A night to remember in Buckland

[ Originally published on: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 ]

BUCKLAND -- Eleanor 'Abbie' LaBelle, 78, lived in 'downtown' Shelburne Falls. She remembers playing kick-the-can or tag with other children in a vacant lot near her Conway Street home on summer evenings.

But the games ended with the clanging of a bell -- letting children of the village know it was time to go home.

'The 9 p.m. bell at night -- that was curfew,' LaBelle said. 'We had to drop everything and go home.'

Edie Gerry, 87, lived in the country, on one of Buckland's 42 farms, the ninth of 10 children. One of her earliest chores was to sit outside her family's Lower Street farmhouse every Sunday morning, listening for the 9 a.m. church bell; then she ran indoors, to make sure the time set on the family's wind-up clock was correct.

Gerry also helped her siblings walk cows from their Buckland farm to pastures in Hawley, some 10 miles away. And, like most children in those summer days in the 1920s and early 1930s, she did it without wearing shoes.

On Monday, the Buckland Historical Society will host LaBelle, Gerry and other lifelong residents in a discussion about 'Growing Up in Buckland' at a Pie Social to be held at Buckland Public Hall on Upper Street.

Historical Society member and local art teacher Polly Anderson will be leading the discussion, which will be taped and televised by Falls Cable TV. The event begins at 7 p.m. Admission is $6 for adults, $3 for children ages 12 and under. There will be a selection of homemade pies and other refreshments.

The discussion will include: school life and the jobs residents held as young people; what their parents did for a living; hard times; life during The Great Depression and several other threads that form a tapestry of town life different from what it is today.

Those interviewed for this story remember growing up in Buckland as a time when children had less than they have today, but seemed to enjoy whatever they had much more.

William Delaney, 78, grew up with LaBelle in the village, and he remembers the curfew bell. But he doesn't remember anyone getting into trouble for ignoring the bell.

'The kids just didn't hang around (after 9 p.m.),' he said. 'There was no reason to. You would have been discouraged by the merchants: You went (home) and you didn't sass them around.'

LaBelle remembers the Bridge of Flowers as 'very beautiful,' but not as beautiful as it is today, with so many volunteers to tend it.

'We weren't allowed to go on it much,' she remarked. 'And we didn't go near the (Deerfield) River or the Potholes. We couldn't go near the canal, behind Lamson & Goodnow, even though it was near our house.'

For Delaney, the river, too, was off-limits, although some kids did go in. 'We weren't allowed,' he said. 'Sometimes there were a lot of soapsuds from the laundry. There was a lot of sewage. If we aren't dead, I guess we're not going to die,' he said with a laugh.

But even though the Glacial Potholes and the river were off-limits to children of the 1930s and '40s, boys and girls could buy cherry bombs, firecrackers, sparklers and fireworks for the Fourth of July -- from vendors on either side of the Iron Bridge. 'On both sides of the bridge, they had shacks where they sold fireworks,' she said. 'All the kids used to save up their money for that.'

Delaney remembers two tin shanties, one run by the fire department, the other by the American Legion, as places where people could buy fireworks.

'The night before the Fourth, (the firemen) used to collect boxes and such; they would put it down by the Potholes and they had a bonfire,' Delaney says.

On July 4th, there was often a big baseball game on the old Cricket field, now known as Chadwick Field, where rivals like the Shelburne Falls and Colrain baseball teams would compete. He said the bleachers in the field sat at least 300. There was 'all kinds of food,' and after the game, a professional display of fireworks in the field. He said people would gather all over the field, at the river banks and up by the railroad tracks to watch the fireworks. Because there were more fields and fewer trees then, there were plenty of vantage points throughout the village.

'I think that was looked forward to almost as much as Christmas -- because we were out of school and we looked forward to the fireworks,' Delaney says of the summer holiday.

'I don't remember anyone ever getting seriously hurt,' he remarked. One danger, though, was that you might step on the hot wand of a discarded, burned sparkler with your bare feet, he said.

'We were more easily satisfied,' Bill Delaney says of his childhood days. 'There was nothing else -- no TV, only one movie (at Memorial Hall).

'But some of the 'good old days' weren't so good,' he added. 'I knew kids who died of simple appendicitis attacks or struggled with tonsils. The morals were better, but the travel? The roads? I always had enough to eat and good clothing, but not everyone did.'

Gerry, living in the country, said her family rarely went 'downtown,' and she doesn't remember celebrating the Fourth of July. 'To my knowledge, we never celebrated it,' she said. 'Thanksgiving was one of our holidays, but we didn't have a turkey. We had lots of chickens, so we had chicken on Thanksgiving. Christmas -- that was fun, but we didn't have many gifts. It was more practical things, like coats and overshoes. That was the beginning of The Depression. We never had a (Christmas) stocking.'

The family had no truck for hauling livestock, so each year, Gerry said, they would take eight to 10 non-milking young livestock from Buckland out to the family's pastures in Hawley, where they would graze. Then the cows were brought back to Buckland before winter if they were ready for milking. One of the older brothers would walk the lead cow, while two or three other siblings walked behind and 'did the chasing' of wayward cows.

She said the family's milk cans would be picked up by a trucker and hauled to the railroad station in Shelburne Falls to be sold.

As Delaney remembers it, many families in the village kept at least one cow, and most families had their own chicken coop.

LaBelle said many townspeople either worked at Lamson & Goodnow or worked for New England Power Co.

LaBelle's mother worked for Buckland landscape artist Robert Strong Woodard, as a nurse and as a cook. Not far away, when she was about 14 years old, LaBelle worked at the Mary Lyon guest house in Upper Buckland, where mostly older women would stay during the summer. The boarding house was run by a Mrs. Griswold, and the third-floor ballroom was where Mount Holyoke College founder Mary Lyon once opened a school.

LaBelle also worked at Alice Brown's Sweetheart Tea House. 'A lot of women worked at the Sweetheart Tea House,' she said. 'It was a going place back then.'

Gerry still remembers taking a job in the office of the Greenfield Tap & Die on Labor Day. 'I got paid 40 cents an hour. I brought home my entire pay of $16 and I felt like a millionaire,' she says. 'After that, they started (taking) the Victory Tax of 5 percent,' she said, explaining it was a tax levied during World War II. 'But my first paycheck was for the full value of what I worked.'

Buckland Public Hall is located on Upper Road, near the Mary Lyon Church in Buckland Center, off Route 112.

 

---