Leave our home and head to the top of Bonneville. Take a left and go down Fairview which shifts onto Abbey Memorial. Pass the cemetery and Szot Park and come to the lights. Take a right then a quick left, unless you want some Papa John’s. You are in what my husband and I and…
Tag: local history
Uncomfortable, Part Two
It’s awkward enough reading and writing about Babu’s desires for Jakey and how she fights to resist temptation: Saturday, April 20th, 1940 Peaches and I went for a ride. It didn’t last long cause we drove into our stall and almost drove ourselves to destruction. But some things are even more awkward than that. As…
Poor Poland
As I read her 1940 and even, of course, her 1939 passages I look for signs of war because I want her version of this story I already know. Her opinions, emotions, when, how, and how often the topic arrises in her pages tells me of The American Experience at this time. What is more…
Retro Wednesday: Trolleys Part Two
Read part one here: Retro Wednesday: Trolleys Part One There were the times she had to wait for the trolley (and faced repercussions,) Friday, January 22nd, 1937 We lost our game with the Juniors 30 to 28 but it was a pretty good game. After school we had a practice then I bought a tan sport…
Retro Wednesday: Trolleys Part One
This is where something historical, the trolley system, meets something more. Something intimate. I read some research and I can tell you when the trolley system was put into place and when it was dismantled. Who funded them, who approved and disapproved of them, I can tell you this history of these machines even in…
Szot Park Fountain
Szot Park is something I’ve always taken for granted. It’s been here since I moved to Chicopee. I can see it from my back porch. But it wasn’t always there. In a Masslive.com article this information is shared: Szot Park opened with dedication ceremonies on Oct. 14, 1939. The dedication included the unveiling of a…
October, 1939
Sunday, October 1st, 1939 Johnny Krol came home with me after church. Jake and Edmund told me to dress in a hurry so we could start for Amsterdam, New York. He (Ed) borrowed a convertible coupe Oldsmobile and we started off in style. Got there at 3:30. Had a good time at Paul and Ann…
The Great Hurricane of 1938
It seems the powers that be, or mother nature, or…some entity had it out for us in the 1930s. I always marveled at how the Stock Market Crash and The Great Depression weren’t enough karmic punishment, (for what I don’t know!) but there was The Dust Bowl to make things even worse. Now as I’m…
Sharing with Babu: That’s the kind of friends we were.
Sharing passages again with Babu seemed to be the cure to what ailed me, and her. We read some of August twice now and we haven’t yet got through. She reads on the computer with really big font and I sit with her and scroll through. Reading with her today was like being on the…
Excerpts, September 1938. The Let Down(s)
Have you ever got something started, or something got started with out your say so, and it’s still young and tender and you know that if you leave it, it stands the danger of withering before it really got started? I could be talking about my garden, about how hard it is to plant seeds…
Why I do this
“Lest you forget.” That is what Nat writes on her senior photo that she gives to Babu. Unfortunately, this process doesn’t bring back too many memories for Babu. Mostly what comes up when we read or look at photos are the same stories. And even those she is starting to loose or they are starting…
Images
Babu writes constantly about taking “snapshots.” but this blog has had a lack of photographs. Granted, the snapshots she talks about are eighty years old. When I started looking through old photographs and scrapbooks, I could only find books from around 57 and further. I had the genius idea last night of asking my husband…
transcribingmemory 