Alexander Frank Tripp, memoir of a Westport Farmer

Alexander Frank Tripp (1920 – 2004), an autobiography

Alexander Tripp in his barn

“I was born in 1920. My father went to get Dr. Hicks in South Dartmouth on Slades Corner Road. The snow was so deep (4 feet) that he drove his horse and sleigh over stone walls and through fields and woods. It was so cold that winter that Buzzards Bay was frozen over to Martha’s Vineyard.”

Born in Westport, the son of Arthur and Agnes Tripp, Alexander was a 1938 graduate of Westport High School and a 1939 graduate of Stockbridge School of Agriculture, School of Animal Husbandry at UMass Amherst. He was a partner in Bojuma Farm before purchasing White Rock Farm in Little Compton in 1960.

His autobiography covers his childhood in Westport MA, life on the farm on Horseneck Road and Main Road, stories of rum running, chicken farms, dairy farming, and turnips. It provides an authentic, unfiltered record of Westport’s agricultural community during the 20th century.

Alexander Frank Tripp Born 1920

My Grandfather had bought the farm on Horseneck Road for his grown children to run. When my father and mother were married, they lived and worked on the farm with Uncle Willis and Aunt Helen. It was what you might call a satellite farm.

I was born in 1920. My father went to get Dr. Hicks in South Dartmouth on Slades Comer Road. The snow was so deep ( 4 feet) that he drove his horse and sleigh over stone walls and through fields and woods. It was so cold that winter that Buzzards Bay was frozen over to Martha’s Vineyard.

In the fall of 1921 my Grandfather had put up a barn on the Horseneck Road property and had a big clambake. I can remember going to it in my mother’s laundry basket. Those are my first memories, the new barn, and the smell of the clambake.
Later Willis rebuilt his house around the old house which stood there. There was a big cellar where he kept his eggs and grain for his chickens and on the other side a root cellar where Aunt Helen kept her preserves. Well water came from a spring. Milk was kept cool in that spring. Years later they made a pond there below the barn.

I can remember that when I was very small, I was kept in a wooden crib. The mattress part could come out and then it could be flipped over and used as a play pen. When I jumped, I could make the entire playpen move, and sometimes tip it over.

In 1923-1924 Pa worked at painting houses for George Russell in the summer and cut wood in the winter. In 1924 we moved to Milton Wood’s on Sodom Road. When I was a little kid, I loved cats but my mother hated them. She would always stop whatever she was doing and make me take the cat out. She didn’t like cleaning up whatever the cat did in the house.

I was born in 1920. My father went to get Dr. Hicks in South Dartmouth on Slades Corner Road. The snow was so deep (4 feet) that he drove his horse and sleigh over stone walls and through fields and woods. It was so cold that winter that Buzzards Bay was frozen over to Martha’s Vineyard.In the fall of 1921 my Grandfather had put up a barn on the Horseneck Road property and had a big clambake. I can remember going to it in my mother’s laundry basket. Those are my first memories, the new barn, and the smell of the clambake.I can remember that when I was very small, I was kept in a wooden crib. The mattress part could come out and then it could be flipped over and used as a play pen. When I jumped, I could make the entire playpen move, and sometimes tip it over.I can remember that when I was very small, I was kept in a wooden crib. The mattres part could come out and then it could be flipped over and used as a play pen. When I jumped, I could make the entire playpen move, and sometimes tip it over.

I remember when my brother Art and I both had impetigo. We swelled up under the arms.
Quite a project getting over that back then as there were no antibiotics. Our lips would break out at the corners of our mouth.My mother made me take a nap every afternoon. One day I decided to break that habit and went over to the barn. When it was about time for me to get up from the nap, my mother came looking for me but didn’t see me. I had crawled under a pile of hay and made off I was asleep. She went back to the house. After about half an hour, I felt guilty
and went home.While we were living at Milton Wood’s, Art and I had the job of scraping the platform off in the barn every day. One time the cow kicked the hoe out of my hand and it went through the window, breaking the glass. Jim Tripp worked for Milt Wood and really gave me heck.While we were living at Milton Wood’s, Art and I had the job of scraping the platform off in the barn every day. One time the cow kicked the hoe out of my hand and it went through the window, breaking the glass. Jim Tripp worked for Milt Wood and really gave
me heck.In 1925, I can remember, we saw two airplanes going over us. They were the first airplanes I’d ever seen. They each had double wings and were flying side by side. Me an Art both watched them as long as we could. Somewhere around that time there was a
total eclipse of the sun and my mother smoked glass so we could look at it.My mother would sometimes talk about the May basket my father left her. It was made up of June bugs. People don’t give May baskets anymore, it’s a thing of the past and they especially wouldn’t be giving them full of June bugs.In 1925 we had a big wind storm and it blew down most of the trees in front of Sylvia Wood’s place. One of them took down the corner of the roof on the eve side of the house.
Holland King cleaned up all trees and the big butts he hauled up the corner of Charlotte White Road. He rolled them into the ditch on the north side of the road. They were still
there in the 1950-60’s. Long time before they rotted away.
Up to Fred Wood’s the jackass would bay every night. We could hear him down where we lived. There was a stone crusher that was used to crush stone in the road. One foot of crushed stone, that was a ton. They moved it around from place to place. That was the last place they moved it to.

One day, Art began to pick flowers along the side of the road. He said he was going to take them down to old lady Peckham so when he went, I went with him. I stopped at the gate and he went in to give them to her. I was scared but he didn’t have any trouble. She was crazy. Years later I heard that when they were working on the road, she came out with a gun. Pumpkin Head Haskell was working on the road and he dropped everything and ran.I went with my father down to Emile Beaulieu’s. He was milking cows when we got there. My father said, “it’s cold, isn’t it”, and Emile said, “yes, all I’ve got on is tin pants” So on the way home I asked my father why Emile was wearing tin pants and that was when I understood that it was his French accent and he meant “thin” pants. Another time I went with my father over to Grillo’s to get rhubarb so my mother could can it. He had a small field of it. 100′ x 100′ surrounded by walls and we picked quite a bit of rhubarb. I know we used to go up to Norman Gifford’s down Martin’s Lane. There were two houses down in there. Eventually, that house burned down. Hazel Cahill was one of those Giffords. She always asks me how Arthur is doing when I see her. She is his age.Come Christmas, Art and I both got sleds and we would go up on top of this shed which was banked with dirt and we could slide right out to the road.1 garage stood along the laneway that went to Devol Pond. That’s where Milt Wood rept his canopy truck and Jim Tripp had farm machinery to keep in there on rainy days. I vould get his goat by scraping something on the cement floor. He was always threatening to throw me out in the rain if I didn’t stop it.

Milt Wood had bought the school house down below Ike’s place where one of the twins now lives. They moved it up to Milton Wood’s on the laneway to the pond. There was a little laneway and they set it up. All the farmers grew oats then for their horses. Milton Wood had his oats put in it and they had a nice peak and pile in there. While they were doing something there I ran through those oats barefoot and flattened them out all over the place. I got the devil for that.Milton Wood had a pair of oxen, brass ends on their horns. At his mother’s, Sylvia Wood’s, they had a place to throw the oxen. They could put them in and “throw them”
Strap the oxen in and tip them right over so as to shoe them.Sometimes Milton Wood would ask me and Art if we wanted to go around the square.

We would go down Charlotte White Road and Main Road and then Milton would stop at Charlie Woods to see a cow he would be thinking about buying in the future. He always had to go see them 2 or 3 times before he bought them. When we left, we would go down Adamsville Road and up Sodom Road. That was around the square. Art’s first day at school at Brownell’s Corner School (now the corner of Sanford Rd and Rte 177) he was missing at recess. My Aunt Jenny was the teacher and thought she knew where he had gone, since she knew my mother and her sisters and some other women had made goodies to sell in a tent they had at the old fairgrounds on Old County Road at the Head. Aunt Jenny got him before he got there, but at noontime he made it all the way down there.In 1923, my sister Virginia was born and then Gloria in 1925 when we moved to Ed King’s place across from Tom Petty’s and Grundy’s on Old County Road, now Rte. 177.
Ike Tripp plowed the garden for us. He had a horse named Handsome. He was only a small horse but could pull anything, but he would always start with a jump. He came with a plow and harrow. He made one pass across the garden and started back and hit a stone with the plow and of course Handsome jumped and broke the whiffletree. That’s the thing that goes behind the horse to hold him to the wagon. Ike had to unhook, take the wagon and go back home to get another whiffletree. Uncle Granville had given him that horse and a cow for a wedding present. Granville always kept a pair of horses, but he liked big showy horses that could pull a lot.Our job, when we didn’t have anything else to do, was raking up glass. There was originally an old dump there and when Pa thought we needed something to do he would put us out there.Art and me used to ride down the hill there on an old axle and two wheels. That was great fun until we hit a rock and went flying. That was the end of that business. When we were about 5-6 years old, we had to walk up to Brownell’s Corner School and Harold Amaral (he was 10-11 years old) used to pound little kids, so when we were coming home at night we always walked in groups, with the older kids watching out for the little kids. Roy Petty lived in the house below. He was Tom Petty’s son. He had a motorcycle and sometimes on Sunday he would come and get my father and they would go to New Bedford to see other motorcyclist ride in the cyclone.In the 20’s, before my Grandfather Tripp died, we would go up there to visit him every Sunday and I can remember my Grandmother’s kitchen, how good it smelled and she always had a red table cloth on the table. She was always busy and never came into theliving room while we were visiting my Grandfather. I don’t remember her, but Russell Tripp says she always moved at a trot, never walked.My grandfather would sit on a couch in the living room, Art on one side and me on the other side. Gramp would put two pennies between his fingers on each hand and Art and I would try to pick them out while Pa would talk to Gramp. We always succeeded in getting the pennies out of his hand just before we went home. Gramp was a modern farmer. He was the first one to have a pump to pump water from the well with a gasoline engine. He even had the agency to sell the pumps. I went to his funeral in 1923, it was the first funeral I went to and I went to Gramma Tripp’s in 1933.About my great grandfather, Howard Tripp. He had 17 kids, 4 boys and 13 girls. A lot of the daughters died of TB when they were 6 – 12 years old. He was a veterinarian and a horse trader. He would go to Canada and buy horses. George Mosher’s grandmother, Carrie Tripp, used to tell me what a good veterinarian he was. She said that if her folks had a sick horse or cow they would get him and he would prescribe a medicine and she would have to go out and pick it. Different kinds of herbs. She claimed he was an excellent vet. My grandfather Alexander was the youngest of those boys. Another Tripp, John Tripp married one of his daughters and that was John Tripp, father of Audrey Tripp.I remember when Pa brought home frost fish. These were Whiting that would come up on Horseneck Beach every winter. A storm with northwest wind and tide going out fast would bring them in and they would be frozen on the beach for the picking up. He would clean and salt them and put them in the cellar in crocks. I can’t remember how my mother
would prepare these fish, but I think she fried them.

Pa bought a pig at Antone Viera’s auction on Old County Road. We asked him how he could tell which one it was since he didn’t bring it home with him. He marked it but he didn’t tell us how, so when the pig arrived there was a notch in the ear. That was the mark. On the coldest night of the year she had 3-4 pigs. We brought them in the house to keep them warm, but they all died.Pa bought a cross cut saw from Sears and Roebuck. We took it to the edge of the swamp and cut a dead tree.Tom Petty came over at breakfast one morning. He had his shot gun and he said he had an eagle stealing his hens and it was on the peak of the barn. He wanted to know if he could shoot it, so he shot it. It had a wing span of 6-7 feet. It was an Arctic Owl (all white). I saw it about 20 years later. It was hanging in the corn crib over at Tom Petty’s.

Another thing, they had a gang that worked about two months down in back of Tom Petty’s. All I know about that is that they were cutting a path into the woods, eventually they hauled a mill stone out of there.Pa would take us down to Walter Kirby’s store at the Head of Westport when we wanted to get something. Of course we wanted candy, so we would ask him for pennies. You could get quite a lot of candy for a penny. Once in a great while we would ask for a nickel and we would get it some of the time.When we needed a haircut my father would take us to Potter’s Barbershop. The barbershop was located in the house Pa would later buy on Main Road. The haircut cost 15 cents. When we were done we would walk home by ourselves – 3 miles.

On my first day of school I was chewing gum. The teacher made me spit it out and I was crying because I had only had it one day. You could usually chew it for a week.
Pa ran for assessor in 1927-28 and he got elected.My father bought the place on Main Road, where we used to get the haircuts, on April 5, 1928, Virginia’s birth day and we started to move. Art and I led the cow down there from Old County Road, about three miles. Main Road north of Charlotte White Road was like going through a tunnel. There used to be a big wide space in the road north of Charlotte White Road. Later years when the town widened the road they eliminated that. It was a beautiful day. I could already milk that cow. When we got there we tied her up and then we went to the dump, down back under the pine tree. Art found a half cent piece and a lot of odds and ends in there and we spent a long time there. In this dump we found the
barber Potter’s old shoes, one shoe had to be elevated and we found 6-7 of these rocker’s that fit onto his shoes. Junk that interested us. After a while we cut a path along the back to widen it out some. Note: The Tripp Homestead Alexander speaks about here is presently the location of the restaurant Bittersweet Farm and the farm house is now A.S. Deams. Up in the first lot in the back where we eventually had a garden, there were 2 big black snakes out there sunning themselves every day. They would go into the hole when they heard us. Joe Travis and I went up there one day to see them. One went into the hole but the other one came after us. He raised himself up about 6 inches from the ground and came lopping after us fast. We ran, Joe went back but it was just going into its hole.In this field where we eventually had the garden, there were always a lot of arrowheads t be found. George Mosher always seemed to find a lot of them. I had quite a few. I also
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found a hatchet, blunt at both ends and a groove around it. That disappeared when my mother’s house got broken into. I always thought there were a lot more arrowheads down the hill from my father’s and Harry Kirby’s line but we never went down there and dug in the bushes to find them. I think that the Indians liked to camp at that spot where the brook comes through and the bank is nice with clover and moss. We liked it there too.We had a rainy, foggy day and Pa went blue berrying. He got lost but came home with 10 quarts of blueberries. He was over in back of Winsor Tripp’s. Years later I went with

The neighborhood boys were the Zaro boys, Clarence Woodcock and the Bowles boys and Roy Petty. They were most of the guys I grew up with. Bert Hathaway had a place
up where the Hancocks live now. He had rented that place. He was a horse dealer. They killed the old nags and took their hide off them and hauled them back up in the woods. the “bone lot” we called it. We would go up there on Sunday morning and they would be breaking green horses. They would buy a carload of them from out west and to break them they would hook them to the lumber wagon with front and rear wheels tied together on both sides and they would drag it like a sleigh. After a couple of sessions of that they were pretty well worn out and pretty well trained. After that they would team it with one green horse and one draft horse. He was pretty well trained by then.
Winsor Tripp’s father, Steve Tripp was a horse trader, mostly when the family lived way up in the woods, up Stevio’s Lane. Night time he used to be up to Harry Kirby’s two or three nights a week and he would go home any time around 11:00 or midnight. One night he came through my father’s cornfield. May have been a wet foggy night and we could see

was laid out in the living room That was the first dead person I had ever seen. I was amazed how clean everything was in the house. They lived as poor as any one could live.
Old Zaro used to raise some oats. They only came about knee high, he would cut them with a sythe when they got about half way dried out he would begin to make haycocks out of them. In fact, he hayed the same way. Every night he would have the hay all cocked up. If it looked like rain, 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning he would get the boys up and get it loaded and take it to the barn. The next day he would have them out in the road raking up
every little strand of oats they had lost. How they lived through it, I don’t know, but the old
man lived to be almost 100

Pa bought a cow from Bert Hathaway for $10. He brought her home and she died the next day. He bought a goose from him and brought her home and she laid an egg every other day and we kids would fight over who was going to get it for breakfast. She stopped laying come fall and my father killed her for Thanksgiving. The goose was about 20 years old. It had a lot of grease in it and my mother saved it. She never threw anything out. The grease got rancid and she always put it in cakes so we had rancid cakes for the next year.Clayty Tripp lived at Bert Hathaways. He used to shoot the horses and skin them. One Sunday Art and I were up there and he shot a horse. Bert said he shot it with both barrels.
Clayty was skinning it, Art and I watched him. He was asking Art about the teachers.
They were all women. We went home and when we went back in the afternoon, Bert was finishing skinning the horse. Clayty had gone to sleep right aside of it. Clayty used to dig wells and stone them up. That is what he was, a stone mason. He came down to the
house night times so my father could take him someplace, to a dance where he would play his fiddle. While we were eating supper, he would play the fiddle for us and sing a few songs. He used to get under a big tree and call the crows. When he got a big group of them he would shoot some. There was a bounty on crows of $1.00 a piece.

Birdie Peckham lived at the town farm. Most of the time he would stand at the end of Kirby Road on Drift Road and stand at the water trough. He would keep a straw across his mouth sideways and the politicians, especially my father, when they would go to
One morning he was sitting on the cemetery wall at the corner of Main and Hix Bridge Road reading the paper. Somebody came along and asked him what the news was. He
said the New York boat had turned upside down. He had the paper upside down. He was a character.My brother Art was over to Willis’s for the day about that time. About midnight that night, when he got home, he woke up with pains all over him. He had been swinging in the barn on the hay rope. He grabbed the wrong rope and the rope pulled right through the pulley and landed on the cement floor. He was all bruised up. Pa rebuilt the barn and the silo, and Art climbed up and put his foot on the roof of the barn, kind of stretched out there, slipped and fell on the rocks below. Another miserable night.Clarence Woodcock and I went down back and found some swamp apples. Before we got through, we went across the road and went up Milton Wood’s woodlot eating apples all the way. I had the worst bellyache I ever had. Never ate another one before nor after.We used to have to drive the milking cows down to Ephraim Tripp’s every day and the dry cows would be driven down to Frank Dean Tripp’s, George Mosher’s grandfather. My father went down there one day to check on them. The cow they just brought was a kicker. He got close to her before she calved. She knocked him down and rolled him around. The only way he got away from her was to reach up, grab her ear and bite right into it. He came home, cleaned up, but he missed his corn cob pipe He went back down to the pasture and found it. When we were driving the cows to Ephraim Tripp’s the first apples of the season would be down by Ephraim’s gate where we turned the cows into the pasture. Last of the apples were at Travis’ orchard along the side of the road.

Schools
I started school on Brownell’s Corner(1-2), then (2-3) at Booth’s Corner, then the Poin for 4th grade, 5th and 6th grade at Booth’s Corner School, the Factory School 7-8 and then High School at Central Village.

Boy Scouts
I joined the Boy Scouts when I was 13, 7th grade. On a special Sunday we went to church at the Union Church on Union Avenue. Charlie Holmes was the Scout Master a
Superintendent of the Sunday School at the Union Church. The first Sunday we went u to St. George’s Catholic Church on the Highland Road. All scouts went to that. The second year we went to the Union Church, not one Catholic kid went to that church service. That’s how much things jave changed. I got to be a life scout. One of my mer badges was for a 14 mile hike. To get the merit badge we had to have a composition (I words). I wrote it out and didn’t have no where near enough. To make enough words increased all the adjectives.We went to Pine Island with the boy scouts. That is a town-owned island off Willis’s shore. It was in September, and we had chowder. We had dug the clams there and cooked some crabs and we picked dangleberries and had them in the pan cakes. We were there several days.In 1934 the Boy Scout Troop was going to pick two boys to go to Washington DC to the International Boy Scout Jamboree. We collected $100. It was going to cost $50 each.
There were four of us going. I had to go over to Cherry and Webb in New Bedford with my folks to buy a whole new Boy Scout outfit. Two days before we were to leave, we got notice that there would be no Jamboree, that it was called off because of the polio epidemic (called infantile paralysis in those days) which was massive back then. The boys going were Freeman Meader, Wilbur Smith, Malcolm Collins, and myself. It wasn’t until years later I asked Milton Earle who financed the two extra boys. He said that the four fathers contributed $25 extra for the other 2 boys.

Anytime someone was coming from Maine or we would be going down to Maine, we ki would always be waiting for some chewing gum. That was a lump of sap off the fir tree Getting a chuck of that and you would have a good piece of gum after awhile. When yo were through chewing it you could put it up and it would dry up. In about 1937, I went with the Boy Scouts to New Hampshire. Just me from the Westport troop and 5 scouts from New Bedford. We went to Gorham and camped and at the Boy Scout campgroun The first day we walked up to the face of the Old Man of the Mountains and we walked around it and the next day another mountain. Finally along the last of it we walked up N Madison and across to Mt. Washington. That was an interesting walk. You got up abo the tree line where it’s all rocks. When we came back we came down by way of Tuckerman’s Ravine. That area all fills up with snow and is a dangerous place in the wintertime. Very tough walk.In 1934 my father took me to the city to buy shoes. We bought a pair of sneakers. My feet used to sweat at that time and the next day I went down to John Davis’s and when I came home my feet were stinking so much and sweating, I found out I had athletes foot.
So we got some Absorbine Jr. and in a week they got better.In 1934 I was delivering papers. We had three real cold days and nights. My father took me around in his car the first two nights, but by the 3rd night it was 8 degrees above at
4:00 in the afternoon and his car wouldn’t start. So I peddled the papers, bicycling sixteer and a half miles, nothing to it. One heel was a little cold, that’s all. The next morning it was 24 below.I had a paper route. I walked it down as far as John Davis’s, 6 days a week. Later I started my 16 mile route. Art stayed home because he had asthma, so he milked the cows.
We shared the profit. That turned out to be my bike riding training. I entered and won

three races, three bicycles. The first bike was supposed to be a balloon tire bike. I saw it at the Fall River Labor Union. When I got up there, 3-4 days later, it was just an ordinary bike, small tires. I’ve never had any use for labor unions after that. That was in 1936.Another race in ’38, no way would they let me in. They said no one else would enter if they let me in. I got mad and told them that I would get someone else to run the race and they would win it. So I got Johnnie Davis to go in it and he won it.Well, I remember back then we had apple trees north of the house. Baldwins and Rhode Island Greening. We would store them on the north side of the house until it got real cold, then we would put them in the cellar where all the vegetables for the winter were.
During the summer, about that time, lightening struck Roy Petty’s house on Charlotte White Road. Roy came down and called the fire department from our house. Art and I went up to see the house burning up. It didn’t burn, but made an 8″ x 12″ hole in the roof and filled the house with smoke. You could follow where the lightening went all around the house and pulled the trim nail out outside. We had a thunderstorm and we had
hailstones as big as marbles. At our back door they came down off the roof and we had a big pile of them. Ice in the summertime made us think of ice cream so my mother said we would make it if we picked the strawberries and if we went to Brillards Store to get the
condensed milk. So we made strawberry ice cream.In this period of time there was a bunch of wild dogs that ran between MacDonald s Slaughter house on Old County Road and Wood’s Slaughter house at Central Village. had an outbreak of rabbies so the Town of Westport hired someone to shoot them all which they did.

My father used to buy hen houses. He bought a hen house down there on Wordell’s Lane in Little Compton and a lot of wire fencing and he had Harry Kirby came down with a
horse and wagon and my father, brother and I went down there and started taking down wire fence. When Harry Kirby arrived, we loaded the hen house on the wagon. Harry started home with the hen house and we finished taking down the wire fencing, making a
truckload. We unloaded that hen house west of the path down back and that was the #2 hen house. Then he bought another hen house somewhere else and that was unloaded down to the north side of the farm. That was the #3 hen house. Eventually, he bought another one a little bigger than the three others. Then he bought one up there in Tiverton.
He bought a Willie’s car there and also a hen house. We knocked the hen house all apart, brought it home and built it onto another one.We always had a garden. My father planted what we thought were watermelons. Art and I watched them grow but they never seemed to be getting ripe so we opened one up one day and it was nowhere near ripe. Eventually, we found out why. They were citrons. My mother cooked some of them and they were real good. No one plants them any more.
My mother always had to start early in the spring and get her dandelions, her water cress, her cow slips, her blueberries, her black berries, huckleberries, dangleberries, cranberries and beach plums. As scared as she was of snakes, she still had to get those berries.Art had a go round with the teachers. One day they told him to stay in at recess but he said he was going out. The teacher stopped him going out and that led to the teacher trying to give him a lickin’. At recess, the kids were all looking in the windows, so at noontime they pulled the curtains down and two teachers tried to give him a lickin’. Miss Lanagan, his teacher, and Mary Partington in the other room. It ended up there was no lickin’, but the teachers each had a nosebleed and one of them had a black eye. When I peddled papers that afternoon, I found him at Winsor Tripp’s about 5:00 eating his dinner.

He was telling me about it but he got home about 6:00. My father had done chores and we were all eating supper. My father got Art’s story where he had been and why he wasn’t around. While we were eating supper, the teachers came and stopped out front and explained what had happened, expelling Art from school. Art had been saving all his school papers and my father told him to go get them. His papers were marked wrong, whether they were right or wrong, he was failing in all of his subjects, getting marks of 20- 50. The teacher’s pet had been correcting them. My father handed them to Lanagan and asked her what she thought of that. She looked at them and said she couldn’t explain it.
They left and later my father called Milton Earle, Superintendent, to tell him that Art had been expelled but would go to school at the next day. The next day Art went to school, my father had a lot of lobster pot rope. He took a coil of it down to the school about
10:30, knocked on the door and went right in. He told the teacher right in front of the class if she wanted to lick him this would help. Five days later Art was shipped to the
Head of Westport. He got along good with Mrs. Newman down there. He began to learn and got better marks.My brother Art kept chickens. Elmer Grundy came to get the grain order from Art and he found him in the brooder house coming out the door with a dead cat that had been stealing
his chickens. In catching the cat, he scared all of the week-old chickens into the corner and they were all dead too. But Art was happy, he got the cat. Another time there was another cat stealing my father’s chickens. Art and I saw him on the wall down in back of the orchard so we told my father and he got his shot gun. He shot at the cat and the cat jumped right up in the air about 2 feet. Apparently, nothing hit the cat because he was still around afterwards but Art came in the shop, the back part of the house, one night and told me the cat was upstairs in the open chamber and he shut the door on him. The cat went upstairs and we went up and found a hole in the side of the wall that went up into the open chamber. We finally got him cornered and after about a half hour or more we killed him.
He was a big cat, he weighed 12 lbs.1920’s – ’30’s. A few things back when we were kids. When anyone had a birthday, they got their noses greased. Olive tells about Fred Webb being there to see my father, so Fred got some grease and chased her all over the house and outside before he finally caught her and put some grease on her nose. Going to school back in the 30’s, May 1st was May Day and we always had a May pole with a big ribbon coming down for everyone at school.
There were two different colors, the paper ribbon that were carrying. Every other person went one way and then others went the other way. That wrapped the two different colors around the May pole. When that was done, we went the other way and unwrapped it.
Those two things are out of style now. Gone out of existence.If they didn’t have it with them they would take the order and bring it with them next time around. The fish man had anything in season. The meat man was Sanford’s truck and the bakers were Pomphrey, then there was Hathaway and Bond bakers. Then there was Kirby’s store. My father would go down there, set at the stove and talk with people about what was going on. They would set around the stove talking all politics and any gossip there was. Lauren Parks lived up on the hill and was running for Assessor. He had Frankie White go down to the store to see if he could find out about the elections and how things were going. So Frankie went under the store and got his ear right up to the hole in the floor right over Bill Ritter. Bill was chewing tobacco and spit and it went right into Frankie’s ear. Frankie got out of that. He used to have a bicycle and called it his bi-wheel.If they didn’t have it with them they would take the order and bring it with them next time around. The fish man had anything in season. The meat man was Sanford’s truck and the bakers were Pomphrey, then there was Hathaway and Bond bakers. Then there was Kirby’s store. My father would go down there, set at the stove and talk with people about what was going on. They would set around the stove talking all politics and any gossip there was. Lauren Parks lived up on the hill and was running for Assessor. He had Frankie White go down to the store to see if he could find out about the elections and how things were going. So Frankie went under the store and got his ear right up to the hole in the floor right over Bill Ritter. Bill was chewing tobacco and spit and it went right into Frankie’s ear. Frankie got out of that. He used to have a bicycle and called it his bi-wheel.Somebody hid it on him and he came into the store telling that somebody stole his bi-wheel. Lauren Parks had 3 geese that were always running out on the landing. Somebody

put an ad in the New Bedford paper, “Toulouse geese, call Lauren Park, Head of Westport”.Eventually, Kirby went out of business. Walter Kirby’s store was sold. First they cut it in half and moved the back half and made an apartment house out of it. The other half was
bought by Frank Azevedo and he went into the farm equipment business. He was selling Case machinery. Eventually his business got better and he moved up to the State Road in Dartmouth. Jimmy went to work for him along with Gerald Souza. He ended up putting
up television aerials all over the nearby towns and cities. Eventually, Frank went out of the machinery business. Bowling allies were the thing then, so he went into the bowling ally business and built the big one and went broke on it. Their time had gone by.I was out in the yard all day. I was about 10-11 years old in the spring of the year. Walter Kirby and his wife Gladys and Lizzie Gifford came by in the Ford delivery truck and stopped and asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. I told them sure and told my mother I
was going with them. The place we were going, I found out, was Peckham’s Greenhouse down here in Little Compton. Walter had come down to get a mess of different kinds of
plants to sell at the store. What I remember most was that the road was a dirt road and there were haystacks on both sides of the road. I guess that most of the hay went for the horses. Everybody had horses.Nat Haskell had a horse. He did a lot of work for George Russell. When he was working that horse you could hear him half a mile away cursing it. It was a big stallion horse and I guess that was all he could understand was the cursing.

nember one time we were all out in the back shop and on Main Road we decided that vould put Gloria in a bag and drop her through the scuttle down into the cellar. She willing. So we did it. Today she tells that we pretty near smothered her before we her out of the bag. Kids play.More on the 30’s. My father was the Treasurer of the Fall River Milk Producers. He would take us to the Academy Building for monthly meetings. We would go to the movie pictures there, never knowing what we were going to see. One time we saw Frankenstein.
Another time we took Albert Brownell with us. He had never been to a movie before.
We saw an exciting bar room fight and so forth. The next morning he came down to the house about 10:30. My father asked him how he liked the movies. He said gosh he never went to sleep until the rooster crowed in the morning.

In the late 1930’s, the two best movies that I remember were the ones my father wanted to see. He took Art and me to the movies to see them. The original Oregon Trail and the Grapes of Wrath. Those were two good pictures. Another fellow I remember was Will Rogers. He was on the radio and he got killed in an airplane crash in Alaska.

Other times my father would leave us off at my cousin Herbie Tripp’s on upper Sanford Road. In the winter, we would go down through the chicken yard to the edge of North Watuppa Pond. If we heard somebody coming down the sidewalk, we’d get out of there in a hurry. That would be the cop coming down. Later on, Herbie built an ice boat propelled by a motor with a propeller on the front of it. He got it on the pond one day, gave his father a ride, hit a crack on the ice, swerved and threw his father off and he slid a long, long way. His father didn’t get hurt because he had a heavy leather coat on. The next day the cops told him to take that machine off the ice. It would go 50 – 60 miles per hour and they were afraid somebody would get hurt.

They My cousin Herbie Tripp was stout and very strong. He only weighed 120 pounds. If he had somebody with him and had a flat tire he would loosen up the nuts on the wheels and then lift it off the ground so the other guy could change the wheel. No jack needed. First class mechanic and welder. He ended up working at Brown and Sharp, Quincy Shipyard and Wilcox in Fall River. He retired from making escape ladders for Salvo. In 1934 when it got so cold, down to 24 below, they only had 6′ of ice but a foot and a half of snow on top and in order to get the ice to freeze so that they could fill the ice house, he and his father, Mert and Herbie’s grandfather Lassond spent 3 days boring holes in the ice to let the water up so it would freeze, and then they went to icing and the ice was 20″ thick.
They filled the ice house at the Narrows then they went down Sanford Road where
Lassond had another ice house started. They began filling them. They got it half way up and the apparatus broke, the ice was too heavy so they quit icing for that year.

In the 1930’s Pa had bought the house on the landing at the head that Jack Dolman had lived in and owned by the town. The town had put it up to auction. He paid $50 for it.
This Maynard always wanted Pa to knock the house down. He didn’t have anything to do with him but he did call Pa once in a while to ask him why he hadn’t knocked it down.
One day he called Pa early in the morning and told Pa he would give him $200 for it. Pa said he would be right down to get the check. He had just came in from doing chores and for breakfast, he still had his boots on, dirty clothes and so forth, but didn’t change and went right down to Maynards and got the check. From there he went to Fall River and cashed the check. Later that day Maynard called back up and said he was backing out of the deal. He told Pa that he was going to stop payment on the check. Pa said that was all right, he had already cashed it. So later, Maynard burned the house down. That was the end of that deal.

Jack Dolman was Pa’s uncle. A veteran of the Spanish American War. He lived for his pension check. When he got it, there was a big party and he might be found laying around drunk anywhere at the Head of Westport.

My Aunt Evelyn told me that when my Grandfather was giving out orders, things to do, Arthur was never there. He would say, “Where’s Art”, but Art was up in a tree somewhere where Gramp couldn’t see him, escaping from work. Pa and his brothers along with Ike Tripp and his brothers used to go to Fall River on the train. They would meet the train about 7 or 8 at night going to Fall River from New Bedford. They would jump aboard it when it came across Davis Road. They went into the Rodman Street yards. When it came back at night they would be ready to ride it back home again.

In the 30’s, when Costa on Charlotte White Road cut his corn he always got a gang from Fall River. The girls told us when they were going to start cutting and where they were
going to start cutting. They were across the road west of Milton Wood’s wood lot so Art and I walked up there in the morning to check up. They were all happy, cutting the corn good. We went up again right after dinner to see how they were making out and they were all happy going along whacking the corn off any way they could from up to the top.
They had had too much booze, that was the trouble. The next day they got sobered up and did it right.

About 1936 the circus came to Westport on the railroad and made a fairground on North Sanford Road. My father took me and Art up to the circus to see them unload and put the tents up. They had something like 300 horses, both working horses and show and riding horses. Art and I got a job unloading a wagon. We got it unloaded and asked for our tickets to the circus. That was supposed to be payment. We got the tickets after hauling sufficient amounts of water for the elephants. In the afternoon we were home, across the

road cleaning a range shelter. Young Zack Lake arrived. He was limping and my father asked him what was the matter. He said that he was making a load of hay for Stella Brightman and somehow or other he shoved a pitch fork through the calf of his leg, going in one side and coming out the other.

That night we went to the circus. My father had to stay after the circus to see the horses pulling the wagons and taking tents down and loading them onto freight cars. The last wagon was the main tent, loaded with the poles from it. They had two teams of horses (8 to a team) hooked to it and it got stuck in the mud so they brought in another team hooked it to the side of the wagon and they couldn’t budge it. Then they brought in an elephant, walked him up behind the load, and without breaking stride, he put his head down and the wagon came right out. Something I will never forget.

In 1930 Billy Harticant and Albert Brownell who lived at the Travis’s place showed up one day with a revolver each. Albert had a long pearl handled one that had belonged to a member of his family. He was a real cowboy. Harticant had a smaller pistol revolver and they were around down there by the pond and telling me stories and when they left to go home, Albert took his pearl handled one home and hid it in the foundation of an old house north of Travis’s in the field, so he could return it to the house when nobody was around.home, Albert took his pearl handled one home and hid it in the foundation of an old house north of Travis’s in the field, so he could return it to the house when nobody was around.
Harticant hid his under the hen house under one of the piles of rock that held up the floor of the hen house. After a couple of months, I got it out and threw it into the pond. To this day no one has ever asked me about it, not even Harticant.

We used to go to the Desjardin farm between our home place and George Russell’s.
Desjardins was an uncle to Rick Desjardin. He had a pipe factory in Fall River and he would bring the sawdust and broken pipe pieces down and put them in his laneway. He also had a building and a lot of grapes for wine. He had pear and peach trees and plum
trees and he grew muskmelons. Art and I raided all that stuff. One night when we were doing chores, he arrived carrying something in both hands. My father went to the milk house to dump some milk and Desjardins had just got there. He showed my father two muskmelon rinds and asked him what did he suppose has been eating these? My father
said, “woodchucks, I guess”. That was the end of that deal except Art and I threw the melon rinds a lot farther into the bull briars. Desjardins had laid tracks back down into the swamp, like a railroad. He had a cart that he would go down back to load with wood and he had a winch at the top of the hill to pull it back up.

My father bought Peking ducks around at different places, 6, 7 or 8 at a time. We were coming back from my grandmother’s house and we saw this fellow with a Model A Ford car, up against a wall in a kitty corner situation, ready to tip over. My father, Art and I helped him get the car back on the road. My father was telling me after that it was Oney Cummings. I kept asking him about his being lame, he must have gotten hurt. Eventually, my father told me that he had a wooden leg. Later he showed up at the house. In fact, he came three times, every time he came he had his car chocked full of groceries to give to my mother. He had three daughters and he brought them one of those times. Eventually, my father bought some ducks from him and some more from his brother Ben Cummings.
The ones from Ben Cummings were crippled. They had fallen into a spring and couldn’t get out. That paralyzed their legs. I went into the duck business. I sent to New Jersey and got 50 Indian Runners. I don’t remember how many I raised and can’t remember what became of them. They were supposed to lay a lot of eggs. They held the world record, 300 eggs a year. My brother Norris used to feed the ducks mash in the morning and he helped the ducks eat it too. I’ll never forget that. One morning I looked down back where there used to be apple trees and there were two deer eating apples under the tree.

When Virginia was 5 years old she had polio and she was in the General Hospital in Fall River. In 1929 I had scarlet fever and they quarantined me in an upstairs bedroom for a month so my father could keep selling milk. I didn’t know anything for a couple of days with my fever. In fact, it seems so I spent those days walking down a long hallway, I was just going by doors in my mind. When the fever broke, I was as good as new. Just like being back to normal again. Ten days later I could tear great sheets of skin off me all over. They said it was caused by the fever.

When my quarantine was lifted, my father loaded the car with my mother and the kids and we went over the Mount Hope Bridge. It had just opened up. The toll was 60 cents for cars and 10 cents for pedestrians.

But About 1937, the family went up to visit my mother’s folks in Maine. I stayed home. I had just been painting the house, but my father told me I better start pulling turnips up Ephraim Tripp’s. I pulled and bagged 80 bushels of turnip in one day and bagged them. I got them home the next day on the truck but I don’t remember who drove the truck since I know I didn’t have my license at that time. Those turnips were the easiest and prettiest ones I ever pulled. All I had to do was cut the tap root off and the top. There wasn’t another root on them. But, they didn’t have any taste to them, they were just flat tasting.
That same fall we had some cow beets. Nobody grows them any more. They grow 2 feet tall. Later I had to finish painting the roof of the silo. I put a noose in a rope and threw it over the cap and I used the rope as my staging to go around the roof as I painted it.

Another day Art and I asked Cliff Mosher about using his boat, so Art and I got it down Hix’s Bridge and we went crabbing. We rowed down around Cadman’s Neck, nice going with the tide, but coming back against the tide it was slow going. We got a bushel of crabs. By the time we got back and got the boat put away we just got started for home,

had not even got off the bridge, when my father came looking for us. It was supper time and he had done all the chores. So we got the devil for that. I used to go swimming on
the east side of Hix Bridge. A lot of shells and glass was there in the river where you
•came back to shore, and I cut my knee there on some glass. The kneecap was laid right open. It looked pretty bad. Joe Cieto arrived about that time. He was the town constable. He took me home and I held my bicycle on his running board. I still have the scar.
Uncle Granville hired me and Art to hoe turnips for him in 1936. We worked 9-3, 80 cents a day each. While we were up there one day, Uncle Granville said we have to get
some rowen. That’s a second cutting hay. So he told me to get the horses out, get them harnessed and hooked to the wagon. I had never harnessed a horse before in my life. I put my knowledge together and looked at the horses. Giants of animals they were. I knew that you approached them from the left hand side, so I went in and got one out, I figured the harness behind him must be the one that goes to that horse so I pulled his head down, got the bridle on him and then after a struggle I threw the harness on him and then got the other horse and did the same to him. I looked up to see Uncle Granville peaking out by the end of the shed so I swore to myself and got the horses paired up, hooked together and drove them out around the back of the shed and began to back them up to the pole that the wagon was going to hook up to. Uncle Granville came running, calling
“wait, wait”. By the time he got there I had them all hooked up. He was afraid that I would break the pole on the wagon but it turned out all right. Then we went up to Uncle Ralph’s to get the rowen (second cutting of hay). First time I ever heard that word.

That fall, Uncle Granville pulled his turnips but there was no market for them so he mac a big ditch and stored them and he fed them to the cows. There was no market because

200 – 300 bushels per load every day from November 1st to December 25. Just as soon as the Smith and Boan’s dug their early potatoes they planted turnips. Some years the market was crowded and the price would be down.

There was a cedar swamp in back of Uncle Granville’s barn. That was where we got the poles we needed for a good gate top. Swing tail gates were made by putting a hole in the post that held them, put an axle down through them and then put rocks in sort of a cradle at the end of it to balance the pole and the boards. The ideal boarding for them was a crooked sassafras tree. When you put the boarding on, being crooked, it matched it.
These gates were so well balanced that a child could swing them open and shut with no trouble. Simple, cheap and they lasted forever. Also looked good.
1930
In 1930 my father was building a two story hen house. He hired Harry Shurtleff as carpenter. Harry was always on to somebody. When he set up the forms for the cement,
he was always finding fault with the wall Squire Lord had built. It was always “hey guy, hey guy, who did this”. The weather was hot and my brother Donald was about three In 1930 my father was building a two story hen house. He hired Harry Shurtleff as carpenter. Harry was always on to somebody. When he set up the forms for the cement, he was always finding fault with the wall Squire Lord had built. It was always “hey guy, hey guy, who did this”. The weather was hot and my brother Donald was about three years old then. He would go down to see how things were going. He went down one hot, windy day with a big straw hat on and pants that hung from his shoulder. The wind blew his hat and he grabbed that but when he grabbed it his britches would fall, so Harry Shurtleff was always after him about pulling his pants up and so forth. Donald told my father, my father told him to call him Harry Shirt-tails, so he went right down right away and called him Harry Shirt-tails. Harry never did call him anything again.

In the early 30’s, rum running was a big business. One of the Gifford’s was the Town Treasurer. He had a store at Westport Point across from Fish’s Store and one night the store got on fire and burned. It burned $20,000 he was holding of the town’s money and years later I heard the truth, that he sent a boat out to a larger boat to get a load of booze, on the way back in the boat sank, so he didn’t get the booze, so he burned the store.
That’s the way the $20,000 got burned up. He had used the $20,000 to buy the booze.

John Oliver at Central Village was the telephone operator. During the night he operated from home. He could intercept all messages by the government agencies and let the rum runners know where they were and so forth. The main business place for rum running was on the Drift Road down in back of the Fireside. Then when Roosevelt got to be president and legalized the booze business, that was the end of that. There were a lot of fellas still making moon shine, that got to be a big business. There was a still at Charlie Menard’s.
Anyway, the cops raided that one night so my father took Art and I and we went up to Granville’s and walked down back across Granville’s field over the walls into Meynard’s to
check out the still. Everything was smashed up, there was a lot of land cleared up and with all of the stumps and roots piled up so as to be fences around the different lots. That land today belongs to Goldstein on the Gifford Road. Rt. 88 goes right down through where that still was.

We used to go blue berrying with Nellie Mosher. She ran the rummage sale for the Macomber girls at the Friends Church. Nellie took rags out of the rummage to tie to the bushes so she wouldn’t get lost on the way out. On holidays, Buck Wood would get Nellie Mosher in his touring car, give her a little something to drink and then they would ride around hollering to everybody. Her husband, John Mosher ran the store. He was blind. One night, Art and I were pouring through the Potter’s junk they had left upstairs. In the room over the kitchen there was a big pool table that belonged to them and we called that room the pool room. We used to go in and play pool when we had company or sometimes just Art and me. It was there for several years. Also, there was stuff there in the open chamber that was packed full of odds and ends stuff. Art and I got up there one night when Mary Travis was looking after us when Pa and Ma had gone off and we found 23 pennies. The next day we went to John Mosher’s and bought 23 cents worth of candy.
At the end of the week my father stopped at Mosher’s to get his smoking tobacco. John Mosher reached into his pocket and took out the 23 cents and said to my father, “Arthur, do you see anything wrong with these pennies”? My father said, “well, they are old, 1700
– 1800”. John told him, “your boys were in here and bought candy with them.” My father gave him the right money for them and brought them home. Another thing we got heck for.Art and I used to work for the Macomber maids. Alice and her sisters, Marianna and Mabel. We were paid 25 cents an hour. We hoed her garden and we mowed her gra just north of their house and clear down to Central Village. That was for the Central Village Improvement Society, financed by Nellie Mosher’s rummage sale.