December was a sad month for us. Linc's mother died, with sister Gretchen at her side, early in the morning on December 12th. Linc, brother Bill, and Gretchen had been taking turns keeping Mom company for the past month or so, and I think we all learned a lot from her in those last few weeks, about her, about ourselves, and about life in general.
There was so much about the way that she declined and passed away that was normal and healthy, if that makes sense. She was surrounded by family. She was comfortable and peaceful, and knew that she was well loved. And, there's still a huge void and sense of loss, an aching feeling that is going to take a long time to lessen, and a slow processing of the enormity of what it means to have someone that close to you pass on.
Going through my files, I don't have any good photos of my mother after her wedding. Mom's photos and files are circulating by mail amongst the family now, so I'll have to wait my turn to scan some of her later years. For now, I've got these shown above, of her when very young, then 20, then 25, and her wedding photo (age 27). Below, is a short autobiography that she wrote a few years back. It covers her life from birth in 1921, up to sometime in the early 1960s.
Autobiography of Dorothy Macomber Vannah
At the request of my granddaughter Rebekah Wilce, I’m writing what I remember of my early life.
Born July 28, 1921, at 21 Melville Street, Augusta, Maine, to George Herbert and Doris Wilder Macomber. I was their first child. I was no joy for my family because babies were all nursed in those days, (they hadn’t invented infant formula by then), and my mother wasn’t very successful at nursing, so I didn’t get enough to eat. I cried a lot, from hunger. Dad used to carry me around at night singing “The Merry Widow Waltz” and “I Picked a Lemon in the Garden of Love”. Nothing worked. I cried a lot, and I developed strong lungs. He could hear the neighbors slamming down their windows.
We had live in babysitters when Tom and I were young – Polish girls from out of town who couldn’t get to high school from Chelsea because there were no school buses, so they lived with us through four years of high school, and were paid a small amount in addition. There were Wanda Lepianka and later her sister, Victoria, then Sophie Trytek (spelling?). They kept the house clean and washed dishes. I think they were paid $2.00 a week plus room and board. Wanda taught me card games. She played the ukulele and taught me songs I can still sing, like “In Eleven More Months and Ten More Days, I’ll be out of the Calaboose”, etc. I can still remember the words. Before television we had to make our own entertainment, and I had many games. Dad would play if I couldn’t find anyone else, be he really didn’t enjoy it. Lots of card games, Flinch, Rummy, Slapjack, etc.
Life was safer when I was young. I could walk about the mile up to the airport to ski or hike, or a mile each way to the high school at night in the winter to skate, and no one worried about me. My skis had just a strap over the toe of my overshoes, and we took off the skis at the bottom of the hill and carried them back up to make another run. The ski slope (at “Muster Field”, where the Army used to muster troops and practice tactics in summer) was steep and long, and the walk back up through deep snow was so slow that we seldom got more than 2 rides down in an afternoon.
I trudged about a half a mile over to the Nash School for kindergarten, behind the Augusta State House, crossing busy Western Avenue by myself (age 5 or 6). Grades 1 through 6 were at the Lincoln School—up on the hill, about a half mile from home. Seventh grade was ¾ mile across town at the Smith School; and the 8th grade was in Cony High School across the river, about a mile through town and up a long hill. Same building as my four years in high school. I graduated with high honors because the work was easy in those days and we didn’t have as much to learn.
On Melville Street, my closest playmates were Hester Sturgis, who lived in a big house down the street, and the Briggs family and their seven children – across the street. Mr. Briggs owned the Ford agency and they had a real big turntable in their garage for turning cars. We could get it revolving and ride on it. The youngest girl had Down’s Syndrome. In those days such children were sent to an institution but the Briggses kept her in a padded room upstairs, so she never seemed to develop. She lived over 30 years.
Mrs. Briggs didn’t believe in doctors, but her children needed one now and then. George, their son, one year older than I, developed polio after we all went swimming at Summer Haven pond about 1927. There was an epidemic of polio, and I think some of us had light cases, but George was really striken and had a lot of paralysis that stayed with him until he died in his 30s. He went to Warm Springs with his grandfather once a year where there was a polio center and he could be treated. His arms were limp but from the brace he used, he could move one hand a bit so we could go over and play games with him. I think President Roosevelt was treated for polio at Warm Springs too. George was an intelligent, upbeat person and loads of friends dropped in to play games with him.
On Halloween, we would go out in the dark and roam the streets, soaping windows of people who didn’t like children – pretty much on our street and maybe one street away. We were always afraid the gang from French Town would come up to prowl, but I don’t think they ever did. We were ready, however, with slingshots, etc.
After summer, we played in the street: “Scrub” baseball, Hide-and-Seek, or Hopscotch, games on my long flight of front steps, what I remember as “Ring-a-Leaveo”, and we climbed trees. The Briggs had one tree we could climb. I could get up the tree, but would have trouble getting back down, which was awful. Most of my friends were boys, as there weren’t any girls on our street that were my age, until Hester Sturgis moved in to the big house on Western Avenue. She was a tomboy, and could beat up the boys, which was fine with me, as I wasn’t that brave.
I spent quite a lot of time at the YMCA. The gym director tried to help me improve my basketball technique, but we both finally decided I could play, but I couldn’t think fast enough to be a top player. I loved the exercise however.
The circus came to town each summer and set up in the big field down below the State House. It was an exciting time, and I remember the huge elephants lumbering through town at the parade soon after the circus arrived. Also, the enormous piles of poop they left behind. But there were horses around in those times anyway, so I guess there was a town clean-up system.
In the summer we could catch a trolley car on Western Avenue at the end of our street and ride over hill and dale four miles to the Country Club in Manchester and walk down to Lake Cobbosseecontee to swim and/or visit my grandparents who had an old camp (formerly the Cobbosseecontee Yacht Club) at the end of Hammonds Grove by the creek that wound its way up to the golf course. The camp had 3 floors and 5 bedrooms, and lots of porch. A little footbridge crossed the creek by the camp, leading to the cottages on the east shore, and we could fish from it. I caught 32 sunfish from it one day till Dad got tired of taking them off my hook and throwing them back. The lake is nine miles long and has a lighthouse on a tiny island about a mile from our camp. It had a revolving light on it, as I remember, and we could see it blinking at night in the lake about a mile away.
Our Augusta house was old; not much land around it. It had lots of nooks and crannies, five cellars and five attics. In the garage were feeding stations for the horses that used to be kept there, and storage areas for hay. Also, trap doors in the floor so the manure could be shoveled down through to a cellar beneath. Dad’s workshop was in the garage too, padlocked. The shed behind the kitchen was unheated, which was very handy for keeping potatoes and apples we bought in the fall. Most of the ice chest, and later, the refrigerator, were in the shed. The door of the ice chest poked through the wall into the kitchen. The ice could be dropped into the ice chest from the shed side. The ice man delivered ice, the rag man picked up rags, and another delivered breads and cookies. Dad owned the house next door in which there were three apartments that he rented out. We had a small yard down back where I raised lettuce and radishes as a youngster. I loved to dig in the dirt. My mother didn’t, but planted a section for flowers she could cut and put in vases.
My brother Tommy (George Thomas) was born on February 10, 1927 – very anemic and requiring lots of care. I remember they fed him liver – they didn’t have iron pills then. Dad’s mother Ida Mitchell lived with us when I was a baby.
Dad’s father had died in his mid-40’s, so Dad had to give up his dream of become a chemist, and instead (after Bowdoin College) went into his uncle’s (George E. Macomber) insurance firm (Macomber, Farr and Whitten) in order to support his mother. She had diabetes before the days of insulin. She was a fervent Baptist. After she died, Dad gave up going to church except on Christmas, Easter and Children’s Day. It was his only day of rest, as he worked at the insurance firm six days a week, ten hours a day. I remember the celebration when the office agreed to work only a half day on Saturday.
At Dad’s firm, many customers found that Saturday was the only day they could come to the office. He was a good man. If any were behind in their payments, Dad paid for them. Sometimes he lost money this way. Dad went blind late in life, and instead of complaining, he just said how wonderful it was not to have to go to the office. His blindness was caused by the doctor not noticing that his blood was getting too thick, so he had blood clots, first behind one eye, and a day or two later, the other. He was a trustee of the bank, and was at a banker’s convention when his first eye went. Dad was the soul of goodness, and people referred to him as Honest George. When he died, even men Mum would meet on the street would weep when they spoke of him.
With a strict Baptist mother, and I think it was hard for Dad to play bridge on Sunday night but he did sometimes. Dad never took a vacation, but he did take a long weekend now and then to go with “the boys” his age up to Herb Locke’s camp at Bean Pond in Maine to fish. The Pond is near where Linc and Jeanne’s Stratton house was, I think. Dad said his job was to row the boat while the others fished, and he loved getting away from work. He also liked being served Vitamin X (rum and grapefruit juice) when he woke up, and not having to shave and or bathe.
Mum had been the first physical education teacher in the Augusta schools. She attended Sargent College in Boston for two years until money ran out, and then started work in Gloversville, NY, going to all the country schools – on a bicycle or by horse and carriage. It was difficult, as she was terrified of horses. I think eventually that the superintendent of schools drove her around to the schools. After that, she came back to be the first Physical Education teacher in the Augusta schools, putting on a huge gymnastics show at the City Hall at the end of each school year.
Mum was a busy lady, and she was very resourceful. As a wife and mother, she was in the Garden Club, on the Augusta Park Commission, and in charge of the Nurses’ Association at the Augusta General Hospital. She was often called upon to put on suppers at the Congregational Church in town. There was nothing she couldn’t do. She and Dad played a lot of Bridge, and had many friends.
Dad had been through the depression of 1929. His partner got him to get into the stock market just before the bottom dropped out, so he lost all his savings. By the time I graduated from high school in 1939, he said he had enough to send me to a junior college. He said girls didn’t need more than two years of college because they usually got married, and he had enough to send me. I wanted to work at college, but he said I shouldn’t because I would be taking work away from some girl who needed the job in order to attend school. I chose Lasell Junior College because it was outside of the city (Boston), they had a crew of war canoes on the Charles River, and I loved the outdoors. Also, Dad felt I should choose a college away from Maine to “get broadened”.
My first year roommate named Gert was a neatnick. One day I caught her showing her mother that I hadn’t hung my clothes straight on the hangers in the closet, and that there was a wrinkle in my bedspread. Luckily I got a better roommate the second year (Dot Walker - who was a free spirit). She had a brother in the graduate house at M.I.T. We would go to Boston to see him, taking an “overnight” permission. Instead of staying at the YWCA as we had indicated, we came back to the dorm and climbed up the fire escape to our room (my roommate’s idea).
I was advised to take the secretarial course at college, though I would love to have learned what they taught in the liberal arts courses. I always wanted to learn, and did get a Literature course and a psychology course as hoped. I was writing to two soldiers from Augusta who served in the 103d Infantry during the war, and got my roommate Dot Walker to write to one of them, John Hughes, from Hallowell, ME. She ended up marrying him.
After college I worked a short time for an insurance company, but it was in bookkeeping (which I don’t really like). Afterward, I worked in Chemistry Headquarters at M.I.T. for Professor Hamilton and loved it. I would rather have been in social work, but Mum got me the job. I don’t think Mum had much confidence in my ability.
I lived in an apartment on the fourth floor (no elevator) on Shepard Street, beyond Harvard Square. I made $80 a month, and lived with the two girls I had roomed with on Bay State Road in a one-room apartment boarding house. They never gave us enough to eat at the boarding house, so we moved in to the apartment on Shepard Street, down the street from a Radcliff college dormitory. I paid $15 a month for my share of the rent.
We wore men’s shirts outside our pants so we would look like Radcliff students (it was the style). On weekends we could take a train to Concord where we could rent a bike or canoe, or we would take streetcars to Boston or to the ocean beaches. It was safe in those days to ride around on the subways – even late at night. I volunteered at the Aircraft Warning Center in Boston and came home at midnight, also as an aide at Mass General Hospital where I handed out juice, etc., in the evening. My office job included working Saturday mornings, then I often took the subway to Filene’s Basement where I spent some of my meager earnings. One of the graduate students, Munther Fattah, from Bagdad, Iraq, had a convertible so we could get to the beaches or even to the summer music concerts in at the Berkshire Music Festival in western Massachusetts.
We helped at the USO in Boston, and my roommate Imogene Caney, from Gardiner, ME, ended up marrying one of the soldiers she met there. My other roommate Marguerite Thayer was from Bellows Falls, VT, and married her childhood sweetheart. I found other roommates and really was lucky to have some good ones. There were always 3 or 4 of us, making rent cheap. I was the only one who knew how to cook, because Dad and I had to learn how when my mother fell through a bridge and hurt her knee. She was in bed for quite a few days. Many of the veterans were returning from the war to go to college on the G.I. Bill, so we never lacked for dates. I had 8 offers of marriage, mostly from students who wanted a live-in cook, laundress, etc., but none appealed to me, until I met Bill.
While working at M.I.T., from 1942 to 1948, I met Bill Vannah. He was a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T. on the G.I. Bill. We were planning a party at our apartment one night in November of 1947 and needed one more man. I remembered that my mother’s friend Bessie Vannah had a son, Bill, at the graduate house at M.I.T., and I called him. He came, and six months later came again and asked me out. Later, he used to court me by riding his old bicycle over from Kenmore Square in Boston to the apartment I shared on Shepard Street in Cambridge.
We decided on Valentine’s Day 1948 that we would like to get married and we called my father to get his permission. He said he thought we would need 2 years to get to know each other, but we got married on Dad’s birthday, July 24, 1948, at the Augusta Country Club.
We borrowed my Dad’s 8 year old Ford on our honeymoon. Bill had wanted to return to the Shelbourne Inn, a country inn near Berlin, NH that he remembered as being a place the young people enjoyed in his youth. By the time we arrived, there wasn’t anyone under the age of 80. Bill remembered that his father had led his family over the tops of the presidential range of mountains every summer when he was young, so he took me to Pinkham Notch, below Mount Washington. In my shorts and halter and tennis sneakers, we climbed through Tuckerman’s Ravine to the top of the mountain. It was raining as we went up over the headwall, and we hadn’t brought much for clothing. Bill’s old sneakers gave out by the time we reached the top, so we swapped shoes, and he returned down through Tuckerman’s Ravine, while I rode down on the Cog Railway. He drove around the mountain to pick me up at the bottom.
We started out married life in Foxboro where Bill worked at the Foxboro Company. We had a little apartment on the second floor at 195 Main Street, owned by Percy and Anna Merriam. Anna ran the hat shop in Foxboro. We went everywhere on bikes but eventually Dad sold us his old Ford for $800 instead of turning it in for a newer one. Actually, we made payments until Christmas, then I think he gave us the remainder as a Christmas gift.
I led a girl scout troop for a while – a large bunch of exuberant 11 year olds. I knew nothing about Girl Scouting and the head of the Scouts wasn’t much help. My assistant was a sedentary person who liked to do handwork. I think I lasted one year, but then gave up the troop.
We then rented an old house (200 years old) on Union Street in Foxboro until we got together enough money to build a house down in the woods off Prospect Street (also in Foxboro) on a new little road called Allen’s Way. Bill helped build it with a part-time carpenter/part-time teacher, still living in his 90’s, named Bob Girardin. A brook ran behind the house.
Tommy was born at 195 Main Street; Gretchen at the second home on Union Street, and Karen at Allen’s Way. I was pretty busy, and didn’t know much about raising children but they turned out fine. Bill worked at the Foxboro Company till just after Karen was born, then got a job in the publishing company McGraw-Hill in N.Y.C. and we rented a 200 year old house, with termites, in Stamford, where Billy was born. Later, we bought a home on Courtland Hill Street in Stamford, Connecticut where Linc was born. I heard Bill telling someone he had figured out how not to have so many children – don’t keep moving, because we had a child in every place we had lived.
The Stamford House backed up to the river, and it was difficult to keep Tommy from trying to fall in it. Sometime while there, Bill bought a small sailboat to sail in Long Island Sound, after which I would go with him and somehow manage to keep the children from falling overboard. My neighbor across the street, Irmgard Matzen (from Germany), had 4 children, and was a wonderful friend. She had been a gym teacher and gave super children’s parties.
End of written Autobiography, by Dorothy Macomber Vannah
Thanks for following our Blog. So far this year (it's now Jan 21st), I've been much better about photo-documenting what we're doing on our homestead. I'm more and more inspired about what we're working on, what the possibilities are for the future, and I'm suddenly becoming passionate about sharing this information with other people.
What I want is what I think most of us want but for some reason often think that we're not capable of doing (even though we're doing it by default by living and interacting with the world around us). I want to change the world for the better through my presence here, as my mother did through her life, (as many would attest even more often as she would deny it), and I want to be as alive and excited and passionate about life as I possibly can. I also want everyone to know something that I do - that I have the best partner in the world in Jeanne Hergenrother! Have a great 2015!
