Month: February 2018

To An Unseen Loon

Enduring Gloucester 1 Comment

Loon © Marianne Thompson

by Barbara Beckwith

 

Listening for

Your loud loon-laugh

Lets me hear soft sounds

Bushes washing the harbor’s edge

Insect swarms, oardrip.

 

Searching for

Your long body skimming over water

Leads me to see secret shapes in driftwood,

Read meanings into your unseen deep dives

And surprise surfacings.

 

If by chance

I ever finally see you,

Mid one wild cry, I may lose you,

Your full mad beauty being half mine.

 

So if you dive deep and don’t come up

Except where I’m not looking,

I won’t mind.

Don’t let me make a poem out of you.

 

Barbara Beckwith writes essays, journalism, and poetry, often focused on her experiences with nature. She lives in Cambridge but often visits Gloucester, not to fish, sail, or lounge on its beaches, but to allow its slower pace to renew her writing.

FRED BUCK’S EMAILS

Enduring Gloucester 6 Comments

Prudence Fish

All of us have complicated lives that consist of varied activities, work, and interests.

I know little about Fred Buck’s family life, his life as a musician or even Fred Buck’s footsteps as a letter carrier immortalized by his friend, Willie Alexander, in a song by that name.  What I do know about is that he was photo archivist extraordinaire at the Cape Ann Museum and that I was the beneficiary of his emails.

More than ten years ago I was working on a book, Antique Houses of Gloucester, to be published by History Press.  What was necessary for the success of the book was access to the old photos of the houses that were hidden away at the Cape Ann Museum.

For some time Fred had been unearthing the boxes and stacks of old glass plate negatives that had not seen the light of day for who knows how long.  Fred tackled the huge job of scanning and identifying the collection; a seemingly never-ending job that would go on for years.

In the early 1880s, a team of photographers by the name of Corliss and Ryan came to Gloucester and photographed most of the houses in central Gloucester, the so-called Harbor Village, and the subject of my book.

Fred began searching for the houses on my list and as he emailed them to me the following pattern emerged.

Fred apparently was a true night owl.  I am a morning person.  So Fred, in the middle of the night, would email me a needed image.  Just a couple of hours later I would be starting my day in which the first order of business was checking my email.  An email from Fred would begin my day with a smile.  I couldn’t wait to see what fabulous antique images were attached to those emails! There was a steady flow.

The old Center house near the tracks on Washington Street in the snow. Circa 1950s.

But there was more.  The images for the book had to be put on a disk in the right order.  Some of my newer photos had to be tweaked to bring them up to the publisher’s standards.  Fred saw to it that everything was in good order and it was.  The publisher commented that the photos were perfect in quality and in order.  No additional tweaking was necessary.

With the book completed the email connection to Fred and the museum continued.  By this time Fred knew that there were certain houses I was interested in and he was always on the lookout for them.  One of these, the Jonathan Ober house, near Short and Main, tucked in the back but long gone was never found.  It showed up on Facebook last week!

Another house had eluded me for years.  The house had been moved, recently demolished and no one knew its original location.  Eventually, I discovered the location on Prospect St. and Fred found the picture in time to insert it in my book.

The old Elwell house moved from 96 Prospect Street to Fair Street in the 1890s and demolished circa 1990.

Fred and Willie Alexander were great friends.  Willie lived on School St. in a Victorian house.  There was something odd about the foundation in the basement.  It didn’t quite match the house.  What was going on?

Fred went with me to the home of Willie and his wife, Annie Rearick.  We went down into the cellar and I quickly recognized the problem.

The house moved from Mason St. to the site of the Proprietor’s School House on School Street to make way for Central Grammar.

In the early 19th century the elite of Gloucester sought a better school for their children and built what was called the Proprietor’s School House for which the street is still named.  After a number of years, it was no longer needed.  It was converted to tenements and its condition and reputation went downhill until it was an eyesore and a public nuisance. Eventually, to everyone’s relief, it was demolished.

Meanwhile, Gloucester High School nearby on Mason St. burned.  Plans to build Central Grammar on the site required the acquisition of more property.  One these properties consisted of land with a house.  In order to get the house out of the way for the school construction it was moved to School Street by house mover, John S. Parsons, and with adjustments was relocated on the old foundation of the Proprietors School House, now home to the Alexanders.  Thus, one more quirky story in Gloucester’s long history of Yankee ingenuity and house moving was explained.

I had long been looking for information about an ancient gambrel-roofed house that had stood with its gable end on Washington St. facing the train track.  I remembered it from my youth but it was gone.  It had belonged in the Center family. Not so long ago in an early morning email came a photo with the query from Fred, “Is this the one you’re looking for.”  Yes!  It was!

Circa 1880

 

Circa 1960

Deviating from old photos and glass plate negatives, one morning Fred sent a scan of a 19th century watercolor of a gambrel-roofed “Cape Ann Cottage.” The ancient house was on its last legs even in the 19th century.  A label stated that it was Mr. Griffin’s house near Plum Cove.  I had no idea where this house was but I sure wanted to know!  It couldn’t possibly be still standing.  There were outcroppings of rocks in the yard of the house and I searched trying to pin down a location with similar outcroppings.

Right out of the blue one day when I was on duty at the White-Ellery house a homeowner struck up a conversation with me and told me where she lived near Plum Cove.  She then went on to tell me that Barbara Erkkila had talked about an Englishman named William Northway who had built her house in the 1870s, reporting that there was evidence of an old foundation, chimney base and a possible threshold in the cellar of the Victorian house.  This homeowner will never forget the look on my face and my excitement at this scrap of information.  She couldn’t understand why I was so elated.

I couldn’t wait to get to my computer to research the deeds. I was not disappointed.  The deeds went straight back to Austin Griffin of Lanesville.  Ultimately the deeds took me back to the mid-18th century and the Sargent family who owned much of the land between Hodgkins Cove and Plum Cove.  The details fleshed out from deeds and probate records portrayed much about the life of the Peter Sargent family and his widow, Lucy Sargent, and how she shared the house with other heirs in a life of hardship but not atypical of 18th-century life of an average family.

The Sargent family built this house near Plum Cove in the 18th century. After more than 100 years, this is how it looked. Goodbye old house!

That mystery solved, Fred then sent me the scan of another Cape Ann Cottage portrayed in a watercolor belonging to Greg Gibson.  This watercolor depicts a charming old cottage larger than most with a central chimney.  Is that an old road sweeping past the house?  And is that a peek at blue water on the left side of the house?

This one, one of about 300 in the 18th century, remains a loose end, a mystery house.  It may never be identified because these small cottages were vulnerable to time or changes making them impossible to find or identify.

Small unidentified Cape Ann Cottage, a left over from the 18th century.

Occasionally, when Fred emailed a 19th-century photo I would be really stumped and would call on my friend, Peggy Flavin for help.  No one is more determined than Peggy to identify or find a gem of a house, shabby but with a story to tell.  She was more than happy to join in the search.  Peggy and I would drive all over town looking for clues to a mystery photo.  More often than not we were successful but not always.  Some are still eluding us.

A few days ago the subject of an old house on Gee Ave was being discussed on Facebook.  It was not the first time on Facebook that readers have submitted house photos that always evoke lively discussion.  The house has been changed dramatically but thanks to Fred I know what it originally looked like and the changes that have taken place.

The Old Castle near the end of Gee Ave. Originally a Cape Ann Cottage in the Bennett family the front was raised to a full two stories. Later the rear was altered until lines of the Cape Ann cottage were no longer visible

I won’t soon forget the last time I saw Fred a few months ago.

Helen McCabe and I had gone to the basement of the museum to work with old assessors’ record stored there.  We were researching records in hopes of dating a house for a historic plaque.

At 1:00 PM we thought we should leave so we climbed the stairs to the lower level of the museum only to find that we were locked in the basement stairwell.  My cell phone was dead and Helen’s phone was at home.

We pounded and yelled.  Then we pounded and yelled some more until our fists and voices were getting tired.  This was getting serious!

Then the door opened and there stood Fred with Stephanie right behind him laughing like crazy.  I will always remember Fred’s amused and smiling expression as we recovered and joined in the laughter.

Fred Buck’s early morning emails have been a very bright spot in the life of this old house preservationist and will be sorely missed.  I like to think that Fred thought it was as much fun for him as it was for me.

 

Prudence Fish, of Lanesville, is a published author and expert on antique New England houses. Read Prudence Fish’s blog, Antique Houses of Gloucester and Beyond.

The Settlement of Cape Ann: What is the Real Story?

Enduring Gloucester 16 Comments

by Mary Ellen Lepionka

Collection of the Cape Ann Museum. Scan � Cape Ann Museum Photo Archive 2015.

Unveiling Tablet Commemorating First Settlement of Massachusetts Bay Colony.    1907 Postcard

Quite often the truth is unwelcome. Tablet Rock in Stage Fort Park, for example, bears a plaque commemorating the 1623 landing of the Dorchester Company as the first settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founding of Cape Ann’s fishing industry. This vertigrised plaque has been at the center of a dispute about whether and how to clean it, but more important to me is that what it says is not true. Neither is the tercentennial marker in Fisherman’s Field that talks about Roger Conant averting a violent confrontation there through diplomacy. Averse to complexity, we oversimplify. Real history is more complicated than we are allowed to know.

Massachusetts Bay Colony did not exist before 1628. Between 1623 and 1628 the Dorchester Company plantation begun by Rev. John White failed; Salem Village was founded in Beverly by its remnants, led by Roger Conant; and the New England Company took over the Dorchester Company’s assets on Cape Ann after debts were paid.

Rev. John White

The New England Company sent John Endicott to govern and subsequently morphed into the Massachusetts Bay Company, which was financed by merchants, including some former Dorchester Company investors. The Massachusetts Bay Company then negotiated a royal charter with Charles I giving them sweeping rights and abrogating all previous claims. (At one time there were as many as 22 claims to all or part of New England.)

Endicott replaced Conant, who since 1625 had acted as governor for the Dorchester Company investors, replacing Thomas Gardner and John Tylly, the original co-leaders of White’s failed fishing plantation of 1623. In 1626, with the aid of an Indian guide, Conant had led the surviving plantation settlers—those who elected to stay rather than be returned to England—and their cattle on the Squam Trail to the Pawtucket village of Nahumkeak (Naumkeag) on the Cape Ann side of the Bass River (Beverly). This small party of English men, women, and children survived through Native agency and planted side by side with the Indians over the next 50 years. They established Salem Village and became known as the Old Planters—but that’s another whole story.

Statue of Roger Conant in Salem MA.

Endicott moved the seat of government across the river to present-day Salem, along with the Dorchester Company settlers’ first meetinghouse, which Conant had transported to Salem Village from Fisherman’s Field. Then in 1630 John Winthrop succeeded Endicott as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, moved the capital to Dorchester, and established a General Court with a branch at Salem. He sent his son to prospect and protect Agawam, which became Ipswich in 1634. The Mass. Bay Colony expanded to absorb all the earlier settlements, including Plymouth Colony.

John Endicott

So, to say that Rev. John White’s Dorchester Company founded the Mass. Bay Colony (on the plaque) or even “founded the nucleus of the Mass. Bay Colony” (on the marker) is a bit of a stretch. That the fisheries “have been uninterruptedly pursued from this fort” (Stage Fort) since 1623 is essentially true, however. In 1637, before Gloucester was even founded, Endicott sent men from Salem to throw up earthworks at Stage Head to protect the fishing station there from possible Indian attack during the Pequot War.

Stage Fort Commemorative Tablet

However, the fishing industry on Cape Ann was founded by Plymouth, not Gloucester. From 1620 to 1626 fishermen from Plymouth established and operated fishing stations on Gloucester Harbor and at Stage Head; at Whale Cove, Straitsmouth, and Gap Head in Rockport; and at Great Neck, Ipswich, in the vicinity of Jeffrey’s Ledge. It was Plymouth’s stages for drying fish—and those of the Native Americans who also fished and dried fish there—for which Stage Head (aka Stage Point) was named.

Plymouth fishermen bunked in the Indians’ wigwams on Fisherman’s Field during the seasonal occupation of the fishing station. They complained to Governor William Bradford about the fleas. They were prompted to build their own wigwams, modified to have a chimney at one end, versus a smoke hole, and a rectangular door opposite—(until 1639, that is, when the General Court of the Mass. Bay Colony decreed that Englishmen may no longer live in wigwams but must build proper English houses).

In 1623 Governor Bradford resupplied Plymouth’s fishing outposts at Cape Ann and elsewhere. The fishermen included William Jeffreys and others who had sheltered at Plymouth following the failure of Thomas Weston’s colony at Wessagusset (present-day Weymouth), founded as a profit center for London merchants. Wessagusset lasted less than a year. Another refugee was Thomas Morton, who struck out on his own and founded the colony of Merrymount in Quincy. A second colony at Weymouth, founded by Robert Gorges (his father Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason also had a king’s grant to “New England”), also ended after a year. Both Weymouth experiments failed through bad decisions about relations with the Native people. Other fishermen at Cape Ann included free thinkers, outcasts, self-exiles, and DIY families from Plymouth, liberating themselves from what had turned out to be a strictly regulated society.

The earliest histories and accounts—Smith, Bradford, Winslow, Maverick, Hubbard, Phippen, Thornton—refer to Plymouth’s role in the founding of Cape Ann, but later ones—Adams, and especially Babson and Pringle—perhaps out of civic pride—gloss them over or omit them. In 1623 Plymouth bought a “Charter for Cape Anne” from Lord Sheffield, who had just received it from the Council for New England. Anxious to ensure the establishment of a successful Puritan colony in answer to the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth, the Council for New England had double-booked by issuing two “patents” that year—one to Lord Sheffield, and the other to Rev. John White, founder of the Dorchester Company. Without authorization and for unknown reasons, Sheffield promptly sold his charter to Plymouth. Governor Bradford later complained that he had been sold a “useless” (illegal) patent and that his Cape Ann had been “taken over by adventurers”.

Statue of Governor William Bradford in Plymouth MA

The “adventurers” were the 52 investors in the Dorchester Company. The venture capitalists’ plantation on Fisherman’s Field at Stage Head was intended to be a permanent agricultural settlement and fishery but was abandoned after three unprofitable fishing seasons, insufficient salt production, and two crop failures, even after resupplying from England. But theirs also is another whole story.

John White persuaded Roger Conant to lead any settlers who elected to stay at Cape Ann and to protect their cattle and other Dorchester Company assets, including their stages and the trappings of their salt-making operation. (Conant’s uncle was a friend of White’s and an investor.) Conant had left Plymouth to establish a trading post at Nantasket with John Oldham. Some fishermen with their families joined them there, including Conant’s brother, as well as Rev. John Lyford, whom Bradford had cast out of Plymouth for expressing “dangerous ideas”. These people came with Conant on the rescue mission to Cape Ann, except for Oldham, who turned down the offer of a monopoly in the fur trade with the Cape Ann Indians.

Conant found a sorry situation. Most of the survivors were brought back to England in ships the Dorchester Company sent for them, and some of Conant’s company also took advantage of the opportunity to return home, including Christopher Conant and John Lyford. In 1625, declaring Cape Ann unsuitable for anything, Conant made preparations to lead the party overland to another location to start over. This is where the plaque and historic marker come into the story again. They both refer to Roger Conant’s diplomacy that “averted bloodshed between two factions contending for a fishing stage.”

The event this refers to happened in 1625, but early historians got it wrong. Their take on it has been repeated ever since. It actually was a three-way confrontation over possession of the fishing station at Stage Head. It was between 1) Conant’s party, who were preparing to abandon the site; 2) Myles Standish, whom Bradford had sent to claim the area officially for Plymouth under the authority of the Sheffield Charter; and 3) West Countrymen from Plymouth under the leadership of John Hewes, representing disgruntled former Dorchester Company investors in London who had heard (from John Lyford) about the Dorchester Company’s bankruptcy. They were seeking to take possession of its assets to try to recover their losses.

Captain William Peirce, master of the Anne for the Plymouth Company, fishing Cape Ann waters, was anchored in Gloucester Harbor at the time. Peirce sent word to Governor Bradford about Hewes’ imminent takeover, and Bradford sent back Myles Standish to protect Plymouth’s interests. When Hewes’ men occupied the Dorchester Company stages and barricaded themselves behind hogsheads of salt, Standish threatened to open fire on them. At that point, according to Bradford (and to Hubbard who interviewed Conant in 1682), Conant and his men “rushed from their huts” (i.e., wigwams—for Conant had also complained to White about fleas) to intervene. Conant explained that the stages, equipment, salt, and patent for Stage Head were still the legal property of the Dorchester Company until further notice. I suppose you could call this diplomacy.

William Bradford recalled Standish and Peirce to Plymouth. Hewes and the Plymouth fishermen abandoned Cape Ann for the Kennebec River in Maine, where they established a fishing and fur trading post at Cushnoc. And Conant and his party left for Naumkeag. But I guess a historic plaque or marker can’t say all that. What they should say is that Tablet Rock was a sacred place for the Native people who lived on Fisherman’s Field and that the first English who came here would not have survived without their help.

 

Mary Ellen Lepionka lives in East Gloucester and is studying the history of Cape Ann from the Ice Age to around 1700 A.D. for a book on the subject. She is a retired publisher, author, editor, textbook developer, and college instructor with degrees in anthropology. She studied at Boston University and the University of British Columbia and has performed archaeology in Ipswich, MA, Botswana, Africa, and at Pole Hill in Gloucester, MA. Mary Ellen is a trustee of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society and serves on the Gloucester Historical Commission.

The Ghosts of Sacco and Vanzetti, Or Fear of the “Other”

Enduring Gloucester 8 Comments

Judith Winslow Walcott

Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco.  Ben Shahn (1898–1969) © MOMA

“Deep in my subconscious the names Sacco and Vanzetti struggle to reach the surface. Their pain and sacrifice are mirrored in the news I see everyday about travel bans, the exclusion of Muslim ‘terrorists’ and Mexican ‘rapists’ from the US, and the push to build a wall along the US-Mexican border to prevent ‘undesirables’ from entering our country.”

I wrote the above in January a year ago, and the fear of immigrants is ever present this year as we watch the painful struggle over the Dreamers. If we look back to Immigration Reform in 1924, the parallels to today are striking.

Vivian Yee, writing in the New York Times on January 13, 2018, sheds light on this:

The argument was genteel, the tone judicious, the meaning plain: America, wrote the senator leading Congress’s push for immigration reform in 1924, was beginning to “smart under the irritation” of immigrants who “speak a foreign language and live a foreign life.”

There were some familiar refrains in the 1924 immigration debate. Cheap immigrant labor had depressed wages, the restrictionists said. Immigrants had seized jobs from Americans, they said. But it was also heavy on racist rhetoric aimed at preserving what eugenicists and social theorists of the time called the “Nordic” race that, in their telling, had originally settled the United States. 

Just a couple of weeks ago “Nordic” appeared in the national conversation between the President and the Prime Minister of Norway. Paul Thornton says this in the New York Times, on January 11, 2018:

By now, we’ve all probably heard that Trump used a scatalogically charged epithet to say what he really thinks of those countries in Latin America and Africa that, contrary to all available evidence, continue to send their wretched refuse to our shores. What the roughly 4 million of us with parents, grandparents or long-ago Viking descendants from the smallest Scandinavian nation also noticed was Trump’s idea of the prototypical non-shithole country: our humble Norway.

The names Sacco and Vanzetti have now been forced into my consciousness as I see and read about the same bigotry, racism, and hate that surrounded their case in the news today.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an Italian fishmonger and a shoemaker, were accused and later convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the April 15, 1920, payroll robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. The case dragged on for over seven years before they were executed in the electric chair here in Massachusetts at the Charlestown State Prison, on August 23, 1927.

The arguments against them are not very different from what we are hearing today. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian and Anarchists. The country was stirred up by the Palmer Red Raids of 1919-1920, during which suspected radicals, many of whom were immigrants, were detained and deported from the US. The Establishment in Boston was terrified of these immigrants and what they feared they might do.  But there was a Defense Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti with many supporters here in Boston and around the world.  We thought The Women’s March the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated was enormous; but pictures taken during the seven years the two immigrants suffered in jail show massive crowds also.

Funeral procession for Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston, August 28, 1927.

As a child, there was a strangeness surrounding certain things to do with family—my own family of Republicans, and my paternal aunts and uncles, Democrats. The lightning rod was my paternal grandmother Gertrude L. Winslow, a supporter and defender of the innocence of these two men.

In the last years before they were executed my grandmother was allowed into the jail to visit them. It is from this correspondence that we see their humanity. In August of 1927, my grandmother and a good friend who spoke Italian made the trip to Italy to visit both Sacco and Vanzetti’s families.

Gertrude Winslow (right) leaves the Charlestown State Prison with Mrs. Glendower Evans (left) and Mrs. Rosina Sacco (center) after a visit to Sacco and Vanzetti.

In a letter from the Dedham Jail House June 27, 1927, Bartolomeo Vanzetti writes to my grandmother:

“Dear Friend Mrs. Winslow:

Now, when you will reach my native home-just think to be at your own. You will be tired by the long trip and that is a good place for rest and restor. To went and left in a day, would be a senseless fatigue and there would not be time enough to explain things to my people. Besides that, the interpreter could be out of home or busy-while if you can stay there longer, all of you will have time to understand and explain one another. My sisters will be happy to have you there-they love all who help us and are proud of them. So please, just think to be at home and don’t leave the place until you feel well.”

As a child, I didn’t have these letters as a testament to the defendants’ humanity.  I only had concrete objects like the pink and blue baby blanket knitted by Mrs. Sacco for my brother Nick. He was 14 years older than me, born in 1927, the year they were executed. That blanket wrapped me as a baby many years later.  It was a blanket that fascinated me because it had blue yarn on one side and pink on the other, possibly knitted that way before we were able to determine the sex of the unborn baby, so it was a true gender-neutral gift. The importance was the new life, not the gender.

I also had other experiences.  It was the innuendos and comments that were difficult for me to understand.  I was being taught something, but I was not sure what.

Mary Martin, stirring up controversy in racist America of the 1950’s, sang loud and clear in the musical “South Pacific,”

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

The insidious thing is that the teaching is not overt and a child is left to figure out the subtext often denying their own humanity.

When my grandmother called “Nana” by our family and “Windblow” by all the cousins because, as children, they could not pronounce “Winslow,” would be coming to dinner, my parents would say, “We will not talk politics”.

Then there is a very clear image of meeting Mrs. Sacco on Mt. Vernon Street in Boston. I think I was with my mother; but there was a strangeness to the encounter and somehow it is intermingled with the Hurdy Gurdy man I was fascinated with, who was always near that spot and also happened to be Italian.

Looking back now, I see the tensions that must have existed between my father, an investment banker, and my mother’s father, a successful electrical engineer, and my paternal grandmother— this radical feminist, who was also one of the founders of the ecumenical Community Church of Boston.   Fear of difference and loss and “other” was at the root of it all, then as it is now.

I see this mirrored so clearly today as the Republicans and the corporate world they represent are so terrified that their vast wealth will somehow be diminished by opening our country to immigrants that they are blind to the rest of the world, a world that is already diminished by poverty, bad health care, racism, horrific natural disasters, and so much more.

The poet Emma Lazarus understood the vision that this country was founded upon.  In 1883 she wrote these lines, which appear on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The power and vision of that lamp is what we must never let be extinguished.

So once again the brave and courageous among us outraged by this inhumanity must speak up. More importantly, the Congress of the United States must speak out.

A thread that runs through the letters of both Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to my grandmother is the need to be brave, and so I leave you with the words of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, written four months before he was executed:

“April 19, 1927, Dedham Jail

Dear Mrs. Winslow:

Oh! Your mayflowers are dear and sweet and most heartly accepted. They remember me of Plymouth and of the woods: the woods which I love so much. They are the flowers of the woods. I thank you very much.

Was not that foolish and unjust to deny you admission? It seems impossible. I was sorry for me and for you. Let’s hope that I may see you again before to die.

Meanwhile keep up a brave heart, dear Mrs.  Winslow.”

My grandmother was never to see him again, as she writes in her memoir:

“…when we reached Rome having successfully concluded our visits to the homes of both Italians, we sent a cable to them in the Death House in Charlestown, telling them that we had seen their families and delivered their messages. I have always hoped that this may have brought them a ray of comfort in their last hours.

“Mrs. Ratcliffe and I read of their execution on August 23rd in an Italian newspaper as we sat on a bench in the little village of Argentiere in the French Alps.”

 

Judy Walcott retired in 2014 after over 20 years of teaching at the Adult Learning Center at North Shore Community College. She also taught reading in the Gloucester Public Schools and is a Certified Dyslexia Therapist. Before becoming involved in education focused on reading, she worked at Facing History and Ourselves, an education project dedicated to the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. It was here that the parallels concerning racism and bigotry and the work of her grandmother began to germinate.