Some Stories: Early Memories and Family Tales

By Beatrice Nash Horowitz

Every family is unique. Loyal and Katherine Nash raised their four children to be honest, fair, and proud of their origins. Born during a Vermont blizzard, Beatrice was welcomed by her older brothers and nine cows. But as would happen several times in her childhood, her family soon moved, packing up and heading for the Northwest.

In a fascinating memoir accompanied by original photographs, Beatrice chronicles her childhood from birth through her varied experiences as her family eventually traveled from the Northwest to an isolated farm in Maine shortly after the Second World War. As she details how she contended with her older brothers and explored as far as her curiosity and legs would take her, Beatrice shares a glimpse into her coming-of-age journey as she played heated games of cowboys and Indians, ran through the sprinkler, built imaginary cities in the hay, and knelt in school bathroom stalls to protect herself from the Communists. But it was not until she turned thirteen and enrolled in boarding school that Beatrice finally saw a world beyond that of her parents’ dreams.

Some Stories is the memoir of a girl’s mid-twentieth century New England childhood as she learned lessons, found happiness in the simple gifts, and ultimately attained independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663246455

Beatrice Nash Horowitz

Beatrice Nash Horowitz is a retired social worker and author of the memoir, A Year Of Days. She has lived in Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire and California. She now resides in Florida with her husband and her dog. When she is not writing she finds joy in painting.

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Some Stories

Early Memories and Family Tales

Beatrice Nash Horowitz

SOME STORIES

EARLY MEMORIES AND FAMILY TALES

Copyright © 2022 Beatrice Nash Horowitz.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

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expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4644-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4645-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022918613

iUniverse rev. date:  11/07/2022

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue

1943 - 1948

Chapter 1     Beginnings

Chapter 2     Life in Portland

Chapter 3     Were We Happy?

Chapter 4     Portland Doesn’t Last

1948 -1955

Chapter 5     Country Living

Chapter 6     Brothers

Chapter 7     Three Squares a Day

Chapter 8     Why Lake Forest was Important to Us

Chapter 9     School Begins in 1949

Chapter 10   The World Outside

Chapter 11   My Outside World

Chapter 12   Change is Coming

Chapter 13   The Big Trip

Chapter 14   The Big Move

1956 And Onward

Chapter 15   Moving On

Chapter 16   Junior High Lasts One Year

Chapter 17   It Begins

Chapter 18   It Is This

Chapter 19   It Moves On

Chapter 20   Mom

Addendum /Extras

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to my readers, Bonnie, Cheryl, Judy, Marie, Susan and Verna: your support and suggestions enlightened me and kept me going.

My gratitude to my son Chris and my daughter-in-law Erinn for raising the three beautiful women who inspired this book.

As for my ‘second husband’ mentioned in Chapter Four: Mark, without your support (What are you doing? Editing. Still?) and feedback (Too much crying here!) this book would never have been finished.

PROLOGUE

Our Family Life

The lawn under my feet was crunchy and yellow, not yet recovered from Maine’s fierce winter. Behind me our farmhouse faced its windows towards Woodville Road, a quarter mile away. Across our dirt driveway the chimney of Daddy’s shop puffed wispy clouds into the iron gray sky. Daddy was in there working on something. I didn’t know what, I never went inside that building. Billy came around the corner of the house holding a triangle of wood as if it were a six shooter. Let’s play cowboys and Indians, he called. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, I was seven years old, and the whole family was at home. My mother was probably cooking dinner. Douglas, my oldest brother, was probably in his room doing a teenager’s thing. Duncan, the next oldest, would arrive soon to play with Billy and me.

My father, Loyal Reid Nash, had what Mom called an independent income. A Chicago bank sent his money every three months to wherever he happened to be living. Growing up, I didn’t know any other family with an independent income. Everyone else’s father worked for a living. Our independent income was one of the things that made us Nashes different.

When I was young, in the 1940s and 50s, fathers worked and mothers stayed home. After World War II ended in 1945 the government told the women to stay home, so that the returning soldiers could take the jobs. The women kept house and had babies, lots of babies. (Boom!) The civilian economy simmered and then boiled; people began buying homes, cars, dishwashers and TVs. In 1946 seven thousand TVs were sold in the USA. In 1950 customers bought five million sets. (encyclopedia.com) My parents were not among those buyers.

It was too bad that Daddy didn’t have to work. A job can give you importance and purpose and prestige and often even a social life. It also ties you down. My parents were not tied down; they could pick up and move whenever they felt like it. And they frequently felt like it during the first years of their marriage.

Mummy and Daddy had all their children before the War ended and the baby boom began. (The youngest, Billy, was born after Germany surrendered but before Japan gave up.) Loyal and Katharine spent the first nine years of their marriage having four children and wandering about, from California to Oregon to Vermont to Washington State to Maine.

It sounds carefree, but my parents were not happy-go-lucky. They believed life was serious, and they expected their children to believe this also. They did not make friends as they wandered the country, and they kept their distance from their own families. When I was in grade school our independent income allowed us to live in the country, where there were few neighbors and no salaried jobs. Almost nobody came to visit us, it was just the six of us on sixty-five acres of southern Maine fields and woods.

Our parents worked hard on their farm. Daddy had a workshop where he made tables and shelves. He constructed cabinets inside the house, and he painted both inside and outside. He never got around to painting my bedroom in Falmouth, and for the seven years we lived there I fell asleep at night terrorized by the monsters lurking in the splotchy old plaster walls. He did build me a wooden doll house, larger and heavier than the commercial plastic ones. It had two stories of bright red and yellow rooms, but where the stairs belonged there was just a hole. My dolls jumped between the floors.

Daddy planted trees and strung fences and built a serious vegetable garden. There were chickens, geese and pigs to care for. Mummy cooked three meals a day from scratch, sewed most of my clothing, braided rugs, knit sweaters and scarves and jackets. She made curtains and bedspreads. She decorated vases with tole painting and decoupage. She washed masses of laundry and ironed almost everything, including our bed sheets and my father’s underwear. In between these tasks she read to us and played board games with us. She took us sledding and skating and to church; she drove us to our swimming and piano lessons. In her spare time she took a correspondence course in counterpoint musical theory from the University of California, practicing her lessons on the piano in the living room.

Does it sound like a pioneer life, with the addition of a car? This was the middle of the twentieth century, the beginning of the modern consumer society and the rise of the suburbs. Our house had no TV, and there was just one car in the garage. Our furniture was inherited: dark carved mahogany, not blond curvy mid-century. We did not have fancy toys. Mom thought living in the country was romantic.

Dad’s independent income didn’t make us rich, it just made us different. If we’d been rich, we would have known other people without jobs. We didn’t. All my schoolmates had fathers with jobs. At the dinner table Daddy complained about the liabilities of a fixed income, especially when the Democrats were determined to keep raising your taxes until they forced you into poverty. When classmates asked what my father did, I explained about the independent income. Their astonishment and envy embarrassed