Oct 1, 2020
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, there was a young kid named Harry who was pretty good at finding ways to make money in Medfield.
Grace Roberts was an elderly neighbor of his who lived on the left side of the two-family house at 13 Pleasant St. She was Charlie Cain’s mom and the grandmother to Linda Cain, who still lives in the same house. Mrs. Roberts lived alone with her Boston terrier named Chester. Chester was a good watch dog as he would bark at anyone who may have come knocking on Mrs. Robert’s back door.
Mrs. Roberts would often have Harry walk to the Clement Drugs store at the corner of North and Main Streets to buy her a 25-cent frappe. She’d give Harry a raw egg to give the soda jerk to put in the frappe along with the chocolate syrup, chocolate ice cream, and milk… just the way Mrs. Roberts liked her frequent frappes.
Mrs. Roberts baked a few loaves of bread every week. So in addition to the 15 cents she paid Harry for running the errand, she’d also give him a fresh loaf of bread to take home to his family. Was it really fresh? Mrs. Roberts would laugh, “Well of course it’s warm and fresh! I just took it out of the oven an hour ago!”
As time marched on, Mrs. Roberts had to go to a nursing home then located at 41 South Street, now a private home – the one with the stone well in front, where sadly a boy fell in and drowned some 80 years ago, after which the well was filled in.
The nursing home had an excellent reputation and was owned and run by the caring and maternal Carol Glenrange. There were a dozen senior citizens, including Mrs. Glenrange’s own mother, Agatha, and three resident cats.
Over a game of cribbage, Ms. Agatha learned from Mrs. Roberts that Harry had three adult cats and seven kittens at his family’s home back on Pleasant Street. Harry’s mother had just given birth to a daughter and was bottle-feeding her… with a baby formula that she was also feeding to the kittens, who were fast becoming big and energetic.
So Ms. Agatha went over to Harry’s home to see his mother and get the get recipe for the formula; she wanted to feed it to the cats at the nursing home. Then she asked his mother if she could sit down at the family kitchen table and write down the ingredients of the baby formula on a pad of paper. Ms. Agatha was delighted to now see those cats and find out how Harry’s cats were growing so beautifully and big.
Not long afterward, Mrs. Roberts, who was about to turn 90, was taken to a nearby hospital and died.
Harry was thankful he got to know Mrs. Roberts. He realized that back then in the 50s, earning 15 cents was the usual payment for running an errand. Harry also learned quickly that no matter how we try to extend life and make our loved ones comfortable, the beloved just has to finally give in and surrender to time. It’s a lesson of birth, death and of love. That marked the beginning of Harry’s getting to know the triumph and the tragedy of the world around him.
Edna Duhamel lived above the block that contained Larkin’s liquor store, Mike’s barber shop, and Bill Palumbo’s shoe store. Mrs. Duhamel was a wonderful, elderly woman who was just about one of the kindest, most beautiful people one could ever meet. She met Harry after he came out of Mike’s after getting a haircut.
Mrs. Duhamel paid Harry 25 cents to take out her trash and put it in the barrel (this was pre-dumpster) behind the building. Mrs. Duhamel kept herself healthy and would buy a bottle of white wine from the Larkin store nearly every week. She said that the wine was good for one’s digestion.
But at the end of one summer Harry went up to the second floor to Mrs. Duhamel apartment. He knocked repeatedly, but nobody answered. He went downstairs to talk to Allan Larkin. Both Allan and Harry went upstairs to the front door and knocked again. With no answer, Allan tried to open the door, but it was clearly locked from the inside. Allan then called the Medfield police department to open the door.
Sure enough, Mrs. Duhamel had died quietly in bed. Allan was especially upset because he thought Mrs. Duhamel was such a lovely woman.
The Old Way of Trash Disposal
Little did Harry realize, but he managed to walk right into another odd job on the weekends. Allan Larkin asked Harry if he’d like to earn some money burning some of the many cardboard boxes that the bottles of liquor came in. Allan had improvised a fireplace behind the building.
In those days, it was perfectly normal for people to burn trash in outside incinerators, and the fire department was occasionally called on to put out fires at the town dump. That dump was closed in the early 70s when the Environmental Protection Agency was new, and it was covered and surrounded by the chain link fence. Once known as Mount Trashmore, it’s the hill on the east side of Northmeadows Road, between the DPW garage and the veterinary clinic.
Also in those days, beer and carbonated beverages came in what some called “bar bottles,” returnable, deposit-carrying heavier glass meant to survive multiple reuses. “Convenient, one-way throw-away bottles” made their appearance in the 1950 in stores… and along roadsides.
In the environmental movement in the 1970s, voluntary recycling came to Medfield. Cans had to be separated and squashed down, and glass had to be separated by color before going into the recycling bins. Participation was voluntary and inconvenient, and after a few years, the program at the Medfield transfer station was quietly closed down for a decade or two.
Sometimes an odd job comes by word of mouth. That was how Harry came to work for a family at a horse ranch on North Street near the Norfolk Hunt Club, the site of English-style horse riding competitions.
Frances Cunningham, a student at Ursuline Academy in Dedham and a talented equestrian, was the daughter of Johnathan and Mary Cunningham. Harry was hired to do a great deal of the maintenance around their property. Harry mowed the large lawn, cleaned the horse stalls, and even helped dig a cesspool. There were horse corrals outside that Harry had to brush with creosote. The creosote had a familiar, strong, pine-sent odor to it; it was applied as a preservative to telephone poles.
Exit Manor Inn, Enter Red Vest
In 1961, the once-elegant Manor Inn was demolished – with the help of a Sherman tank – to make way for a strip mall. That unmourned strip mall was demolished to make way for the post office about 1998. Here’s a link to a youtube video of the demolition of the Manor Inn.
The Red Vest was a new, stylish restaurant that opened in that new strip mall in the early sixties. It offered a good menu and the chance to hear the popular Robert Hersee, the Medfield music teacher, playing the piano at the bar. Worthy competitors included the Frances Café (now Basil) and the Colonial restaurant (now the site of Precision Car Wash on Main Street).
For a short time, the Red Vest had a fine chef from Hyannis running the kitchen who would drive to Medfield every workday from Cape Cod. His nephew was the second cook who also prepared the food. There was a woman who made salads and desserts. Harry got a job as a weekend dishwasher for $1 per hour and a free meal.
One day Paul Pender of Brookline came to the Red Vest. Pender had recently upset boxing legend Sugar Ray Robinson to become world middleweight champion. Harry wanted to meet Pender and went into the lounge and shook hands. Pender signed his autograph on a Red Vest table napkin, To Harry, a fellow Irishman! Best wishes!, Paul Pender. It was a memory Harry would always remember. Here’s a link to Pender in action.
(Legendary Red Sox slugger Ted Williams was known to occasionally eat at the Frances Café.)
Harry liked earning the money, but he soon came to realize that restaurant work was a tough business with rapid employee turnover.
The Red Vest became Tally Ho and then closed after about six years. Later the site was occupied by two Asian restaurants, Sun Island and the Golden Rice. Then the strip mall was demolished to make way for the new post office in 1998.
One might always wonder what it would be like if we could go back in time, all in one day to revisit the scenarios that have been explored here in this story. Sometimes it would almost seem that it was the people who made those times so very appealing. What if we could just suspend time for just a few hours to savor the beauty of what we have seen and lived through? The memory of lives in Medfield have been ephemeral and greatly influenced by the long passage of time.
Regardless of the advance of time we truly appreciate the precious nature of a life well lived. There is an artfulness and value of routine daily activity. However, people sometimes are not attentive to their lives. Some of us assume that we have an indefinite amount of time on Earth. But in essence many people find themselves at the end of life unfortunately, with much to be desired. They regret that their lives and actions were not more extraordinary and significant.
Birth and death seem inevitable, and the most important stage of life is the desire for companionship, friendship and love. Love epitomizes human creativity and achievement in the face of the advance of time. The clock dictates what people do and where they go. People are always hurrying on to the next thing. But life presents itself as opportunities, even the ones we’ve missed. We forever ask ourselves, was it kismet where everything is preordained or is it fate?
All the people spoken of here may seem like they have entered another dimension appearing in memory like returning apparitions cloaked in a serenity, reminding us of other people we have now come to know. Those who we knew seem like self-proclaimed messengers with logical theories, lonely in a clouded moonlight. One has to wonder sometimes of how that ethereal beauty holds our attention. From such an astounding scene have come all our confidants who have been some of the best people we could ever know with the same hopes and dreams with the cheerfulness and exuberance of a lyrical life and time well lived.