This section comes from the stories I heard growing up. First, a little bit about my dad’s formative years. Then the same for my mother, their first years together, and the story of our move from Mom’s childhood home to where we’d spend most of my youth.

Dad

He was named Theodore, born midway through ten siblings, and apparently grew up in constant trouble with his father, who was a strict disciplinarian. And Ted became a “chip off the old block.”

I have almost no information about the family’s situation during the Great Depression, but after it and during the Second World War, his father, Bill, worked for the Thew Shovel Co. and retired in about 1954. Life for the family had been difficult, with few extras. During the Depression, Ted and his brothers scavenged coal along the nearby railroad tracks for home use and to sell to neighbors. They hauled it through the neighborhood on wooden sleds.

Young Ted dropped out of school and left home when he was sixteen after the last of several fights with and severe beatings from his father. He moved into an apartment above the Sherwood Inn, across the street from the National Tube Division of the United States Steel Corp. I’m not sure what he did while living above the Sherwood, but Ted ultimately joined the Merchant Marines as a steward, then baker. He went to radio school and became a radio operator on merchant tankers, fueling the U.S. Pacific Fleet during the war (WW2). 

During wartime, the Merchant Marine becomes an Auxiliary of the Navy. Dad received his training to become a radio operator at Great Lake Maritine Academy. He was an officer, a lieutenant, I think, though he never said, but there are family pictures of him from that time in his uniform that certainly looks like a Naval officer’s.

It is my understanding that he met Mary, my mother, after the war while working as a mechanic with his older brother, Bill, who owned an automobile repair shop in Boston. This was sometime between 1945-1946.

To be continued

–LE