I was born on February 9th, 1885, on Monument Square, Charlestown, directly in the shadow of Bunker Hill monument, and in the home of my grandfather Brown. Probably my earliest memory is of having diphtheria there, and of being taken for airings by him up to the sunny side of the old obelisk, during my convalescence. I am afraid that a great part of my childhood was spent in bed, as I was a sickly infant and a puny child, subject to every contagious outbreak that came near me, and with fairly chronic bronchitis filling in the inrervals. There were probably two reasons for my survival; first and foremost, a tough constitution from ancestors who lived to be a good old age through trials and tribulations, and second, a determined grandmother. My mother overheard my doctor say to my grandmother, "She doesn't expect to raise that baby, does she?" - this after my two older brothers had died from malnutrition.

Mother says that she threw me in despair on her mother's bed, and cried, "Take her, I just give up!" Whereupon the wise old grandmother, who had never had faith in "those baby powders (Mellin's Food) and doctors' formulas," secretly took me down to the basement kitchen, minced up rare bits of the breakfast beefsteak and fed them to my hungry, smacking lips. Probably she also gave me a pap-ball to suck, a chunk of bread soaked in sweetened milk and tied up in a square of cloth; that was the pacifier of those days. Anyway, I pulled through the critical transition to solid food, but at three I caught diphtheria, the child-killer of those days, and barely survived it. I well remember the heroic treatment. Every morning I was tied in my high chair in the window, while my mother and grandmother held my legs, and the doctor pumped a river of permanganate solution through my nose and throat to wash out the fatal membranes. After it was all over, he would say, "Now, chuck the whiskey into her!" No wonder that highballs and old fashioneds are distasteful to me now. But he pulled me through, either because of the afore-mentioned tough streak or because the treatment really worked. All this of course was before the days of antitoxin.

As soon as my father's business permitted him to live in Boston, we took two rooms in Oxford Terrace, so that my mother could get to the Boston Public Library more easily, where she was a cataloguer; because by this time my father was in the last stages of tuberculosis, yet able to continue his mechanical drawing. To reach Oxford Terrace you went down a long flight of wooden steps, about oppoaite the present Trinity Court. They led down the big fill that enabled Dartmouth Street to have a bridge over the Boston and Albany tracks. There was a vacant field at the foot, alongside the railroad, then a row of brick houses. I can remember the fascination of being allowed to play out, all alone, in this field filled with the usual trash of such city lots, and with trains constantly chooing past the high wooden fence.

At twelve o'clock my father would lean out of the window of our second-floor flat and call, "Hattie, come get your dinner." He was a good cook, so I came a-running. I used to sleep on a trundle-bed pushed under their bed every day, Never a window could be opened, for fear of the dangerous night air! Certainly the Lord gave me a precious resistance to the two dread diseases of that day. But it was the fear of TB, whenever I developed my graveyard cough, that made my mother bring me up, practically swaddled in cotton wool, and forbidden to join in normal sports like skating and swimming. Poor littlke me, it certainly made a timid sissy of me! My father died there when I was four. I was taken to the room of a friendly neighbor during the funeral (which, by the way, was conducted by Stopford Brooke, father of our friend Edith Baker). They had bought a little painting book to amuse me, and I can actually recall the picture - of children playing under a striped umbrella on a beach - that I colored that afternoon. It is strange how a vivid experience, like a death in the family, makes insignificant details memorable.

We soon moved out to West Newton to live with my mother's sister Aunt Lizzie, and Uncle Arthur Luke. They had never had children, to their great disappointment, so I became the idol of two mothers, a dubious blessing. My mother continued to work at the Library, because it gave her independence, and she loved the work, but my aunt certainly took the full care and support of me. She was a very energetic person, full of skills and enthusiasm. She painted china beautifully; had the finest perennial garden in our neighborhood; gave the most elaborate lunch, dinner and card parties; drove a horse and buggy, kept at the local livery stable; made all my clothes and her own' played games and loved puzzles, like charades, ardently. She was an early photo fan, with a long box-camera that held a roll of one hundred films, her entire summer's take, and left a clear record of my girlhood in journals of our vacations that show an easy fluid style of writing, though perhaps the contents are only interesting to me. Unfortunately, illness and several serious operations quite changed her personality in her last decade, so that I was able to repay her for the good upbringing she gave me, by playing nurse and serving as her elevator over the stairs, several times a day.

As children, my future husband [Donald - she actually calls him "Grandpa" in this account] and I lived only a mile apart, he in Newtonville, I in the next village, suburban West Newton. Though we later lived on the same street, two houses apart, we never met until we were about thirty and he was engaged to Jeanne's mother, Ethel Jaynes. He has so well covered our physical environment, common to us both, that I can omit much of that. We too played group games; in the street, of course, as no one had a lawn or yard big enough to stage them. Hill, Dill, come over the Hill; Still Pond (that might have been "Palm"}, no more Moving, and the great favorite, Prisoners' Base. There were lots of girls but few boys of my age on Prince Street so we missed the fun of mixed baseball. To the infinite disgust of my husband and sons, I have never understood the game, and cared less. We punged on grocers' sleighs (standing on the runners, six or more of us). We coasted and even bobsledded in the streets, as there were no dangerous automobiles in those days.

But too many of my afternoons were spent indoors, making pans of fudge and penuchi, pulling molasses candy, and peppermints. My aunt too was inordinately fond of candy, and drove home from Bradshaw's, the dear old couple who turned out delicious home-made candies in Newtonville, every week with five pounds of assorted sweets; chewy chocolate caramels, guaranteed to locate and remove any unwary filling, crunchy peanut brittle, to break off a few chips here and there, marvelous sugared almonds, chocolate sugared peanuts (they were the cheapest, so she usually bought ten pounds), and most devastating of all, molasses taffy, wrapped in yellow oiled paper, that would even extract any first tooth that was approaching rejection. These were all stored in the top drawer of her desk, subject to petty larceny at almost any time, and so plentiful that the larceny was hardly discovered or even suspected. The result - my mother often rec4eived dentistry bills of $100 or more, and I spent wretched Saturday mornings all through the years, none of us ever dreaming of the cause. Pure candy couldn't hurt anyone. No wonder I joined so cooperatively in the No-candy regime, when we had children of our own. We were considered hard-hearted by our fellow parents.

I remember that one of Grandpa's aunts came from California to visit us, bringing the customary guest gift, a five-pound box of chocolates. She never tired of repeating the tale of how I opened the box and turned to the six small children present, "Children, come here, here is a chance to smell of chocolates," and they all gathered seriously about, each in turn burying his little nose as close as possible to the delectable odor. To her it was the acme of cruelty, to them with their keen noses a genuine treat. Of course when they entered public school, our control over sweets weakened. The twins, our most rebellious offspring, started having caries. Our logical answer to that was to make them earn half their dentists' bills, in hard labor. Jeanne, who never cared for candy and ate very little, had some trouble, possibly due to the poor circulation on the paralyzed side of her face [Jeanne developed polio as a young child], but Mary, Billy and Peter got to college age without a single cavity. Could I fail to believe that the candy ban, plus plenty of milk, oranges and a well-balanced diet had made the difference between their teeth and mine?

Our summer vacations were always spent at Beverly Farms, where Uncle Arthur's parents had a lovely place built high on a ledge of rock overlooking Misery and Baker's Islands. Jyst below us stood Oliver Wendell Holmes' summer home. His birthday came in August, as I remember, and when he had his eighty-second, he gave a party for all the children of the neighborhood. I must have beenn about six, because I remember being taken on his lap - and told to pull up a tulip that seemed to be growing in a pot on his desk. Very hesitantly I did so, to his amusement, and found that the "earth" was just a cover for a dish of candy that he then invited me to sample. That may well have been his last burthday - and I was very fortunate to have had that contact with greatness.

Another result of our summers in Beverly was learning to sail a boat. Unitarians seldom go to church in the summer, so Uncle Arthur engaged a comfortable, tubby catboat called the "Ralph," every Sunday morning of every summer that we were there. Our usual run was over to see the yachts hathered at Marblehead, but once we went up the coast to the Isle of Shoals, which gave me my first taste of cruising. In later years we actually lived on his big schooner, the "Corona," and sailed many times from New York to Mt. Desert. But until I married, my sailing was pretty theoretical, largely learned by watching others. However, the love for the sport was all there, and perhaps the best days oif our lives were spent in boats, working up from the little "Zephyr" to the "Georgie Bowden," in which we spwent nine months, getting as far south as Havana, Cuba.

In early years my best friend was a girl of Scottish descent, Dora Burr. We played with and dressed dolls, bg and little, bicycled and made candy together; in fact, we were inseparable. If I were to criticize my good aunt Lizzie, it was that she was too perfect a housekeeper. My dolls and I were relegated to a cold attic room, and friends, muddy, messy or otherwise, were not exactly welcomed. So I played at Dora's almost every afternoon for years, until our Unitarian minister, Mr. Jaynes, built a house on Prince Street nearby, and his daughter also wanted to be my "best friend." That was the first rift in the lute; two's company, three's a crowd! and oil and water just can't be mixed. Ethel Jaynes had the advantage of going to the same church and dancing school with me, thus having many identical social affairs, but I was honestly very fond of both of them, and had to steer a course of diplomacy from then on until I left West Newton. Ethel was much more of an outdoor girl. She it was who organized the street games; we spent innumerable afternoons playing croquet on her lawn (even on Sunday since it was completely hidden from the street. Oh, those wicked Unitarians!) There were monthly sociables for the young people, at which each Sunday School class in turn took over the entertainment, so we were often involved in plays or programs together. Dora drew into her Scottish shell, a little hurt and, I am afraid, a little jealous, but I did my best to keep up our friendship. I had to admit that there was more fun at Ethel's house, and there were periods when I practically lived there, especially when Mother and I moved to my Grandmother's in Newtonville, so that I could attend Newton High School, my uncle having moved to New York.

I went through the entire public school system, up to the sophomore year in high school, and believe it was an excellent education, lacking only on the cultural side. I didn't stay in Newton High long enough to study with "Andy George," the only stimulating English teacher I can recall, so when I moved to New York to rejoin the Lukes, and entered my first private school, the Brearley, I found myself severely handicapped in modern languages and English, but better grounded in Latin and mathematics than my classmates. I had intended to go on to Vassar College, at the instigation of a friend of Mother's, but having experienced the pain of entering a new school as a stranger, I was easily induced to consider joining my new friends and try for Bryn Mawr. They had all passed off half of their examinations in the previous June. I had to bone up for the entire set of eleven separate, three-hour tests that last spring - a grueling experience, keeping me at my studies morning, noon and night, with no recreation beyond an occasional game of ping-pong, or pinochle, or a Saturday matinee. Of course life in a New York apartment offers few opportunities, anyway, so I probably read fewer novels. In any case, I passed with one condition in Greek and Roman history, which, paradoxically, I had studied for three years, but found invariably boring; due, I believe, to the teaching methods. Five to ten pages of the textbook to memorize at home and give back in class the next day, date for date, battle for battle, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and a quiz on Friday, then forget nine-tenths of it on Saturday. No contribution by the teacher at all. She just knew when we were right or wrong, and said so in no uncertain terms. What a wasted opportunity on both sides!

The original plan was for me to go to college just one year, to get a taste of college life, as my aunt's health made great demands on my mother's strength. So I tasted deeply of the extra-curricular during Freshman year. I reveled in dramatics, glee club, even sports a bit, up to my capacities, earning my class numerals for playing on the second team in basketball, and of course countless "muggled chocolate" parties, but postponed serious studying until the week before midyears. Result: I flunked philosophy, to my complete surprise and horror. I promptly embarked on a reformation and thereafter had no difficulty with any courses. Had I not lowered my average by that silly first term, I would have made the "first ten," Bryn Mawr's equivalent of a "magna." My average for the four years was 87%. They were four very happy years, with no outside distractions such as my daughters had to contend with. We made our own fun right there together. Classmates who lived nearby often invited us to their homes, but there was practically no dating. As a class, we have a very good marriage record, but we just felt that all that was temporarily postponed. We amused each other sufficiently not to feel bored!

We moved back to West Newton a year after my graduation to build the dream-house that my aunt had envisioned for many years, on a lot on the corner of Prince and Chestnut Streets, but she died very quickly of a brain tumor before it was finished. My mother and I had to take over the responsibility of completing and decorating this mansion, the finest we had ever lived in, but we were never very happy in it. My uncle, Arthur Luke, in spite of great business prosperity ( he rose from a bank clerk to be the treasurer of the new giant, the U.S. Steel Corporation) had been gradually developing into a confirmed alcoholic, and had been pretty hard to take for years. But by now all his inhibitions were off, and the evening meal was a purgatory we had to endure until he finally married an unfortunate German girl from New York. My mother and I were then free to move away to an apartment in Boston. I had always had a yen for nursing, and in the face of family opposition I had made an appointment with the head of the Children's Hospital nursing school. She asked about my educational record, and I began with, "Well, I went two years to Newton High School," and was promptly interrupted. "Oh my dear, you would do better to go back and get your high school diploma, and then come and see me." I very meekly proffered my Bryn Mawr A.B., whereat she looked at me incredulously. That will give a picture of how immature I looked (and probably was) even at twenty-four. Of course I was accepted, even measured for my uniforms; then I came home to confess. Pandemonium broke loose! The family doctor, the minister's wife, the neighbors, all were enlisted to beat me down. "Your frail constitution will never stand the terrific strain of nursing." "You will probably get T.B., and think of all those germs in a hospital." My family were painted as a long-suffering group who had sacrificed their only sunshine, for my four years of college, and now deserved better of me. I was immature and weak-kneed, because I capitulated, and gave up what would have been an ideal career for me, with a broken heart.

I turned to social service, but could only stand two years of it. It was so nosey; I felt utterly inadequate to advise and interfere in the lives of people, older than I, who had real experience where mine was quite theoretical. I was supposed to adopt an attitude of distrust toward all their statements, until I had verified them by the confirmation of relatives, neighbors, and employers. It all went against my grain and my desire to give real help instead of superficial, involved me in situations that had great repercussions in later life. So I drifted into teaching, a much more congenial occupation. For one year at the Hyde Park Home for crippled children, I taught most of the grades from kindergarten to high school. The high school student took the kindergarten group in the morning, while I worked out short cuts to keep the six grades who were under me, up to their normal standing, so that they could return to their home schools without loss of grade, when they were discharged. Then in the afternoon I taught three of four subjects to the older girl. For this whirlwind of activity I received the princely sum of $25 per month, enough to cover my train fare to Hyde Park, and to purchase some materials for busy work. The experience did more for me than for the kids, but they were so happy to have school to break the boredom of hospitalization, and so natural and patient, in spite of their handicaps--some on stretchers, all with braces and crutches--that I felt well repaid. But one year was enough.

In 1913 Ethel Jaynes had asked me to be the maid of honor at her wedding to Donald Macomber in June. I really felt it an honor since we had been separated for so many years, I in New York and Bryn Mawr, she in Paris studying singing, and on her return busy with pupils in both music and French. I had made a new friend, Ethel Freeman, through the Lend-a-Hand Dramatic Club. We gave Gilbert and Sullivan operas and various plays for charity, and she and I used to run a vacation-house for working girls, recommended to us by the Bennett Street Infirmary, at the little old farmhouse in Ashfield that we had bought for $500, with one hundred acres of cut-over woodland. We named it Journey's End, as it was a long trip in those days, from Boston, by rail and the last part by horse and buggy. The Club financed our venture, but for us it was altogether a rewarding experience. I learned to cook, to garden, to manage a horse and a cow, and later to drive a model T Ford. To return to the wedding, I had been trying to get the vegetable garden at Journey's End all seeded before June 17, the wedding day, and had developed a tremendous sunburn blister on the nape of my neck. As the minister's daughter, Ethel had to have a big church wedding. At the rehearsal, the best man, who had assumed the running and criticism of the occasion, announced loudly after the first time down the aisle, "Everyone was in step but the maid of honor," which didn't exactly endear him to me. The next day came; I wore a luscious apricot low-necked gown (it was the year of hobble skirts) with turquoise details. Ethel Freeman had plastered my neck with actor's grease paint, and did a professional make-up job, which really covered the raw skin, and I wore a heavy pearl necklace! At the familiar chords we started to march down the aisle, six bridesmaids and ushers, behind me; at about the tenth pew, pop went my string of beads, scattering in every direction! The entire wedding-party demonstrated superb self-control and did not wink an eyelash, though stepping warily, while kind guests on the aisle seats gathered most of the pearls, after we had passed.

My only other experience in a church wedding was equally disheartening. When about six years old, I acted as flower-girl for an aunt.. As I passed proudly down the aisle behind the bride, scattering rose petals, I heard a man on the end-seat whisper vocally to his wife, "My God, will you look at that child's legs--broomsticks!" I had some undiagnosed illnesses and had suffered from excruciating leg pains. A physical examination when I was in my twenties showed one leg shorter than the other. Dr. Lovett of Boston, one of the first men to investigate polio, felt that I had almost certainly had a mild attack as a small child, which atrophied my calf muscles. But the careless comment hurt even more than ever did the polio.

The next winter I took a secretarial course at the Bryant & Stratton School, but before I had earned my diploma, I came down with severe tonsilitis, and was advised to drop it and recuperate for tonsilectomy. While I was convalescing from the operation, a great tragedy came to us all. Ethel Macomber died after the birth of her twin sons. It was the first time that death had hit in my own generation and was a profound shock. Her husband had been my medical director for a short time before that, so I saw a good deal of him after the funeral, since I wanted to help as much as I could with the babies. Finally he told me that it was her wish that I should bring up her children; so we were quietly married six months later in our Brookline apartment. He was in bed with his O.D. shirt over his pajamas, and unable to do more than whisper his responses because he had been taken with septic sore throat while visiting me, just before. The next morning he left to join his Army medical group in New York, and I departed for the Berkshires for recuperation, but came down with acute sinusitis. Not a very joyful honeymoon, but--we didn't know about the power of Vitamin C to raise resistance to infections in those days. From this point his story joins mine, so I need add only a few words about our family life.

He was a very busy doctor and I had to learn the diplomatic art of handling his home telephone calls, and keeping professional secrecy. It was still the day of plentiful servants. As our family grew from three to six, I gradually added one and then two maids to our menage, not realizing that perhaps I was adding an equal amount of trouble along with their help. When we moved to Lincoln, trying to escape urban sophistication, we needed another girl to look after them, and eventually Donald's parents came to live with us there, so there was a family of fifteen housed and fed under our roof, like a small hotel. I was an unpaid chauffeur, dashing to Waltham, five miles away, for food-shopping, driving the maids to the bus for their respective days off, taking children to appointments, in short, chasing my own tail! But, all the same, we had wonderful days in Lincoln--coasting and skiing on our own hill, camping and skating by Sandy Pond, just feasting our eyes on the marvelous view of Wachuset and Monadnock. We raised cocker spaniels and chickens and turkeys, even the kittens that raised themselves only too well, were fun up to a point. Each child was permitted to keep one from a batch produced by our black cat, Mimi, soon after we arrived in Lincoln. Such names--Fluffy, Muffy, Tuffy, Buffeets, Gliddy-gladdy. I can't recall them all. Eventually the seven became about twenty-seven, and our house became infested with fleas, so the order for deportation went forth. One fine day I drove to the Angell Memorial with about twenty frightened, frantic, mewing cats, cats, and kittens seething about my shoulders and lap. What a trip! I felt like the man from St. Ives, but finally dumped them with intense gratitude at the hospital, and brought home about ten pounds of moth flakes, which, liberally sprinkled over and under rugs, solved the flea problem, and peace settled on our home once more.

After the great depression struck, and families had small use for sterility experts, we knew that we could not keep all that help, or run that beautiful but enormous house without them. So we took the bull by the horns (or tail) and found a simple house in Squantum, close to the ocean, which we had sorely missed in Lincoln, and where we could live without servants! Liberation, Independence, I learned the sweetness of those words! Donald helped organize the children into a service squad; chores were no longer artificial. The boys took care of some chickens, the girls learned housework and ironing, and all six of them eventually achieved the ability to cook and serve an acceptable dinner, once a week. I had to prepare Sunday Dinner only. I believe that skill has stood by them as a real asset in after life. We felt that it was a very successful experiment, as family esprit de corps gradually grew stronger and stronger. When they began leaving for college, we had a maid come in by the day--faithful Bertha--but after we moved to Brunswick, we were permanently on our own.

Our Brunswick days have been the best of all, watching our grandchildren grow and develop, knowing that their parents still love to come back to us, whenever they can, and feeling that we have room for one and all. They can be close at hand but never underfoot. Our children have done us the unspoken compliment of bringing up their families on much the same principles that they grew under themselves. They all have the habit of good manners, they do not feel that the world is their oyster, but that one gets out of it about what one puts in. They earn their fun and their parents' love and approval by good behavior. And there are no eating problems! The rules are simple: small helpings but an unlimited number, clean your plate or leave the table (without dessert, and without comment), no arguments, no recriminations, no coaxing. No between-meal snacks, if the main meal was unfinished, no concentrated sweets or cake, (except the birthday sponge cake) no water insisted upon; rather satisfy their thirst with milk or orange juice at any time of day. We have never known this approach to fail, but are pained by the constant sight of whimsical, "picky" eaters among children brought up on the "What-do-you-want" system, an outgrowth of demand feeding.

They are a heart-warming bunch of kids, and we are very proud of them all. We would like to live a hundred years to see what they become, provided that we could keep our health that long. We have been very lucky so far. Perhaps the luckiest thing was that "Aunt Teddy" came to live with us, and made life so easy for us both, that we really ought to go far beyond the three score and ten. We believe that the primary factor in longevity is one's inherited constitution. As we read back over these pages and see how many of our ancestors lived to eighty, ninety and even a hundred, under far greater hardships than we have ever known, we feel that the luck is on our side, if we only use it well. That, of course, brings up the question whether freedom from hard work is the blessing we tend to think it.