Post Five

In January of my senior year in High School, we were astounded one night to learn that my Father’s mill was afire. It was a bitterly cold night, and in spite of the firemen’s attempts, they could not put it out. The water just froze on the brick walls of the building, and they fell in huge blocks, falling over the railroad track and thus stopping the railroad service for days. I remember we girls getting up in the night to carry hot coffee to the firemen.

And so, because of it, my Father decided to buy a mill in Oxford, Mass. Even though several men in Amsterdam wanted him to rebuild and even offered to finance it if he would stay, but he went and got himself established in Oxford.

While my mother, Eleanor, Edna, and I finished out the school year. The day after graduation, we left Amsterdam for good. I have only been back twice.

It also ended my hopes for college. I had passed my entrance for Vassar and visited there. My brother was at the University of Pennsylvania finishing his first year.

My father’s mill property consisted of a very fine red brick mill with a village for the workers – a handsome house on a hill nearby for us, and three bodies of water  to supply the energy for the mill. It was fun to drive up to Pierpont or Granite to turn on more water with my father. We had a horse and buggy – a beautiful horse named Bobby. After we were settled in the house, I began going down to the office to help father with letters, etc., and then I went down every day for a year.

There was a German Officer – a Uhlan, I think, that used to sell Aniline dyes at the mill, and when Thanksgiving came along, he asked all the family to go to Boston to eat dinner with him at his hotel, so we went and had a delicious dinner, after which he took us for a ride in his car. I remember we weren’t very warmly dressed, so he provided us with what he had, and he gave me his wonderful officer’s coat, and I felt so big and warm. Not very long after he was called to Germany, and on the way was captured by the British and spent the rest of the war in an internment camp in the British Isles. Apparently, he was a member of the German government, selling goods and spying.

I never could understand how Father used to allow me to ride on the trolleys from Oxford to Worcester to get the payroll for the workers at the mill. I was only  18 years old and we had a two-mile drive through the woods before I took the trolley – but I never was molested. Later, we had a man Billy Shortsleeves to take care of the horse and do things around the house.

After a year of helping in the office, my Mother decided it was not the place for me and settled that I should go to Wheelock to learn to be a kindergarten teacher. It was a two-year course, and although I rather liked it, I never felt I as a teacher was my full capacity. All the outside reading we were supposed to do,

I had already read. I think I enjoyed the course in psychology we had as much as any.