Category Archives: Memoir

Memoir

North Fairhaven Girl

I get nostalgic for my hometown of Fairhaven, Mass., when I read Chris Richards’ posts on Substack in his series Long Ago & Close By. Fairhaven is located in Buzzards Bay and across the Acushnet River from New Bedford. It has a rich history, including the first man to sail solo around the world, whaling, the first Japanese person to live in the U.S., generous gifts by a local who got rich from oil, and much more.

But I am writing about North Fairhaven where I grew up, and to be specific, Jesse Street, a modestly sized road that links Main Street with Alden Road. Like this part of town, Jesse Street was a bit of a melting pot with Polish, French Canadian, and Portuguese families, many of them immigrants like my grandparents — and mostly, Catholic. My neighbors’ last names were Potkay, Bissonette, Tenczar, Lyonaise, Fauteux, Beaumont, Correia, and Silveira.

None still live there, but I remember which houses used to be theirs. There were five older ones, all with front porches. During my childhood and afterward, homes, mostly affordable ranches, were constructed in the spaces between them, including the land my grandfather once farmed. Their yards were always well-kept.

But let me back up. My family’s name is Medeiros. My grandparents, Manuel and Maria Medeiros, emigrated from the Azores Islands in the early part of the 20th century, part of the large influx from those islands and Madeira to the New Bedford area. Their land, which extended to Main Street, was large enough to have barns filled with chickens, grapevines, and fields to grow corn and other vegetables, strawberries, and gladiolas my grandfather sold in his farmstand.

They had many children, including my father, Antone. I lived with them for the first few years of my life before my parents built their own home on a piece of my grandparents’ land. An aunt did the same next door.

My dad told us he paid a kid who went to the local vocational school $20 a week to help him build the house. My mother, Algerina was proud she laid the floors herself. That’s Mom holding onto me while I stand on a stack of lumber. The cinderblocks they used for the cellar are in a pile.

Over the years, they made improvements like finishing the attic and building stone walls on two borders. Like his father, my father kept a large garden. Here they raised their family of three daughters and one son.

(My father, known locally as “Hawk,” was heavily involved in local sports. My mother was always on the sidelines. They were involved in town events and performed in St. Mary’s benefit shows.)

Dad holds me when I was a baby in front of my grandparents’ home on Jesse Street. The land to right is where he and his sister built homes.

I loved visiting my grandmother, who always seemed to have a rosary in one hand. After school, she served me tea with milk and lots of sugar. Sometimes my aunts sewed clothes for my dolls. Dad’s siblings and their families gathered on weekends. The cousins played in the backyard and under the grape vine’s trellis.

The grounds for the Our Lady of Angels Feast, which is held on Labor Day weekend, is located at the bottom of Jesse Street. On the third day, a hand-carved statue of Mary — brought to this country by immigrants from the Azores who were grateful they had made it here safely — is carried in a parade along Main Street by a team of men. My father did it, and now, my brother, Tony does. The statue is kept at St. Mary’s Church, located opposite the end of Jesse Street. I look forward to a post by Chris about the transformation of that church’s building, which was initially a basement.

The feast grounds were lit up with lights strung on long wooden poles, painted blue and white that were installed weeks before. I recall standing in line at the feast to buy malassadas, a fry bread rolled in sugar. A group of women, mostly dressed in black, kept guard as the dough rose in a vat. We kids attended the auction because there was the chance someone would win the bid for a large sweet bread and announce, “Cut it up for the children.” The feast had band music and games of chance. My father worked in the beer stand, and at night, we kids sat on the cases in the back. When we were older, my sister and I volunteered in the concession stand.

Then there was the Holy Ghost Feast, where people were treated to free sopa or soup in the hall’s basement. The best part was the chunks of bread you could dip in the broth.

The rest of the time, Jesse Street was a quiet spot. In the warmer months, we rode our bikes. My sisters and I played whiffleball in the yard — a ball hit over the fence was an out — and other games like croquet, jump rope, and hop scotch. We ate pears and butternuts from trees on the street.

In the winter, we slid on the snowy surface of Jesse Street, which had enough of a hill to make it a decent ride. My father stretched out on his belly on the sled and we kids would do the same in a stack on top of him. Our names were painted on its wooden slats. I smile thinking of that.

Here’s one memory: a neighbor across the street used to play drums in a strip club. When I was a teenager, I recall walking home to hear him practice with a recording of that oh-so-familiar ‘ti-da-da-da, ti-da-da-da” through the open windows of his house. It was a bit embarrassing.

I remember wishing as a child my family would move to the southern part of town, where the houses and buildings are grander. But, of course, that didn’t happen. That’s okay. Jesse Street was a good place for this girl to grow up.

A final note: I want to thank all the new subscribers who have come via Chris Richards’ recommendation. I post about a variety of topics, including my experiences and the books I write.

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Memoir, Uncategorized

Doing the Dishes — My College Job

Dennis Merritt shared a recent Substack post Showdown at the Pembroke Dish Room in which he wrote about a job he had in college unloading dishes in a school’s dining hall. It brought back a memory although my experience was different, especially since a dean tried to get me fired.

In my junior year at Bridgewater State College (now a university), I was hired to work in the dining hall at Tillinghast Dorm, know as Tillie. My job was in the dish room for the early morning shift, which meant I had to be there before 7 a.m. Sometimes that meant I came straight to work from a party, left a boyfriend behind in my off-campus apartment, or had pulled an all-nighter studying. My shift lasted until my first class.

But I had motivation. During the summer, I worked at a textile warehouse in New Bedford, MA, which covered most of my expenses. But I was hoping to travel to Europe. I thought I could swing it if I didn’t spend any money, except for food and rent.

As in Dennis’s experience, the dining hall had a large machine with a conveyer system. Unlike his, we used large racks to hold the contents while they were being washed. Students and faculty brought their plates, cups, and utensils to a metal counter in the dish room’s large opening. There were two of us on duty, my friend Betty and me. One of us scraped plates and loaded everything onto a rack, which then traveled through the machine. The person on the other end removed the rack and stacked it on a counter for lunch time.

The shift started slowly with the early risers, but it got very busy.

On the few days Betty couldn’t make it to work, I had the job of loading and unloading the dishwasher by myself. I had to be careful the racks didn’t back up on the end, so I was running around a lot. Frankly, the experience was rather Chaplinesque.

Then one of the college’s deans got wind that I was working in the dining hall. The woman, who shall remain nameless, wasn’t pleased about the emergence of the hippies on Bridgewater’s campus. Of course, I was one of them. So one day, she approached my boss at the dining hall. She wanted him to fire me because, get this, I was an immoral person.

I found out about it when my boss took me aside. He told the dean he wasn’t firing me because I was one of his best workers. I thanked him for backing me up.

Actually, the dean’s attempt was a big source of amusement for me. I was too immoral to scrape food off students’ plates and get them clean? Perhaps she had hoped I would fool around enough that I would get poor grades and drop out. But that didn’t happen either.

By the way, that’s a photo of me from that time. And, yes, I did save enough to travel to Europe.

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Memoir

Los federales let us go

In a recent post, I shared a story of how we managed to get out of a jam in Mexico when our VW van toppled into a brush-filled ravine. Now, let me tell you about how we escaped being arrested by los federales.

In the mid-’70s, Hank and I, new in our relationship, and my daughter, Sarah, only 2, wandered around Mexico in our vintage VW camper van we named Rosalita. (The photo above was the one on Hank’s passport he obtained before we left.) We decided to settle for a while in San Cristóbal de las Casas located in Chiapas, a southern state in that country. We had delivered a gift a friend wanted us to bring her brother and decided this would be a good place to stay a while.

I don’t recall how we did it or what we paid, but we rented a small house on the outskirts. The house had water, but the toilet drained into a backyard trench that didn’t work well. I used a gas camp stove to cook our meals, and because of the rats, we kept our food locked in a sturdy case in the VW. We could hear rats running across the tin roof at night, and Hank kept a flashlight and hammer next to the futon we used on the floor to kill them. There wasn’t any furniture, not even a chair, except for a woven hammock we strung beneath the courtyard’s porch.

Every day we walked to the mercado, usually stopping at a café in the town’s center. We met a few other gringos, including a friendly man who was our guide as we traveled to indigenous villages in the mountains. He also taught us some basic Spanish. We also met a family of hippie types who rented a large house in town and hung out there a couple of times.

Interestingly, locals sometimes thought I was Mexican, thanks to the looks I inherited from my Portuguese ancestors, and would comment I was lucky to have found a gringo.

One day on a walk to the mercado, Hank and I were approached by a young man dressed in what I would describe as fake hippie garb and who asked us if we wanted to buy marijuana. No thanks, we told him. We didn’t smoke, which was the truth. We also noticed the same day another man, older, who wore one of those fringe suede jackets, driving a dirty, beat-up American-made car. It got even curiouser when we noticed those two talking on a side street like they were sharing a secret.

A night or two later, after Hank pulled into a Pemex gas station, our van was surrounded by armed federales. I recognized the man with the fringe suede jacket was among them. We were told to leave the van, so they could search it.

We had been warned that whole American families were being arrested, and then they had to pay a ransom to get out of prison. That is what we were told happened to the family who rented that big house by the way.

I held Sarah as we watched the federales dig through our stuff. We didn’t own anything illegal, but perhaps they would plant something. I knew this was a serious situation. 

But, instead, they let us go.

Hank and I were relieved as we drove away. We hadn’t done anything illegal in this country, but we decided it was time to return to the U.S. So, we packed up and left the next morning in the VW van that had brought us here.

Once again, good luck had been on our side.

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Memoir

My Cheating Job

My first job was changing labels at a pants warehouse in New Bedford, Mass. When an order came in that required, say, a hundred pairs of men’s size 32 W 32 L and the warehouse only had sixty, the pickers would bring a stack of 30 W 30 L. Or 34 W 28 L. Or frankly, anything close enough.

I ripped off the old labels neatly and sewed the new ones with this nifty machine.

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Sometimes the sizes weren’t even close. I remember an order of boys pants for a military PX down South. We scrambled to turn size 12 boys into size 8 and so on.

Because of that experience, I know better than to trust the label on an article of clothing. I have to try it on. You should, too.

Did I feel we were being dishonest? Of course. But I was 18 and waiting out that summer between high school graduation and my freshman year in college. I was going away from home for the first time, a big step for a shy girl. Every cent I made went in the bank.

My Dad called in a favor with the foreman, so I could get this job. I don’t recall how they knew each other but I do the Christmas tree the man gave our family one year. The tree’s needles all dropped within a couple of days and my mother took photos to record the experience.

I was paid minimum wage, which in those days was $1.60 an hour.

Once, New Bedford used to be a hub for textile mills. My mother’s parents, who came over the boat from Madeira, were weavers. So was my mother after her parents made her drop out of high school. By the time I came along, the textile mills had moved down South, where labor was cheaper. Now, they’re overseas. 

So, what was left were distribution warehouses. Among their biggest clients were military bases all over the U.S. This was during the Vietnam War.

The warehouse where I worked was situated across the then-polluted Acushnet River from my hometown of Fairhaven. The stairwell had an interesting assortment of profane grafitti like “Maria sucks dead Portagees.” I’ll spare you the coarser stuff.

The building didn’t have air-conditioning so it got hotter as the day progressed. Large fans kept the air moving in the area near them but they didn’t help much for the rest of the building.

My co-workers were for the most part lifers. A few were young like me, including a friend from high school who worked in the office, but they weren’t going to college. I was mindful of that so I did my job and tried to be as friendly as necessary. I met some interesting characters for sure.

And I scored my first pair of bellbottoms, gratis, of course.

I worked two summers at this warehouse. When I went to the unemployment office on the third, I was sent to another pants warehouse. This time I was a picker who filled orders and made ten cents an hour more because the owner liked me.

About the photo above: That’s me after I became indoctrinated into the alternative scene at college but I still went home for the summer to work in a warehouse.

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Memoir, Uncategorized

Father’s Day at the Mental Hospital

My grandfather was hauled off to a state mental hospital after he went after my grandmother with a hoe. The story goes my grandmother knocked him out with a bucket and thought he was dead. When the police came, he was taken away to one of the state mental hospitals that existed then. His diagnosis, I believe: clinical paranoia.

I didn’t see Vovô, as we kids called him, very often after that incident, but I recall visiting him at the hospital on Father’s Day. (Vovô was the grandfather on my mother’s side of the family, which included two sisters.)

On that day, my father drove our family to the hospital. My uncle brought his, which included my aunt and two cousins, plus my grandmother. One time, another aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, came.

The family brought Vovô a carton of cigarettes and made a picnic of the visit on the hospital grounds, with food, croquet, and a game of Wiffle Ball. Vovô insisted on taking us kids to the canteen for Hoodsie Cups ice cream and to introduce us to his friends. I felt half-afraid and half-curious by the experience.

By the way, the photo above is a family portrait my mother took on one of those visits. Vovô wears the suit. My grandmother, Vovó, sits on the bench holding my brother. I was only 12 and the girl on the far left.

Let me tell you a little about Vovô. He came over on the boat from Madeira when he was young and married my grandmother, who came from the same island, here. They worked in the textile mills of New Bedford, Massachusetts. A hard worker, during the Depression he bought a home in the small town of Acushnet, where the family grew and raised much of their food, plus took in boarders. He and my grandmother took English lessons and converted to a Protestant religion. Vovô made his two oldest daughters drop out of high school so they could work in the textile mills or watch the house when he and my grandmother were at work.

I don’t recall Vovô being a warm man. But then again, I imagine it was a huge adjustment emigrating to a new country and one so different than the Portuguese island where he once lived. One of my cousins told me recently our grandfather was bullied by his co-workers.

Vovô spent the last years of his life at Taunton State Hospital. He made a life for himself there. He had a job working in the laundry and even a girlfriend, whom we kids met one Father’s Day. She waited beside a tree on the grounds to meet us. My grandmother refused to divorce him.

He tried coming home once but that didn’t last long.

Vovô died while he watched a movie at the hospital. The lights came on and he was already gone. I went to the wake but not the funeral. I was a teenager then.

Years later, I worked and lived in a psychiatric halfway house, which took in patients from state and private hospitals. At that time, Massachusetts was closing its hospitals and placing people in such places. The staff was untrained and inexperienced. We were supposed to be role models and helpful roommates, I suppose. That experience inspired a novel I wrote, The Swanson Shuffle, but have yet to publish.

The halfway house’s staff had a ring of keys that unlocked every ward in the closest hospital, Foxborough State, so we could come and go freely. When I did, I thought of my grandfather and how he got used to living in one.

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