This is the second article by Jean Chenoweth covering the West Harbor childhood and young adult years of her mother, Virginia Frey, later Huskins. The local living conditions during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, as told to Jean, are profiled below. –Barbara Rumsey

My mother was sickly as a small child, with severe headaches and stomach problems so she couldn't eat for days. She said her arms and legs were like broomsticks. One day she overheard the doctor tell her mother that she was failing and couldn't be expected to live. To say the least, that was very upsetting for a young child to hear. However, she finally grew out of those problems and lived to be 84 years old, when Parkinson's disease finally did her in.

They frequently had no money to pay the doctor for his frequent house calls so Dr. Barrows would look around and say, "Well Bertie (my grandmother's nickname) how about letting me have a couple of those doughnuts you just fried" (my grandmother was an expert at baked goods), or "Maybe you could just let me have one of your geraniums." She also had a very green thumb. That was how a doctor got paid in those days, when there was no money.

Food and chores

Food was simple. Since they lived near the ocean “the boys” caught fish and dug clams. I'm sure they must have had a small vegetable garden. In the winter my mother remembers meals consisting mostly of dried salt cod which hung in the cellar. Her mother would send her down to tear off a piece and they'd have it boiled with some potatoes. And there was also a barrel of apples in the cellar, and after dinner one of the boys would bring up a cold sweet apple for each of them.

There were almost no cars in those days and the road that ran past the house was dirt. One of my mother's jobs when was to grab her small metal bucket and shovel and run out into the road to retrieve the manure from any passing horse. My grandmother would use that in her gardens. She would also send the boys to bring back soil from the woods to bake in the oven of the coal stove to kill anything undesirable and use that for her houseplants (she still did that when I was young, except my uncle Ken and I would fetch the soil).

Laundry was done by boiling clothes on the top of the stove every Monday and hanging it to dry on the clotheslines in the back yard. I remember her shaving yellow laundry soap into the big copper boiler and the long soft stick she used to poke and turn the clothing, the same as she did when my mother was growing up. One of my mother's favorite chores, until electricity arrived when she was 12, was cleaning the kerosene lamp chimneys every day, polishing them with newspaper until they shone. She remembered that task fondly.

1918's flu and freeze

In 1918 the Spanish flu was raging. My mother remembered the horse-drawn hearse going by day after day, carrying off the bodies of the dead. And then all three of her brothers got sick. She and her mother tended them for days, all three eventually recovering though my sickly mother and sickly grandmother never caught it. It was said that the flu liked the strongest. Other highlights of my mother's early life was watching the harbor freeze out past Tumbler Island in the winter of 1918 with horse teams crossing the ice pack from West Harbor to town. And she loved seeing all the coasters come into the harbor when a storm was approaching.

Schools #8 and #17

My mother started school, as all children must, at school #8 on Lakeside Drive which was a rather long walk, nearly a mile from her house. When she came home from her first day at school my grandmother asked how she liked it. "It was all right, but I don't think I'll go again." More wishful thinking. But eventually she loved going to school at #8. She loved the big ledge that they used to sit on to eat their lunches in the warmer weather. They had a metal dipper and a bucket of water to drink from, and they all dipped and drank from the same dipper. She also loved the Concord grape jelly sandwiches her mother made for her. She had friends who were also cousins and lived near her, the Williams girls, and she especially liked Millie. She talked about the woodstove and the boys bringing in the wood to keep the schoolhouse warm.

Later, when #8 was closed, she went to #17 on Lakeview Road, a much shorter walk. She went on to high school, something her brothers never did, but had to drop out when she was 16 because of her mother's failing health. She was needed to help keep house for her mother and brothers, who never married. She was highly intelligent and well-read. The school tested the student IQs while she was there, and the two highest were her and J. Blenn Perkins who went on to become a well-known local attorney. She would have liked to have been a nurse but never had a chance.

Next time: the last of the articles on Virginia's life.