Harriette Amelia Healey (Warnock) Martin’s 100th Birthday

Harriette Healey 1933

Dad wrote this one to commemorate Grandma Martin’s 100th birthday.  He tucked the letter inside a special  gift to me in her memory.  Love you Dad!!

August 20, 2014

Dear Wendy,

Happy Grandma Martin’s 100th Birthday!

In trying to remember Grandma’s wisdom, as told by her, I remember two things:

• Because I said so.
• It’s for your own good.

But I’m convinced it’s who you are and not what you say that counts most.  What your Grandma was, the example of how a life should be lived, is her priceless legacy to our family.  She followed in an ageless tradition of Colonial women—not rich but hard-working, helpful steadfast, loving, faithful, optimistic, thrifty, resourceful, strict, fun-loving, and never still.

She was born and raised on Balance Rock Farm in Seymour along with 4 sisters and a little brother.  Milked cows; harvested hay and corn: picked blackberries; worked in the garden; baked bread and pies; washed clothes; ate chicken and salted cod; canned tomatoes, beans, and peaches; went to a one-room school; sang and played piano; went to Grange meeting; sewed her own clothes; played penny-ante poker at the kitchen table on Saturday nights; drove the Willis-Knight; and helped her Great-Aunt Kate (who was born in 1831) hang out clothes when Grandma Healey was sick—just to name a few things.  Back in those days the watch word was ‘helping out.’

The Great Depression came right about when it was time for her to leave the nest.  Luckily she got a little money (I think from her Grandfather Celestine Gressot) and went to the University of Connecticut School of Nursing in Hartford.  As we see in her yearbooks, she was active in track and field hockey and had many friends.  Her nickname was ‘Hatch’ but I never learned the story.  She did well in class, but from what she told me, the practical work in the hospital was long, hard, and demanding—not much time for social activities.  She graduated as a registered nurse.

Harriette Amelia Healey 1934 at University of Connecticut 

She married Dutch in 1938.  They lived in a small rented house in South Coventry on a dirt road about a mile from Nathan Hale’s birthplace.  When I was about two years old and about the time your Uncle Bob was born in January 1942, Dutch was drafted into the Navy.He served until the end of the war as a gunner’s mate on an LST.  Grandma was for all intents and purposes a single parent with two boys living alone three-quarters of a mile from the nearest neighbor in a house with no electricity, no indoor plumbing (there was only a kitchen sink with a pump), a real ice box, no phone, oil lamps, a kerosene stove, and a battery powered radio.  I don’t know what she did for money but I do remember ration stamps and tokens.  The top halves of the headlights on our 1939 Plymouth were painted black in case there were air raids.  She grew a garden, raised chickens (and a huge rooster that would terrorize us young boys), a pig, and rabbits.  I remember getting hand churned butter at our landlord’s house, the Olsen’s.  Later, we did get a party line telephone—no dial, you just flashed the operator.

I started first grade in 1945 at the age of five.  I would ride my bike and leave it at the intersection near the Nathan Hale place and ride the bus to school which was in the basement of the South Coventry Congregational Church.  I remember when the announcement of V-J Day came over the radio.  Shortly after, Dutch came home.  He drank a lot.  I remember he would take me for rides (I think this was an excuse to get away) and would leave me sitting in the car outside taverns.  He could be a very nice person when sober, but he would come home drunk in the middle of the night, and he would yell at and hit Grandma.  She was strong enough not to put up with that.  She filed for divorce in 1947.  Uncle Sonny came up from Seymour in the flat-bed farm truck.  They loaded the furniture on it.  On the way back to Seymour, Bob and I rode on the top of the load with our two pet crows in their cage.  Sonny, Mom, and baby Jack rode in front. Later I heard that as Dutch told it, she left him with only a tea cup.

When we lived on the farm, there were lots of people.  At meals there might be 10-15 to feed including hired hands.  We had plenty to eat.  For example at breakfast we had our choice of bacon, sausage, eggs, toast, dry cereal, or oatmeal with raisins—every day! Grandma Healey got a television set in 1949.  She liked to watch Ed Sullivan, and we kids liked to watch western shows on Saturday morning.  Grandma Martin soon got a job with the Seymour school lunch program.  When she could afford it, about 1952, we moved to a rental house at 434 North Main Street.  She went on to become the school lunch supervisor for the whole town, in charge of five schools.  She was also a Cub Scout den mother and worked in Civil Defense in charge of emergency meals.  She liked to ride on the Civil Defense float in the Memorial Day parade.  Later, I remember she was proud to have spoken at a meeting of the Connecticut School Lunch Supervisor’s meeting in Hartford.  Our house had three families.  One was Steve Martin’s whom she married, and the other was the Cyr family from Maine, who became our dear friends.

Jack Warnock, Bob Warnock, Bill Warnock

Harriette and Steve moved to a rental house at 43 Spruce Street about 1957.  We lived there until 1962.  Most of that time I was in college.  They began building their own house at 38 Bungay Road in 1961 on land that Grandma Healey gave them.  Since I was taking a surveying course at UCONN, I did the survey and Steve had it reproduced on the blueprint machine at Kerite’s, where he worked as a millwright.  (After Mom died, we found the survey in her papers but it had become faded and unreadable.) I never lived there, but I helped with the building of it.  It was a kit house.  They tried to dig a cellar but struck a solid rock ledge.  I helped dig the trench for the water line and helped Steve put oak up in the cast iron drain pipes.  I left for Germany in the fall of 1962, after marrying your Mom in July.  She also helped work on the house before joining me in Germany a couple months later.

Life at her house on Bungay, I think, was the best and happiest part of your Grandmother’s life.  She and Steve fixed the place up, and she spared no effort in planting flowers, growing vegetables, and feeding the birds.  However the crowning feature was the picnic area was the picnic area built around the old ice pond at the top of the hill. The pond was used in the old days to harvest ice to cool the milk in the summer.  Uncle Sonny bulldozed the pond to clean it out, and Steve built a bunkhouse, diving board, bathhouse, privy, fireplace grill, horseshoe pit, miniature golf course, and other features.  He also ran electricity up the hill.  This was the scene of countless picnics and family gatherings.  At this point, your own memories can take over so I’ll stop my narrative except to say that after Steve’s death in 1990, Harriette carried on alone, relishing the time when family would visit, and refusing to leave when, in her last years, Uncle Bob asked her to come and live with him in Oklahoma.

All of which is to say that your Grandma lived by example and taught us all how to value our own lives by her light.  As I research our family history, I’m finding that people often times know little about their forbears unless they lived with or had contact with them during their overlapping lifetimes.  Memories are valuable things.  We’d have more of them if human life spans were, say, 300 years.  That conjured up in my mind a Currier and Ives print of an old homestead all lit up for Christmas with candles in the windows.  Of course that could not be since the whole lawn would be cluttered with dozens and dozens of sleighs who had borne hundreds of descendants over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house for the holiday! No, we must all strut and fret our own hours upon the stage and then do as the moving finger does.  But along the way, it’s worthwhile to reflect, savor, and learn from those memories we are fortunate enough to have in our stock...


Love,

Dad