January 6, 2022
Thanks to Claire Shaw for her recent snippet about our family’s long-standing livery service. The snippet prompted the Historical Society’s David Temple to contact me about writing a deeper dive into the story of Newell’s Livery.
How many small-town taxi companies, do you suppose, have ever been featured on national television? Or had a notorious gangster as a passenger? Or a black lab named Dinty? But I get ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.
Amie I. Newell, my grandmother, was the founder and driving force (pun absolutely intended!) behind Newell’s Livery Stable in the horse-and-buggy days, which in later years evolved to become Newell’s Motor Livery, aka Newell’s Taxi Service. She was a woman ahead of her time, who quite literally took the reins of her family’s future in her own hands after my grandfather died, started and made a success of a business normally run by men – a business that survived her by more than three decades.
My grandmother raised seven children, four boys and three girls. In the days of the Livery Stable, Amie, or one of her sons who was still around and of age, would drive the horse and carriage to take people to and from work at Medfield State Hospital or the hat factory, or to catch the train to Boston at Medfield Junction railroad station at the corner of Adams and West Mill Streets and pick them up when they returned.
My dad was Goodie Newell. (His given name was Gordon but his brother Henry couldn’t pronounce that and his attempts came out something like Goodie, so that’s what stuck.) He spoke of his high school days when he and his twin brother, Charlie, the youngest of the seven, would drive the horse-drawn wagon, which served as the school bus, to school. They would pick up the other kids along the way and take them back home after school. This was in the early 1920’s.
The family homestead and livery stable were located on Main Street west of the center. It was the last house on the right before the cemetery heading west. When my Uncle John married, he and his wife Dot bought the Cape across the street from the homestead. (That house is still in the family, now the home of one of John and Dot’s granddaughters.)
Several years later my father married, and my parents bought the other Cape across the street right next to John and Dot. Not quite the Kennedy compound, but a cozy family enclave, nonetheless. My father met my mother, Doris, while driving taxi. She worked as a bookkeeper in the administration building at the State Hospital where he often went to pick up or drop off passengers. Not surprisingly, my mother became the bookkeeper for the family business.
After Amie died in 1941, John and Goodie ran the growing company, with the help of their wives. Charlie joined them when he came home from the service and continued until he died in 1948.
As Claire mentioned in her snippet, my cousin Johnny/Hookey was already driving for the business at that time. He left in 1942 for 20 years of service in the Navy and got right back behind the wheel when he came home. He was undoubtedly behind the wheel for brief stints any time he was home on leave.
That’s how it worked – if you were a Newell, had a license and happened to be around when there was a need, you were conscripted into service. Johnny’s wife Liz drove. His sister Marcia drove. His brothers Eddy and Will likely drove when they were around. I drove.
My mother and Aunt Dot took shifts answering the business phone and dispatching the cabs using the Heathkit CB radios Johnny built. It was a thrill as a kid to be allowed to dispatch a call on the radio: “KBA-3550, Base to Unit 2 – passenger at the hospital to go to Lord’s.” In later years, my mother got her driver’s license and added cab driver to her family resume.
We were also agents for Western Union. Dot and Doris would write down the messages dictated over the phone by the Western Union representative, type them onto official Western Union forms, slip them into official envelopes and our drivers would deliver them.
Uncle John died in the summer of 1961, right before I entered high school. He left a big hole in the fabric of the family and the business. My parents and Aunt Dot carried on, along with those of us who were able to help in some way, and the many people who had worked for us for years and who came on board in the years to come. Some drove cab; some school bus; some both. The ones who come most readily to mind are Bill Geer, who was from Millis, and Bob Meaney, Lucy Jackson, Johnny Grover, Clara DeNucci and Guy Savage, all of Medfield. Apologies if I have forgotten anyone.
The only competition I can recall Newell’s Livery ever having in its long history came from Don Inman, whose daughter Margaret was a classmate of mine. Mr. Inman launched his business, called Don’s Town Taxi, in 1962 and ran it until his death in 1974.
Another classmate of mine was Jimmy Blake, middle son of Superintendent of Schools, Tom Blake. In the winter months, when visions of snow days danced in our heads, and snow was in the forecast, it was Tom Blake and my dad who made the decision on school or no school. They would watch the evening weather report and consult over the phone. Tom wanted to be sure my dad felt it was safe for the buses to roll. If they hadn’t decided by bedtime, they would consult again around 4 a.m. If it was a no-go, the no-school whistle would blow around 5 or 6 a.m.
Every kid waited for, hoped for, that sound. Jimmy and I were super popular in the winter. Kids offered us bribes to influence our dads to cancel school, even asked me to sabotage the buses. Our pleas to the dad duo fell on deaf ears. They made their own call.
My dad, and thereby Newell’s Livery, retired from the school bus part of the business in 1968. He received a citation from the Registry of Motor Vehicles which honored his perfect driving record – fifty years of driving a school bus without a single accident.
The taxi service continued on. Even after my dad died in 1971, my mother and aunt forged ahead for several years. More strong, determined women, making it happen, carrying on their mother-in-law’s legacy. When it was time for them to step away, they sold the business to Wally Shackley. Even the Newell’s Taxi phone number was transferred to him. He had a good run in the business as well.
And now to some noteworthy oddities of our history, which were alluded to at the beginning of this piece. The black lab named Dinty was our own dog. The curious thing was that she would periodically wander out of the yard and make her way to the center of town. To do this she had to cross Route 27, Park Street, Miller Street, Pleasant Street, and sometimes 109. Once there, she would wait patiently, either in front of the library or across the street at the taxi stand in front of Town Hall, for one of our cabs to show up and take her back home.
My father came home after work one day when I was in high school and told my mother and I of an unusual passenger who had arrived on the bus from Boston and gotten into the front seat of his cab with a briefcase, which he placed on the seat between himself and my dad. The briefcase crowded the space my dad needed to shift and turn the wheel. He went to move it into the backseat and the man grabbed it and said, “Unh unh! That stays with me.” He had my dad drive him to 128 Station. The whole thing struck my dad as a little shifty. We watched the news that evening, as always, and there, in a lead story, was a mug shot of my dad’s passenger. It was the gangster Rocco Balliro, and there was a manhunt on for him.
When my cousin Marcia’s daughter Karen was in high school, her after school job was to go to her grandmother’s (my Aunt Dot’s) house, answer the taxi calls and dispatch the cabs. Karen watched the PBS show Zoom, which was popular at the time. The show had started a segment where they were profiling young people with unusual jobs.
Karen wrote to Zoom about her job and never told the family she’d done it.
A couple of weeks later, Marcia got a call from the producer regarding Karen’s letter. They wanted to make an appointment for the film crew to come to Medfield and film the story. The sputtering began. In our family, that’s what the expression of any agitation was called – sputtering. There were those who wanted to strangle Karen at the time, yet the film crew came, and everyone became stars. Karen answered the phone and dispatched the cabs. My mother and Clara DeNucci drove. Marcia played a satisfied customer. Aunt Dot recounted the family history. That story aired hundreds of times, nationwide, over a period of years.
Karen even got letters from young male admirers. Way more than fifteen minutes of fame was had by all.
All of this far-reaching family legacy was set in motion more than a hundred years ago by Amie Newell.
Note: This story acquired an unexpected, fitting, and poignant footnote a couple of weeks ago when a friend hired me to drive her sister three days a week from her group home to her day program. A Newell, once again (albeit marginally) in the livery business. The most amazing thing? My friend and her sister also grew up in Medfield. When they were wee ones, my dad drove them both in his cab to nursery school in Sherborn. A story coming full circle in the best of all possible ways.