Oct 1, 2021
Depending on whether you are looking back or looking ahead, 50 years can seem like yesterday or an eternity.
Monday evening, members of the Medfield Historical Society looked back to yesterday through the eyes of Daniels Hamant, a Medfield resident now a resident of Dover, and learned what life was like in Medfield during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Hamant described Medfield when it was really a small town with about 4,000 inhabitants. Half of these were patients at the state hospital, “The Hill,” as it was commonly called.
Despite its small population, the Medfield of 50 years ago was a thriving community, with four grocers, two dry goods stores, a news agency, a drugstore, a hardware store, two cobblers, a fruit store, a general store, two garages, several filling stations, and two barber shops—no beauty parlors yet.
The town boasted a hotel industry in those days, with the King Philip Inn, the Medfield Inn, and the Corner House.
A number of townspeople found work at the state hospital and a local brickyard, but the principal employer was the Tofias family’s straw hat factory, known simply as “The Shop,” part of which has been recently renovated by Corning Medical.
“It seemed as if half the town worked in the straw shop, and half of them were my relatives,” Hamant told the society. “There were Uncle Henry, Uncle Frank, Uncle Fred, Uncle Sed, Aunt Bertha, Aunt Gertie, and her husband Uncle Guy, cousins Ralph, Jean, and Floris.
“My cousin Leon and his wife Janie also worked in the shop for a year or so, but then they went back to the farm in Vermont because Leon thought Medfield was too citified.
“Even I worked there one summer. I was scared to death I’d do something stupid and one of my relatives would notice. I wasn’t afraid they might tell Julius Tofias, the big boss—I was afraid they’d tell my mother.”
Hamant reminisced at length about some of the “characters” he remembers from his youth, who had “the courage to be non-conformist.”
“Kate Tucker and her bicycle, for instance. Kate got her picture in the Traveller because she rode her bicycle everywhere when she was 64 years old—to visit people, to do her shopping, with a box fastened on the back where she put her bundles. No other woman at that age at that time would have thought of doing such a thing.
“Then there were the McKay twins. Individually neither would have rated as a character, but together they were something else, and woe be unto anyone who took them on in an argument on the drugstore corner where we hung out evenings (at the corner of North and Main Streets, now site of a real estate office). It was like arguing with a person with two heads. They both worked at Hodgson Portable Houses in Dover, and they both rode the Boston train to Dover for years—on one ticket. The conductor never found out there were two of them.”
“Jack Nasty was another character. His real name was George Phillips, but he was called Jack Nasty because he chewed tobacco and it stained his white mustache a brownish yellow. “He was a true male chauvinist pig. One day his wife Annie was standing on the corner of North and Main Streets loaded down with bundles when he went buy in his horse and buggy. She waved to him to pick her up but he drove right by, leaving her to walk home—way out on Green Street.”
“Tom and Mable were another odd pair. Tom was blind in one eye, and he kind of listed when he walked. Mable was a very large woman, who had a limp. Tom made some kind of salve that was supposed to be good for anything that ailed you—cuts, burns, arthritis—you name it. “He was a kind of low-key snake oil salesman. He put the stuff up in odds and ends of jars he got somewhere—maybe he picked the dump—and the two of them walked around door-to-door, peddling it. They were quite a sight.”
Little League hadn’t come to Medfield 50 years ago, but baseball played a big part in the life of the young men of the town, Hamant said. Games took place on Grange Field, so called because of the Grange Hall adjoined it. What remains of Grange Field is now Metacomet Park.
“The star of the team was Bill Kelly, father of the Bill Kelly most of you know at Lord’s,” said Hamant. “He hit the longest ball I ever saw at Grange Field. There was a flagpole close to 500 feet from the plate. Bill hit one ball all the way to the flagpole on the fly, and I as opposing center fielder was just picking up the ball as Bill rounded third base.”
In the early 1930s, Hamant said, the local International Order of Odd Fellows took over sponsorship of the Medfield team, which included as players Walter “Wady” Reynolds, Kenneth “Scratch” Clark, John “Monk” Newell, Everett “Duffy” Dewar, and Chester “Tiny” Gilmore.
In the later ’30s, the Odd Fellows were replaced by the Medfield Athletic Club, which also sponsored basketball and hockey teams. The club played in the Eastern Mass Twilight League, which included teams from Millis, Sherborn, Westwood, Islington, Holliston, Norwood, and Walpole. Some other players were Mel Procaccini, George Maker, Pat, Pete, and Nina Iafolla, Lawrence Rossi, Joe Belmont, Red and Bruno Palumbo, and Earl and Rosey Kerr. Dick Breck, a pitcher, had been in the Braves organization, as had Red Palumbo.
“We got uniforms by soliciting merchants in town and putting their names on the back of the shirts—$54 bought eight uniforms. We raised money for bats and balls by passing the hat at games. One of the town characters was self-appointed hat-passer, and we often wondered if all the proceeds wound up in the coffers of the A.C.
“My wife, Muriel, was the official scorekeeper. If someone argued that he should have been given a hit instead of an error charged to the opposition, she’d say, ‘My grandmother could have caught that without a glove.’ “End of argument. They never saw Muriel’s grandmother.”
Hamant remembers on game that ended precipitously one hot August afternoon when the fire whistle blew. “All of the volunteer and ex officio fireman headed for the fire station, and the rest of the populace headed for the fire. ‘Scratch’ Clark and I stopped to pick up the bats and balls and were the last ones to reach the fire station. “There was only one truck left, an old Republic of pre-World War I vintage with hard rubber tires, a hand-operated siren over the dash, and of course an open cab, as all fire apparatus had. It also had no muffler.
“Scratch drove and I cranked the siren. With no muffler and a very loud siren we were making an ungodly racket as we proceeded up North Street. All the Sunday drivers were scurrying to get out of the way as our top speed climbed to 20 miles per hour. “I often wondered what strangers thought of an old noisy fire truck with two baseball players aboard. Of course, the fire was out by the time we got there, but we had a hell of a time getting to it.”
“The only funnier incident I remember about a fire was the time young Joe Roberts drove a truck dressed in his striped trousers, frock coat, and derby hat.” (Roberts was an undertaker.)
Some of Hamant’s favorite childhood memories concern his association with Charles Martin Loeffler, a composer and violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who lived on South Street Extension. (His house burned down about 1940, but his music studio across the street is now a private residence at 274 South Street.) When the National String Quartet came from Washington, D.C. to study with Loeffler, two of its members stayed with the Hamants. The group spent its evenings playing quartets in the Hamant’s living room.
Loeffler suffered from a heart condition and never went anywhere alone. When Serge Koussevitsky and his Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered Loeffler’s Pagen Poem and none of the musician’s regular companions was available to accompany him to Symphony Hall, Hamant was elected. “After the performance of his composition I escorted him to the stage, where he made his bows and received the accolades of the audience….We didn’t stay for the rest of the concert, but that was truly the thrill of a lifetime.”
When the great hurricane of 1938 struck, felling huge trees like matchsticks, blocking driveways, roads, and damaging houses, Hamant was among those working around the clock for three days clearing up. From an aesthetic point of view, perhaps the worst thing that happened was that the steeple of the Unitarian meeting house toppled and fell through the roof. “This was the tallest steeple in town,” said Hamant. “It seems there was much competition in town over which church would have the tallest steeple.
As a kid I went up inside the old spire, and I know it was heightened at least once—presumably after other churches were built with higher steeples, and the Unitarians refused to be outdone. I think some people of other persuasions thought we got our comeuppance when the hurricane blew the steeple through the roof.”