FAMILY

Family--The Murphy Connection

    My father was an easy going man.  He was a lot softer than many policemen I have met.  He was born in Cambridge in the year 1894 and died in Dorchester in 1960.  His parents both emigrated from Ireland.  His mother, Julia, ("Nanny" to us) came in at 17 years old.  I don't know yet when his father came, but they were married  while in their early twenties in 1887.  There were three children in all, but only my father survived.  The eldest, Jeremiah, was born in 1888.  Family tradition said that the baby born about 1890, and died of meningitis as an infant, was named Jane.  However, when checking the family gravesite I learned that according to the cemetery records, the baby was named John.  Since they decided to use the name again with my father it is easy to see how the name changed in the oral tradition.
    The death of the baby in 1890 was to be the first of several tragedies for my grandmother.  She lost her husband in 1906 at the age of 47 to "apoplexy" or stroke.  Four months later, in July, Jeremiah drowned in the Charles River at 18.  So, by age 12, my father was the only surviving child of three, and a semi-orphan.  Fortunately, Julia was from a large family and had others to help her. 
    Uncle Mike and Aunt Minnie (Mary) never married and lived with her in the house in Arlington that Uncle Mike had built.  Uncle Mike was a kind, gentle man who took me to the swan boats in the Boston Gardens many, many times.  There were sporting events, too.  I imagine Mike was a good role model for my father as well.  I know he put him to work in his meat market.  Dad's father was listed as a butcher at the time of his death.
    One of my favorite stories involved smoking.  I used to spend a lot of Sundays visiting Nanny, Mike and Minnie.  Since I started smoking in the fifth grade, which would make me around 10, and smoked until I reached my early twenties, I was curious about whether my father smoked as a boy.  When I asked Nanny about it, she remembered catching him on the street corner with his friends, smoking.  I asked her what she did and she told me,  "I grabbed him by the ear and marched him right home."  I found this quite amusing,  but not so amusing as her next reply.  When I asked how old he was, she answered, "Twenty one."   My, how times have changed since 1915.
    It was hard to picture this gentle, sweet old woman taking such forceful action.  She was so patient and understanding.  I can remember following her around from  room to room as she did her chores, giving her a detailed account of all the events which occurred in the latest adventure movie I had just seen.  Never once did she tire of it and quiet me.
    Dad was lucky during the depression  as far as employment went.  He was working for the Ward Baking Company delivering bread when many others were out of work.  He went onto the police force from a full time job because of the greater security it appeared to offer.  Except for a brief period when he first went on the force, he worked in South Boston all the time.  As a new face, he was used under cover a bit at the beginning.  Originally he was in station 12.  His badge number was 1234,  for station 12, officer 34.  It used to amuse me as a boy.  Later they closed station 12 and only 6 remained, on D Street, around the corner from Blinstrub's Village, a famous nightclub where stars like Tony Bennett and Sammy Davis appeared.
    My mother was a hard working woman.  When she married my father she was 32 and he was 36.  That was pretty late to be starting any family, let alone a large one.  It would have been one larger had she not had a miscarriage once.  I can remember the fright we felt seeing her being taken out of the house on a stretcher one night amid flashing lights.  The neighbors all pitched in and divided the kids among them.  I was sent to Arlington to live with Nanny Murphy for two weeks.  We were told that mom just collapsed from exhaustion from shoveling coal into the furnace while my father was at work. I didn't learn about the miscarriage until I was in my late twenties.  Such things were not talked about much then.  Nowadays you can hear about things worse than that on the evening news while trying to eat supper.
    Doing laundry was not easy for mom.  When I was only nine, the last child, Claire, came along. This meant a lot of laundry to be done by hand.  In those days there was no such thing as a throwaway diaper.  Diapers were cotton cloth and had to have solid waste removed by dunking it in the cold water of the toilet and wringing  it out by hand twisting.  Washing was done on a wood and tin scrubbing board in the double soapstone sinks in the kitchen.  In mid-winter, the water pipes under the sink would freeze and have to be thawed out with hot rags.
    My mother was thrilled when she got a Kenmore washing machine.  On its top was a double set of rubber rollers for squeezing out the water.  Naturally, I just had to try it out the first day. She showed me how to do it,  and when I inserted my first item of clothing into the rollers my arm went in up to the elbow and stopped.        Quick-thinking mom struck the release and the rollers popped apart.  Lucky she read the directions.  I  later met other kids who got broken arms from such an experience.
    Keeping food from spoiling was a challenge.  In the hallway outside the kitchen door, we had an old fashioned icebox.  A man named MacDonald delivered ice and bags of coal in the neighborhood.  His card was about a foot square and had 25, 50, 75, and 1.00 on its four edges.  If you wanted a 50 cent piece of  ice that day, you placed it in the window with the 50 at the top. He would see it, cut a piece that size,  and bring it to your home and install it..  Underneath the icebox was a large roasting pan to catch the ice melt, making emptying it a daily chore.  In severe freezing weather there was a large tin box mounted on the kitchen windowsill.  You would save ice money by opening the kitchen window and  putting the food in it.  The quart bottles of regular milk, before homogenization came in, would often freeze, pushing the cap off, leaving it resting atop a candle of frozen cream.  
        After my Aunt Mae died, we inherited her new electric refrigerator.  One of the earlier models, it had a freezing compartment that would hold at least a full pound of hamburger. No more pans of water to empty. 
   
 Ah, the good, old days.
                                   
  Next Article                                                                      Linked Index