The Magical Memories Tour

Last Saturday, my sisters, brother and I got together in our old home town for a nostalgia trip. We are very seldom all together in the same location. I live on an island, one sister lives far away out West, another is a boat ride and 100 miles from me and our brother lives in the city - closest to our old 'hood. Our town, Newton Centre, is one of 13 villages in the city of Newton, MA. Our Dad's family had lived there since emigrating from Nova Scotia and we grew up in the family homestead on Braeland Avenue. The street fronted on railroad tracks that had been part of the Boston and Albany Railroad until the MBTA took over the right of way for Green Line trolleys. A walk around the block revealed a lot of things about our childhood memories.


We share the same perceptions
Although there are eleven years separating our ages, we seem to remember things the same way. No one remembers our parents arguing with each other. We all knew we were in deep trouble if our Dad took us aside to talk to us. If my Mom called me by my full name, Judith Ann Marie McClelland, I knew I'd done something wrong. We did a little lay analysis on our parents and decided that Dad was a happy-go-lucky optimist and Mom was probably somewhat depressed. We confessed that our transfers from public to parochial school had nothing to do with religious fervor. I switched from Newton High to Sacred Heart High because I had a crush on Jimmy, a handsome neighborhood soda jerk who went to the Catholic school. My younger sister realized that the Jewish boys she liked best in junior high would never be able to marry her. Two of us admitted to some petty crime: I stole a Tangee lipstick from Woolworths, and felt so guilty that I returned the next day and anonymously put the package back on the counter; Peggy remembered eating a cherry from the fruit display in front of the little market - fifty years later she still felt a little remorse. Best of all, we four agree that we had a basically happy childhood.


The incredible shrinking house
We all remember having a big back yard and that we were set back quite a way from the street. On revisiting the house, it sat on a tiny lot as did all the others on the street! Maybe the snow wasn't as deep as we remember it, either. It was fun to walk around the block and dredge up the names of everyone who lived in each house. Lucy and Tito who had a garden, chickens and grapevines and introduced us to pizza in 1950. A brick duplex now sits where the apple orchard (or was it pears?) used to be. Next was the house that belonged to Henry the Tailor, a concentration camp survivor. Our grandmother's friend lived in the next house. On and on around the block, between the four of us we could name an occupant for every house. Some houses have been gentrified and some look just the same, but they all look smaller!


A time of safety and trust
It goes without saying that those were simpler times. The neighborhood cops knew we were Mac's kids. We played dodgeball in the street. We walked to the playground unsupervised. We were allowed to ride our bikes to the vast woods, explore Goochie's Cave, visit the deer in Hammond Reservation - all without adult supervision. My mom would send me to the corner store up the hill and across the railroad bridge where I could buy her a package of Chesterfields and a bottle of Schaeffer beer - no questions asked. We also could go there for popsicle, a nickel Coke in a thick glass bottle or a Hoodsie ice cream cup with a picture of a movie star under the lid. My sister and I could ride the train into Boston to go to the garment district (she's fabulously creative) before we were teens - no problem that we were only a block away from the Combat Zone. Every winter we spent hours racing down the town-owned toboggan slide; it's been torn down because of liability concerns. We were happy to see that the swimming beach at Crystal Lake is still there and that, in fact, it looks cleaner than we remembered it.


What happened to...
The place where our primary school stood is now a bank. The site of our elementary school, the venerable Mason School, is now a parking lot - that's where I had the job of pulling down the classroom shades during our "duck and cover" air raid drills. John Wingate Weeks Junior High School has been converted to condos. There were four drugstores with soda fountains during our youth - now there are none. There were two hardware stores (our Dad moonlighted as a delivery driver for Skelton's Hardware) and two grocery stores - no longer. The Women's Club where we took ballroom dance classes is now office space - I guess no one learns "slow, slow, quick quick, slow" foxtrots anymore. The Five and Ten is gone and the stationers. Happily, the Newton Centre branch of the Newton Free Library is still there; that's where my life long love of books began.

We didn't visit our Dad's fire station, because the old one had been replaced during our childhood. What a great place the old Station 3 was: the horse stalls were still at the back of the building and fireman Mike always had hot chocolate and cookies or pies for visiting kids like us. We even got to slide down the brass pole.

We ate lunch at the Station Diner, a very successful conversion of the old railroad station. Andover Newton Theological School, up the hill from our old house, looks pretty much the same. We remembered standing with the whole neighborhood one night on that hill as we watched Sputnik soar overhead.

The kindness of strangers
As we walked around the block to Chase Street, we hoped to see a familiar face but we were disappointed. However, as we approached the site of many dodgeball and King of the Hill games, we saw a couple doing some yard work at a house where we had climbed the massive copper beech trees. Our Colorado sister has lost her native New England reserve and she had no qualms about approaching these strangers to ask if she could look for her initials in their tree. Not only did they allow her to inspect their trees, they showed great interest in our childhood reminiscences and added a lot of information about our neighborhood. They had bought the Nutting house shortly after I left the area for Martha's Vineyard thirty five years ago. We spent at least an hour chatting and they even showed us their beautiful house and cool GTO. We hope to see them again.

The innocence of childhood
In the days before National Enquirer and Facebook, we kids had no idea of the adult scandals surrounding us. But it appears that our block was a hotbed of sexual intrigue. As teens we did learn that the college professor who lived behind us had left his wife and family for a student romance. As adults we found out that another neighbor also had an affair and a similar infidelity story was involved at the house with the beech trees. It fell to me to break the news to my siblings that our own grandfather had a long-term girlfriend. I had wondered why Gram slept in a separate bedroom, but these things were never discussed in those days.

Magical Memories
The magic of this memory tour was that I feel so much closer to my sisters and brother after a simple sharing of a few hours in our old neighborhood. I hope that we'll get together more often. I love them.

Look us up...

If you have Street View Google, you can look up our old neighborhood. We grew up at 20 Braeland Avenue in Newton Centre, MA. In the early sixties, we moved next door to 16 Braeland Ave (don't ask me why - parents didn't explain themselves in those days). You should also look at Chase Street, scene of dodgeball, tag, hide and seek and later spin the bottle.