bedford. They would jump aboard it when it came across Davis Road. They went into the Rodman Street yards. When it came back at night they would be ready to ride it back home again.

In the 30’s, when Costa on Charlotte White Road cut his corn he always got a gang from Fall River. The girls told us when they were going to start cutting and where they were
going to start cutting. They were across the road west of Milton Wood’s wood lot so Art and I walked up there in the morning to check up. They were all happy, cutting the corn good. We went up again right after dinner to see how they were making out and they were all happy going along whacking the corn off any way they could from up to the top.
They had had too much booze, that was the trouble. The next day they got sobered up and did it right.

About 1936 the circus came to Westport on the railroad and made a fairground on North Sanford Road. My father took me and Art up to the circus to see them unload and put the tents up. They had something like 300 horses, both working horses and show and riding horses. Art and I got a job unloading a wagon. We got it unloaded and asked for our tickets to the circus. That was supposed to be payment. We got the tickets after hauling sufficient amounts of water for the elephants. In the afternoon we were home, across the

road cleaning a range shelter. Young Zack Lake arrived. He was limping and my father asked him what was the matter. He said that he was making a load of hay for Stella Brightman and somehow or other he shoved a pitch fork through the calf of his leg, going in one side and coming out the other.

That night we went to the circus. My father had to stay after the circus to see the horses pulling the wagons and taking tents down and loading them onto freight cars. The last wagon was the main tent, loaded with the poles from it. They had two teams of horses (8 to a team) hooked to it and it got stuck in the mud so they brought in another team hooked it to the side of the wagon and they couldn’t budge it. Then they brought in an elephant, walked him up behind the load, and without breaking stride, he put his head down and the wagon came right out. Something I will never forget.

In 1930 Billy Harticant and Albert Brownell who lived at the Travis’s place showed up one day with a revolver each. Albert had a long pearl handled one that had belonged to a member of his family. He was a real cowboy. Harticant had a smaller pistol revolver and they were around down there by the pond and telling me stories and when they left to go home, Albert took his pearl handled one home and hid it in the foundation of an old house north of Travis’s in the field, so he could return it to the house when nobody was around.home, Albert took his pearl handled one home and hid it in the foundation of an old house north of Travis’s in the field, so he could return it to the house when nobody was around.
Harticant hid his under the hen house under one of the piles of rock that held up the floor of the hen house. After a couple of months, I got it out and threw it into the pond. To this day no one has ever asked me about it, not even Harticant.

We used to go to the Desjardin farm between our home place and George Russell’s.
Desjardins was an uncle to Rick Desjardin. He had a pipe factory in Fall River and he would bring the sawdust and broken pipe pieces down and put them in his laneway. He also had a building and a lot of grapes for wine. He had pear and peach trees and plum
trees and he grew muskmelons. Art and I raided all that stuff. One night when we were doing chores, he arrived carrying something in both hands. My father went to the milk house to dump some milk and Desjardins had just got there. He showed my father two muskmelon rinds and asked him what did he suppose has been eating these? My father
said, “woodchucks, I guess”. That was the end of that deal except Art and I threw the melon rinds a lot farther into the bull briars. Desjardins had laid tracks back down into the swamp, like a railroad. He had a cart that he would go down back to load with wood and he had a winch at the top of the hill to pull it back up.

My father bought Peking ducks around at different places, 6, 7 or 8 at a time. We were coming back from my grandmother’s house and we saw this fellow with a Model A Ford car, up against a wall in a kitty corner situation, ready to tip over. My father, Art and I helped him get the car back on the road. My father was telling me after that it was Oney Cummings. I kept asking him about his being lame, he must have gotten hurt. Eventually, my father told me that he had a wooden leg. Later he showed up at the house. In fact, he came three times, every time he came he had his car chocked full of groceries to give to my mother. He had three daughters and he brought them one of those times. Eventually, my father bought some ducks from him and some more from his brother Ben Cummings.
The ones from Ben Cummings were crippled. They had fallen into a spring and couldn’t get out. That paralyzed their legs. I went into the duck business. I sent to New Jersey and got 50 Indian Runners. I don’t remember how many I raised and can’t remember what became of them. They were supposed to lay a lot of eggs. They held the world record, 300 eggs a year. My brother Norris used to feed the ducks mash in the morning and he helped the ducks eat it too. I’ll never forget that. One morning I looked down back where there used to be apple trees and there were two deer eating apples under the tree.

When Virginia was 5 years old she had polio and she was in the General Hospital in Fall River. In 1929 I had scarlet fever and they quarantined me in an upstairs bedroom for a month so my father could keep selling milk. I didn’t know anything for a couple of days with my fever. In fact, it seems so I spent those days walking down a long hallway, I was just going by doors in my mind. When the fever broke, I was as good as new. Just like being back to normal again. Ten days later I could tear great sheets of skin off me all over. They said it was caused by the fever.

When my quarantine was lifted, my father loaded the car with my mother and the kids and we went over the Mount Hope Bridge. It had just opened up. The toll was 60 cents for cars and 10 cents for pedestrians.

But About 1937, the family went up to visit my mother’s folks in Maine. I stayed home. I had just been painting the house, but my father told me I better start pulling turnips up Ephraim Tripp’s. I pulled and bagged 80 bushels of turnip in one day and bagged them. I got them home the next day on the truck but I don’t remember who drove the truck since I know I didn’t have my license at that time. Those turnips were the easiest and prettiest ones I ever pulled. All I had to do was cut the tap root off and the top. There wasn’t another root on them. But, they didn’t have any taste to them, they were just flat tasting.
That same fall we had some cow beets. Nobody grows them any more. They grow 2 feet tall. Later I had to finish painting the roof of the silo. I put a noose in a rope and threw it over the cap and I used the rope as my staging to go around the roof as I painted it.

Another day Art and I asked Cliff Mosher about using his boat, so Art and I got it down Hix’s Bridge and we went crabbing. We rowed down around Cadman’s Neck, nice going with the tide, but coming back against the tide it was slow going. We got a bushel of crabs. By the time we got back and got the boat put away we just got started for home,

had not even got off the bridge, when my father came looking for us. It was supper time and he had done all the chores. So we got the devil for that. I used to go swimming on
the east side of Hix Bridge. A lot of shells and glass was there in the river where you
•came back to shore, and I cut my knee there on some glass. The kneecap was laid right open. It looked pretty bad. Joe Cieto arrived about that time. He was the town constable. He took me home and I held my bicycle on his running board. I still have the scar.
Uncle Granville hired me and Art to hoe turnips for him in 1936. We worked 9-3, 80 cents a day each. While we were up there one day, Uncle Granville said we have to get
some rowen. That’s a second cutting hay. So he told me to get the horses out, get them harnessed and hooked to the wagon. I had never harnessed a horse before in my life. I put my knowledge together and looked at the horses. Giants of animals they were. I knew that you approached them from the left hand side, so I went in and got one out, I figured the harness behind him must be the one that goes to that horse so I pulled his head down, got the bridle on him and then after a struggle I threw the harness on him and then got the other horse and did the same to him. I looked up to see Uncle Granville peaking out by the end of the shed so I swore to myself and got the horses paired up, hooked together and drove them out around the back of the shed and began to back them up to the pole that the wagon was going to hook up to. Uncle Granville came running, calling
“wait, wait”. By the time he got there I had them all hooked up. He was afraid that I would break the pole on the wagon but it turned out all right. Then we went up to Uncle Ralph’s to get the rowen (second cutting of hay). First time I ever heard that word.

That fall, Uncle Granville pulled his turnips but there was no market for them so he mac a big ditch and stored them and he fed them to the cows. There was no market because

200 – 300 bushels per load every day from November 1st to December 25. Just as soon as the Smith and Boan’s dug their early potatoes they planted turnips. Some years the market was crowded and the price would be down.

There was a cedar swamp in back of Uncle Granville’s barn. That was where we got the poles we needed for a good gate top. Swing tail gates were made by putting a hole in the post that held them, put an axle down through them and then put rocks in sort of a cradle at the end of it to balance the pole and the boards. The ideal boarding for them was a crooked sassafras tree. When you put the boarding on, being crooked, it matched it.
These gates were so well balanced that a child could swing them open and shut with no trouble. Simple, cheap and they lasted forever. Also looked good.
1930
In 1930 my father was building a two story hen house. He hired Harry Shurtleff as carpenter. Harry was always on to somebody. When he set up the forms for the cement,
he was always finding fault with the wall Squire Lord had built. It was always “hey guy, hey guy, who did this”. The weather was hot and my brother Donald was about three In 1930 my father was building a two story hen house. He hired Harry Shurtleff as carpenter. Harry was always on to somebody. When he set up the forms for the cement, he was always finding fault with the wall Squire Lord had built. It was always “hey guy, hey guy, who did this”. The weather was hot and my brother Donald was about three years old then. He would go down to see how things were going. He went down one hot, windy day with a big straw hat on and pants that hung from his shoulder. The wind blew his hat and he grabbed that but when he grabbed it his britches would fall, so Harry Shurtleff was always after him about pulling his pants up and so forth. Donald told my father, my father told him to call him Harry Shirt-tails, so he went right down right away and called him Harry Shirt-tails. Harry never did call him anything again.

In the early 30’s, rum running was a big business. One of the Gifford’s was the Town Treasurer. He had a store at Westport Point across from Fish’s Store and one night the store got on fire and burned. It burned $20,000 he was holding of the town’s money and years later I heard the truth, that he sent a boat out to a larger boat to get a load of booze, on the way back in the boat sank, so he didn’t get the booze, so he burned the store.
That’s the way the $20,000 got burned up. He had used the $20,000 to buy the booze.

John Oliver at Central Village was the telephone operator. During the night he operated from home. He could intercept all messages by the government agencies and let the rum runners know where they were and so forth. The main business place for rum running was on the Drift Road down in back of the Fireside. Then when Roosevelt got to be president and legalized the booze business, that was the end of that. There were a lot of fellas still making moon shine, that got to be a big business. There was a still at Charlie Menard’s.
Anyway, the cops raided that one night so my father took Art and I and we went up to Granville’s and walked down back across Granville’s field over the walls into Meynard’s to
check out the still. Everything was smashed up, there was a lot of land cleared up and with all of the stumps and roots piled up so as to be fences around the different lots. That land today belongs to Goldstein on the Gifford Road. Rt. 88 goes right down through where that still was.

We used to go blue berrying with Nellie Mosher. She ran the rummage sale for the Macomber girls at the Friends Church. Nellie took rags out of the rummage to tie to the bushes so she wouldn’t get lost on the way out. On holidays, Buck Wood would get Nellie Mosher in his touring car, give her a little something to drink and then they would ride around hollering to everybody. Her husband, John Mosher ran the store. He was blind. One night, Art and I were pouring through the Potter’s junk they had left upstairs. In the room over the kitchen there was a big pool table that belonged to them and we called that room the pool room. We used to go in and play pool when we had company or sometimes just Art and me. It was there for several years. Also, there was stuff there in the open chamber that was packed full of odds and ends stuff. Art and I got up there one night when Mary Travis was looking after us when Pa and Ma had gone off and we found 23 pennies. The next day we went to John Mosher’s and bought 23 cents worth of candy.
At the end of the week my father stopped at Mosher’s to get his smoking tobacco. John Mosher reached into his pocket and took out the 23 cents and said to my father, “Arthur, do you see anything wrong with these pennies”? My father said, “well, they are old, 1700
– 1800”. John told him, “your boys were in here and bought candy with them.” My father gave him the right money for them and brought them home. Another thing we got heck for.Art and I used to work for the Macomber maids. Alice and her sisters, Marianna and Mabel. We were paid 25 cents an hour. We hoed her garden and we mowed her gra just north of their house and clear down to Central Village. That was for the Central Village Improvement Society, financed by Nellie Mosher’s rummage sale.

I started Sunday School at Brownell’s Corner at the Fourth Christian Church. The first day in class, I was with Veryl Hanson, later Herbie Tripp’s wife. She had chewing gum and it stuck in her hair. Susan Davis was the Sunday School teacher. When we moved to Main Road, I went to the Friend’s Church at Central Village for Sunday School. Marian Davis was the Sunday school teacher there.

In 1939 Lewis McHenry Howe was President Roosevelt’s Secretary. He lived at Westp Point on Valentine’s Lane. That was his summer house. He found a placed in Westpor through his doctor in Fall River. The doctor in Fall River came out to Tom Petty’s while he was there and asked Tom if there was a place a friend of his could live in Westport. in time, Howe bought that place at the Point.

He met twice a year in spring and fall with the officials which were mostly farmers at th time. In the spring of 34 he met with them to get a report so he could tell Roosevelt about the economy of the country people. After the meeting, when he was leaving, he
turned to the meeting and asked any of them if they could use any cows. Most of them said, “sure” and that was all that was said. Along in August they got a telephone call at the town hall that they had two carloads of cows up in Fall River at the Rodman Street Depot. My father, Art and I went up there. Everybody in town who had a truck that could hold two cows went, that was as big a truck as they had at that time. These cows were ERA cows, from the drought in the mid west. Minnesota is where they came fron It was branded right on them, ERA. We spent the day moving cows to the Kirby Farm the Gifford Road which now is just north of Route 177. The cows were real hungry anc thin. When we unloaded them they headed right for the dry leaves and ferns along the wall. The town got some of the WPA workers to take care of the cows. There were 43 43 cows altogether. These workers put up a small shelter to milk the cows and that milk went to people on welfare

Come fall and cold weather, the town found out they couldn’t sell the cows so they began to butcher them and give the meat to the welfare people. When they got down to 18 or 20, they moved them to the town poor farm on the Drift Road. By spring, the rest of them were all butchered and gone. That was a part of the Great Depression.

In 1936 there was six weeks of ice. We used to go down to the baseball field at the Ear School and play tag football on the ice. That same winter during that ice storm my fath started to buy day old chickens from Kendrick over in Freetown. There was ice on the road all the way. I went with him. He bought all the rest of the chickens in the years following from Kendrick.

In 1938 Squire Lord and I went to Maine. He had just bought a ’33 Chevrolet and he wanted to try it out. We had a week to do it. We went to Dixmont the first day and stayed overnight with my uncles. The next morning we headed toward Bangor. From there we went over toward Mattawaska. In that town, we went by two or three different time zones. There was either 2 or 3 time zones there, Standard, Daylight Savings and Canadian time. From there we were going to Fort Kent but we changed our minds. It was getting around 1:00 p.m. so we headed south. We drove south of Mattawaska down through the woods. One plantation after another. These plantations were just towns with nobody living in them. About 4:00 in the afternoon we were getting low on gas. We came to a village with three houses and a store. So we got gas at 25 cents a gallon, almost three times as much as the regular price. These houses were the first we had seen since we headed south through the woods. We got something to eat at that store too, but the only sign of life that we saw coming down through those woods were dead porcupines, run over by someone ahead of us. We stopped and we got some quills and I put them in my billfold. By the time that we got home the things were sticking in my leg.
I put them on my bureau and in a month they had all softened up. After leaving the place, put them in my billfold. By the time that we got home the things were sticking in my leg.
I put them on my bureau and in a month they had all softened up. After leaving the place, we drove through the woods again. It was getting dark and we had no idea where we were going except that we were headed south. Just after dark the black top road came to an end. We were on a dirt road. There was a great big boulder in the road and the road
went around it. Then we decided to pull along side of the road and sleep there. The next morning we got started and drove 15 – 20 minutes down the road and we came right back onto Route 1 somewhere north of Bangor. We stopped and had breakfast in Bangor and
then we headed toward home, but we had a week and we decided to go out toward Amherst, MA. I went to the office of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture to see about finding a place to stay when I went to school out there. They told me where I could and
signed me up for that place. From there we went out to North Brookfield and stayed wit Bill Smith’s folks that night. From there, the next day, we headed for Connecticut. I dont

know just where we went in Connecticut, but we made a big sweep and headed back toward home. We still had about three days to waste so instead of going home, we drove right through Westport on Route 6 and went clear to Provincetown. After we got there we turned around and came back home. It was getting dark then. We were three days early in the week.

In the 1930’s, George Mosher had a 22 rifle and Donald wanted to shoot it. Donald took George’s gun and went over in back of the home place. There were hay cocks (piles of hay left to dry). Donald saw a fox there and he shot it. He came home happy. We asked him how he happened to shoot it, he couldn’t shoot anything running. He said, “Well this fox had mange and he set right down in front of the haycocks there and had a crap, that’s when Donald shot him. The first and only time Donald ever shot a gun.

Near a wall between Perry’s and my father’s place near that gravel bank, there was a big beach tree. Everybody had cut there initials in it and somebody had drawn the face of an Indian in head dress and feathers and all. That tree is gone today, all rotted across. Must have been 6 feet through the butt of it.

One of the things back in the 30’s were the CC camps. A place for the 18 – 20 year olds who wanted to go to work for the government. They had them clear across the country.
When the ’38 hurricane came, they used them to cut up trees all over New England. On the Fall River – New Bedford road they had them cut up trees. This turned out to be a god send for the government because the government owned the lumber and when WWII broke out all that lumber was used to build up the camps for the soldiers and sailors and the CC fellows lived more or less under military control and were some of the first ones to get drafted.

A lot of young fellows had joined the National Guard for a place to go and get a little money. They were the first to go to war.

The WPA government grants in the 1930’s. These were gangs that were making ditches in the marshes around Horseneck and the rivers so as to get rid of the mosquitoes. They
were enlarging cemeteries. In fact, my father bought a burial lot of 12 sites for $125.
That was money that he inherited from his mother. He also inherited $25 more and a wood stove. The WPA also built the town hall and that was when they made Route 177 down the Old County Road. From down below Grundy’s out to Lincoln Park, that was all new road. After the road was made, my father asked George Russell what became of the old stone marker that was at the north end of Sodom Road. This marker gave directions
to New Bedford, and to the west, etc. George said he didn’t know but he would find it.
He found it and he made them put it back. It is still there today. About 1995 I got after different people in the town, the Highway Surveyor Perreira and finally got the bushes around it cut. I thanked Al Lees for getting it done but said that they didn’t put any tar in the engravings so that it could be read.

In 1936 Pa was a town representative to the Democratic Party. Roosevelt came to Lincoln Park and Pa went up there to greet Roosevelt. Ma told us about 50 years later that Pa had his pocket picked of about $50 dollars that day and lost his wallet along with his papers. That was a lot of money back then.

We used to go skating in the evening up to the trout pond which is located on Route 177 in back of Siminsky’s. We could get to that pond by entering from the Gifford Rd where the ERA cows were or coming up Forge Road and coming up across the fields just above the lower mills to the north. A lot of people went skating there. Kids from everywhere.
The pond was an acre, or an acre and a half. Damned up on the south side, and nice and

big on the north side where we put our skates on. Stanley Siminsky’s father bought that originally and then sold it. Stanley inherited a piece and put up a house on Rt. 177. To the east of the house and in back of his house, there was a massive hill. Stanley cut the hill off and sold the sand. It was like beach sand, all nice and soft. From there they carted a lot of fill out and piled it up in big piles from the big housing development to the north.

Around 1936-37 on Thanksgiving and Christmas we would either have it at home or at Aunt Marcie’s, and I remember one Christmas at Aunt Marcie’s when we had dinner.
Everyone complained about the gravy. It was terrible. We later found out that somebody had used a pan to get kerosene for the stove and that pan was the one used by Aunt Marcie for making the gravy in. After the meal we went skating on the pond down the road from Aunt Marcie’s, (Cornell Road). There was also an ice house in that pond at the time. The water was running out of the pond under the road. The water under the road wasn’t frozen and either my cousin Fred Kent or Porter Kent saw some eels under there so they went under there and caught three of them.

1938 HURRICANE
The 1938 Hurricane was the first hurricane any of us around here had ever seen or heard of. In the morning, my father took the truck down to Frank Petty’s garage to get a sticker on it. Art and I, we weighed and tied up the turnips. After dinner, my father brought the truck back and we were getting it loaded and the wind began to blow. By the time we got the truck loaded, the cupola had blown off the barn. The big apple tree had blown down across the driveway. By 4:00 the wind had abated and I still had my papers to peddle.
Before I could drive the car out, Art and I had to saw up the apple tree to get out of the driveway. I took the car and the ax with me so that I could clear the road if I had a tree across it. I never had to use the ax, all the trees were cleared as I drove through.
Everyone in town had an ax by then. Everybody who had an outside chimney, which most did, they were all down flat to the ground. That night, after supper, my father and I started for Providence with the turnips. We made our way through Fall River around downed trees. Before we got across the Brightman Street Bridge, a cop stopped us. My father says, “I guess he’s got us for something”, meaning the truck. The cop come to the truck and asked my father, “Where you going?”, My father said, Providence, the cop says,
“you can’t. Lee’s River Bridge is out and Cole’s River Bridge is out”, so my father turned around and stopped at the corner of Jenks and County Streets to see about an order for eggs in there. He also found out that we had had a Hurricane. First time we heard of a Hurricane and high water.

So we went home. My father said he was going down to the Head of Westport because he had heard the water had come up. It was 9:00 at night then. I told him I was going with him. A little building down there was up and almost blocking the bridge. He thought his brother Leslie was down there as a special policeman. The cop who was there said that Leslie was down to Hix Bridge. So we went down there and that was all washed out and we saw Leslie. The next morning, after chores, my father put Art and me to work picking up a portable silo that had fallen down to pieces.

Squire Lord arrived. He was the last one to come across the bridge at the Point. He had been cutting corn for George Norman at the Small place at the end of Horseneck Road.
My father said that he was going to check up on the Hurricane. Twenty minutes later, me and Art and Squire decided we would go check up on the Hurricane. So we went to the Point. Charlie Dean, town cop, was standing by the barricade at Fish’s store. We ducked under the barrier and headed down the street, Charlie hollered to us “where you fellas going?”, we told him to Horseneck. He said that he couldn’t let us go through there but if we went out around where he couldn’t see us we might get away with it, which we did.

The bridge was all twisted out of shape but we could still walk across it. So we got to the beach and walked clear to Allen’s. There were three houses and Allen’s was left protected by the Causeway that went to Gooseberry Neck. Then we went clear to Horseneck Road, up to East Beach Road. That’s where all the rich people lived. Today the beach is right up to the road. No lawns or houses at all. We walked back to the John Reed Road. Just at the corner of John Reed Road there was a pond that had 8-10 automobiles in it. We walked back to John Reed Road to the Point Bridge where we started and that was the end of that business.

In 1935 my father set out a rhubarb patch. He got the rhubarb from Julius Smith on Pine Hill Road. He had thrown all rhubarb roots out into a heap in the spring after picking the forced rhubarb in February and March. At that time all the neighborhood boys used to go over and work for this Smith in the summer. He grew a lot of market garden stuff for the Providence market and in the fall and late summer he started to grow a lot of celery way
down on the river flats. This Smith had bought the farm from John Tripp father of Audrey Tripp, first cousin of my father.

At the Head of Westport, they used to build a lot of ships. Building big whalers. They would get them across the river and when the tide was down the would put a lot of big
barrels and tie them some way. When the tide would come up they would turn them around and head them down stream. When they put up Hix Bridge they couldn’t go under it so Hix owned the bridge and built his house so they could move it. When the ship got there they moved the house out and then moved it around where the house was and then put the house back where it was. It was fitted when they got to the Point with mast and supplies and so forth. At the Head they had places where they could flood the big box area and then shut it off and dry it to get the salt. They used the salt to salt the fish they caught. The last ship that they made, they made it up the Reed Road. I don’t know just how far but about up to the Forge Road, I guess, and when it was finished they rolled it down to the river and put it in at the Head. They used up all the nearby trees for lumber and that was about it and for the ship building business. Down over the hill by Ferry’s Farm on the Gifford Road it was damned up so that there was a big pond there. There were three fellows that had a grist mill and saw mill. I think that was a Gifford, a Lawton and a Tripp that owned it.

Pa always planted potatoes. First he used to plant by hand and we used to dig them by hand. When he got to planting an acre, he bought a potato planter. Art and I figured it would take forever to dig by hand and he bought a potato digger then. He used to plant Cobblers, Green Mountain and Spaulding Rose, the red ones. Finally he bought a Fordson tractor. Art was gassing it up one day and the thing caught afire. We got the fire out and had to put all new wiring in it. That was the beginning of my father doing his own plowing and harrowing and I remember the first plow he bought was a new one, Little Grant, International.

Otis Macomber he was a retired whaler. He used to paint for George Russell. Norman Gifford used to have him come into the high school every year to tell his storeis on whaling but my father always said and I have heard Otis say that same thing, “That he was quick as a cooper around a cask”. That was an expression. In the winter Otis used to dig skunks. He would get ten or a dozen skunks out of one hole. He had the skins to sell plus all the fat on the carcass he would try out for skunk grease. That is what all the old Yankees used for colds, rub it on the kids chest. If it was real bad they would make them eat a spoonful or two. Either that or Cod liver oil.

In 1935 the high school was getting an addition put on the back of it. I was outside playing football with some of the boys when I leaned over to get a football and leaned right into a crow bar stuck in the ground. It broke an eye tooth off right to the gum.

In 1937 we were going to all the fairs judging the cows from high school. At Topsfield Fair we walked around there all day, left Erickson talking to the goat lady. We met a fella two times and he was selling hot dogs. They were long hot dogs and his sales pitch was
“hot dogs a foot long and all the mustard you can eat”. We would sing back to him “all the mouse turd you can eat”. The next week we went to Brockton Fair and that’s when it rained. It rained all day that day, cars were getting stuck and we got separated from Erikson for three hours. We had done our judging and we came home late in the afternoon. He said no more of that business. The next week was Eastern States Expo. I was on the judging team for cattle in the forenoon. Me and two other fellas on the team were dropped off at the Frojoy plant to judge milking. When the judging contest was over, they opened up all the vats so the boys could have ice cream, any kind they wanted.
So the first brick of ice cream we had was the nearest one to us. After eating 4 or 5 we began to eat the ones we liked the best to try them out. In the afternoon I went to judging cows at the exposition. I found out later that I was the top cow judge. That my score there, averaged with the other scores at the two fairs before that, put me up in the top 20.

That night we were put up at the Biltmore Hotel and we got separated again. All we knew was that we were going to stay at the Biltmore Hotel and there were four of us.
The next morning we called up the office at the hotel and asked if the others had showed up there and they had. They were in the next room to us. We called them up and told them some of the places that we had been. We shared the same bathroom. One of the boys I was with got a dishpan of water, opened the door to the other room and threw the water on Erickson in bed. That was our last time at going to the fairs. It was a wonder he brought us home. He was one of the best teachers Westport ever had. He later taught agriculture in Dartmouth, MA. From there my father helped lot to get him appointed up at Segregansett School of Agriculture. He rebuilt Segregansett. The state wanted to class up Segregansett, but he rebuilt it. He had students help to tear it down and rebuild all the buildings there today with student help and union overseers. When I was going to high school I used to go up there to judge fruit and vegetables but we always headed for the apple orchard when we got there. Erickson would lock his car so we couldn’t get into it but we always had bags with us and we would fill them with apples and lift up the hood of the car and put apples all over the motor. Those were the good old days.

We went out to Amherst in 1934 to judge horses and cows. This was just after the spring flood of the Connecticut River. There had been a lot of snow up north that year and when it started melting, the river flooded. While out there we went towards the Connecticut Valley to see how bad the flood was. I remember going by one house where somebody was in an upstairs bedroom throwing junk out of the upstairs window. The bushes were full of junk. The man of the house was plowing the field south of the house and water was running right down the furrow in back of him and he had boots on. I will never forget it because I thought the only reason he was plowing was because he didn’t know what else to do.

In the 1930’s, we cleared the family farm of rocks and trees. We started out by clearing land. My father hired Art Kirby and his father with their plow to help clear. There were lot of briar patches that we had to clear ahead of the oxen so they could turn them over.
Harry and Ben Kirby, they done the plowing and harrowing so we could plant corn. It took a couple of years before the corn would grow right because all those briar roots would pull up the corn when it was cultivated. There were big rocks and my father used to have George Kent dig big holes aside of them so he could roll them in and bury them Then my father got to dynamiting rocks. Three of us. One would hold the big drill, the other two would strike with the striking hammer on either side. The one holding the dri would have to pick the drill a little bit and turn it after each strike. Eventually there was enough powder in the hole so we had to stop and pick it out with the shoveling spoon

Sometimes we would split the rock with wedges. Each little wedge had a piece of backing that went on each side of it and you could bang the wedge down, that would split the rock. You can see those little half holes in stones around here where the rock was split.
I’ve been told that earlier, they used to drill the holes, put a dry wooden plug in them and then pour water on top of them. In the winter, when it froze, they would expand and they would crack the rocks. But the best way was to put some dynamite in them.

We used dynamite caps to put in a stick of dynamite. In later years my father did get somebody to come in and drill 100 holes in a day with a big compressor. Then he would get Wordell from New Bedford to come and blow them electrically. He would string wire between quite a few holes and blow all of them at once with a battery powered electric shock. It didn’t make a noise near us, but over on Pine Hill Road they could hear it, even shook the ground they say.

In the 1920’s the farmers sold all the walls and lugged them to the stone crusher, 50 cents a tip cart load. The town used the crushed stone in the roads. They put a ton of rock to
one foot of roadway. So on our home farm, the original walls had gone into the roads and we had to build them again and we did it with no trouble getting stone. We did this with the 3 legs which had a winch on it and with either a rope or chain it went through a two wheel pulley at the top of the three legs and a 3 or 4 wheel pulley at the chain where it hooked around the rock, that way cranking the winch you could lift several times the pressure, you could lift a lot more.

Along toward 1929 or 1930, my father had a family party one night and Harry Kirby there. We had home made ice cream and Harry would begin to tell about the past. used to be a small houselot in the northeast corner of my father’s land. They said the used to be an old church there, there was an old foundation. There was also an old there and this shack, in the front was in poor condition and the top covered with big signs. All companies used these big tin signs in the 30’s. Eventually, the roof had th it too. They advertised Camel cigarettes, Lucky Strikes, Philip Morris and Chesterf mostly. When I went to Wisconsin in 1940, it was just the same out there. They w put them all over the sides of the barns advertising chewing tobacco and different ki beer. On the way home, we came around the Minnesota side of the Mississippi and chorn corner we came around there was a big flat piece of land in the valley all planted mostly. When I went to Wisconsin in 1940, it was just the same out there. They would put them all over the sides of the barns advertising chewing tobacco and different kinds of beer. On the way home, we came around the Minnesota side of the Mississippi and every sharp corner we came around there was a big flat piece of land in the valley all planted with tobacco. Anyway, we would go to this old lot and get wild strawberries that were big and nice. In back of that foundation there was a well with a great big piece of tin over it. Eventually, my father filled that in with rocks so that no one would fall into it. Harry said that the swamp over north of the brook where we used to get ground pine and creeping jenny used to be a cranberry bog. It was all nice flat land and swampy. The brook was all banked up to the north and east side so that it could be flooded. The water wouldn’t run out. Harry said that was 50 years ago or so before we got the place. That would be about 150 years ago now.

Art and I got our first bike. We bought it from Dilbert Wilkie for $2.50. My father didn’t want us to have any bike because there was too much traffic on the road. This was in
1930. So my father wouldn’t know about it, we kept it under the bridge where Wilfred’s Garage is now. Where the garage is now there used to be a great big elm tree and a walled up spring. One day we left the bike out and my father found it. The next day, I found it over the wall on Perry’s land and brought it back and put it under the bridge.

stolen and you are the only one who knows it. George peddled eggs in Fall River but he had a strawberry patch and grew a lot of berries. All his egg customers got a free box of strawberries. They were happy to get those strawberries but little did they know that they paid 10 cents a dozen more for the eggs year round. George had a lot of berries to pick so one day he hired me and Art to help him. He had Ruth Petty picking there. George left us for a while and as soon as he left, Ruth began to throw berries at us, so we threw berries back. George showed up soon after that and hollered at us to stop it. He never hired us again to pick berries. That was the first and last day. In years to come, he had Virginia, Gloria and Olive pick berries for him but I think Virginia was the chief berry picker.

My father used to say that Uncle Elliot and George Perry were the strongest men in town.
They used to work for the town crushing rocks when they were putting the roads in.
They were the only ones that could change the crusher jaws. They had to crawl in on their backs into a hole and lift the jaws so they could be taken out to sharpen them. Elliot was a WWI veteran. I asked him about that one day. We used to go down there some. He was living in Marion at the time, and I went down there once and spent a week with him.
He told me that they put him in the Ambulance Corp when he went in the Army and everybody had to pick a pair of horses. He said that he ended up with the last two scrubs they had. He said it wasn’t long before he had the best two pair of horses around. I asked him if he ever got into any combat and he said just once. He said he was driving through a German town with a load of wounded and he always carried a gun across his lap when he
was out there. He said he looked up and saw a German in a window already to shoot him.
He raised his gun and shot him first. That was the only contact he ever made. He was very strong.

In the winter we used to go skating at the pond down below the barn. We used to go under the fence into Desjardins and skate around the clumps of bushes in there. There was some dogwood in there. I’ve been told that Pa gave Norris a hatchet or small ax for Christmas one year and he went down there and chopped that dogwood down. Ma used to use baking soda on that but it didn’t work on Norris and she had to get the doctor for him. He had it all over him bad.

The area south of Kirby Road between Main Road and Drift Road, in back of what is now Lee’s Supermarket, was known back then as Trippville.

About 1932 I got a Christmas tree for the Point School. Two or three of the boys went with me to find it. It took all day to get it because we didn’t want to go back to school.
In the 5th grade, at Booth’s Corner School we went Christmas tree hunting again with two or three boys. We got the tree but that was another all day job because we didn’t want to get back to school too early.

On March 1st, 1932, Charles Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. It was the biggest thing in the country. Every bit of court testimony by Bruno Hauptman was printed in the paper word for word. They found him guilty and sentenced him to death. Two or three years later we had a murder in Tiverton. A man named Hathaway was tried and convicted. The victim was found over the town line on Stafford Road. She was a nurse from Truesdale
Hospital and a classmate of Henry Perry’s wife. Every part of the testimony of that trial was in the paper. I read them all. Rhode Island didn’t have a death sentence then and they
figured that was why her body was left in Rhode Island. Hathaway got life in prison. I saw in the paper here about a year ago that he got out of jail. It was all done quietly.

In 1930-35 my father would help get ice from different people. He got and helped put ice in for Lassond up to the Narrows, Uncle Ralph for his dairy, and the ice house on Mouse Mill Road. There was another ice house on the pond on Cornell Road where we would go skating around Chrismas for if there was ice. Also, at Macomber’s Pond on Dunham’s Hill on Main Road.

Winsor Tripp had three heifers down in Dunham’s pasture down towards the point. Two of them he got as calves up to Walker Gorden’s. We went up there twice, a calf each time. The third one was a Holstein he got from Borden Tripp. He wanted me to go down there and help him catch them. That was because they were so damn wild you couldn’t get next to them. Antone Viera had hired the pasture and had taken all his stuff out.
Winsor got me and Manny Santos on a Sunday afternoon and went down to try to catch them. I caught one soon after we started up against the fence. The others, you could not get near them. I told Winsor the only way to catch them was to run them down. Windsor said, okay I would have to do the running so I chased them from the road down to the swamp toward the river 5 or 6 times. We caught one and got a rope on her and got her back to where we had tried the first one. That left the black and white one. I ran her for about an hour back and forth we finally got into a small lot. I got behind the wall at the
barway and told Windsor and Manny to drive them out. When they came through the barway I ran out and tackled her and hung on until the others got there with the rope.

That heifer turned out to be a real good cow. My father bought her from Winsor.
Everytime she calved, she was trouble. First time she was in Howard’s pasture down on Horseneck Road. Actually, she was in the pasture in back of Almy’s that belonged to Almy’s sister, Dabneys. She calved down there just before Columbus Day. On Columbus Day my father, me and my brother-in-law Raymond Vorwald went down to get her in Howard’s barn at Almy’s. We spent the day tracking her. We never saw her. First it began to rain then a little snow so we started for home. Got colder and my father’s car froze. But he stopped and it thawed itself out. She showed up so Howard got her in with his cows about a week later. He put her and her calf in a box stall so we could get her.
The next time she calved, he had her to home. Pa told me to watch her, so I found her down in the swamp in back of the barn, she had started to calf. Just as soon as she found that I was somewhere close, she got up and ran. She got up and ran to the lot in back of the garden lot, she jumped the gateway into Harry Kirby’s but the calf fell out when she jumped the bar way. I tied the calf up right near there and we had here in the next day.
Donald says she was the best cow Pa ever had. That is the end of that one.

Another cow story. In 1934 my father and all the other people had to get TB tested.
Most farmers, even if they didn’t loose their cows for TB reaction, got rid of them all.
The government appraised them for a certain amount of money before they were sold and that amount was subtracted from their appraised value and between the two prices that is
what they got for cows. So Pa lost all of his. After cleaning up the barn and having it inspected he went to Brighton to buy a new heard. He came back with a Brown Swiss, two Ashires, a Jersey and two Holsteins. One of those Ashires was a purebred. Her name was Alta Echo. One day Art and I went down back to drive them in and Art went down around in back of them. He began to bark like a dog and this Ashire Alta Echo put right for him. He ran up toward me and I picked up a piece of a black stick. By the time she got to me she gave up. Art never did bark at the cows after that.

In the 1930’s my father had a police dog and on a hot day he got to killing the hens in the henhouse down by the back spring. Art and I went down to pick up eggs. The dog was under the henhouse, guilty I guess, and wouldn’t let you get near him. He had killed about a dozen hens. We told my mother and she called up my father at the town hall. He came home and got his gun and shot the dog.

About the gun. One Fourth of July my father got his gun out and shot it up through the apple tree – knocked some leaves off. That was the celebration of the Fourth of July back then. As the years went by, there was a July 4th observance in Westport although I’m not sure just how it began. It was held at the fairgrounds at the Head and as you would walk in there was a building on the right where they used to have wrestling matches and so forth. The paths were lined with things to eat all in tents. On the left there was a good size building that was filled with sewing, all kinds of cooking, market gardening stuff, all in there for prizes 1st, 2nd, 3rd. On the east side there was a pavillion of exhibits. On the south side an outside arena with grand stands for viewing the showing of the animals, horse racing and up the west bank along the river there was a long building with the pens for the sheep, goats, small stock, pigs and then the barn where they kept the cows, beefers and horses. They had tents where they had all kinds of games where you could loose you money or maybe win a prize or a cigar. Might have been the Town of Westport or the Grange that sponsored it. Walter King owned the grounds. Every year they had the Fourth of July Horribles Parade. The “Horribles” were Oakley Tripp pushing his wife around in a baby carriage. Chet Wilkie loaded a back house on the back of a truck with somebody sitting in it with the door half open, half moon on the door, Sear’s Catalogue hanging prominently for everyone to see. My brother Art went in on stilts one year and won first prize. I can’t think of any other “horribles” that were in it. In that fair my father had a cow and calf one year.

In the 1930’s George Kent lived down where Charlie Lees lives now. The fellow next door dug a well with a wheel barrow. He dug a path to the foot of the hill to wheel the dirt out. As he dug down he lowered the path. When he hit water he wheeled the rocks into the well to build it up and he had his dirt back to the path as the rocks got higher.
The cheap way to build a well.

1930’s. When my father picked corn it was all by hand. This was in the late 1930’s, maybe 40’s too. When we were chopping it in the silo, we used to pick a lot of ears and save it for the pigs. We put it on the hen house roof to dry. After we left home in the 40’s it was up to the girls to husk the corn. It was Gloria who would have the husking bees in the fall. She would get all her friends and whoever got the red ear could kiss whoever they wanted to. They would have refreshments after when they were done. One day when I was picking corn and putting it in the barn in Little Compton, Jane Cabot and Carolyn Montgomery stopped to talk about it. I told them about it and they had never heard of that before. In the 1930’s my father used to pasture the cows out to the neighbors sometimes but after Jim Hancock bought the place up the road we used to pasture them up there. There were no fences so we had to go up and watch them every day to see if they were where they were supposed to be.

About 1930 Howland King was getting ready to build a house down at Alston and Harry Potter’s. His men hauled gravel from Fred Tripp’s the boat builder. We used to walk up to
Fred Tripp’s to see them load it. They had a little dump Ford truck. They loaded all the gravel with shovels to dump it and they had a winch on the truck. Things have changed today. Everything was manual labor back then.

In the early 30’s, Fred Tripp’s boathouse burned early one morning. It got struck by lightening. They had no electric and no telephone. The oldest son, Leonard had just got a new second hand car. He was real proud of it. He was headed for the fire station and he ran it off the road in front of the house coming off the curb and he was onto the rocks and he came into the house to call. Their telephone line came from Fall River and they were at the end of the line and our number was at the end of the line from New Bedford, nothing
in between. The boathouse was destroyed. After that, he put his boat building at the Point. The start of Tripp’s Boat Yard.

Before we got the telephone, Paragon Wilkie sold my father a battery powered radio for $15. My father also paid Wilkie $5 more to put up an ariel on the barn so that we could listen to Lowell Thomas and Amos & Andy. I remember when the famous Orsen Wells radio broadcast was on WOR. I heard some of it on that radio. Pa heard all of it. It came on about 7:30 in the evening. He didn’t get too excited about it, but some people did.

In the summer I used to have a baseball team made up of neighborhood kids. We played baseball at the Earle School playground. We played the Adamsville team. I don’t know who won. In the fall I had a football team. We played Lakeside City Boys on Sanford Road. We met them up to Brownell’s Corner and I don’t know who won that game either.
No one ever got hurt in those games.

In 1925 Art and I made tar balls. They tarred Sodom Road and we were a mess. In 1930, they tarred Charlotte White Road and we made more tar balls but we didn’t get so messy.
They were hard as rocks too.

Around 1927 Winston Norman, Art and I used to dig holes for water. We wanted to dig wells. They were about 1 – 6 foot across and about 3 feet deep but we never got any
water. I was only 7 years old so it was a wonder that we didn’t get killed.

In 1927 Tom Petty asked me one day, when it was hot, if I wanted to go for a buggy ride.
He said, tell your mother that we are going over to get the horse shod at Bliss’s Corner.
We went in the horse and buggy, Old County Road to Bulgarmarsh Road. There wasn’t much roadway going over to Bliss Corner. As you went up the hill from the pond, it was just a rock ledge. You picked your way up where you wanted to go up the hill. I’ll never forget that. The blacksmith shop was right at the northwest corner where there are shops now. I watched them shoe the horse and then we went home. A long, long day it was.

Another thing, when they built Rt. 177 through the Old County Road there was a stone up there on the corner of Sodom Road and Old County Road that had the miles and directions chiseled into it. They cleaned it up and dumped it somewhere so that it disappeared. Pa got after George Russell about it. He was a selectman. George got after the people who were building the road and made them put it back. It’s still there today.
Two or three years ago it got a lot of weeds and brushes growing around it. At the time Al Lees was writing stories about things around town and I told him he better get after somebody to cut the weeds around it and he did. After a couple of years, the town Highway Surveyor did trim the bushes and cut around there. Al asked me if I had seen it and I said yes but there is one thing they didn’t finish. He said what’s that and I told him they should put tar in the figures so you could read it. It is the year 2,000 and they still haven’t done it.

There is a tall stone post that marks the boundary of Westport and Dartmouth at the corner of Beeden Road and Old County Road. There is one more stone that marks the boundary and I think it is at the corner of Hix Bridge and Division Road and White Oak
Run.

In 1929 the music teacher came once a week. I was at the bottom of the class as far as singing. I was a “crow”. She saw I wasn’t singing and came down to my desk. After she listened for a while, she put her arm on my desk and I bit her right above the wrist, and I’ll bet she still had those scares when she died about three weeks ago.

When I was ten years old I went to the 4th grade at the Westport Point School and every week we went across the road to Miss Hall’s Library. We used to bring books back to the school and keep them about a week. That was Bob Wick’s grandmother,

Every year we had to go down to Wordell’s peach orchard. They lived just below where Dr. Lepreau lived. We would get 3-4 bushels of peaches. My mother would begin canning peaches. Later in the 30’s my father would pasture cows across the road at Ed Pierce’s. In 1938 he had a blue and white cow that calved down there and Art and I had to walk the cow home. The calf was blue and white. My father sold the calf to John Costa on the way home. Those blue and white cows were a type of Holstein.

Ephraim Tripp wanted me to help him get hay one night. While I was up there with the truck after supper he pitched and I made load. About dark he was all through and was hollering to me, telling me which way to go. You could hear him all over the neighborhood. When I got home Art knew I was coming home because he could hear Ephraim.

Around 1937-38, the Grange had a get together at the Boy’s Club in New Bedford. Chief Black Hawk was there with an Indian supply of stuff. He was talking about making bows and arrows. He said he needed a good ash butt about 6 feet long. I told him my father had a couple down in the swamp and we would cut it down for him. We did and we had 2 lengths for him. In about three weeks he arrived with a bow for me and 5 arrows. You could adjust the string in it for fightness so it wouldn’t be fight all the fime. I kept that bow until I got married. The boys used it and left it outside with the string on it. It finally cracked and broke that way.

When I was going to high school I played in an orchestra with a violin and also played in the orchestra at the Community House in Central Village. By the time I got out of high school I stopped playing. My fingers had sweat so much that I had worn off the skin. I didn’t have any music in me anyway.

When we graduated from high school, I was the class president. Russell Tripp was Valedictorian and Dot Field Dennis was Salutatorian. I had to give a speech at both the Class Day and graduation. After the ceremony, we had to walk by a line of people and be greeted by all of them. Russell Manchester was just ahead of me in the line and told Ms.
Doyle this was the last time he would see her and he needed a good kiss from her. I asked too and got a good kiss from her. I was fifth in my graduating class.

After graduation, I wanted to go to the state college. I told my father that I was going to work for Bill Smith out in No. Brookfield. Bill Smith was the agriculture teacher. My father thought I was going to work for him that summer. I said I could get $25 a month out there and got nothing from him. He said that if I worked for him he would see that I got the money to go to college. A couple of weeks later Norman Gifford principal of the high school told me that if I wanted to go to college I would have to take special English through the summer. I said, “nothing doing”. I applied for Stockbridge School of Agriculture at Amherst, a two year course but entered as a second year student with the idea that I could go to Michigan State College for junior-senior year and get through college in 3 years because Mass State did not accept anything like that. So eventually, I went to Stockbridge and paid my own way. I was going to go a week early so I could play football but instead we had the ’38 Hurricane and school didn’t open up until 2 weeks later. That’s when I got there.

In 1938, 4 or 5 days after graduating from high school, Russell Manchester drove into the yard and wanted me to go to the World’s Fair with him. He said he had left a note on the table at home, “gone to the World’s Fair with Alec”. He left his car in our yard and I left a note in our house saying, “gone to the World’s Fair with Russ”. We didn’t have much money so we decided to hitch hike. We got up as far as Sanford Road, and being a hot day, when a Cozy Cab came along we got a ride for 25 cents to the bus station in Fall River. Then, at the bus station the sign said $2.50 to New York City so we took the bus and got into New York City half past ten at night. We signed up at the YMCA. $1.00 for the night. The next morning, early, we got up and walked down Fifth Avenue clear to the East River, by the Empire State Building and we came back to the next street, went up Wall Street and checked that out. There weren’t any buildings we could get into. It
looked as if they were all coming together at the top, they were so tall. We got back on course and we went back to Cedar Street and each bought a hamburger. That cost 10
cents each. They were raw but we ate them. Then we walked down to the pier and found a Providence boat and got a boat ticket back to Providence for that night. We got on the boat and looked it over, took off our sweaty stockings and threw them overboard because
we had bought some new ones and then took the subway and went to the World’s Fair.

We went there and looked up a fellow who went to Stockbridge with my brother Art. He was working at the cow barn, but it was his day off so we never got into the barn. There were 2 other buildings that were open with long lines of people waiting to get into them.

We went into both of them, didn’t see much, so we figured we would get out and go home. We spent an hour and 40 minutes going to the World’s Fair. When we were going to the fair all the signs said how to get to the fair, but on the way back we had to ask people. Most people only knew the way they were going. We made it to Times Square and from there we made it down to the boat. Before sunset we were sailing out by the
Statue of Liberty and got to Providence next morning and made it back home.

When I was going to Stockbridge on one of the first trips home, I came home with Charlie Nelson. He was majoring in dairy. I took my racing bike apart and wrapped it in paper like a big package. When he came to pick me up, I put this big package in the car and asked him if he had room to take my bicycle. He said “No”. Before we got to Amherst, the fella sitting beside me asked me what was in the package. I told him, “my bicycle” the one Charlie didn’t have room for. I had one up on Charlie then because he had charged me a dollar to take me home and bring me back. While at Stockbridge, Freeman and Bonnie Meader already had a girl for me in East Hampton, MA. I went to meet her and she was a wonderful girl but 15 – 20 miles was too far to walk and I didn’t have any transportation and so that was the end of that. Also I had a girl named Stephanie Palumbo in Concord, MA when I went to work there. She was better known as Fannie and she was a wonderful girl too.

In 1940 while I was in Concord, I bought a Model A Ford for $10.00. I bought it from an Irish fellow who worked up to the school where Verrill and Jim DeNomidy had bought the machinery. I bought Ryan’s Model A Ford. He let me know that he was a Protestant Irish and not a Catholic Irish. That was the first I knew there was a difference. It was part of my education I guess. I sold the wheels and tires to Slim Chapman who used to milk cows at the farm where I started and sold the rest for junk, probably made $5 on the whole deal. Slim put the wheels on his car and that night he wanted me to go with him and two or three others to Waltham. When they went to Maynard, they always took me to drive them home because they went to the beer parlor. I would walk around town until things began to close up then I would go to the beer parlor for a drink of coke. Never once did I drive them home. After drinking 22-23 glasses of beer they would want to stop for a cocktail on the way home, and oh yes, on the way to Waltham, one front wheel came off and went by us as we were driving. We saw it go ahead in the bushes. He hadn’t tightened up the nuts when he put the wheel on during the day. One morning, at 1:00
A.M., Slim came down and woke me up. He lived just up the hill from us in a little cottage, and wanted me to drive him and his mother in law up to Acton where she worked, she had been baby sitting for him. So I said all right, we got up the road to Concord where the state police was and I went around the rotary twice, he was trying to show me what road to take but he couldn’t do it, so he said, “let me drive, I’ll find it” so he drove around it once, half way to Acton and through a stop sign, across the main highway there. He said always stop here because I got stopped by a cop for not stopping here. So he drove into Acton, left her, and then drove all the way home. He could hardly walk but he could drive.

On the 4th of July, young Verrilll and I went to the fireworks in the Rio car. After the fireworks, we were going to Sudbury but he wanted to go to an eating place in Concord first, so we drove up there same as he always did, full speed and put on the brakes. No brakes and he smashed right into the side of the building. He got out of that scrape, drove home and said, “well, we better take the Grand Supercharger.” His parents had been to the fire works but were home by then. So we went to the fire works in Sudbury in the Gramm. It was most midnight when it was over so we left, the early ones to leave. On the country Sudbury Road he drove 50 and passed everyone in front of him. We got up to the railroad tracks and the train was coming, two cars ahead of us had stopped before he realized he couldn’t stop. He smashed right into the cars in front of him. The first two accidents he had had since I had been there. His father was some mad. I saw him in 1965 at a milk meeting and I asked him how long that car lasted, he said for a couple of more years. Said he had been up to the wood lot in Bethel, Maine, drove it home and shut it off. He said it ran for half and hour after that and then that was the end of it.

Apple Orchard – Bedford, MA. In 1939 we went up there with a tractor. The plow was up there. Someone else had started but they didn’t like plowing, too stony, they said There were about three acres there. They said I came from the stony country, I could plow it. So, eventually, I got the harrowing done, we got it seeded and later in the year I took the teamster, mower, and two horses over there but going through Concord, he wanted to stop and get some rubbing alcohol for one of the horses. So I stopped at the drug store in Concord Center for him. He was mowing hay over there at the apple orchard and I was mowing grass with the sythe. Later I looked up there to see that he was drinking the rubbing alcohol. In fact, he drank it all while we were up there. The horse didn’t get any on his legs. Later in the year they picked apples and I went over there and loaded three truck loads and took them to West Concord for cold storage.

The hill between Lexington Road and 102 is where Concord grapes were developed. In between the lower road and Bedford Road is another little road that goes too Concord
Bridge. There is a house there that has a hole where the British shot there firearms. At Thanksgiving time there was a lot of red turban squash. Back then there were only two kinds of squash, red turban and hubbard. Right after Thanksgiving, Verrill sent me up to Strawberry Hill Road to a farm that raised all these squash. I got 2 or 3 loads of them and fed them out to the cows. I asked the guy up there where I was getting them why they didn’t sell and he said that you can’t even give them away after Thanksgiving. I brought one home and Ma cooked it up. It was as good as any squash. They raised a lot of hubbard squash up there too and filled the greenhouses right up full of them. After Thanksgiving they began to sell them. In the meantime they began to build up big wind rows of horse manure beside the greenhouses. At the first of the year they began to haul this horse manure into the greenhouses where they had taken the squash out. Then they planted rhubarb roots in the horse manure. That process continued until all squash was out and all rhubarb in. By the later part of February they were selling forced rhubarb in the Boston market.

The state college at Stockbridge, was a land grant college so every boy who went there had to be examined by the Army. It wasn’t a university until the end of WWII. Up there we studied genetics and veterinary science. Everyone had a law course and I was 5th in
the class there. I’ve forgot it all since then. That law course was so hard for people to pass that they finally discontinued that. We slaughtered cows, pigs and lambs. We even sheered sheep for wool. We had one of the best teachers in the country, Professor Rice.

In 1938 at Stockbridge, one of the fellows, Frank Whitehead, came back and had a heck of a headache. He wanted to go for a walk so we did. We walked down to Hadley and all the way up to Sunderland all through the tobacco growing fields. Every farmer had one or more tobacco drying sheds. Every other board in the shed was so that they could open them up for drying in the good weather. Those sheds are all gone now or converted to something else. The only tobacco grown out there now is cigar tobacco, grown under nets or tents. There was a lot of onion country then and more so now. Also, lots of potatoes. After we got back to Amherst, his headache was better, about 2:00 in the morning. In 1940 when I was working in Concord, I got a bill for poll tax. I told them I lived in Westport and wouldn’t pay the tax. I was only 19 and had to be 21 to be taxed.

I bought my first car in 1940 for $50. I got the Grange Insurance from Uncle Leslie. We had a bad snowstorm up in Concord and I started at the Middlesex School to milk at 4:00

in the morning. It took me half an hour to shovel snow. I stopped at the bakery in Concord Center so I turned around and called the farm to see what they wanted me to do.
8:00 1 was back at the farm, shoveling for the second time. They said go back to the dairy and shovel more snow. The next week we had a little bit of snow but they had a lot in Westport.

Don Holt was the fellow I worked with in Concord. He joined the Navy and wanted me to take him home. This was in the first two weeks in December. I took him home and it was about 10 degrees when we got there at 10:00 that night. First thing to do was to drive up to one of the cider mills. There was a small door where we could reach in, take a cup and get a drink of cider. About half way through the week it went to 40 degrees below zero. My Ford wouldn’t even show signs of starting. So we put a pair of horses on it and towed it down the road. The wheels would kick backward on the snow. We put chains on it and it still kicked backwards. Oil on the oil stick was just like grease so I drained the antifreeze out of it and put it on the stove and heated it three times. I put it back in and it started like summertime. It was the first and only time I went cross country skiing. A heavy shirt and heavy sweater and never got cold.

When I graduated from Stockbridge I went to work for Floyd Verrill in Concord, MA.
His son was in my class. I worked for $35.00 a month and board, but he paid me $40 all the time I was there. While I was there I went right to working, cutting grass and putting in the silo. That was when I met Don Holt. The second haying we did up just dry hay.
That was the first time I worked with a hay loader. I made load and when I got to the silo, Don Holt unloaded it. In two weeks we were on dry hay and we ran it into the chopper into the hay mow. Verrill had 20 acres of sweet corn. The corn was planted in check rows and we pulled three cultivators behind the tractor. The corn was picked for the Cambridge market. We would take that in the nighttime.

When we graduated from Stockbridge in the spring, we went somewhere every week. We went to Squire’s where they killed the hogs and then we went to New England Dressed Meat and Wool where they kosher-killed livestock and lambs. Then they took us through the meat storage. The carcasses went in one door and back and forth across the building until they came out another door three months later. When they came out they scrapped the mold off of it and that meat was for the high class restaurants and hotels.

After that we went down to Faneuil Hall and went through there. I’m not sure, but that was at Haymarket Square. From there we went to the Old Howard Burlesque Show. If you sat way back, the old ladies looked pretty good but you didn’t want to be too close in the front. Then I came home for the weekend.

We went to all the Guernsey, Holsteins, Brown Swiss and the Ashire cow farms on Saturdays and then we went to the Perchering Horse Farms in New York on the other side of Great Barrington, MA. All those towns out there were dying then but they’ve all recovered since.

When I went to Stockbridge, Virginia peddled my papers. After she did it for a few months they took it away from her. It wasn’t a fit thing for girls to do, but she was a good football player and a good baseball player. Sixteen and a half miles she had to ride.

In the 1940’s my sisters Gloria and Olive milked the cows during the war. Gloria was never going to marry a farmer. She advertised for a man in one of the military papers somewhere and Ray Vorwald from Wisconsin showed up from Washington one day at Lincoln Park, tore the telephone page out and called her up and then proceeded to come down to see her. He stayed all night but my mother didn’t care much for that. He said he had been standing guard down in Washington, D.C. with a wooden gun. He proceeded back and then was sent to France. By the end of the war Gloria was working for his folks out in Wisconsin. When Ray got out of the Army and went home they got married. She was going to raise a baseball team. I think she was one short and they were mostly girls anyway. Now at 75 she is still market gardening by herself. Ray had died.

In 1940 Don Holt had gone back to Maine and he had joined the Navy. He came to Newport after his 8 weeks training in Newport he called me and wanted a ride home, so first week of December we started for his house, a two week vacation. We got there 9 or 10 at night.

I got a ride with Wheeler’s Potato truck into Boston and went to the North Station and took the train to Portland and Don came and got me. After a few days we came back to Concord and I never saw him again until we went to visit him in Bethel, Maine around
1956. When we were up in Concord, night times we used to go up to White Pond and go swimming. There were two watch cops up there and they called us the “Gold Dust Twins”. We went on a state Republican Cruise out of Boston Harbor with Verrill in his Grand Super Charger that would go 40 in first speed, 80 in second speed between two telephone poles and on the way home that night he said he had it up to 105 MPH on Route 2. He floored it and it went up to 114 MPH with sparks flying out the muffler.

This fellow always drove fast. He drove a grain truck out of the railroad station with 12 bags of grain in the back of it and the grain dropped off right near the puddle, never got wet. Eventually his father told me to go catch him and tell him to come back and get it.
But nobody knew just where he had gone and suggested I take the Lexington Road. I took that for quite a way and then turned around and came back, then I took the low road but never did find him. Then I found out how easy it was to drive that car. I thought I was going about 30 MPH through the curves on Lexington Road but I was going 60 and climbing. Come Christmas, his mother was in Emerson Hospital and he had lost his license for two weeks. He knew he was going to get it back because all the police up there owed his father money for milk. Just before that he and I had gone back to Stockbridge for an annual meeting and he got stopped going 50 MPH through Grafton.
Actually, he was going 75 MPH. So this week I was his chauffeur and he was going to take his girl out. She had another girl with her and set me up for a blind date with her.
This girl was the daughter of the person who owned Pepsi Cola. She was sick that night so I never did see her.

At Stockbridge, I earned my letter up there running half mile. I think I had to get 5 points. I finished third once and second twice.

first street north of Hawthorn. Every day we would walk down by the New Bedford jail.
We would go toward the center, but on the first Sunday we went to the movies and I saw a ball room brawl and Tarzan for the first time. Every day we went walking and I had a frozen Milky Way for the first time, 5 cents. By being frozen, they lasted a long time.
That was the only place I ever had them too.

I used to go to the town meetings in the 30’s when I got a chance. There was a pile of wood under the apple tree and it had the clothes line hooked to it. I was supposed to get some wood split and my father wouldn’t let me go to the town meeting because I hadn’t split the wood. On splitting the second stick, I hit the clothesline and a big stick fell off and hit me on the head. I bled quite a lot so I went to the town meeting anyway. The town meetings were a lot smaller back then and a lot of kids went. Frank DeAndrade always had a lot to say but it didn’t amount to much. It always made the meetings last longer and they didn’t have the business they have now. We used to have hot cross buns on Town Meeting Day, and my mother who would never spend money on anythng we didn’t need would buy a dozen or two hot cross buns there.

In 1928 there was an awful fire in Fall River. It burned out the middle of the city.
Westport had just made a fire truck out of a Chevy truck and they got called to go there and the put them in the fire station at Bogle Hill on Pleasant Street. That was for emergencies because there were great big roofs which were burning and flying up into the air and they didn’t know where the next fire would be starting. Later in the Depression a lot of those mills burned. My father said those fires were started by the friction of keeping the insurance policy and the mortgage policy in the same drawer.

In the 1930’s, we were going up to the Factory School for 7th and 8th grade. At the end of the year the bus driver gave us the day off and took us down to George Howland’s beach at Westport Harbor to thank us for being good kids on his bus.

In the 30’s, my brother Arthur went into the bee business. We tracked bees for him. We would catch a bee in the cup with sugar and water. It wouldn’t take long for them to get loaded up, letting him out and watching him leave. With their radar and would start a bee line and head right for the swarm. A short time later he would be back by himself and with another bee or two. We would shut them in the cup or a dish and let them fill up again and then you could walk that bee line for their swarm. When you have gone far enough take the cover off and let them go again. That way you could go right to where the swarm was. Easy to find. Art was in the bee business. He sold a lot of honey and grew to have 15 -20 hives. He had to take care of them in good weather, no powder, no stink or anything, a sweating horse that would be stung after. If I got stung, my face and eyes would swell up and be closed the next morning. His customers wanted buckwheat honey, He was selling a lot at the house, more honey than he could produce. He would send to New York to get it and he got 2 cans of buckwheat honey, 80 pounds. Art also bought and sold it, 450 pounds of elever honey. The customers would never come back for buckwheat honey. It must have taken Art 20 years to eat all that buckwheat honey.
That bee business led me to put up a hive to take some out of Spicer’s House on Old Harbor Road. I went down there and put a trap over the door. He had a big swarm of bees there that they could never get rid of them. I took a small hive down there with a queen in it and just a few bees. The bees didn’t want to go into that hive. They made a big swarm out there. After about two months they began to go into my hive. So I took the bees down and back to the harbor. They were such good workers. So many bees that I think I had the strongest hive in the country. I had to take the honey off every other week. Art figured that I set a new record, 295 Ibs. of honey way over anything he had ever heard of. In a good year around here we got honey from the Clera bush or pepper bush. Comes in bloom the last of July, first of August. Little white bush. And that in a good year. On a bad or dry year they don’t get as much. Then in those dry years the wild cherry trees begin to bleed the juices run down and the bees get that. It’s a dark honey with a metallic taste, nobody likes it. Goldenrod honey is dark and nobody likes it.
Usually leave that for the bees to live oft of in the winter. The honey bees are all female except the queen. When the bees swarm the old queen leaves. In the meantime, the worker bee is a female bee and when they sting you they’re dead. These bees grow a new queen. They build a special cell for her. Then they make some cells for the drone bee.
The male bee. One mating of the new queen with one drone is a mating for a lifetime. In August all these bees kill the drones, that is the August slaughter. The next year George Case had me come down to Huntoon’s to set up another hive for the second story window. I trapped them out for 6 weeks, then he wanted that taken down. We went down one dark cloudy day, you can’t handle bees in bad weather but this fall I got about 12 bees under my veil that stung me and the next morning my head and neck, my face swelled up so much that made me immune and I never swelled up after that from a honey
bee sting.

More on the 1920’s. The first car I can remember my father having was in the twenties. It was a Chevy with isinglass side curtains you could let down and raise. It had two round windows in the back. The second car was identical but had a square window in the back.
The third one was a Dodge, they had began to have metal sides on them then. The next one was a Roosevelt, both Art and I got our licenses on that car. It was a heavy car like the old Buicks. That Roosevelt was only made the last half of 1929 and the first half of 1930. In 1933 the company started again and went out of business soon after. Then he bought a Whippit in Tiverton. Then he bought a 36 Buick sedan that had a lot of room in it for peddling eggs. The door handles on them pointed forward and were stabbing people in the cities. Pa came home one day and said something had hit the side of his car so he walked around to see if he had a dent in the side of the car and he had stabbed a pheasant and it was hung on that handle. They soon changed that handle to point back. Then he bought a Chevy, another Buick, same model and used the second Buick for peddling eggs.
That was his last car.

One night it was snowing, this was before I had my license so Art and Virginia took the car and peddled the papers. Up near Charlotte White Road, the car slid off the road up there on its side. People came along and got it tipped back up onto the road and they finished peddling the papers. I stayed home to do the chores.

In the 30’s we cut corn by hand. Ike Tripp brought his tractor over. My father had the chopper. Ben Bowls and Alden Perry cut the corn by hand. The last year they cut it by contract, they were real workers. They hauled the corn on corn wagons. They used Granville’s wagon and Willis’ wagon and used horses belonging to those people and Harry Kirby’s horses. It took half a day to get that Fordson tractor started.

Another thing about my father growing up big enough to leave home. Granville had gone out to the mid-west. He worked for somebody who did a lot of thrashing. He was part of the crew that went from the mid-west clear up into Minnesota. He used to tell about sleeping in tents. Come night time he used to shake out his blankets. He said there was almost always young rattlesnakes in them. Eventually he came home but he wanted to go back again and when he went back he took my father. My father only went as far as Indiana or Illinois peddling papers on the railroad. He used to sing that song about going around the triangle, down the Wabash River and coming back where they started. He said that on the railroad going around the countryside there were plenty of beefers and hogs.

After they got the corn he said the pigs stayed up on the top of the hills. If they saw a steer lift his tail they would all come down there. That was the meal for them. When Art and I were little kids, we used to have buttons to put on our shirts. These buttons would set right over the shirt buttons. Those were the buttons my father used when he was selling papers on the railroad. Granville didn’t stop there, he kept on going clear to the Northwest. In the process somewhere he put in a claim for land in Laramie, Colorado.

The only reason I know this is because I recovered a deed for it. Somebody else wanted the land because he had never done anything to it. He had six years to improve it and if they didn’t do anything in six years somebody else could claim it. That is how I got the information that he had land on this claim because the court had written to him notifying him that they wanted the land. Granville had itchy feet I guess. He went to Florida when they started to clear land in the 20’s. He said the first day he got a couple of snakes and tied their tails together and took them in to show them to the people and they told him they were poisonous. He said that they would turn pigs into this swampy land that they were clearing up. The pigs would clean up the snakes because the snakes would bite into

the fat and that would absorb the poison. Granville also spent time going out on to the Banks cod fishing. He started and ended his fishing for Holden Wilcox down here at the Point. His brother Willis told me that when he (Willis) left home he went to New Hampshire or Vermont working in the woods. He said they had beans 3 times a day, that is what they lived on. He also spent time working for Wilcox.

Bicycling. I joined the AAB and the AAU and I entered a 38 mile race in Melville, RI.
I was racing against people who had been racing every Sunday. All kinds of races. In my first race they gave me a handicap of five minutes. It was a 38 mile race. 18 miles up hill and one mile down hill. We went twice. The second time around a bunch from Worcester caught up with me. They told me to get behind them and they would break the wind for me, I must be tired. I was. In 3 or 4 minutes and a fellow in the car came by and hollered
“shift”. The ones in the back came to the front and somebody else set the pace. I was on my own again. Within 3 or 4 minutes two fellows from Boston caught up with me. I rode along with them almost to the top of the hill. When we started down I told the Boston boys if we were going to get near the front we had better get going. My bike was geared for level going but down hill I really had speed. I finished 5th in that race, much to my surprise. We had a big feast and a rest afterward and it was 20 minutes before I could pull on my pants. The next week I went over to New Bedford near the water. The 6 day bike racing had come to an end, and two of the fellas wanted to have a 3 day bicycle race and
went to Melville with turned pro so I went over to watch them. That
In 1939 on Columbus Day I rode my bike home from Stockbridge, 125 miles. It was a cold morning and I had cramps in North Brookfield but eventually they worked out. I was going to get coffee and donuts in Weir, MA. The diner hadn’t opened when I got there so I rode along to Spencer, MA and the diner there was opened and I got coffee and toast.

Coming out of there I was like a new man. By the time I got to Worcester, the half way mark, it was so hot that I rode around the block looking for a place to buy a soda. I rode the rest of the way home including riding up President Avenue in Fall River without
getting off. It took 13 hours. On Sunday I rode back all the way without incident and without stopping against a northwest wind and it only took 12 hours.

In the 40’s all the corn took a long season, 120 days to mature. Henry Wallace was the Secretary of Agriculture and he began to breed the corn to shorten the season. Through the years after that they kept getting the season shorter, corn moved north. So that now corn is raised way into Canada and all over the northern United States.

1920’s (late) The family would go down to Uncle Willis’s at least once during the summer to go out to Pine Island. In the summer there was a boat there that we could take to get across the first narrow channel then we would all get out and walk across the flat to the
Island picking up quahogs along the way. While we were out there and the tide was low we dug for clams and we would get a bushel. We would walk around the island looking for crabs. There was no trouble getting a bushel of them. When we walked back across
the mud flats we picked up quahogs again and they would make a bushel. The next day Ma would get to cooking and canning. The quahogs were put in the cellar for a few days spread out, and we would sprinkle dry corn meal on them. Quahogs would live a month that way but we would keep them a week and then open them to cook or can.

I broke a tooth off when I was going to high school. Eventually, I had that tooth pulled and I had a tooth ground down and had a gold cap put there. Eventually it began to fall in and the tooth wouldn’t stay in. So I put it in a cup. In later years I don’t know what happened to it.

We had a cooking class at school. Something extra, all boys. Miss Dennis was the teacher, and we asked her to go on a winter vacation with a foot of snow on the ground to the boy scout camp on Reed Road in Dartmouth. It was a half mile into the woods. We had a real good cookout and Miss Dennis enjoyed it.

Art and I wanted to use Cliff Mosher’s boat. He had it down to Hix’s Bridge. We finally got to use it, we rowed clear down around Cadman’s Neck and we went with the tide.
Time don’t mean anything on the river. It was 6:00 by the time we got back to Hix’s Bridge. We had to row against the tide. It was 6:00 and Pa finished chores and came looking for us. We had a bushel of crabs and had just got back.

In the 40’s I quit work in Concord to come home to ride bicycle across the country with Russell Manchester. When I got back I looked him up and found him working for his brother-in-law in Portsmouth. He said he had to work there a few more weeks to get a little more money. A week later I was helping Art put paper on his two story hen house.
Late in the afternoon, Russell arrived and told me the bike ride was out. He was on his way home from Providence. He had joined the Army Air Corps, there was no Air Force at the time. They sent him to Hawaii based at one of the airfields the same as Hickham but also at Wheeler Air Field when the Japs bombed it. After the war he told me where he had been and what he had done.

In 1940 I had a Wendell Wilkie sticker on the back of my car. Wilkie was the Republican running against Roosevelt. My father asked me what was the idea of that, I couldn’t vote, I wasn’t 21 yet. I didn’t know until years later that my father was a Democrat. He had been a Democrat since the Depression in ’32.

On December 7, 1941, World War II started. I considered joining the Marines but I was talked out of it and I was deferred until ’44 when I went up for a physical examination to
be drafted. I passed the draft but the only one that did take me was the Army because I had one eye that was weak. We were bused from Fall River to Winthrop. I was informed later that I was deferred again. Help on the farm was very short and I was considered to be boss material. I was deferred all through the war anyway. In 1944 I went up for my exam to be drafted. Those that didn’t pass the draft previously, more farm boys had been deferred in Westport. I passed the draft and then got deferred.
In 1941 I went to work for R.T. Small on Horseneck Road. I had the best of board, $50 a week, not much work, cousin Howard Tripp was my boss. After 10 weeks, I quit. I had stayed home just one night out of those 10 weeks. Then I found another job.
Freeman Meader steered me to Borden Tripp. When I met Borden for the first time, I never knew him before that, he was in bed with pneumonia at his mother’s place. He hired me for SS0 a month with board, 4:00 in the morning till noontime, 2 hours off, until we got through at night about 7:00.

Back then a kid could work. Later years, when OSHA took over you had to have the Social Security Number, tax and insurance and kids couldn’t work unless they were 16 and they had to be 18 to do most things. You couldn’t afford to keep all those records, operating under OSHA standards. The kids would come to work, they wouldn’t know nothing or how to do it. They were just interested in taking the money home. Couldn’t afford to hire one. Things are still that way today.

I married Helen Archibald Hasson on August 17, 1943. It cost $2.00 for the Town Clerk but we gave him $10 and we gave Uncle Doug $10 for being best man and then we were broke. The Town Clerk was Edward L. Macomber who lived across from Lee’s where the doctor lives now. Helen had been divorced and had six children. Charles (Charlie), James (Jimmy), Bessie, Patsy (Pat), Lois (Loie) and Winifred (Winnie) Hasson. Over the next three years we had Dianne and Helen. Macomber rented me the house on Rt. 177 across stom Lawton’s that belonged to the Mello’s. It was two weeks before we could move into 16, so 1 took Helen home and I went back to the Harbor to live with the Varney’s Eke I had been for those two weeks. So we moved in and then it was me getting up at 4:00 in the morning and getting home at 7.00 at night. We had a chimney fire in the winter, a foot of snow on the ground. I called the fire department from Arthur Lawton’s down the road.
Firemen came and put the fire out. That night when I got home the house was cold and they had to call the fire department again about 6:00. It was green wood that caused it Most chimney’s didn’t have a lining in it. That one didn’t. It had to be rebuilt, it had
burned out around it. So I went to see Teachman down on the old Harbor Road. He went right to work with it and built a new chimney that week. We used an oil heater for heat all that week

We moved to the Old County Road across from Adam Lawton’s. I started with a Model B Ford ear, 4 eylinder. I fell asleep and smashed that one in 1941. Then I bought a DeSoto then a Rio. I had two Chevys, a Ford, and an Abe Quick Ford, a Buick and a Pontiae, a LeBarron, and then a Plymouth. Also a Plymouth that Wally had given me when he left Raynham for Florida. In trucks I had a Dodge, Ford, a Ford platform and a Chevy, an international and another Chevy.

In the spring, Gramma Archibald bought Charlie 25 chickens. In 1944 we moved down on the Drift Road. That started him in the chicken business, and we moved with the idea that I was going to work for my father after the war. I remember the kids picking grapes over near the stone wall. Mrs. Messier didn’t like that. The kids were over to Messier’s quite a lot. Winnie was over there fooling around looking in the key hole. Somebody inside opened the door and knocked the corner of her front tooth off.

Jimmy took care of the livestock. I had a few calves and a cow. He did the milking and we began to get more chickens. Charlie and I were in business with them. In 1944 the hurricane had turned over a brooder house of John Hart’s. John Hart sold it to me for $25. I got Albert Field to move it. Now we had a good brooder house before that I had built one from logs I had got up in Art’s woods and taken down to Gilbert Costa’s sawmill.
Jimmy also took care of the two pigs. I don’t remember where I got them from, but they had 16 or 17 young ones. I sold all but two runts. I gave them to Donald and he fed them a new chicken growth grain that Eastern States had and they grew fast and big like normal size pigs.

One night I went herringing with Raymond Fields. We got there about 1:00 and I never saw herring run better. Before daylight we had the beach covered with fish and our nets were all broken. The next day Raymond and I cut out the row. That was my day off. We cut out 40 pounds of row and that day we sold about 20 pounds of it. The rest was put in his mother’s freezer. The next day we finished taking the row out and the dead fish I took home and fed to my pigs. We sold the row that we took out the second day and then we took out the 20 pounds or so that we put in his mother’s freezer. When it all thawed, it fell apart so we had to throw it away.

I started planting turnips with the boys. The first turnips we pulled we took them into Providence. We took them in at midnight and then the phone began to ring all the
forenoon and Donald could hear it at Brownell’s Corner School. So he went home at dinner to answer the telephone. It was Tourtelot at the produce market in Providence wanting another load of turnips as fast as I could get them. That night we put up the rest of my turnips that I had pulled and enough of my father’s to make a load. We got $2.00 a bushel for those turnips. Years later Sam Boan told me he was pretty mad about the business because he only made $1.00 a bushel for his.
MThe next 2 or 3 years we grew a lot of turnips and did pretty good on them. The last year was the year Charlie got sick. We had pretty near 8 acres of turnips that year. We had the early ones pretty well pulled when he went to the hospital. They operated on a tumor they called cancer and gave him 5 days to live. They recommended we send him to Pondville.
That fall the last 2 acres I planted real late. Christmas and New Years came on Sunday so we had Monday and Tuesday to pull turnips. On Sundays we went up to Pondville to see Charlie. We pulled the late ones on New Years Day. What was big enough brought a dollar a bushel the rest we let stay in the ground. The following July those late turnips had all gone to seed, the ones that were left in the ground. I cut the branches and dried out the seed. I got about 20 pounds of seed which I sold for $3.00 a pound. We had filled the cellar up with real big turnips the tops had been frozen and soon they began to smell. Jim was feeding the livestock all they would eat and I was selling them to Frank Petty for his sheep at 25 cents a bag. It only took about 5 to 7 turnips to fill a bag so we made money at that. We cleared the turnips all up eventually.

In the early 1940’s, my father, myself, Charlie Hasson and George Mosher were pulling turnips in the fall up at Jim Hancock’s. The weather had been nice and warm all fall. My father was asking George and Charlie whether or not they thought there would be skating that winter. Not long after that, my father had them betting each other whether or not there would be skating that winter. In the winter, the only skating there was between Route 6 at North Watuppa Pond and the railroad track where Rt. 6 goes across now. I don’t know who won the bet, but my father gave the winner $2.00 in the spring.

Around 1947-50 Grandmother Archibald gave Charlie a little dog. We were living on the Drift Road then. I came home one noontime and he had got into a rain shelter and killed 50 chickens in there (broilers). He had killed 50 and the last 3 were left when I got there.
I knocked him in the head and killed him and my wife never forgave me for it, saying that I would do the same thing to the kids if I got mad.

That year Borden Tripp planted three acres of potatoes. He had high school kids come down and pull the mustard weed out of them. We had turkeys that were laying eggs. I took them to Lakeville, MA to have them hatched out. We raised 11,00 turkeys that year.
That year Borden had moved his dairy up to Fall River, North 7th Street. Percy Tripp trucked the milk up every morning. If Percy couldn’t go or had a day off, Borden would take it. Some days Borden might go up early and I had to truck the milk up and bring the cans back. Those were real cold winters, 42 – 43. On Christmas day we had a cow calf that I had bought along with two others. She calved and stepped on her teat and split it right up the side of it. The water in the barn was all frozen that morning. After chores I got the cow in the front part of the barn and threw her. I went in the house and got a needle and thread to sew her up. Borden’s sister Judy came out to give me moral support.
In two days the swelling in the teat had cut right out and it had begun to heal. After it got healed and you were going to milk her, you had to put the machine on because there was a hole in her and the milk would come right out.

In 1947, Calvin Tripp’s grandfather came down one noontime and I told him about the snake in the path. He wanted to see about a part on the truck. After telling me about the part, he started telling me about the snakes over on the stone heap at Perry’s. The town owned the gravel pit there. He said he got there and saw a big snake and he shot it and put it on the stone heap and stretched it out. It was 13 feet long. The next day he went over there and shot another one, it’s mate and it was 12 feet long. He asked me if I had seen the bones there on the rock heap and I told him “no”. A few weeks ago, I asked my brother Art if he had ever seen them and he said yea, they were there a long time. In the World Encyclopedia, I ran across mammoth snakes. It said in the world there only two places that had them, Horseneck Beach and some other country. Since then some of the old timers say they used to see them. They would stretch clear across the road or a path sunning themselves.

In 1945 after the war, I went to work for my father. One of the first things that he did was trade his International tractor for a Case tractor with a loader. He also bought a manure spreader, a side delivery rake, and a mowing machine to go with it. That tractor was the beginning of clearing the land more. Bushes, stone, building walls it was a real work horse.

Jimmy and I finished a wall to the gate to use all of the stones we had there, it kept the wall level on the top but the ground went down hill. At the gate the wall was 5 1/2 feet high. Pa asked me who made it that way and I told him he always said to make them horse high and hog tight. He said, “Oh”

We were beginning to clear rocks when we got that loader and he got a man from Mattapoisett to come drill holes with a compressor. He drilled about a hundred holes.
Then he got Wordell from New Bedford. He was telling us about when he went up to Alaska for the Gold Rush. It went to 80 degrees below one morning and they kept water in a barrel for the shack and that morning all there was was a hole in it. It was confirmed that it was 80 below. He had Wordell blow the rocks with electrical charges several at a time. When he blew them, I would spend several days taking those rocks out so I could plow. Surrounding these rocks, it was cobble stoned in with small stones so we were always kind of late getting the corn planted. He got Westport Sand and Gravel, run by Eddie Waite at the time. He didn’t want to bury them, he wanted to lug them off, so he started to lug them off. After about 4 days of carting off rocks, stone walls and such, he pulled all his equipment out. My father asked him how come and he said, “Well, I don’t think you can afford it.” My father never started anything he couldn’t afford so he hired Rapoza and Azevedo drove the bulldozer. He dug one massive hole up in back of where we lived and he got a stone out so big he couldn’t push it so he rolled it all the way to the hold he had dug and buried or covered it. Later when he got smaller stone, we had one piece of land and my father sent me over to take the stone out one afternoon, I took the stone out of the spot a hundred by a hundred or a little bit smaller, lowered the ground level over a foot and then caught a flat stone between the draw bar and the wheel and that broke the axle on the tractor. So Henry Perry had to fix the tractor right where it was.
Take the whole side of the rear end out.

In 1946 my father had rebuilt his barn and had bought a hay carriage and hangar and one little piece was missing and he just didn’t get it. It was haying time so he sent me to Sears and Roebuck in Boston to see if I could get it. I went up there and went from one department to another. Then they began to send me to these department all over again.
After two hours of going from one place to another, they finally gave it to me. Just a little piece you could put in your pocket. That was the only way they could get rid of me.

In 1948 Charlie and I grew chickens together. I sold about 150 pullets to Herbie Tripp The well was dug at Herbie’s by Claytie Tripp. He dug it 50 feet deep to be down with the level of Watuppa Pond. He was home one day in the spring and I asked him what he was doing home. He said he had to run his pump all day so he wouldn’t flood.

In 1948-50, my father and Jim Hancock bought hay at the Brown Farm in Little Compton.
He had John Martin and his brother mow and bale it. An old Case baler, it took two people to put the wires through. George Mosher and I picked it up and took it up to Sylvia Wood’s on Sodom Road and put it in the back shed. The next year Pa bought some to be baled at Nelson Cabot’s. Nelson bailed and was afraid it was going to rain so he put it in his barn.

Another time in that period, my father sent me to Boston to get Virginia. She was coming back from Europe. When I got there the boat was there but she had to go through customs. I must have been there three hours and that’s when you can really tell how much the tide changed up there. The boat was at high tide when I got there, way up in the air. When I left, it must have dropped 10-20 feet because you had to look down at it.
Virginia, being ever helpful brought along two people, immigrants from Ireland. She wanted to take them to Park Square, so I did and she went in with them and I waited over an hour for her to come out. I was double parked all that time so when she came out, I was pretty happy, thought I was going to get out of it but Virginia, still helpful, wanted some money for these people to get started. So, I gave her $20, they were going to send it back but I haven’t seen it yet.

In the SO’s, we started the Westport Farmers Group at the High School. We had speakers come in every week. One week there was a speaker come in to talk about rats. He said that rats hardly ever grow to weigh a pound. Donald was at the meeting with Alec (Bud)
Smith. They disappeared before the meeting was over. When Donald and Bud came back, they had been down home and caught a bunch of rats. They brought up 3 that weighed a pound and a quarter a piece. The speaker couldn’t get over that. They caught them by blocking up a drain on the outside and reaching in and put on the light, all the rats would run to this drain and they would turn on a faucet and drown them all.

In 1950 Charlie got sick and he went to Union Hospital and they operated on him and said he had cancer and gave him 5 days to live. They recommended that we send him up to* Pondville and we did and his wife and baby came to live with us. After being up there awhile the tumor he had had taken out came back. His father in law went up to see him that day and called that night and said that if we wanted to see him alive we had better go up there that night. We couldn’t but we did go the next day. The tumor had broken and from then on he began to get better. It took him a year to recover and then he went back to work and lived until he was 69 years old. He died in 1998. It was hematoma, not cancer

We had scallop years in the 50’s. The scallops had been planted in the Westport River so a lot of young fellows and older fellows went scalloping. They had to get licenses and could take 12 bushels each per day. A lot of people got around that by going twice a day. Once in the morning and once later in the day. My brother Donald was in on that deal. He bought a boat, motor and dredge. He and Bud Smith went scalloping. They did that for 2 weeks. Donald said that he finally realized that if he fell overboard, he would drown because he didn’t know how to swim. He sold that business right there.

Back in the 50’s, every April – May, Everett Coggeshall used to get his gang together to go fishing down at Quicksand Pond. The gang consisted of Arthur Carter and Charlie Dwelly and I don’t know who else. He used to drag the pond with a big net and empty it on the spit of land that goes out from Charlton’s pasture. There was a bass that came in with the herring about the same time. When they got a truck load they would quit. Load them up and take them to Drake’s in Fall River, sell them for a good price and Drake would ice them down and take them to New York. The herring were left for the seagulls.
Coggeshall told me that they used to go eeling. He went on the 10th of April. That is the day the eels come out of the pond to head for the salt water. If it rained the day before or the day after that is the day they came. He said they would be out in the river with two or three barrels and a boat and let the eels out as they came out of the creek from Cockeast Pond. If there were too many eels coming at once, they would go right across land into the ocean.

I had my Rio car motor overhauled. Manny Perry did the job and I thought it was real good. 58 Helen and I stared for Nova Scotia. I think it was over Labor Day or before or after, I’m not sure. Everything went fine until I went up a hill on 128 Noth of Lawrence.
The car began to make a rapping noise and the oil pressure went to practically nothing. 1 drove a little way and then took a right off of 128 into the town hall just off the road a way. A man was walking out of the town hall and t waited for him to get out to the car 1 told him my trouble and asked him if he couldn’t direct me to a good garage. He said there was a young fellow just up the road a way on 128, so t stopped there and he came out and looked at the car and said that his father had one just like it. He said he could adjust the oil pump, something new to me, so he went into his station and came out with a couple of wrenches. He loosened a lock nut on the side of the engine and tightened up a screw-stud and he tightened the lock nut again and said, “start it up”. 1 had oil pressure He said the oil was 100 thin, it ought to be changed to 30. I said well change it. He checked his supply and only had 20 and 40 and wouldn’t mix it. So I gave him a couple of dollars and went to the next gas station and had him change my oil there Then we made It to the Canadian line out east or Holton. Little bridge across a little brook. I know that before we left Maine and got to a crossing and stopped on top of a hill we could look 10 miles out across the valley. Helen took a picture or two and on the side of the road there was a lot or boxberries, big ones. That was when we continued into Canada and stayed that night 40 miles inside Canada, all flat country. The next day we headed for Old Bars, Nova Scotia. It was an interesting ride. I was hoping to see a lot of hay barns going across the isthmus into Nova Scotia but most of the barns were gone. Just roads and railroads through there. Most barns were gone.

When we got across the isthmus into Nova Scotia proper there was a big museum fort on the right. We stopped and went through all that. We went through Lower Echo and
Upper Echo and stopped to look at the St. John River Valley. Then we headed for
Trouro. We stayed in Old Barns with Aunt Bessie. From there we went visiting. We
went up to Trouro and out to the Northeast to a big area they called Bible Hill. That’s where Percy grew up. Then we went to Aunt Bertha’s in Trouro. All her boys worked on the railroad. From there we went to see aunt, I can’t remember her name, but her husband
made the fiddles. She lived in a little old house covered with vines Then we went to visit
one of Helen’s cousins who was in WWIl and trained with US troops. He was a parachute
jumper. We didnt see him bur we saw his wife. Along in the 1970’s he came here to visit
us. Then we went to see another one in Trouro. She had become incapacitated with some
kind of paralysis, the same as her cousin, Olive. Another day we went down to see
another aunt who lived on the south side of Old Bars. From there we went to her Uncle’s. He was plowing on a hill. I was amazed, he was plowing on a steep hill around and around. He had two tire chains on the upper wheels to keep him from rolling over.
drafted. With the bore of the tide coming up that river the fishermen would come up and level and then go back with the tide. All they had to de was steer the bout. We started to go to Halifax our never did ger there Aunt Grace lived there. After being there a little over a week we started into New Brunswick along the coast. We were headed for helen’s Uncle John’s. It took most of the the day to get there Every little way and there was a great big Catholic church with & or 10 small shacks or cottages. It was either wood chopper or fishermen villages on the way up to Fairhaven Bay. Uncle John had a store up there where he made his living but he also had cabins. We stayed in one of them that night. He had two sons but I don’t remember seeing them. There was a big paper mill there that stunk all the time on the edge of town. So the next day we started for home. We went right down the center of New Brunswick mostly woods but 50 – 60 miles of Canadian Air Force territory. By night we had got back to Fredrickton. That long narrow bridge. Talking about bridges, a lot of the bridges we saw in Nova Scotia were one way bridges and if a car was coming you had to stop and wait your turn to come across. All the roads were raised with ditches along the side because of heavy frost. They were treated with salt even in the summer to keep the dust down. We stayed at my grandmother’s house in Maine that night with Uncle Leroy and his wife. The next day we came the rest of the way home.

During the Korean War Jimmy got drafted. He had been putting antennas up for Azevedo. He went up for his examination and they asked for volunteers for the Marine Corps. Surprise. Jimmy stepped forward. They sent him to Paris Island for training. When he finished, he came home and got married. After being assigned different places, he ended up finishing out the war at Cherry Hill, NJ. In 1954 he came to work for me at Borden Tripp’s.

In the meantime, Borden Tripp wanted me to go into business with him in 1954, so I agreed. My father got my brother Norris to go to work for him. Norris bought a truck in Wisconsin and moved all his furniture to the Drift Road, and I moved to Borden’s house on the Cross Road. Then it was setting up business all over again. He had 18 first calf heifers that calved and we began to sell milk to the Fall River Milk Producers. Jimmy came to work for me and we began to get the work down around there and then the ’54 hurricane came. That knocked the corn all to pieces. My brother Art came down several days to help me. Two silos and the elevators got crushed so we had to use a pit silo. The next week another hurricane and then the backlash of it took the silo up to Borden’s barn down. Then we went into the milk business in ’58. So Borden and I had to go up to the Hood Company to get a release so he could sell milk. So then we went into business. We were the first in the area to have jugged milk. Gallons and half gallons. We got the school contract and business was growing until I got through. We cut hay all over,
Brayton’s Point, Truesdale, Chariton’s pasture, planted corn at Manchester’s, Dick Hawes, the home place, and Everett Coggeshall’s place.

In 1957-58 Helen and I took the family (Loie, Winnie, Dianne and Helen) to Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. We were headed for Dixmont. As we went through New Hampshire we went to a movie one night. We stayed in Gorham, New Hampshire that night but that afternoon the girls wanted to go swimming, that had been on their mind for quite awhile so after we hired a place to stay that night we went to a place where they could go swimming in Gorham. No sooner had they got in the water than a thunder storm came up. So we spent the afternoon and headed for Bethel, Maine by way of Berlin, New Hampshire. I think it was only about 20 miles or so. There we saw Don Holt, the fellow I had worked for in Concord, MA. I hadn’t seen him since 1940. He had been pretty well shot up on a cruiser in the Battle of the Coral Sea. He recovered in Australia. He had married an Australian girl and when he left for this county, she didn’t want to come so he left her there. When he got here, he met another Australian girl and married her. The girls had a good time, they had their pictures taken riding his horses. We had gone to the Desert of Maine and on the way to Dixmont before we got to Augusta, the motor in the car began to knock. So we drove into Augusta and stopped at a garage that afternoon and found out that the cylinder had broken in the motor. We had to stay that night at a camp one of the mechanics had a few miles from there. The next morning he took me back to work with him and they got the part to fix the cylinder and I spent the day looking at all the pictures of the great Maine Warriers in the state house next door to the garage. By afternoon the car was fixed. I paid my bill and went and got the family and we headed straight for home. No further incidents.

My mother was pretty worried when they were going to put the middle school in Westport, about 1958. They came and appraised the farm and offered them $6,000 for the whole farm, that was from Route 88 over to Main Road. They had a committee that looked all over the town for a place to put this new middle school. They decided that the place for it was on Charlotte White Road. That was half way between Rt. 88 and the Main Road and they would take part of Perry’s land on the south side and all of my father’s. They had a town meeting to vote on buying it. They had a lot of discussion and when they got ready to vote, my father got up and told them what the Massachusetts law said. They couldn’t take it by eminent domain as long as it was being used for farming and my father said his was being used for farming. So that was the end of that. They finally bought the gravel bank where the middle school is now, on Old County Road. They also put my mother’s mind at ease. When they put Rt. 88 through town, that was Eisenhower’s idea and they took a strip right through town almost all of it on high ground. By taking the high ground they wrecked all the farming on the way. They took enough to put two strips of road. They’ve only put one strip of road in and they have enough left on the east side to put in another strip but they never have. The purpose of that road was to use it as a military road. Big enough for planes to land on in case of attack. That was the theory to get the road built. The main reason was to get people to Horseneck Beach. They offered my father, Perry and Schofield and Smith $6,000 a piece to take the land, they were looking at. My father took the S6,000, the other 3 or 4 took it to court. They finally won $12,000 but after paying the lawyers they ended up with $6,000 like my father did.

My father had an International truck. It had a habit of loosing a back wheel. I was coming down Main Road with a load of logs from Art’s just below where they started to build the high school. One of the wheels came off it. It rolled down the road a long way and finally hit the back of the baker’s truck that was stopped. My father paid for fixing the baker’s truck, it only hit the back bumper of the truck and went straight in the air. Then it rolled across the road, hit the stone wall and laid flat. Another time we were taking cows down to Percy Tripp’s at the harbor, down there, where Joal’s Garage is now, the wheel came off again. So we got that fixed and another time we came through the gate over in back of the house. George Mosher got out to shut the gate when he came back to the truck, he said, “the front wheel is off”. The axle had broken. That was the end of that.

When I was down to Borden Tripp’s we had a lightening storm one night. It was close, and we heard a great crack of lightening and thunder during the night. In the morning, Jimmy came and the cows weren’t there, close by anyway. We got them in and then Jimmy went looking for the rest of them and found them in what was an old apple orchard just south of the house where we lived. There were 13 of them killed by lightening. They weren’t under the trees but we figured the lightening had traveled the roots of the trees and got them. We had to get the insurance adjuster and then we got John Martin and Rapoza to come down and bury them with a bulldozer. That was a devastating thing for my milk business, but we made out without buying any more milk. But we had to buy milk from John Hart so we could still stay in the milk pool.

In 1960 I took a tour up through Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine with the high school boys looking at loose housing for the cows. Soon after, Borden’s son Peter thought he had education enough and according to Borden and my agreement, we had 6 months to dissolve it. So Borden wanted to turn it over to Pete and hire me as help. I told him I wanted to think it over. In fact, I thought right off that it was about time I went into business for myself. So I told Borden that I would go into business for myself. He was disappointed

Then I began looking for a place to move to start my own business. Donald took me around to different farms looking at them. The only one that appealed to me was over here where I am now. Belonged to Jane Cabot and her mother. Donald and Norris had already hired the farm and had had it 2 years. Jane went out of business and said I could have it if I wanted it. So I went to see Jane and she said that she would let me know in a week. She wanted to check me out. The answer was I could have it.

On August 1, 1960, my father, my mother and my daughter Helen and I headed for Wisconsin to buy some cows for my new farm. Before that I had to go to Providence to get a permit to bring them here. They all had to be tested out there before they could be moved here. I finally found out I could take them to MA and have the animal inspector over there who was Mr. Kirby inspect them and then bring them in here as a new herd, so that is what I did. We left here in my father’s Chevrolet car. We wanted to see the country so we drove up toward Worcester to Rt 20. At night time, we were in New York state. I can’t remember what town we stayed in but it was on Rt. 20 and 50 miles south of Buffalo, New York. The next morning we got started on Rt. 20 again. As we drove through Ohio we got a good idea how many orchards there were. Acres and acres of peach trees, cherry trees and grape vines. Going through Cleveland, Ohio there was one stop light on every corner going through the city. Enough to put me to sleep. I almost ran into a pick up truck right in front of the Oliver tractor headquarters. Then we entered Indiana to make better time we got on the main roadway to Chicago. There was 4-5 hills and they all had radar stations on top of the hills that could cover the whole road. So all of a sudden it sounded as if we had tire that had gone flat. I pulled off the road, got out and looked at my side, went around the other side where my father said the tires over here are all right. Before I could get back in the car a state trooper came along. He wanted to know what the trouble was. I told him I thought I had a flat tire but maybe it was the road. He said it was. So we headed onto Illinois we could smell a few pig farms as we got there. When we got to Chieago we went over Calumet Skyway. We came off that and landed on some kind of a main street in Chicago. We knew that must be a wrong street because it headed the wrong way. I stopped at a gas station and asked the way to get on to some rout and we went up the shoreline of Lake Michigan. That was a kind of an experience in itself: We went a couple of miles to this Rt. we wanted to go on. At 50 MPH on a 4 lane highway we were going around right angle curves. But the car didn’t lean enough to hit each other. But we got on that road up along Lake Michigan, the beach all the way and black people. We were looking for another route off that when we got up there about 50 miles. We finally saw what we wanted but I was out in the middle of the street and we had to stop for a light so I stayed right there to make the right turn until all the other cars went by. Two or three cars right behind me eventually pulled out and went by and they all had black women in them and they had to holler out something to make me take notice. One of them swore. But I finally made the turn. Along toward
night we got to the Illinois-Wisconsin state line and we hired a cabin there. Ma and Helen got the cabin ready and Pa said lets go for a beer. They had a bar right there, so we did.
That was the best beer I ever had. One of about 4 in my lifetime. The next day we got started again for Gloria’s, about 20 miles south of Madison, Wisconsin. At about 11:00 we had a bad rain and windstorm. You couldn’t see nothing so I pulled into an eating place that had a big parking lot and there were wires overhead so I moved to the next lot.
We stayed there for close to 3/4 of an hour. The wind rocked the car back and forth, made you wonder, then it let up and the sun came out.As we went through Madison, we could see a lot of broken limbs. North of Madison we went through 35 miles of com stalks all sticking up where a previous storm had stamped them right down. We got to Gloria’s in the middle of the afternoon. That’s a place where they treat people good. Take you everywhere. We went looking for cows with a fellow whose job that was. He had just got back from the Dakotas. He said that up there he couldn’t buy any cows because they had plenty of feed. One cow per 20 acres whereas Wisconsin had been very dry. We started going to farms looking at heifers who were about ready to calf. There weren’t many of the kind I wanted. We had to look pretty close because every day they were shipping them to Arizona and California after they calved. It is amazing out there, they get these washouts 20 miles long. When it rains, it rains hard. These washouts carry the water 20 miles, sometimes further. Then we went down to the St. Croix River. It a half mile going down hill to the water. That is where everybody goes swimming, skating, ice fishing. Gloria’s husband Ray pointed out these great mounds along the river bank built by Indian civilizations, and I’m told that these mounds are all along the rivers. The St. Croix River comes right through the middle of Hudson, Wisconsin where Birdie comes from. Another day we went to the St. Paul slaughter houses. Swift wouldn’t let us in but we went into Armor. While in there we came to a big open area and upstairs I could see chickens on the boxes so I asked the guy what they were doing with chickens in a beef house. He said it was mock chicken. You couldn’t read the “mock” on them because of the fence there. He said it was tripe but they called it mock chicken. He said they sent it to Chicago for the Chinese. There they were killing 800 cattle a day and quite a lot of hogs coming in by the train load and sheep

mo, wisconsin Where Birdie comes from. Another day we went to the St. Paul slaughter houses. Swift wouldn’t let us in but we went into Armor. While in there we’ came to a big open area and upstairs I could see chickens on the boxes so I asked the guy what they were doing with chickens in a beef house. He said it was mock chicken. You couldn’t read the “mock” on them because of the fence there. He said it was tripe but they called it mock chicken. He said they sent it to Chicago for the Chinese. There they were killing 800 cattle a day and quite a lot of hogs coming in by the train load and sheep coming in two decker trailer loads. We had a good time going through there.
Another day we went out to Richmond, Wisconsin to the east of where Gloria lived to 4-H fair.
4-H is big stuff out there. In that county fair, they had two big pens of small beefers, two big pens of pigs, two big pens of sheep, one big tent of poultry, one big tent of cookery
and sewing all on display. Going across the pasture at Ray’s we saw these mounds. These mounds were made by little animals like prairie dogs. I didn’t know what you called them.
They were like rats. They would dig in the ground and after that get the dirt out the plugged up that hole and then dug some more, I saw one patch in an old pasture, must have been 300 – 400 feet where they had built it up. Every day Ray went down to the poor farm he had bought. He had one lot there, 56 acres. He would mow around it once, rake what he had mowed the day before and bale what he had mowed the day before that.

He had a trailer load of alfalfa, second or third cutting. Eventually we decided we had better go home. I had bought cows and had to go home and wait for them. I had to get them delivered out there. One day we went into Roberts, Wisconsin. Ray had a business to do in there I went in the hardware store and bought a set of wrenches. I think it was $4.75. I asked the guy if he would take a check and he said, yes. I told him that I wasn’t from around here. I was from Rhode Island. He said that was okay he would take the check. While over there we went to Ray’s fathers and his brothers. Ray’s father raised a lot of corn up there and lived half way up a big mountain. You had to circle it to go up there. That is where his house was. He dug into the side of the hill and built a big bomb shelter. He had made some money. He had come from Iowa and was in the lead mining business. Eventually we got started for home. We went over on the west side of the Mississippi River. I wanted to go clear down to Iowa on the west side where we were it was very hilly, and every time we went around a corner and up a valley and it was planted full of tobacco. The other side of the river was open flats and that is where they did get from around here. I was from Rhode Island. He said that was okay he would take the check. While over there we went to Ray’s fathers and his brothers. Ray’s father raised a lot of corn up there and lived half way up a big mountain. You had to circle it to go up there. That is where his house was. He dug into the side of the hill and built a big bomb shelter. He had made some money. He had come from Iowa and was in the lead mining business. Eventually we got started for home. We went over on the west side of the Mississippi River. I wanted to go clear down to lowa on the west side where we were it was very hilly, and every time we went around a corner and up a valley and it was planted full of tobacco. The other side of the river was open flats and that is where they did get the floods when the river was full. About the middle of the afternoon I decided that we had better give up the idea of going to Iowa so we went right across the southern part of Illinois. We put up in Illinois for the night, had breakfast in Indiana and stayed in Pennsylvania that night. The next morning we left for home down the east Branch of the Delaware River. It was 60-70 miles all downhill. There was no traffic except for empty trucks coming back from New Jersey and New York. Trucks that had taken automobiles down there coming back empty. Sometime late in the afternoon we stopped to get something to eat. All we could get was grinder rolls and we kept right on going toward Johnson, New York on the lower side of the Adirondacks. Then we had the new road they were putting in from New York to Albany with traffic 70 MPH. We took it up as far as we could to the Bear Mountain Bridge across the Hudson River. My father said the road was so crooked a snake would have a hard work crawling up it. When we got on the other side we went across the bridge and it looked as if we were going into sheer cliffs but we took the road that went north and south and we turned south and found a place where we could go into CT. It was dark by the time we got to CT and then we got messed up and took 1A instead of 1, took it wrong anyway. We ended up in Hartford, CT. From there we made it back to my father’s at 1:00 in the morning.

I moved here on August 17, 1960. The cows came through Westport and that was to cover the inspection of them and then they came over here in the evening. 23 of them.
Clara Peckham said that that was the biggest truck she had ever seen. Donald was here to see that they got unloaded right and Joan was up in the hospital having Milton. That made Joan mad that he was over here instead of up there.

These cows had never been inspected and they were kind of wiry about getting in the stanchions. One of them would put her head anywhere except in the stanchion. I was having a time with her one night and Dianne came in there and headed her into the stanchion. Eventually she calmed down. These cows cost about $100 each less than I would have to pay around here and that was with the shipping.

So we come back over here to Little Compton. Up until that time I was still going over to help Borden do the milking nighttime. I was all done, back here with full time to myself. along in September we had a hurricane. The fellow who had sold me the cows was out here and came to see Norris and Donald and came to see me and how my cows were
doing. I was baling hay down at Esther Rose’s lot when he came. He said that they didn’t bale in Wisconsin when it was damp out like it was that day. I told him that we did here especially if a hurricane was coming. The hurricane came the next day and the hay was in the barn and it kept good. Before I had gone to Wisconsin, I had got hay down back and put it in the silo, a lot of it. Norris and Donald had hired the Will Tripp place down on Shaw Road (100 Acre Lane Farm). I had been mowing down there for them. I don’t think they ever finished it. I know the next year I was hauling grain from Eastern States over in North Dartmouth. That was the first year that I had plowed and planted corn.

Manny Azevedo asked me if I was using much fertilizer. I told him “no just low grade”.
He said, “why?” and I said that as soon as I got on the land and began to harrow it, seagulls would show up and I would have a whole crowd of them before I got through and I said they limed it for me. In the fall, the Canadian geese would fertilize it for me.
So all I needed was low grad fertilizer. That is still true today.

I had to sand the floor in the house to satisfy Helen, sanded it and varnished it. Furniture got fitted into the house one way or another. Dianne and Helen were here then and went down here to Little Compton School and graduated here. Dianne went to Campbell School and Helen went to URI and graduated. Before we came over here and we still lived at the harbor, Lois went to Bryant College and Pat went to Truesdale Hospital for training. Bessie and Winnie got married. Today they are all doing well. I went into debt $14,000 which I borrowed from my father. He paid for my cows, my bulk tank and that came to about $12,000, another $2,000 he loaned me so that Lois could go to college. I was paying it off very fast but my father left us all a couple of thousand dollars a piece.That, plus I took the mortgage on the land on the Drift Road that my father had sold to Sam Perry over there and that squared me off with the estate. I later cashed in with Alden Perry so I got my money and he could sell gravel and land.

Organizations: Director of Newport County Extension Service, President of Newport
County Milk Producers Association, Delegate for New England Milk Producers, member of RI Farm Bureau. As President of the Newport County Milk Producers, I had to go to a meeting over in Woonsocket and give a speech on something. My speech disagreed with something that they had. Joe Chaves was County agent and in later years the government had a dry year and the govemment was giving out loans to farmers. Loans up to $20,000 and he said I should apply for it. Eventually, they opened it up again for a grant. I called Joe Chaves and told him that maybe I should sign up for it. So he came over that day.
The first $5,000 they gave us after that we had 3 years to pay it off at 1.5%. He asked me how much money I wanted. I said $5,000, the amount they were going to give away, but I got 6,000 and put it in the bank then paid off the additional $1,000 at $40 a month for 3
years.

I guess along about 1975 we had a power surge on New Years Day. A lot of new houses in Little Compton I guess and it burned out my compressor. I had to spend another $250
– $300 for a new compressor. I couldn’t prove that the light company was at fault. I bought a tractor, mowing machine, side delivery from Alfred Bodington that was because his mother told him to sell it to me. He had a baler to sell but I didn’t want it because I had one I had bought from my father. I ended up with a 30 Cockshut tractor and one 40 Cockshut tractor, a bigger one and an English Leyland tractor. Cost me $7,236. That was with a loader and I had the money to pay for the whole thing. I never believed in borrowing.

I was a member of the Extension Service of Newport. It started out as a little bureau but changed into the Extension Service. It was a different thing. I got to be Chairman of that
for one term. I went to Woonsocket and gave a speech one time that was when the government was going to give us some money and then the state wouldn’t let us use it so I changed my speech and criticized it all. It must have helped because the state gave us what we wanted. At one of the meetings they brought up about the skunks eating cut worms in the sod, one little story led to another and I told them about the orange rabbits I saw down to the river and Eddie Brousseau used to tell about going down there hunting for them and somebody else told me that same thing. There were quite a lot of them there. Chet Wood was at the meeting. He was a delegate from Newport. He wrote for the Newport paper. He wrote a paper about my orange rabbits over here and cut it out and sent it to me. We had charge of the 4-H clubs and the county agent carried them out.

I was a delegate to the New England Milk Producer Association. Originally, I belonged to the Fall River Milk Producer Association and sold milk to the Newport Creamery at a
premium price. Eventually, Fall River wanted everything for themselves so if I wanted to keep selling to the Creamery, I would have to join the New England Milk Producers and that is when I joined. After that Newport Creamery went out of the dairy business. I sold to somebody in Rumford, up in Pawtucket, Reed in Swansea, and I can’t think of the last one before I went out of business. First I was a delegate for the New England Milk Producers and then I was President of the Newport County Milk Producer and we used to go to Boston for the yearly meeting. That was a two day affair. One year I had to come home in the afternoon and do chores that night. I think I was through chores when we lost the lights, in fact, there was a black out all over New England so I was lucky to be home. By the next morning, we had light again and I went back to Boston for the meeting. We used to go to Providence every two or three months for a regional meeting.
I belonged to the Farm Bureau and still do. For the Town of Little Compton, I have been the Estimator of Dog Damage for the last 20 years. When someone has an animal that has been damaged by dogs, I go and appraise the damage. I was a delegate to the New England Milk Producer Association. Originally, I belonged to the Fall River Milk Producer Association and sold milk to the Newport Creamery at a premium price. Eventually, Fall River wanted everything for themselves so if I wanted to keep selling to the Creamery, I would have to join the New England Milk Producers and that is when I joined. After that Newport Creamery went out of the dairy business. I sold to somebody in Rumford, up in Pawtucket, Reed in Swansea, and I can’t think of the last one before I went out of business. First I was a delegate for the New England Milk Producers and then I was President of the Newport County Milk Producer and we used to
go to Boston for the yearly meeting. That was a two day affair. One year I had to come home in the afternoon and do chores that night. I think I was through chores when we lost the lights, in fact, there was a black out all over New England so I was lucky to be home. By the next morning, we had light again and I went back to Boston for the meeting. We used to go to Providence every two or three months for a regional meeting.

I belonged to the Farm Bureau and still do. For the Town of Little Compton, I have been the Estimator of Dog Damage for the last 20 years. When someone has an animal that has been damaged by dogs, I go and appraise the damage.

I was the first one around here to have a mower/conditioner. I mowed my own hay and hay all over the town, and sold most of it right in the field or from the farm. I had Rusty Cabot working for me for a few years. He mowed and raked and baled and he said it was my job to sell it. Before that, I hired Roscoe Macomber to do the haying in the summer, One year I hired Frank Davis’s Puerto Rican. Frank had not raised potatoes that year but he was around so I hired him.

I gave Rusty a calf when it was first born. He sold it 3 or 4 months later. I sent it up with some small ones that were just born. That was when the calf market got better all at once.
I got 15 – 20 dollars for 3 or 4 calves of mine, but the big surprise was Rusty got $75 for his. Along later one year I sold a little over 3-4 trailer loads of hay to a fellow. It was junk hay that he needed for a shipment of horses, headed to somewhere in Scandinavia where horse meat was considered better than beef. The boat was leaving from Boston, MA.

Odd lot stories:
When Norris was growing up, 13 or 14, he was out about every night. One morning Pa couldn’t get him up so he got a pan of water and threw it on him. Norris finally got up and came out to the barn ready to fight. Whether he ever hit Pa, I don’t know, Pa couldn’t raise his hands up because of arthritis, but that began the complete undoing

Norris was always in trouble one way or another. He quit working up in Beverly, MA for the Hood Company and signed up to join the Army, but he got in a fight down the Grange Hall with a gang that came from Little Compton. Note: Norris always liked his hard cider. So I guess Norris won that fight but the next week Little Compton brought some fighters with them. The cops were there at the Grange Hall to look out for things so another fellow met him under the tree at Central Village. They had a pretty good fight
and apparently Norris lost that one. He twisted his knee so he couldn’t go into the Army for 3 weeks. In the meantime, he came down the harbor and worked for me. That was in the 40’s.

In the 60’s Norris had a bull up there at Yankee Bill Farm and it got out and it roamed the Head of Westport for about six weeks. Maynard who had bought the little house by Lambert’s house on Old Country Road at the Head and was always calling the police.
Finally, they got it and shot it with a tranquilizer gun. They brought it back up to Norris’s place. To celebrate the event, Norris had a party. They cut the horns off the bull and castrated him. The next morning, the bull was dead. The SPCA heard about it and took Norris to court over it. During the court hearing they called Ike Tripp, Sr. as a witness.
He was asked when was the best time to castrate a bull. Ike said, “as my father told me, the best time was when the knife was sharp”. That drew a lot of laughter. The judge
finally threw it out of court.

Norris had trouble at the cemetery with Joe Arruda, the caretaker at the cemetery. When Pa was buried, they were going to put the dirt on Norris’s graves. Joe Arruda said there was no other place to put it. Norris told him to put it on the roadway. They got in a fight over it and it was me and Donald or Art who went to see Harold Wood who was a selectman. We told Harold what the problem was and Harold said he would do what he could. The result was they loaded the dirt on a cemetery truck and after the funeral they brought the dirt back and used it for burial. Joe Arruda took Donald to court for beating him up and threatening to kill him or something. That didn’t amount to much, but Norris had to buy Joe a new jacket.

Just before this he came and borrowed the wheels and tires off one of my Plymouths.
They were pretty near new tires but they were wartime tires. He and Rufus Paine did a lot of riding, I guess, so when he left Walker Gordon’s he went to work for Hood in Beverly.

He left his car in Dedham. When I asked him about my ties, he said they were over at Walker Gorden’s in Dedham. I had been up to Walker Gorden’s and got a couple of
calves for Winsor Tripp and on a day off I went up there to get them. They had got rid of his car, said it was in the junk yard the next town over. I forget the name of the town. I had to go over there and get them off the car. The people there knew about the tires. The tires were pretty near worn out.

After Pa died, my brother Art settled the estate. Ma got the homestead, she already had half of the Yankee Bill Farm. Pa left one third of his to Ma and the other two thirds divided up among us seven kids. Then there was a big argument how to get rid of it and so forth. Every year Ma gave us some of hers, up to ten thousand dollars worth each.
When she passed away, she only owned a small piece but the taxes went back two or three years and the place was appraised at $192,000. So, when Ma died, we got the rest of it.
We got her house too. I was administrator. We had it for sale and I finally sold it for $80,000. Had a big argument about how we were going to sell the Yankee Bill Farm on Pine Hill Road, so I had Norris’s share in trust. Two of them wanted to take it to court and have the court sell it because they didn’t like Norris. They wanted to have a meeting.

We had the meeting and I told them I had two hats to wear and I would vote against them taking it to court. Besides court expenses, lawyers fees and not knowing what the court would sell it for, we would not do that. I had it for sale for $300,000 and places weren’t selling for much then. Nobody had the money. Helen went to the Durfee Bank in the morning and saw Norris. Norris told her he was coming down to see me. He had a customer to buy the place. Later that day, Norris died while putting up a gateway near the road. In two weeks the agent he was talking about wanting to buy the place showed up down here. Two cars with the agent and the people who wanted to buy it. That was just taking it to court. Besides court expenses, lawyers fees and not knowing what the court would sell it for, we would not do that. I had it for sale for $300,000 and places weren’t selling for much then. Nobody had the money, Helen went to the Durfee Bank in the morning and saw Norris. Norris told her he was coming down to see me. He had a customer to buy the place. Later that day, Norris died while putting up a gateway near the road. In two weeks the agent he was talking about wanting to buy the place showed up down here. Two cars with the agent and the people who wanted to buy it. That was just about dinnertime, I asked them what they expected to pay for it. They were sure that I
was going to sell it to them. They said $35,000 for it. I asked them where they got that information and they said Norris. I asked them if they had looked up the deeds on the place or anything and they said no. I told them that they might as well have gone and talked to one of the neighbors. They asked why and I told them that I controlled all of Norris’s real estate interests in a trust. I told them that I wanted $300,000. They were some mad, and got in the car and drove up the road with the wheels spinning. When I came in for dinner, Helen asked who were those people who left in such a great hurry. All the real estate agents wanted to sell it and get their 10% out of it. I told them that I wouldn’t give any of them 10% of $300,000. 6% was the most I would give them. I never heard from any of them again. Eventually, I was the first in Westport to sell the farm development rights to the state. The State of Massachusetts offered $205,000 for the development rights and that didn’t include the house and barn. The small barn had been stuck by lightening earlier and burned. Set on two acres, they were excluded from that. That cost me a thousand dollars for the whole thing. I sold the rest of it to brother
Donald for $100,000, so we got our $300,000 plus. Later, lightening struck the cow barn when Donald had cows in it. I paid off some of Norris bills and Birdie wanted to sell her part so I paid $30,000 for it and told her that if I sold it for more I would give here the difference. Actually, that was before the development rights were sold so I ended up giving her $10,000 more when everything was straightened out. Art was settling my father’s estate and I took the mortgage on the Sam Perry place on Drift Road and where we used to live. Eventually, I settled up with Alden who had inherited everything east of Rt. 88 to the Drift Road.

For the home place I was asking $100,000 for it but finally sold it for $80,000. After that somebody told me that if they had known that I was selling it, they would have given me $150,000 for it, but that wasn’t to be.

This farm here in Little Compton was known as the White Rock Farm. Still is, I guess.
Every wall has got white rocks in them and the white rock quarry down at the lower end of the pasture. With all the white rock chips on this farm, I have only found one arrowhead in the middle lot down by the river.

About 1984 I got to baling a lot of hay and buying a lot of hay too. It was about six weeks in February and March I bought a trailer load a week. I made money on it. There were about 3-4 customer who owed me money but didn’t show up to pay for it. I guess that was the cost of doing business. Some died and some didn’t intend to pay me.

Jane Cabot was always good to me. She always wanted to keep this place as a farm. She wanted to save it for Rusty and his family. Rusty went to Cornell University on a ROTC Scholarship. That was most 20 years ago. Now he is in South Korean, a Lt. Colonel and a Squadron Leader. He is hoping for a Colonel commission in the spring. His wife Erin and two children, Nelson and Jane, are still in Japan. Rusty has signed up for six more years. But after three years he can leave the Air Force if he wants to.

Over the years I have heard some funny anecdotes about the various Tripp families.
There were so many different Tripp families in Westport that they were designated by the size of their ears. The Long Earred Tripps and the Short Earred Tripps. The Long Earred Tripps would be the Ephraim Tripp Family and the Short Earred Tripps being my
grandfather’s Family. I think Ephraim and my grandfather were first cousins. Daughter Winnie married into the Ephraim Tripp’s by way of marrying Calvin Tripp, great grandson
of Ephraim. Now, of course, there are the boat yard Tripps, etc. and I’ve heard other such designations.

Another story told to me was that the Tripps were supposed to leave England on the Mayflower, but they had so much darn junk they wanted to bring with them that they made them wait for another ship.

Poem written by grand daughter Karen Hasson Charest and presented to Grampa on his 80th birthday

We are gathered here with you today to celebrate your 80th birthday.
In this room as you look around many memories will abound.

You told us of a free young man who gave it up for Nana’s hand.
With Nana you raised a great big crew, who stand here proud to honor you.

The generations here do know, you have always been there as they grow.
In times of need you’ve had time to spare. Stories of your life, with us, you share.

As you milked the cows and bailed the hay you taught through hard work you will find the way.
Watching as we made mistakes but letting us know we have what it takes.

In our hearts memories we own, the thread of legacy for generation sown – of the one who is head of our clan, Alex Tripp you are one hell of man.